Being The Brave Counterweight

Is it racist for a baby to say, “momma”? Clearly, it must be — since the term is English and thus of white patriarchal origins.

If it sounds absurd, you ought to know better — and to take it seriously. Ibram X. Kendi does. He is the author of the pictographic “book,” Antiracist Baby. Which aims to get babies obsessed with race, equity, and other shibboleths of Wokeness.

“Book” is in air quotes because this one hardly is.

Mostly, it’s vaguely Soviet/Che Gueverra-era Cuba political cartoons accompanied by rhyming ideological slogan-statements such as “Antiracist Baby is raised to make society transform” … by “…learn(ing) all the colors not because race is true…”  but because “…if you claim to be color blind, you deny what’s in front of you.”

In other words, the first thing a baby must learn is to focus on the color of other people. Which in no way encourages the baby to think of other people in terms of their race, first — and last.

This is the sort of reading material Trent Talbot of Brave Books is trying to countermand with his series of actual books for kids, with sentences and paragraphs, even. The eight books in the catalog — with more on deck — follow the adventures of fictional characters rendered in the form of various animals, who must fight to defend Freedom Island by fighting for traditional ideas — such as the right of all people to speak freely, without being told that “speech is violence” when some don’t like what’s spoken — and perhaps wondering whether people who can’t seem to stop talking about race — including baby racism — might be the ones perpetuating racism.

Talbot sees a need to counter what is being pushed by the Left, of which Kendi is one of all too many. The Left has the institutional backing of major media such as The New York Times as well as major publishers, which often won’t even consider a book if it isn’t Woke.

Just as Rumble and Gettr arose because they had to — because YouTube and other outlets cancel everything they don’t agree with. The only alternative to being dropped is to pick it all up — and start something new.

That’s what Talbot’s doing — with the help of other conservative stars like Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), The Hodgetwins, and radio host Dana Loesch, all of whom are concerned about the closing of the American Mind (the reference is to the prescient 1987 book of the same name by Allan Bloom).

Who else would publish a child’s book in which little boys don’t “transition” into little girls … because little boys aren’t (and can’t be) little girls? That’s the theme of the first book in the Freedom Island series, Elephants are Not Birds, by Ashley St. Clair. The fact that this lesson even needs to be relearned is a barometer of the unmooring of the American mind.

Talbot sees a need — a mission — to tie it back down to reality. As opposed to “making equity a reality,” as Kendi’s pictographic book urges.

More finely put, Talbot is determined not to allow the ideological Left to maintain the impression that Leftism is all there is by allowing the Left to systematically eliminate everything that isn’t the Left’s point of view. “Once my eyes were open, I was seeing it everywhere and I couldn’t unsee it,” he told The New York Post. “I thought there was a need for books that could help parents teach their values they hold dear.” As a counter to “values” being shoved down their kids’ throats, at school — and on TV.

Recommended: Wokeism Is a Religion Without Grace

In Elephants Are Not Birds, a young elephant named Kevin has a talent for singing. A villain-vulture by the name of Culture urges him to believe that because he can sing, he must be a bird. He gives Kevin a pair of wings and a beak, but Kevin doesn’t transition into a bird.

Lesson learned.

The book’s author, Ashley St. Clair, says it’s a critical one for kids — to learn and accept the distinction between objective reality and pretending objective reality doesn’t exist. Part of the transition from childhood to adulthood is coming to understand this — and that pretending reality is fungible not only doesn’t make it so, it makes for psychological unbalancedness.

“You get special attention now in the classroom if you say, ‘Hey my name is not Billy, it’s Amanda,” St. Clair told The Post. She recently had a little boy herself and says “It’s scary to think he could come home and say, ‘My friends all identify as something else and that’s how I feel…’”

He might not even feel he’s human.

After all, if a little boy can “identify” as a little girl why can’t he (or she, for that matter) also “identify” as a cat?

Other books in the Freedom Island series touch on the importance of life — above all, not considering the lives of others a “choice,” to be taken away at whim. This is the theme of Little Lives Matter, by Elizabeth Johnston. The momma bear doesn’t regard her cub — who was born with one arm missing — as a “choice.” Or rather, her choice was to cherish and love the equal value of the life she brought into the world, contra the urgings of the vulture named Culture, who tries to tempt her with another “choice.”

“Why don’t you just live for yourself,” he oilily suggests. It’s a despicability any six-year-old can see through — or will, having seen (and read) the story.

Which is why it’s so important to get such stories out there. As a counter to the pernicious pictographic propagandizing of “books” such as Antiracist Baby.