Journalist and former diplomat Dave Seminara exposed a marked bias in the world of children’s literature in a critique published in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
“Liberals are devoted to diversity, but they define it in a peculiar way — obsessing over race, sex and sexual orientation while demanding conformity of thought,” wrote the award-winning writer and father of two sons, 11 and 9.
“The folks who put together the Barnes & Noble display probably never considered that there are literate Americans who wish to expose their children to ideas outside the liberal orthodoxy,” Seminara concluded.
“There has been in the last two years just an enormous outpouring of hysteria, vitriol — the same sort of thing that we’re seeing in the news, we’re seeing coming through children’s books,” said Meghan Gurdon, a WSJ children’s book critic, on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” on Monday night.
“If you’re into the resistance movement, this is your cup of tea,” she told host Laura Ingraham about certain children’s books.
She also said that for those parents who are not proponents of the resistance movement, it’s best to avoid them.
Gurdon said one vulnerability of certain books is that they’re “boring.”
“Political propaganda does not open the mind or lift the spirit, exactly. It’s inculcating a kind of dissatisfaction and rage, and this is true even [for] books for very young children,” said Gurdon.
Ingraham asked why picture books about liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg are so prevalent, while picture books featuring conservative Sandra Day O’Connor — the first female justice on the nation’s highest court — are nowhere to be seen.
“One will look, almost in vain … for any conservative heroines,” responded Gurdon.
Seminara’s opinion piece described the one-sided material offered on the “Inspiring Books to Empower Young Readers” display at Barnes & Noble, the largest retail bookstore chain.
Among the featured works are “memoirs about persecuted illegal aliens, morality plays with 3-year-old vegan protagonists, and autobiographies of liberal Supreme Court justices.”
The books are notable not only for who they lionize but for who they demonize, such as immigration agents who arrest a child at school — while his white and MAGA hat-wearing classmates taunt him.
Overtly religious books aside, children’s books that feature socially or politically conservative protagonists or storylines are rare.
Such characters appear in an anthology, “We Rise, We Resist, We Raise Our Voices,” whose contributors include Ellen Oh, the co-founder of the influential nonprofit organization called We Need Diverse Books.
The anthology received Best Book of 2018 notations from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly.
Overtly religious books aside, children’s books that feature socially or politically conservative protagonists or storylines are rare.
If curious shoppers and readers happen to know the title of such a book and search for it on Google, they’ll likely be able to find it on Amazon. But that book almost certainly wouldn’t appear in a flyer from school or an outlet that sells children’s books.
The brainwashing begins early and never lets up.https://t.co/1YomgsqbaZ
— Fector.. (@Fector) December 17, 2018
.@BNBuzz Seriously, you can do better than this. Your list is a pathetic attempt at indoctrination. // Barnes & Noble’s selection of ‘Inspiring Books to Empower Young Readers’ is notably left-wing, writes Dave Seminara https://t.co/5OTsulKYU9 via @WSJOpinion
— David Ross (@djross95) December 17, 2018
The folks who put together the #book displays at Barnes & Noble seem incapable of considering that there may be literate Americans who wish to expose their children to ideas outside the #liberal orthodoxy ~ https://t.co/1tGncOcE5W
— D.A. Nygaard (@Danofhope) December 17, 2018
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