Book Tells Kids Republicans ‘Don’t Believe In’ Immigrants While Dems Are The Party Of Lunch And Free Stuff
Just because your middle schooler can’t vote doesn’t mean he’s not the target of election materials designed to make him sympathetic to Democrats. A book in the “Who HQ” series (published by Penguin Random House) titled “What Is A Presidential Election?” introduces kids to leftist talking points about the Electoral College, Donald Trump, and government spending, to name a few.
In a two-page spread, the book’s author, Douglas Yacka, presents kids with 10 sentiments and then tells them, “If you answered ‘Yes’ to more of the odd-numbered questions, you agree with many ideas held by Democrats.” If you answered “Yes” to even-numbered statements, you might be a Republican, Yacka explains.
What kind of sentiments are Democrat-coded? Spending more tax dollars on “education and improving schools,” ensuring “businesses can’t pollute the environment,” government-provided “affordable health care available to all Americans,” government efforts to “see that all Americans have a home, a job, and a decent education,” and taxing those “wealthy people and big businesses” to provide “school lunch programs for children whose families don’t have much money.” Does your 8-year-old like free things, trees, lunch, and his teacher? Congratulations, he’s a Democrat.
Your kid is a Republican, on the other hand, if he doesn’t “believe in letting immigrants into our country,” a blatantly false mischaracterization of Republicans’ (and most Americans’) concerns about the open border crisis that has seen millions of people and hundreds of thousands of convicted criminals cross into the United States illegally. Those immigrant-hating Republicans are the same greedy people who want lower taxes just so they can “have more money in their pockets,” Yacka informs your kid.
Other “Republican” statements — like “the government should stay out of people’s business as much as possible” and “if I own a business, the government has no right telling me how to run it” — are disingenuously listed right after Yacka offers sympathetic Democrat reasons why the government wants to do the exact opposite.
Elsewhere in the book, Yacka asks kids to rank issues “in order of their importance to you.” You might be able to detect the feel-good slant in the terms “better public education,” “protection of the environment,” free college tuition,” “good, affordable medical care,” and “equal rights and protections for all Americans.”
Much less exciting to the average middle-schooler are items like “lower taxes” and “cutting costs for government programs.”
In a section titled “Leading the Way,” the book celebrates Democrat Hillary Clinton as the “first woman to be the presidential candidate of a major political party” and Democrat Pete Buttigieg as the “first openly gay man” to run for president.
You might think, as the first female campaign manager to helm a successful presidential campaign, Kellyanne Conway would get a special shoutout. Instead, the book dedicates a half-page illustration to Biden’s 2020 campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, whom it describes as the “first female campaign manager for a winning Democratic presidential campaign.” In parentheses, the caption begrudgingly admits “Kellyanne Conway had been the first in a Republican presidential campaign” four years earlier.
In its handling of the 2020 election, the book boils down widespread concerns about an unprecedented election into the sentiment that Trump was wrong, saying he “did not concede or begin planning a peaceful transition.” (On Jan. 20, 2021, Trump peacefully left office and Joe Biden was inaugurated as president.) There’s an obligatory paragraph about Jan. 6, and the lawfare against Trump by his opponent’s Justice Department is handled by noting that the former president faced “criminal charges” for trying “to change the election results.”
‘Unfair’ Electoral College
There’s also a not-so-subtle dig at the Electoral College: “Believe it or not, whoever wins the most votes does not necessarily become president.” The Electoral College, Yacka adds, is a system from “more than two centuries ago.” Back then, Americans, especially those rural voters “living outside of urban areas,” were “much less informed about the candidates,” he says. Now that our population has access to social media and search engines curated by Big Tech censors, “some people believe that the Electoral College is unfair and no longer necessary.”
To drive home the “unfair” point, Yacka can’t help reminding kids that Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 “but still lost the election.”
After making an argument against the Electoral College for the better part of four pages, a line tacked on at the end acknowledges that some “argue that the Electoral College still provides a more equal representation between areas of the country with higher populations and those with fewer people.”
Just to make sure your kids got the point, readers are prompted to write down their opinion about which system seems “fairer.”
Kamala Harris, Your Kid’s New Hero
The book was released while Joe Biden was still Democrats’ presidential frontrunner, before Democrats decided he couldn’t win and ousted him from the race to be replaced by his vice president, Kamala Harris. The series doesn’t include a book about Biden or Trump, but it does have one about Harris, who is described as “a young, multiracial teenager who dreamed of becoming a lawyer” and “a successful US senator who fought for progressive reforms and women’s rights.”
(In the book’s description, Who HQ describes the diversity-box-checking politician’s “rise to national prominence” as “one filled with unexpected turns and obstacles” … like her initial failure to pass the bar exam.)
The series also includes profiles of left-wing icons like Sonia Sotomayor, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The only 21st-century Republican figure the publishers could bring themselves to include — in a series that saw fit to describe communist dictator Fidel Castro as “a boy who loved sports” and sexual predator Harvey Milk as “a young Jewish boy who liked listening to opera and playing football” — was the late Sen. John McCain.
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_etreynolds.
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