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For the past several years, America’s conservatives have been all up in everyone’s business about what it is they think children and teens ought to be allowed to learn or know about. Usually this pertains to LGBTQ+ people, as they somehow believe that merely telling children that gay and trans people exist will compel them to be gay or trans themselves. Now they have to worry that their kids are going to find out what Democrats and Republicans believe and then become Democrats.
In a plaintive essay published on The Federalist this week, Patrick Henry College graduate Elle Purnell complains that a book about United States elections titled What Is A Presidential Election? is biased against Republicans.
Purnell’s Complaint is titled “Book Tells Kids Republicans ‘Don’t Believe In’ Immigrants While Dems Are The Party Of Lunch And Free Stuff”— which seems entirely accurate. But let’s dive in, shall we?
Purcell writes:
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.
Seems fair enough!
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.
These things are all literally, factually true. Democrats do support those things, and Republicans oppose them.
Perhaps Yacka should have noted that Republicans like Newt Gingrich have offered that they would accept subsidized lunches for poor kids if the poor kids worked as janitors at the school for free. That only seems fair!
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.
Again, those things are factually true. Why else do Republicans want lower taxes? Immigrants, regardless of their status, commit crimes at a far lower rate than US citizens, so that can’t be their only complaint, can it? Unless it’s just crimes they made up, like accusing Haitians who are here with Temporary Protected Status of eating people’s pets? Should there have been a caveat explaining that they have nothing against the immigrant wives of Republican politicians? Sure, there is currently a Republican lie making the rounds about “Joe Biden let in 600,000 murderers” or something (you can see it linked in her paragraph, above); it is, in fact, a lie. Glenn Kessler, usually seen lambasting Bernie Sanders, calls it an “outrageous lie.” So no, the children’s book author should not in fact have taken that into account!
How would Elle Purcell describe her party’s desire for lower taxes and anger about immigrants in a way that would not be off-putting to children?
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.
Ah! I get it. You see, the Republican line on these things is that Democrats do want to do good things for people, but only for entirely nefarious reasons, like wanting to control everyone or make everyone lazy. If you just put them out there by themselves, however, they sound very appealing! And if. you just put Republican ideas out there … not so much!
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.”
Again, these are things people actually believe in and want. Would Purcell prefer that the Left believe in more repulsive things, in order to strike a balance? Oh! Or should Yacka have included a few weird Republican ideas about what we believe in and do? Like, you know, how Roseanne was telling Tucker Carlson all about how we eat babies the other day? Would that be more fair?
Much less exciting to the average middle-schooler are items like “lower taxes” and “cutting costs for government programs.”
How is that our fault? How is it our fault that the Right wants lower taxes, wants to make cuts to the social safety net, is constantly mad about diversity programs and immigrants, and opposes universal health care and public university tuition? Did we force them at gunpoint to talk about their plans to dismantle the Department of Education?
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.”
I love this whole line they’ve got now about how attempting a coup doesn’t count if it is unsuccessful. You don’t get points for that!!
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.”
Also all factually true! Candidates do not have to travel around the country and make their cases to people in person, because practically everyone in the country has ways of finding out what they believe otherwise. Purcell’s “Big Tech censors” on the other hand, more like an opinion. And a stupid one.
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.”
Again, factually true.
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.”
The fact is, any description of the electoral college is going to sound like an argument against it, because it is an inherently ridiculous system. Unless someone has it ingrained in their head that geography should determine how much impact someone’s vote has, it does not make any sense. Republicans want it because it makes it easier for them to win elections, and not for any reason more high minded than that.
In fact, that seems to be the primary reason this book feels biased to Purcell. Right-wing ideas sound cruel, insane, and unfair unless one has been properly primed to accept them. Left-wing ideas sound nice and fair and very appealing unless someone has been primed to believe that people only want those nice things for reasons of unspecified evil.
As far as I can tell, Yacka didn’t even delve into some of the more appalling things that Republicans believe — I’m not seeing anything about guns or social issues or LGBTQ+ rights or abortion or support for cops who kill unarmed Black people or wanting to force their religion on everyone else.
There is a reason why Purcell didn’t refute any of the actual points here and didn’t offer a more compelling reason for wanting lower taxes or opposing universal school lunches. There’s a reason she couldn’t offer any alternative ideas that might make Republicans look less like assholes. Because there aren’t any.
I would encourage Purcell to try her own hand at this. To write down what she believes each party believes without speculating on what their real intent is. I guarantee you it will come out sounding “biased” against Republicans. Hell, her own reading of why Republicans oppose immigrants doesn’t make them sound too sympathetic either. “See, they’re only upset about the immigrants because of how they think all of the immigrants are homicidal maniacs!” still makes them sound like assholes.
If she can’t do it … then perhaps she has some things to rethink about her life and her belief system!
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