The point being, now even the distinguished ALA, founded in the bicentennial year of 1876, has become prey for the right's nihilistic culture warriors. "Politicians and parents on the right increasingly paint the association ... as a defender of pornographic literature for children — tying their allegations into a broader conservative movement that asserts school libraries are filled with sexually explicit, inappropriate texts."
State libraries in the blood-red zones of Missouri, Montana and Texas have dissociated from the organization, "imperiling their libraries’ access to funding and training," notes the Post. Officeholding nihilists in nine other states are pressuring their state libraries to join the movement's disconnection. In Alabama, one state rep called the ALA "a conduit" for pornography.
It's a kind of mass mania in which the ALA observes that there have been "1,269 attempts to remove library books in 2022, the highest number of challenges to books since the ALA began compiling statistics on the issue" more than 20 years ago. Continues the Post: "The disaffection with the ALA is unprecedented and related to larger societal tendencies to refuse vaccines and to doubt climate change, said University of Pennsylvania professor Jonathan Zimmerman, who studies the history of education. He said that for more than a century, the ALA benefited from 'professional deference' as the leading organization for librarians. That deference is gone."
Its vanishment among the right's nihilists extends even to the U.S. military, once the most sacred cow among all of Republicans' critters. Even the Marine Corps, which once proudly entered debates only with guns blazing, has become a sissified target of right-wing derision.
(Wouldn't you think these fighter planes with price tags of $90 million to $166 million apiece would come packaged with some sort of "Locate Me" function that you have on your $500 cell phone? Like Timex watches superior to Rolexes, that might work better than the "transponders and beacons" the planes come equipped with.)
Mysteriously missing Marine Corps jets aside, I'm genuinely puzzled by how the right has managed to retain the moniker of conservatism — "a disposition in politics to preserve what is established" — when nihilism — "a belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable" is not only indisputably more apt, "conservatism" describes the modern right not at all.
As noted earlier, also key to nihilism is that it's "independent of any constructive program." Republicans, the right, "the movement," the nihilists — you can call them many things but don't call them conservatives — are altogether devoted to destruction. They seek the annihilation of the justice system, the press, public schools, colleges and universities, fair elections, the culture's arts and entertainment, organized labor and big business, and, of course, government writ large.
One would be hard pressed to think of one honored American institution they any longer embrace with love and protection. Republicans banished the word liberalism. Democrats should do the same to conservatism's relationship with Republicans. They're just nihilists, plain, simple, and painfully.