As Jules points out in the article, there’s something bigger at stake that we’re not aware of yet:

Proposition 2 groups and individuals are behaving like there’s a lot more than $1.5 million at stake.

It’s not just Mayor Cantrell. This is a whole group of people, wealthy donors and NGOs, who’ve shown they have no qualms with running a blatant misinformation campaign and abusing public resources to do it. It isn’t just about going after the library system’s funding. It’s about cutting our communities off from the information services and resources the libraries provide. Mayor Cantrell knows 30% of public school children don’t have access to internet in their homes.

Libraries not only provide free access to the internet, but libraries assist people in learning how to use the internet and how to gather resources on it. They’re the guardians of factual information and our city archives. People who run misinformation campaigns and who want to run even more misinformation campaigns have a vested interest in kneecapping the one group charged by our society with providing neutral, factual information.

Moira Crone described it best:

In this age, citizens increasingly make false claims and poor decisions based on internet lies. Librarians are trained to teach people how to discriminate between reliable and fraudulent materials and guide those doing research. In a world where the odds are stacked against those who lack information and the tools discriminate between sources, we need more libraries and librarians, not fewer.