As part of “Read Across America Day,” Joe Biden recently took part in an annual presidential tradition, unveiling his book list for the country’s school children.
Notably absent from the list was the very author whose birthday the celebration commemorates: Dr. Seuss.
The conspicuous omission comes as the woke mob, alongside local school districts, pushes to “cancel” his work for supposedly being replete with “racial undertones” not conducive for “culturally responsive” learning. The company which controls Dr. Seuss’s estate even ceased publication of six books they found to be particularly “hurtful.”
Though the Biden administration didn’t give a specific reason for keeping Dr. Seuss from the list, if you believe they happened to omit the most popular children’s author in American history, on the holiday set on his birthday by accident, and not for fear of offending the outrage mob, you’re living in a world as outlandish and fantastical as one of Seuss’s creations.
The Biden administration has tacitly canceled Dr. Seuss because some of his work doesn’t live up to their modern day “woke” standards.
What Biden doesn’t seem to realize is that if he was held to those same standards, he would face certain cancellation.
If it weren’t for the conveniently-selective outrage of the mob, whose ire falls solely on those outside the inner sanctum of wokeness, Biden himself would’ve been cast out, canceled, and forgotten long ago. That is, if we’re abiding by the idea that the past words and actions of an individual — say a children’s author or politician — should be held under a microscope and viewed through a modern lens.
By now, most on the Right are familiar (despite the legacy media’s lack of coverage) with Biden’s history of what the Left would call “racially insensitive” comments.
Read for yourself each of the following statements and think of the litany of historical figures or modern day conservatives who’ve been canceled for less.
- In June of 2006, Biden was filmed telling an Indian-American voter, “you cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”
- In August of 2019, in an apparent attempt to offer support for impoverished children, Biden had an apparent freudian slip, saying, “we have this notion that somehow if you’re poor you cannot do it, poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”
- In February of 2007, Biden seemed to imply that up to that point, America had been devoid of any well-spoken black leaders, calling Barack Obama, “the first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
- In 1977, while arguing in opposition to a measure which would have allowed busing to further desegregate public schools, Biden said, “Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point.”
And who could forget Biden’s insistence in 2020 that “you ain’t black” if you’re an African-American who doesn’t support the Democratic party? Well, who besides the media, Democrat leadership, and woke mob as a whole, could forget?
Ask one hundred Americans whether they find any one of those comments or a few drawings from a Dr. Seuss book more offensive, and the answer would be obvious.
If the standards Biden now requires others to live by were applied to any of these comments, he himself would be sacrificed upon the altar of political correctness.
And that’s the problem.
While Democratic politicians increasingly embrace the cancel culture tactics of their radical base, the work of ignoring their own cancelable offenses becomes ever more difficult.
The woke mob is a beast with an appetite satiated only by the blood of new victims. The eyes of that beast have been focused by its masters on a predetermined population. For now.
Sooner, rather than later, that beast will break free of its restraints and seek new victims. By then, its masters will appear more appetizing than ever.
Cabot Phillips is Managing Editor of The Daily Wire’s Readers Pass. Follow him on Twitter at @cabot_phillips.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.