Too On Brand: School Purges 1984, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, and Others to Promote ‘Diversity’

You really can’t make things like this up. 

Seriously. Liberals may want to purge libraries of “wrongthink,” but you would expect that anybody with an IQ above room temperature could have figured out that tossing out more than half your books in a school library, including 1984 and Animal Farm, would be a bad look. 

But no. Not in Canada, apparently. And certainly not at the Thames Valley School District in London, Ontario. Out of a High School library of 18,000 books, 10,000 were “deselected” and tossed into the trash because they didn’t fit the vision of having an “inclusive” library. Presumably, that explains why they tossed out books by J.K. Rowling, which I assume were quite popular with the kids; she engages in wrongthink about gender, and needs to be purged. 

A London, Ontario, secondary school binned more than 10,000 library books between January and March this year under the Thames Valley District School Board’s “inclusive libraries revitalization project,” eliminating more than half of the school’s 18,000-book collection.

H.B. Beal’s library once held one of the largest collections in the board. Today, fewer than 8,300 books remain. The estimated value of the discarded materials exceeds $180,000.

Education Minister Paul Calandra moved quickly to halt further library culls while the ministry investigates the Beal revitalization project. A spokesperson for the ministry confirmed last week that “the minister has directed that all current and future library collection reviews be paused, pending further evaluation.”

According to board documentation, the project aims “to revitalize the collections of Thames Valley schools to ensure they are culturally responsive, reflect our diverse student population, and contain accurate and up-to-date information.” The project adds that it will focus on “deselecting texts with harmful images, messaging, slurs, and racial epithets to facilitate the safety and well-being of all students.”

Some of the books “deselected” blow your mind, not because it would surprise you that radical leftists would want to hide them, but because it makes their goals of purging the library of any ideological diversity so blatant. They literally purged books about…book banning. 

Among the purged books were works that challenge power, authority and ideology, including George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Literary classics such as Hamlet, Macbeth and To Kill a Mockingbird were also removed, along with Wuthering Heights and multiple Harry Potter novels.

The deletions extended well beyond fiction. Removed titles included Canadian political biographies, such as those of John A. Macdonald, Cold War history books, and social commentary on residential schools, religion, family violence and sexuality. Numerous coming-of-age novels and realist works dealing with adolescence, identity and social marginalization were also culled, as were titles on book bans.

Walk into any library in even a moderately liberal area, and you can find books aimed at children explaining how to engage in dangerous sexual activity, change genders, and even telling kids how to sign up for sex apps like Grindr. 

But 1984? To Kill a Mockingbird? Canadian history? Nah. Too dangerous and not diverse enough. 

More than half the books in that library weren’t “inclusive” enough to be available. 

Of course, this is not QUITE as bad as another Ontario school library. 

This is not the first instance of mass book removals in Ontario. In 2023, the Peel District School Board was exposed for removing all books published before 2008 as part of its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

I wrote about that at the time, too. That purge, too, would have captured almost all the books eliminated in this purge, plus a bunch of others. 

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.”

That line from Orwell comes from 1984. And of course that means it was tossed into the trash bin. 

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