First we saved abuela, then we saved Virginia, now we are saving the children’s book genre. As any parent who has ventured into the children’s section at Barnes and Noble knows, the category has become totally flooded by left wing propaganda. Every other title on the shelf is “Anti-Racist Baby” or “I Am Jazz” or “Jacob’s New Dress” or “Charlie the Unicorn Has Two Mommies and Three Daddies” or whatever. A good portion of this agitprop has a racial message but most of it is focused on gender and identity because the first and primary goal of the indoctrinators is to induct children into the religion of gender ideology.
Why is this so important? Because, as I have long argued, we are in the midst of a war over truth. These are not scuffles around the edges of truth. We are not fighting over the truth or falsehood of this or that claim. The goal of the Leftist, fundamentally, is to relativize everything, relativize reality itself. He wants to be the God of his own life, his own universe. This is how he envisions freedom. This is what he means when he uses the word. Freedom in the sense of being untethered from any sort of objective, defining or definable force, floating aimlessly in an ambiguous abyss. And if this is the goal, there is no better starting point than to undermine biological reality, freeing oneself from one’s own physical nature. And there is no better place to start that project than with children, who already have a tenuous grasp on reality and will believe pretty much anything you tell them (hence the whole Santa Claus thing).
Children have no choice but to rely on the adults around them to guide them through the early stages of life. The young of many different species have this need, to one degree or another, and sometimes in the lesser species this vulnerability and reliance put them in danger. Rats, for example, will sometimes eat their own young. Lions and scorpions will do the same. Humans have a more ideological version of this. Helpless children are devoured by the Leftist indoctrinators. The predator feeds upon the innocence of the child, exploits it, uses it to his own advantage. This is going on everywhere, especially in the books and shows and other forms of entertainment made for kids these days. For a long time, conservatives have essentially surrendered this ground to the Left, like it had surrendered almost everything else. Allowing the Left to turn children’s books into vehicles for this cult-like brainwashing, without offering any response or alternative. But it’s time for that to change, which is why I have finally embraced my true calling as a children’s author — cardigan and all — and written my first work of children’s literature, “Johnny the Walrus.”
It’s difficult to summarize the book because it is a lengthy story of some 400 words, across 30 cardboard pages. It took me many laborious months to write. Countless nights were spent hunched over my typewriter, honing and crafting this work of literature. In brief, it is a story about a creative and imaginative young child. Like most young children, he likes to play pretend. One day, he pretends to be a walrus. He even has wood spoons in his mouth like tusks and socks on his hands like fins. But unfortunately his mommy is the confused and impressionable sort, and she learns from the internet that if your child identifies as something, then he must actually be that thing. Johnny’s mommy spends the majority of the story trying to raise her child according to his walrus self-identity. She does her level best to give her trans-walrus son the sort of walrus life she thinks he wants and needs. At the darkest point in the novel (yes I’m calling it a novel now) she brings him to a purple haired doctor who recommends that he take medication and undergo rather barbaric surgical procedures to complete his walrus transition. Over time, though (spoiler alert), Johnny’s mommy comes to understand that just because a child pretends to be something, that doesn’t mean he actually is what he’s pretending to be.
On second thought, the summary was longer than the book itself. Forget about summaries and buy a copy for yourself and 20 more for your closest friends and family members at JohnnyTheWalrus.com. The book sold out on Amazon in a day as we rocketed to number three on the bestseller list. What this means is that I can legitimately refer to myself as a bestselling children’s author, and I have indeed been referring to myself that way all week, and will continue to do so for many weeks to come. I even gave the name “Bestselling children’s author Matt Walsh” when I ordered a pizza last night. I am going to milk this for all its worth, believe me.
The “controversy” surrounding my talk at SLU this week has been well documented and I probably don’t need to rehash the whole story here. Instead I’d like to share the footage of my confrontation with the mob that came out to protest the event. They had come out because of me, and were standing out in the street, so I thought it would be only polite to go out and say hello. My favorite part of this exchange is the very end where I wave my hand and instruct them to get off the street and they actually obey. I felt a bit like Moses parting the Red Sea, except in this case the sea was red in the communist sense of the word. Who would have ever thought that a bestselling children’s author could have this kind of power?
I went out to say hi to my protesters and give them a chance to answer my “what is a woman” question. They declined, it seems. pic.twitter.com/1qRzOPgod9
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) December 2, 2021
The kids who attend Chicago public schools do not have it easy. They live in one of the most violent and crime-ridden places in the country. As of November 1st, 678 people had been murdered in the city, outpacing the murder rate from 2020 which was itself historically high. Homelessness is also on the rise along with drug abuse and nearly every other marker of societal disintegration. The poverty rate in Chicago is 20 percent.
These dire conditions can be felt in the school system itself where the violence from the street often spills into the hallways and classrooms. The schools are so infected and surrounded by violence that many students are scared to walk home at the end of the day. Earlier this year, two 15-year-old students at one Chicago school were shot and killed in separate shootings on the same day, near the school they attended. This is what it’s like to go to class inside a war zone.
Academically, Chicago schools are subpar at best. Elementary aged students are below the national average in both math and reading. The situation is so bad that the school system brags about a graduation rate of only 82 percent — also considerably below the national average. Granted it is an improvement from the catastrophic 60 percent graduation rate of 2007. Suffice it to say that Chicago public schools have problems. Major problems. And they aren’t focused on solving any of them.
Instead, the district has set “inclusivity” as one of its primary goals. And it most especially wants to impose inclusivity in the bathrooms. As a normal and sane person, you have probably been inside hundreds of public restrooms and never once thought to yourself that the environment needed to be more inclusive. It is unlikely that you have ever looked around and said, “I really wish there was a more diverse array of people peeing alongside me.” You may take note of many other improvements that could be made inside any particular public restroom — most of them hygiene and sanitation related — but diversity and inclusivity are probably not among them.
But the Chicago public school system, like so many other school systems, is not run by people like you. It is run by weirdos and predators who have never met a “heteronormative” arrangement that they did not want to dismantle. And that’s why the district announced this week that all bathrooms in all of its schools at every grade level will be made gender neutral from henceforward. They proudly released a video where Cammie Pratt and Deb Spraggins, their top title 9 officers and chief groomers, announced the change:
ICYMI: We’re requiring all schools to adopt new signage to make our restrooms more inclusive. This is a big step forward for gender equity for our students and staff. pic.twitter.com/4JPBdd1jQy
— CPS – Chicago Public Schools (@ChiPubSchools) November 30, 2021
The signage on the bathrooms will read “Boys+” and “Girls+” with a note indicating that “all who feel comfortable are welcome to use this restroom.” This, of course, does not take into account the fact that, for most well adjusted people, their comfort level in the bathroom depends on who else is allowed to use it. Most girls feel comfortable using the girls restroom precisely because there will only be girls inside it. They will not feel comfortable if anyone else who feels comfortable, regardless of sex, is allowed to join them.
The upshot is that normal girls with a normal desire for privacy and safety will not feel comfortable anywhere anymore. There is no restroom for them to use. For the sake of providing comfort to the tiny minority of gender non-conformists, the comfort of everyone else must be sacrificed. For normal girls (“cisgirls,” as they are now called in an effort to marginalize normalcy) the signs ought to simply say: “Go to hell. We don’t care about you.” After all, that is the real message.
This is not about comfort, generally speaking. And it’s not about being inclusive or tolerant. As always, these nice-sounding words are window dressing for the true agenda. In this case, the real point is to institute a social hierarchy where the desires of the Uber Victims — those in the LGBT camp, especially trans people — are placed explicitly above the needs of those who are their social inferiors. Normal girls (and boys) are punished for being normal. After a while, these punitive measures tend to have, by design, an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join’em” effect. Kids are so immersed in gender ideology, so subject to its commands, even in the bathrooms, that eventually they are worn down and learn to accept it and even embrace it.
You have probably already taken note of the timing of this bathroom policy change in Chicago. It comes directly on the heels of a major national scandal in Loudoun County (exposed by the Daily Wire’s investigative reporting) where a girl was brutally raped inside a girl’s bathroom by a boy in a dress. Some on social media have said that they can’t believe Chicago would instate this policy in spite of what happened in Virginia. They’re looking at it the wrong way. Chicago is not doing this now in spite of the Loudoun County scandal. They’re doing it now because of that scandal.
The groomers and predators and brainwashers of children are not backing away in shame. They certainly won’t change course out of any concern for the safety of students. They don’t care if kids are raped in the bathroom. They only care if the raping becomes inconvenient to the trans agenda. The wellbeing of children is not a priority at all. It doesn’t factor into the equation. What matters is that every aspect of student life conforms with the demands of leftist ideology — especially gender ideology — and any amount of suffering is a worthy trade off towards that end. That’s why Chicago is doing this now. They are doubling down and sending a message to the domestic terrorists (i.e. parents who value their children’s safety and wellbeing), and the message is: “Your kids are ours. We own them. We will do what we want with them and to them.”
I said before that Chicago isn’t focused on addressing the violence and chaos in its schools. That’s true, but I should mention that they did announce this year a new plan — what they call a “healing centered-framework” — to help kids cope with trauma related to violence, COVID, or other struggles. It’s not clear what this will entail, exactly, but we do know that it will cost 25 million dollars. I wonder if the girls who will now be abused, raped, harassed, and accosted in the school’s bathrooms will have access to these services. Something tells me that they will not. Their trauma doesn’t count, just like their feelings and their comfort and their privacy don’t count. It all must be sacrificed on the LGBT altar.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.