What happens when a home-schooling mom discovers librarians tolerating open masturbation and the downloading of child pornography inside a library just outside of Chicago? Heads should roll, right?
We caught up with the authors of the just released expose’ SHUT UP! The Bizarre War that One Public Library Waged Against the First Amendment, Megan Fox and Kevin DuJan, for some answers.
.
BFH- Megan, how did this begin? I read in your bio that you’re a home-schooling mom. Did your discovery have anything to do with that?
.
MEGAN: Yes. As a homeschooling mom, public libraries are often my classroom. I love the Orland Park Public Library and would frequently use it with my homeschool group. It’s a beautiful library, but I was horrified to discover that staff were looking the other way and allowing men to camp out at computers anonymously and sexually arouse themselves in clear view of passersby.
BFH- Call me crazy, but that doesn’t sound legal.
.
MEGAN: Watching pornographic videos in public where other people can see it creates a sexually hostile environment that is against the law (it’s lewd behavior, public indecency, and also exploitation/endangerment of a child if a minor is exposed to the pornography being watched on a screen in public). When I complained to library staff about what was going on right in front of them, the staff member shrugged and told me they get a lot of that in there, like it was a common thing and they weren’t allowed to stop it.
.
BFH- Given the declining political and moral climate, I would probably wonder for a moment if the laws changed and it was now protected under the 1st amendment.
.
Megan: Well, it made me curious what else was happening in that building. So, Kevin and I used Freedom of Information Act requests to pull the Library’s incident reports for the last several years. They aggressively fought production and we had to sue them to get some of the reports, which they even redacted with CIA-level blacked out redactions.
When we finally got the reports, in addition to open masturbation at the computers, stalking women, children being accosted sexually, and women being sexually harassed, we discovered that child pornography was viewed in the library (and the man who did it admitted it to the library director!) but library staff chose not to call the police as they were required to do. Right there in black and white, the library’s internal documents showed they were covering up heinous crimes and not reporting them to authorities and they had a pattern and practice of staff looking the other way and ignoring sexual activity (and sex crimes!) in the library.
.
BFH- Was your initial complaint met with a tone of resistance by the librarian? Was there ever a tone that suggested that people complaining about patrons viewing pornography were not the bad guys?
.
KEVIN: From the first day we complained, the Library made the choice to be hostile towards us. In fact, immediately after Megan wrote the Library a letter of complaint about what was going on in the adult computer lab (which is now locally known as the Orland Park Public Library’s Masturbation Lounge) and we FOIA-ed the Library for its incident reports, the library director contacted the Chief of Police and asked him to dig up dirt on Megan’s YouTube channel to scare her away with.
We discovered this in emails that the Village of Orland Park and the Library produced responsive to FOIA: emails actually show that instead of dealing with the problems in the Library, staff enlisted the police to try to scare us away. And instead of the Police Chief telling the Library they were out of their mind, the police went along with it and harassed us for two solid years to try to make us shut up and stop investigating the Library.
It was all a clear violation of our First Amendment Right to Petition government bodies for change and redress of grievances, which is one of our most important First Amendment rights. Consider the irony of a public library using the police as a weapon to silence someone’s First Amendment rights and censor them by chilling their free speech through intimidation and fear tactics.
.
MEGAN: Once library staff admitted that they never did anything to stop sexual activity happening in that Masturbation Lounge at that library, we used FOIA requests to dig up the Library’s incident reports through the years. The Library tried to avoid producing these, but the Attorney General of Illinois and also a judge in chancery court ultimately made the Library turn everything we asked for over to us. When we finally got the unredacted reports, we were stunned to find just how many sex crimes were committed in there through the years. The Library’s spokesman even had to admit in a live radio interview that child pornography was viewed in the Library and the staff chose not to call the police.
.
BFH- This sort of thing, the looking the other way, probably makes its way through the depravity grapevine, no?
.
MEGAN: Yes. The most horrifying pattern we uncovered was that because the staff kept choosing not to call the police, it became known to anyone who wanted to masturbate in public or access child porn that the Orland Park Public Library was a place they would get away with doing that, since for years and years the police were never called by library staff when they were supposed to call the police. In fact, the only time that the police were ever called to that library turned out to be when library patrons (always women and usually moms) called the police themselves on their cell phones.
When a mom trusted a library staffer to call the police, the staffer chose not to. It seemed like the staff would give patrons the impression they would call the police, but then wouldn’t because they knew that would be very bad PR for the library.
.
BFH- It’s hard to imagine a librarian being aware that this went on in their library without making immediate changes. Were these policies outlined by people who were over the heads of the librarians, leaving them unable to make necessary changes?
.
KEVIN: The American Library Association is a sick and twisted lobbying group that is right up there with ACORN. The ALA, as it is commonly known, is funded in large part by George Soros (who also funded ACORN). Back in the 1990s, a woman by the name of Judith Krug took over a department of the ALA known as the “Office for Intellectual Freedom.” That office does two things: it runs the cockamamie “Banned Books Week” in September of every year (where it claims that any book that is not handed over to a small child, no matter how sexually explicit or age inappropriate is a book being “banned”) and it also advises libraries on how to scare away parents who complain.
.
BFH- So you were going up against a bonafide machine, every bit the tentacled apparatus of a union.
.
KEVIN: The ALA sees a mom or dad complaining about something bad that happened in a public library as an existential threat to the ALA’s existence. You have to understand what a racket the ALA is running: immense sums of taxpayer money is funneled into the ALA by public libraries nationwide, because every library pays for expensive ALA memberships, sends staff and board members to pricy ALA conferences, and buys the ALA’s publications from the ALA’s printing press (and a book sold by the ALA is around $60 or $80 in most cases). Multiply this by thousands of libraries and think about how much taxpayer money the ALA is taking from communities like that.
The ALA then funds its mission to be “transformative” in communities. And the key to transforming communities into what George Soros wants them to be is for children to be targeted. Sexualizing children and alienating them from their parents is the ALA’s goal, as proven because the ALA consistently says that librarians should not look out for children, should not keep sexually explicit material (even Playboy!) away from small children, and that librarians should even sneak adult material to children behind their parents’ backs if the children ask for it (otherwise the ALA says that is age discrimination). The net effect is that taxpayer money funds an organization that does things that harm communities whose tax dollars are gobbled up by the ALA.
.
BFH – Your investigative work eventually expanded beyond the local library, covering 666 libraries within the system. Would you say the problems you uncovered crossed political lines, or is this a product of one particular party principle? You know where I’m going with this, you’ve mentioned George Soros, so I’m trying to nail the left with this. Am I off the mark?
.
MEGAN: Interestingly, we found that almost exclusively economic lines were the determinant when it comes to sexual problems and abuse in libraries. The more affluent a community (such as Orland Park), the more likely it is to have a radical library director who sets policy and practice to not call the police on the masturbators and the child porn viewers. Poor libraries in poor communities do not tolerate any of that and they call the police right away. The rich libraries have staff that seem to feel good about themselves for interfering in police investigations or obstructing any attempt by the police to know what is going on.
So, very affluent communities end up with library directors and other key staff who do whatever the ALA tells them to do and that ends up harming their communities. But, it seems that poor libraries do not have the money to pay the high salaries of the ALA radicals and they end up being much safer for families than the no-expenses-spared pie-in-the-sky well-funded libraries in the wealthy suburbs. You end up being safer in a public library in a bad part of town than you would be in the computer area of a well-off, rich library because the poor library would never allow creeps to be doing sexual things in there while the rich library feels good about itself for allowing that.
.
BFH- The idea of 1st amendment rights being trampled is a constant thread in this story. You mentioned how there was an early attempt to silence your findings. Did the librarians ever use the 1st amendment to justify the viewing of pornography in the library, and if so, how did they square this belief with the fact that some of the pornography was illegal?
.
KEVIN: One of the big lies that the ALA tells librarians is that the ALA insists a library will be sued if it does not allow people to watch porn (and even masturbate) in the library. That is hogwash. The Supreme Court ruled in 2003, in the case of US vs. ALA, that no public library has any duty to provide pornography to anyone. No taxpayer money needs to be spent buying or allowing sexual arousal or sexual activity in a public building. The act of viewing pornography in a public building out in the open is actually a crime as it is lewd behavior.
The ALA sent robotic spokeswomen from the Office for Intellectual Freedom to library board meetings to swear up and down that the library had to allow the porn viewing and look the other way when they know this is a lie. They repeat the lie because that is a classic Alinksy trick, to repeat a lie often enough that it becomes true. The ALA wants people to believe that porn viewing in public is a First Amendment issue but the Supreme Court loudly said that is not true back in 2003.
.
BFH- I read that you also uncovered information that led to allegations of theft and abuse of public funds.
.
MEGAN: We uncovered evidence of library board trustees stealing gold jewelry that was purchased with taxpayer money and also taking expensive $500 steak dinners that they were not allowed to eat under the Illinois Local Library Act, which prohibits library board members from being compensated for being on the board. There is no clearer form of compensation than gold. The library director was caught shopping at an expensive local jewelry store, buying gold jewelry, watches, crystal clocks, and other extravagances straight out of the Mamie Eisenhower era and giving it to board members. The board members would then vote however the director wanted them to. After the child porn incident happened, the director waited two months until the coast was clear and then records show she took the board out to an extravagant steak dinner to celebrate them getting away with it and no one finding out. And no one would have ever found out if we had not uncovered all this using FOIA requests.
.
BFH: I get the feeling that the librarians dug themselves a much bigger hole by not handling initial complaints in the right way. Did they step on their own dic… Did they cause their own misery by being jerks?
.
MEGAN: If that library director had just called me up after I complained about seeing the sexual activity in the computer area and staff not caring about it, then we would have not kept digging. Because she and the library chose to fight us, however, and they went to the police to get the Police Chief in on it to scare us away, we knew they were hiding something big. It took us two years to piece it all together but we won against them every time in court and we forced them to make a lot of changes and admit to a lot of wrongdoing. None of that would have happened if they had not attacked us and used Alinksy Methods on us to try to scare us away and censor us. The ALA does this to all moms and dads who complain and it usually works, but the Orland Park Public Library found out what happens when a library tries to silences critics and violate their rights and the critics are not scared away because they know their First Amendment rights.
.
BFH: Are we witnessing a classic case of schadenfreude, or karma?
.
KEVIN: I think I would say that this is a case of public officials’ arrogance. The various government entities in Orland Park circled the wagon and instinctively sided with one another against the public. That’s why when the library director received a complaint, her first instinct was to go to the Police Chief and get him to scare away the people who complained. The director wanted the mom silenced and scared away so she would never have to address the complaint. What this tells me is that for years the Village of Orland Park must have operated this way and anecdotal reports we received from others in the community verified that.
The Village officials in Orland Park forgot that they had to follow the law, including the US Constitution. Megan and I beat these people in court time and again (with the library having to pay out a $55,000 settlement for wrongdoing and the Police Department having to shell out another $12,000 for its own wrongdoing) because they all willfully violated the Open Meetings Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and the First Amendment in our US Constitution. Their pre-set attitude to any interaction with the public where a citizen had criticism or complaint was to shut them up and scare the people away, which is behavior that I expect in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Thailand, or the old USSR…not an affluent Chicago suburb in the USA.
.
BFH: Do you think the number of libraries, 666, is a sign of some sort?
.
MEGAN: At various junctures in all of this, Kevin and I saw God’s hand (and His humor) at work. Our book ended up being 666 pages long as well, which was unplanned. That number also came up various times in receipts and expense reports we uncovered for the wasteful spending. For whatever reason, the number 666 haunts that strange, messed-up library. Sometimes they pay $500 or $750 for a supposed “paranormal expert” named Bob something or another to come to the library to do lectures on ghosts he claims he has seen or believes in. Maybe the next time he is there he can postulate why 666 is so connected to that place. That would be a better use of the taxpayer money going to him on a regular basis (and he’s not the most outrageous spending waste we uncovered in the book!).
.
BFH: This story gets ugly, very ugly, and it isn’t small potatoes. There are constitutional issues at stake.
Where do you see this heading? What are the probable outcomes, fallout, or aftermath?
.
KEVIN: Already the American Library Association members are trying to suppress and censor the book. They don’t want people reading about what happened. I think they also don’t want people knowing that the ALA can be beaten and that the Village of Orland Park lost every single time it attacked us.
I think the bigger picture here is that no one had ever challenged a library board before or cared to look into what it was doing. Kyle Olson at EAG does a great job looking at school spending abuse and there are a few sites that look at what’s going on with villages and county government, such as the excellent Edgar County Watchdogs group in Illinois and the Better Government Association. But no one before Megan and me (apart from Dan Kleinman who runs Safe Libraries and who assisted us in Orland Park) ever FOIA-ed the incident reports, spending reports, and legal invoices of public libraries in Illinois to see if the board members were honest or if they were stealing and looking the other way when crimes were committed.
In writing the book, Megan and I wanted to show everyone who would read it that they too could look into what was going on at their local government level…and they might be horrified by what they find, like she and I were horrified by what we found in Orland Park. If Illinois (and America at large) is ever going to climb out of the mess we are in then we as Americans need to start looking more closely at what elected officials at all levels are doing.
If a local public library board is stealing gold, stuffing their faces full of steak, and looking the other way when child porn is being accessed and men are openly masturbating in their building then what else is going on in town? People should not find these board meetings to be boring but instead see them as opportunities to stand up and supervise how their tax money is being spent. The boards are not our monarchs. In America, we the people are their supervisors and they are our public servants, not our masters or betters.
.
BFH: This is all jaw-dropping stuff. I’ll never go into a library without thinking about this, nor will I ever vote locally without checking things out. A good first step would be to request that your local library stock your book. What do you suppose the chances of that would be?
.
KEVIN: So far, the Orland Park Public Library has refused to carry SHUT UP!, despite many local residents asking them to carry it. According to what the ALA says every year during Banned Books Week, if a decision is made to purposely not carry a book when the public is asking for it, then whoever is refusing to buy the book is banning and censoring the books. By the ALA’s own logic, the Orland Park Public Library is banning and censoring our book because it is critical of the Orland Park Public Library and the ALA. There can be no clearer example of book-banning and censorship than refusing to stock on shelves a book that is critical of the very same library that is refusing to carry the book.
.
BFH: Well, I thank you both for your time, not only with this interview, but with the sacrifice of your time investigating this corruption. I hope your work has made our society more safe.
.
MEGAN: Kevin and I both appreciate your readers checking out the book (hopefully literally, in their local libraries) and asking why their library doesn’t carry it if they don’t. We also appreciate people opening their minds to the idea that a place that everyone assumes is totally safe (their local library) might have a lot of terrible things being covered up, since no one has probably ever bothered to check before. We would love for people to look at what incidents are happening in their own local libraries and do what they can to clean those up. If people did that and started asking more questions about their local government, then the work we spent on this project for the last several years was all worth it.
.
.
SHUT UP! is available through Amazon HERE
.
Authors Megan Fox and Kevin DuJan
Great interview covering a great cause. There is still some hope.
This story touched on so many of the issues that concern me as a citizen, it’s hard to consume all at once.
Everything I hate about the left is in this piece.
Perversion, authoritarianism, cronyism, unions, greed, secretiveness.
Yes, ask the library to stock this book and see what happens.
OMG THAT IS JUST GROSS!!!
Think about the people who have to use a computer after some dude was “leaving their DNA” on it.
I don’t like using them thinking about nose pickers.
Congratulations to Kevin and Megan for not backing down to these library thugs! You just showed the rest of this country how to fight city hall. Thank you for calling out the tyrants who use their power to lord over the innocent public.
I’m so proud of you two!!
Sounds like maybe a shit ton of leaflets should be dropped in and around the library about the scum who work there.
Are the employees getting some money on the side from the creeps?
And thanks for doing the interview, Fur. I hope this post goes viral!
If only Jared knew that looking at child porn in a publicly funded library in Illinois wasn’t a crime, he wouldn’t be in jail right now.
Dayum, well done.
Doesn’t anybody own a cane or a walking stick?
If I saw some pervert wanking in the public library, in full view of any little kids that might go by (whether there are any or not) I would leave that son of a bitch a gibbering mass of cane welts.
You go right ahead and put my ass in jail, there are some things that shall not stand. I will not tolerate degenerate behavior in the sphere of my vision and hearing.
That Library belongs to the public, therefor I too have a share of ownership, and if I came out of my bathroom and saw some guy wanking in my house I would cane him within an inch of his life.
Now I don’t expect a Lady with kids to confront a pervert, but there should be at least one man with blood in his veins still somewhere around.
Excellent interview on a subject I didn’t have a clue about. It surprised me (although it shouldn’t have) how far Soros has his evil claws in every aspect of our lives. I’m going to ask for the book at my local library.
Excellent interview, and glad you did it.
The book’s cover photo looks like Elizabeth warren on a bad hair day.
Great interview….and reveals the depravity of the left.
I find it hard to believe, that the library IP address, has not come up on law enforcements radar. You know these pervs are downloading this crap onto thumb drives and such. Some agency somewhere had to have picked up on it. And it seems like the media has no interest in doing a story. I guess the left won’t be happy until this shit is on broadcast television.
I’m sure this is true about any publicly available computer. All the pervs need is a tiny smidgen of privacy. I was waiting for my husband to come out of surgery at NW Hosp in Chicago. They had computer terminals in the waiting area for family to use (the days before everyone had an email/internet capable cell phone). I went to use one to check my office mail. Tapped a CTRL H to pull up history, just for the hell of it. Quite a few sites popped up on the list that seemed to be porn related. Did not bother to check my email. Went to wash up in the restroom. Never, NEVER use a publicly available computer.
I wondered about this. I stopped by the Orland Park public library to check out some reference material, and found that my briefcase had stuck to the table. I thought that was odd at the time.
I have never figured out why many public libraries don’t put blocks on their computer equipment. But given the reluctance of a growing number of people to read anything, some of these administrators probably feel that if it were not for the perverts, the entire place would be empty. It’s a sad state of affairs when librarians turn dictatorial.
Wyatt, a lot of them only put blocks on some Conservative blogs/websites. I have come across that before.
I was thrown out of a library once when I asked the librarian if I could use the public access library computers to download music. She said; ” NO, sir you can only download music with a Macintosh, I know because I have a Mac”
So I laughed and she called the cops.
Stupid lib
Just horrible, Libraries have always been My Sanctuary since I read “Where the Wild Things Are” at Wanless Elementary in Spfld Il. in 1970…Here in Key West, there is a always a Deputy Sheriff behind the counter…and I always joke” I’m only a few days late, there was no need to call the Cops” Sooner or later they’ll Tase Me for that( and deservedly so)
I am so happy to see that Kevin Dujan and Megan Fox are still teamed up together!
When I was in high school, many moons ago, the public library seemed to be Perv Central, and this was in the days before the internet. Seems to me Marian the Librarian has always been closing her eyes to this.
MJA, money on the side. I’m thinking that they are getting something else on the side. Not only men go for porn, I’m wondering if the women there are also getting off on pervs getting off. Also, I have had clients whose husbands/boyfriends/whatever, were into porn of all types and they went along with it for various reasons. Could be these library folks aren’t exactly pure on the subject.
I couldn’t remember how I knew about Kevin. Just remembered – Hillbuzz. I used to love Kevin’s writings. Have to go back and check out Hillbuzz.
Outstanding! I submitted this to Drudge. Everyone needs to hear this.
Tammy turned me on to this story many years ago.
Followed Kevin and Megan’s reports when Kevin still had his website.
Glad they wrote this book. Will buy this at the same time I buy “Crisis of Character”
🙂
I have my own way of dealing with public masturbation:
(In loudest voice possible) “LOOK! IT’S JUST LIKE A PENIS, ONLY SMALLER!”
JcLady kevin stil has a website. HillBuzz.org It is still there
Well, this whole report is a total pack of lying nonsense! I have been a professional Librarian for 40 years, and this is just the vilest collection of ridiculous untruth I think I’ve ever read!