Countering woke kidlit and other commentary

Culture critic: Countering Woke Kidlit

“Whereas the children’s section at your local library or bookstore was once filled with fables and fairy tales, it’s now filled with titles like ‘The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish’ and ‘Race Cars: A Children’s Book About White Privilege,’ ” laments Bethany Mandel at Spectator World. “Writers and agents know what publishers want, and it’s woke content.” Who’s “buying the 27 different versions of Ruth Bader Ginsburg biographies for kids?” Not parents but “librarians and teachers.” The “battle for children’s minds is being fought in classrooms, at school board meetings and in publishing houses in New York City.” A literary startup, Heroes of Liberty, aims to give parents more options. Its “objective” is “to impart the values and morals” of “historical and contemporary titans,” to have “Alexander Hamilton to teach our children humility and John Wayne to teach them about masculinity and honor.”

Poll watch: Inflation Fears Soaring

“Americans of all political persuasions expect prices to shoot up over the next year,” notes Issues & Insights’ Terry Jones. In the November I&I/TIPP poll, “84 percent said ‘over the next year prices for gasoline, food, and other household products’ would be ‘much higher’ or ‘somewhat higher’ than today,” with a full 48 percent saying “much higher.” Some experts declared the April inflation surge of 4.2 percent to be “transient,” but the following five months all “were 5 percent or higher. In October, prices surged 6.2 percent, a 30-year high, exceeding even already-gloomy forecasters’ predictions.” Compare that to “the average 1.9 percent annual CPI rate that prevailed during President Donald Trump’s four years in office.”

Psychologist: Social Media = Poison for Girls

“Rates of depression, anxiety and self-injury” among adolescent girls “surged in the early 2010s, as social-media platforms proliferated and expanded,” reports Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic. Indeed, a platform like Instagram “takes the worst parts of middle school and glossy women’s magazines and intensifies them.” Worse: “When teens went from texting their close friends on flip phones in 2010 to posting carefully curated photographs and awaiting comments and likes by 2014, the change rewired everyone’s social life.” Congress should raise “the age at which children should legally be allowed to give away their data and their privacy,” now just 13, and make Facebook and others “allow academic researchers access to their data.” Parents should “delay entry to Instagram and other social platforms until high school.”

Urban beat: Crime Drives Chicago Black Exodus

“A city that once drew tens of thousands of southern Black residents and once held the nation’s second largest Black population seems to have lost its attraction for Black folks, who continue to leave,” observes Chicago Tribune’s William Lee. “Chicago’s Black population dropped to 787,551 in 2020, its lowest total since the mid-1950s.” Blame “the city’s inability to create or facilitate jobs to replace the industrial job losses, as well as the rise of drugs” and its “national reputation for violence.” It’s a reverse of the past: After Indiana next door, “Georgia and Texas were the top destinations for Black residents leaving Illinois each year between 2015 and 2019.”

Libertarian: Dems Look To Bloat Gov’t More

President Biden has finally “united the American people — in disapproving of his performance, with 70 percent of Americans disliking the direction the economy is going” and 59 percent concerned he’ll expand government too much, snarks Veronique de Rugy at Reason. While both parties share blame for growing the federal government, Dems now want to go far further. Meanwhile, inflation is sapping buying power, as people “are hammered with higher prices at the grocery store and at the pump,” while wages fail to keep up. Yet Dems would “rather stoke the inflation flame so they can centralize more federal power even if they risk a painful intervention by the Federal Reserve. That will do little to assuage people’s concern about government’s growth.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

source: nypost.com