Remember Scholastic book fairs? Those magical days in elementary school when your mom gave you ten bucks and you came home with a Goosebumps book, a poster of a dolphin, and one of those erasers shaped like a race car? Well, Scholastic is still in your kid’s school. Only now the book fair table has a few new titles — and they’re pushing pro-transgender ideology and “anti-racist” propaganda on ten-year-olds.
Yeah. The Captain Underpants people went full woke. Surprise!
PragerU’s Jill Simonian dropped the hammer on The Alex Marlow Show this week, exposing how Scholastic’s school book stores have been “tilted so far woke under a veil of inclusion and diversity and equity” that they’re now peddling books she called “radicalized and age-inappropriate” for the kids browsing those little cardboard displays.
We’re not talking about high school seniors here. We’re talking about ten-year-olds. Fifth graders. Kids who still think “puberty” is a weird word their older sibling said once.
And Scholastic — the company that built its entire brand on being the trustworthy book vendor that every school in America welcomed through the front door — decided these were the perfect customers for gender ideology reading material. Nothing says “wholesome childhood” like explaining to a fourth grader that biological sex is a spectrum. (Where’s the eraser shaped like a question mark when you need one?)
Here’s what makes this so infuriating. This isn’t some fringe indie publisher selling pamphlets at a street fair in Portland. This is Scholastic. They have access to virtually every public school in the country. They set up shop in the library, the cafeteria, the hallway. Teachers hand out the order forms. Parents trust the brand because they grew up with it themselves.
And Scholastic weaponized that trust.
They knew exactly what they were doing. Slap a colorful cover on a book about “gender identity” and nestle it right between the Dog Man graphic novels and the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Most parents never even look at what their kid picks out at the book fair. They just hand over the money and figure, “It’s Scholastic — how bad could it be?”
Pretty bad, it turns out.
The “anti-racist” angle is the cherry on top. Because apparently we’ve decided that ten-year-olds — kids who are still figuring out long division — need to be lectured about systemic racism through picture books written by adults with gender studies degrees and blue hair. (That last part is an educated guess, but we’re probably not wrong.)
Pop quiz: When did we collectively decide that elementary school book fairs should double as progressive indoctrination sessions? Was there a vote? Did we miss the PTA meeting where they decided Captain Underpants wasn’t diverse enough?
The playbook is always the same with these people. They don’t come at your kids through the front door with a bullhorn. They sneak in through institutions you already trust. Your school. Your library. Your book fair. They wrap radical ideology in bright colors and kid-friendly fonts and count on you being too busy to notice.
Scholastic used to sell kids books that made them love reading. Now they’re selling books designed to make kids question whether they’re boys or girls before they’ve even lost all their baby teeth.
And the “inclusion” label is doing a LOT of heavy lifting here. Because there’s nothing “inclusive” about telling a ten-year-old that the body they were born in might be wrong. That’s not inclusion — that’s confusion dressed up in a book jacket.
The good news? Parents are catching on. The Scholastic brand isn’t the untouchable institution it used to be. Moms and dads across the country have started actually reading what their kids bring home — and they don’t like what they’re finding. School boards are getting an earful. Book fair selections are getting scrutinized.
Scholastic bet that parents would stay asleep. They bet wrong.
So here’s the deal. If your kid’s school is hosting a Scholastic book fair anytime soon, maybe walk through it yourself before handing over the debit card. Flip through a few of those titles. Because the company that gave us Clifford the Big Red Dog is now giving us something very different — and your ten-year-old doesn’t need to be the one who finds out the hard way.