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Seventh grader Thomas Bornman read Dr. Seuss’ “The Sneetches” to roughly a dozen students and parents Monday in front of Olentangy Local School’s administrative building — more than a week after a podcast aired where a communications official stopped a teacher from finishing the book in class. “It’s important to send the school district a message that it’s OK for students to ask questions and talk about race,” said the 14-year-old Olentangy Hyatts Middle School student. The read-in was part of a peaceful protest by a group of concerned parents that was organized Monday in response to Amanda Beeman, the...

Five of the top ten Hard cover fiction books for the week ended March 13th were by Dr. Seuss

Ignoring and conceding small battles like six Dr. Seuss books or Mr. Potato Head is what empowers the left's culture warriors to take control of everything.Bill Maher made an interesting point on his show last Friday, arguing that America’s obsession with political correctness is crippling its institutions, leaving the country hobbled in the geopolitical race with China. That’s an accurate assessment, one that also tasks the defenders of cultural sanity with resisting wokeness while not getting bogged down by trivialities at the cost of basic efficiency. That’s an impossible balance to strike. Despite the left’s false but emergent narrative that...

My mother had a ban on pork, and I thought she was mad that I broke it. One afternoon four decades ago, when I was about 8, I walked into my family’s house after playing outside and saw my mother sitting in the yellow recliner with a book in her lap. She had found the copy of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. I knew that I was in trouble, because normally no one sat in the canary-colored La-Z-Boy, a throne reserved for my grandmother. Another member of the family occupying it automatically meant that something very serious had happened­....

Race Neutrality is the New RacismHow Wokeism Turned Against Liberalism and Dr. SuessThis week’s controversy over Dr. Seuss may seem like merely the latest in a series of bizarre cancel culture maneuvers from the radical left. Indeed, it comes after a cancelation extravaganza that has included attempts by Princeton faculty to cancel the literature of Greece and Rome, attempts by Amazon to cancel the book When Harry Became Sally, and even an attempt by our President to cancel women. But in the case of the sudden withdrawal from print of six books from Dr. Suess’s corpus, something deeper is at...

A poem defending Dr. Seuss was posted on Facebook recently. I expect it to be banned soon, so I’ll re-post it here: =============================================================== Alas they’ve come for Dr. SEUSS, they wish to hang him with a noose. They claim his tales were racist bent, they judged him fast, missed what he meant. But if we look inside his tales, you’ll find the balance of the scales. Remember when Horton heard a Who, and we heard the wisdom of the Lorax too. The lesson behind Green Eggs and Ham, that changed the mind of Sam I am. Remember too the rotten...

<p>Just days before President Joe Biden passed one of the most consequential spending bills in American history, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader, was reading Dr Seuss on Twitter.</p><p>What, one might wonder, was going on? McCarthy was reading from Green Eggs and Ham in response to a decision made by the estate of Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr Seuss) to stop publishing six books by the much-loved children’s author because they contained material deemed racially offensive. The issue inflamed conservative media, dominated the airwaves and drew angry condemnation from senior politicians, including Ted Cruz, a Texas senator, who blamed the Seuss decision on Biden.</p>

Bill Maher says the people who actually live in China don’t care about Dr. Seuss’s “racist” cartoon of a Chinese man holding chopsticks, because they’re too busy learning math and building skyscrapershttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DH4v6FnbvM

HBO’s Real Time host Bill Maher warned of the rising influence of China globally and in the United States — a concern routinely ignored by Democrats in his own party. China, Maher cautioned, is growing in dominance as America continues to allow cultural issues, such as the political correctness of iconic children’s books, to distract from more pressing issues. “You’re not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are a silly people. And Americans are a silly people,” Bill Maher said during his monologue Friday night. “Do you know who doesn’t care that there’s a stereotype...

A donation site run by Ted Cruz was raising money by selling copies of "Green Eggs and Ham," which were signed by the senator. "Lefties are losing their minds that I'm signing & sending copies of Green Eggs and Ham to anyone who donates $60 or more," the Texas senator said on Twitter late Friday. "We've raised $125k in just 24 hours!"

The latest front in the culture war focuses on—wait for it—children’s cartoons, in the form of animated shows and movies and illustrated story books. Several Dr. Seuss titles, along with Disney movies like Peter Pan and The Artistocats and Loony Tunes characters Pepe LePew and Speedy Gonzalez, have all been essentially canceled by the woke mob. Unfortunately, though unsurprisingly, in their insatiable appetite for new phantom offenses, the wokesters have completely missed the point. Of course those cartoons traffic in stereotypes. They’re cartoons, another word for which is caricatures. More importantly, though, the fact that they might contain some mildly...

This week, Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced it would stop the sale and distribution of six classic volumes from the great children’s author. Those volumes, said the company, violate its commitment to “messages of hope, inspiration, inclusion, and friendship.” The books include portrayals of people “in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” Society has long held that activity that damages others ought to be curbed. John Stuart Mill posited the so-called harm principle—the belief that activity that harms someone ought to be condemned or even barred—in the mid-19th century. But Mill refused to conflate harm and offense: Being offended wasn’t cause...

Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904–'91) wrote and illustrated more than 60 books under the pen name Dr. Seuss. By the time of his death, his books had sold more than 600 million copies and had been translated into more than 20 languages. Geisel was a graduate of Dartmouth with graduate studies at Oxford. His work received two Academy Awards, two Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. For decades, Read Across America Day has celebrated his birthday while encouraging children to read. Like millions of others, I read Dr. Seuss’ books as a child and then read them to...

This week, Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced it would stop the sale and distribution of six classic volumes from the great children's author. Those volumes, said the company, violate its commitment to "messages of hope, inspiration, inclusion, and friendship." The books include portrayals of people "in ways that are hurtful and wrong." Society has long held that activity that damages others ought to be curbed. John Stuart Mill posited the so-called harm principle -- the belief that activity that harms someone ought to be condemned or even barred -- in the mid-19th century. But Mill refused to conflate harm and offense:...

NEW YORK, NY—Things have changed quite a bit in the world of Dr. Seuss, as six of his works have been pulled from publication, banned from sale on eBay, and eliminated from people’s minds using lobotomies to help fight the threat of racism. To get with the times, though, a new Dr. Seuss book has been released, called The Cat in the Hat (He/Him). “In this new book, using reworked art from Dr. Seuss,” said a letter from Dr. Seuss’s estate, “the Cat in the Hat once again finds the two children home alone and bored. This time he diagnoses...

Comedian Gabriel Iglesias defended the cartoon mouse Speedy Gonzalez, whom Iglesias is voicing in the upcoming Space Jam sequel, against claims that the mouse perpetuates “corrosive stereotypes.” Iglesias took to Twitter on Saturday, shooting down any attempt at potentially canceling the cartoon mouse over claims that he or his cartoon friends contribute to harmful stereotypes of Mexicans. “I am the voice of Speedy Gonzales in the new Space Jam. Does this mean they are gonna try to cancel Fluffy too?” Iglesias, who is nicknamed Fluffy, posted with an image of Speedy Gonzalez. “U can’t catch me cancel culture. I’m the...

The “anti-racist” organization, Learning for Justice (formerly known as Teaching Tolerance), says it can no longer use a Dr. Seuss book, that was a key part of their “anti-racism” curriculum to teach acceptance to children after last week’s Dr. Seuss “cancellation” drama. Learning for Justice used to use the Dr. Seuss book, “The Sneetches,” to teach children how to overcome visible differences to forge lasting friendships. In the book, there are two types of “Sneetches” — giant, yellow, bird-like creatures with barrel bellies — one with plain bellies and one with star-shaped marks on their bellies. The two groups begin...

Anybody else keeping track of the score in the Culture War?Probably not as there are no actual rules and therefore no way to tally the results. But there are a lot of keen observations out there:The culture war becomes more infantile by the day. Quite literally. The big talking points of the past few weeks have focused almost exclusively on children’s TV shows, toys and authors.So let’s see:First Disney Plus slapped a warning label on The Muppets Show, due to the ‘negative depictions and / or mistreatment of people or cultures’ it apparently features, acknowledging the ‘harmful impacts’ these puppets...

While sales of most Dr. Seuss books have gone through the roof, if you want a copy of one of the six Suess books that have, after all these years, been deemed racist, you won’t be able to buy them cheap. While you can still get a “collectible” edition of the recently canceled Dr. Seuss book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, you’ll have to shell out at least $300 for it through a third-party vendor on Amazon.But if you happen to have copies of any of the six Seuss books that have been given the...

Instead of a populace with a developed understanding of sin, and a prudent sense of what to punish and what to tolerate, we now have personal and social moral instability.Canceling Dr. Seuss is what a moral panic looks like. Unlike the stereotypical moral panic, in which ill-educated yokels whip themselves up into a frenzy of denunciation, today those with power and influence — journalists, educators, and suchlike — lead the way. At moral panics finding more and more evil to frantically purge, backwoods Baptists have nothing on The New York Times newsroom and students at elite universities. Canceling Harry Potter...