Jared and Nick discuss the canceling of Dr. Suess and how it represents a bigger political ploy by the Republicans to avoid actual governing. Find out the lastest conspiracy theory Nick has regarding Mitch McConnell potentially stepping down before his term is over, and Jared's fascination with a new online game.
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I'm Nick Hauselmann and this is an announcement to let you know that we are going to be doing a new series called The Weekender over on Patreon that will appear every Friday.
And this is a little sneak preview so you can get a handle on what it's like and why you'd want to go over there and join the Patreon and be part of that community which has been incredible and amazing with a lot of people there and a lot of great conversations.
So Here it is.
Check it out and feel free to check out the actual patreon as well at patreon.com slash muckrake podcast Hey everybody Welcome to the weekender edition of muckrake podcast for our wonderful beautiful patrons I'm Jared Yates-Dexton.
I'm here with Nick Hausman you know, this is usually the sort of fancy free more dressed-down Episode, um, but as you know, because you are a fan and a supporter of the show, uh, when things need to be taken seriously, we take them seriously.
We, uh, unfortunately are broadcasting today and I have some, um, I have some sobering news.
I'll just say that.
Uh, and that is that Dr. Seuss has been canceled after being dead for, um, check my notes, uh, 30 years.
He has been canceled.
Uh, and by that, I mean that the company that publishes his books has decided to stop publishing six of his books that are incredibly racist and offensive.
But, uh, to watch coverage of this, Nick, it has, uh, it has been a great American tragedy.
I don't know what the big deal is.
I cancel myself like at least once or twice a day.
Why does it have to be a big deal for Dr. Seuss?
I mean, listen, it is, um, this is maybe, and you know, we've been doing this for a while and we've been documenting the decline of American culture.
This might be a new low.
This might be a new low in political discourse.
So, for those who have been paying attention, because maybe you don't, and maybe you rely on us to cover this shit, the Dr. Seuss Publishing Company has decided, as a company, like, let me check here, did leftist mobs, did Antifa overrun the Dr. Seuss Company and make them do this, Nick?
No, I think that's the ridiculousness of all of this.
They self-canceled themselves.
It's not a cancel if you do it yourself, you know, without any outrage ahead of time and no one's like, um, what's, you know, you should get rid of that.
Uh, you know, here's the thing I think is interesting.
I saw an article about this where they were talking about it on, on, uh, on Fox and they're spending... Wait, wait, wait, wait.
They're not just talking about it on Fox.
They were talking about it on Fox 24 hours a day.
If you turn on Fox right now you will find extensive coverage of the canceling of Dr. Seuss.
Yeah it's really frightening and I think that the key here though was they won't show the offensive images so they're on there arguing that they're not offensive or how dare they cancel these things but if that's the case then why wouldn't you just show The images then, right?
Clearly they're not offensive and no problem, right?
Let's put them on there.
And then no one is showing them.
I think there's a reason why, because they can't make the argument if you actually see the drawings.
And I think we're all on the same page.
You know, what are the three things that the Constitution, sorry, the Declaration of Independence guarantee all citizens?
Do you remember those three things?
You know, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And I feel like this is what this is.
We want to make sure we can have as many people as possible, allowing them to pursue happiness.
And if these racist things are so offensive to certain people, or you call people by certain way, or they really frustrates them, you're getting in the way of that pursuit.
So we should accordingly adjust how we behave to allow as many people as possible to find that pursuit of happiness.
And I think that's what we're trying to, I think that's not stress enough.
Well, for those who maybe have not had the disgusting experience of seeing this stuff, pause the podcast.
Go and Google Dr. Seuss racist.
Because if you look at these panels, they are indefensible.
Now, of course, a lot of us have grown up with Dr. Seuss.
I grew up with Dr. Seuss.
I grew up with Green Eggs and Ham.
I grew up with Cat in the Hat.
All of that stuff.
Like, probably everybody listening to this podcast, when I graduated from high school, I was given a copy of Oh!
The Places You Will Go.
Okay?
Those things are part of American culture.
They're not going away whatsoever.
What is going away are six particular books, and I'm going to go ahead and read from this story from NPR's Code Switch.
In And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, for example, a character described as Chinese has two lines for eyes, carries chopsticks and a bowl of rice, and wears traditional Japanese-style shoes.
In If I Ran the Zoo, two men said to be from Africa are shown shirtless, shoeless, and wearing grass skirts as they carry an exotic animal.
Outside of his books, the author's personal legacy has come into question, too.
Seuss wrote an entire minstrel show in high school and performed as the main character in full blackface.
Now, if you actually go and look at the history of Dr. Seuss, and by the way, because we Because we call things equally.
We talk about these things.
We are not biased partisans.
Let's make it very clear.
In his life, Dr. Seuss was a Democrat and a quote-unquote liberal.
He was alive during the time where Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who I happen to think was a pretty great president, but did awful things also as president, interred Japanese Americans.
Dr. Seuss was highly in favor of that and used his artistry to push it by, by the way, creating propaganda that showed Japanese Americans, obviously made to be caricatures, getting boxes of TNT so that they might destroy America and help the Japanese enemy.
This is some really repugnant shit.
Like, it's really gross.
Nobody is saying that you can't have cat in the hat.
Nobody's saying green eggs on hand needs to go in all the places you need to... you'll go.
What else is it?
There's Horton, here's a Who.
What else are we dealing with here?
Lorax or something like that.
And here's my thing.
I was not raised...
On Green Eggs and Ham.
Wait, what were you raised on?
What were you reading as a kid?
I've got, I've got thoughts on this.
Well, here's the thing.
My mom was a writer.
She was, you know, a short story writer, publisher, and editor.
Ironically, I was allowed to watch as much TV as I possibly could.
So I was raised, like, dream on, right?
Like, I watched every show, didn't matter how good and how bad it was.
But when it came... Dream on was before its time.
Oh yeah, they should redo that, for sure.
That was, that was quite the...
Yes, but when it came down to reading, I was a little bit more high-minded.
I was reading Catch-22 probably before high school.
My mom was the one who gave me the novel Forrest Gump way before the movie ever came out.
That kind of stuff.
And when you mention high school and you mention all the places you'll go and Dr. Seuss, I think I might have talked about it once before at some point during this, you know, our broadcast, but I have a real sense memory, a real anxiety-inducing moment when I think about this because freshman or sophomore year of high school I had a test.
Multiple choice.
We were doing like binary and yeets and all the romantics and we had to like match who said which quote and she threw a Dr. Seuss in there.
And I, like, Redfish, Bluefish, something like that, one of those, and I didn't know what it was.
And I think I even saw Dr. Seuss as one of the ones to match, but I thought, oh, she's just kidding.
She just threw that in there as an extra one, whatever.
It got me so flustered that I didn't, I couldn't, I got it wrong.
I think I chose, like, Lord Byron or something like that said it instead.
And then she had the temerity to call me out.
I don't know if she identified me, but she said it out loud.
And somebody even, you know, did this and chose this for Lord Byron when it was Dr. Seuss.
And even though she didn't say my name, I am still completely and utterly traumatized by that moment.
Mrs., gosh, I could still, she had red hair and she was, oh, she is a substitute teacher for a long-term because our original English teacher for that school went crazy.
And so, it was really... I'm going to remember her name before we finish because it was still so traumatizing.
So, that is my issue that I have when we're talking about Dr. Seuss and reading.
But again, I was much more high-minded, I suppose, when it came to literature and reading.
So, I missed out on a lot of those things.
Well, unfortunately with that experience... And by the way, that's awful.
You shouldn't have been called out for that.
Like, that's not good teaching.
That's not what we in the business call Good pedagogy.
But I will say that, Nick, unfortunately, you're not the only person who is triggered by Dr. Seuss and Dr. Seuss-like situations.
And the reason I wanted to talk about this is, let's make it very clear what is happening with what the Republican Party and the right are calling cancel culture.
Which is that the cultural wars that we're having, right, which is where everything ends up with one prolonged battle after another.
The problem here is not that Republicans think that Democrats are necessarily or the left is necessarily like actually canceling Dr. Seuss.
It's a political cudgel, first and foremost, because it sounds good.
You know what I mean?
It sounds ludicrous, the idea that they will cancel even Dr. Seuss.
The big issue here is that America is changing and it is becoming more tolerant and diverse and inclusive.
And I'll tell you who else understands that.
Businesses.
Businesses understand at this point that if they aid, promote, or profit off of things that are obviously disgusting and racist and misogynistic and you name it, that people will decide not to give them their business.
And you have a lot of businesses who maybe don't even believe in progressivism or diversity or inclusivity who then have what we would call performative wokeness, right?
Which is that a lot of businesses are like, yeah, we don't buy that shit, but we have to pretend like we do, right?
This is one of the reasons why corporations one time after another are having all of these trainings and they're having all these speakers come in.
I mean, the other day it was like Oreos put out a thing that said like trans lives matter.
And it's like, what are you doing, Oreo?
Like, what is this?
You know what I mean?
Like, you're a cookie.
Stakehom is the most progressive company on Twitter of all.
Stakehom's now has, and by the way, again, Stakehom's is a frozen Philadelphia meat product, right, that we used to find at the Save-A-Lot when we were running low on money back in the day, and they basically got a leftist PR person to run their social media and the PR person is like we now have an identity.
We're socialists Yeah, and that way I'm totally on board with that.
I think if that's what keeps companies like that trying to tow the line or or behave rationally or properly that's fine with me, but it's about the bottom line and And again, this is the whole point, is we can hold two thoughts in our heads because we're intelligent, nuanced people.
We can understand that these corporations might not actually mean what they're saying, but we also understand that it also represents advancement.
You know what I mean?
Like the fact is, Companies like a Coca-Cola or even now the NFL has to do this.
Even the NFL was like, oh my god, we really screwed up this whole Black Lives Matter thing.
We at least have to throw money at it.
We have to make a point of showing this.
That shows that the wealthy and the powerful know that the future belongs to progressivism and diversity and inclusivity.
Now that doesn't mean that they won't try and stop it.
That's the important point that we have to hold, which is, why are they doing this?
How are they doing it?
What's it mean?
But it has absolutely nothing to do with an actual outrage that the Republicans have.
And I want to point this out.
Ted Cruz, who, he's having a hell of a month.
Like, Ted Cruz is just Just getting after it.
In the past month and a half, he gave hope and aid to people who wanted to overthrow the government.
He tried to overthrow the democratic election of a president.
He then tried to leave his state as – let me check my numbers here, Nick.
58 human beings died during a failure of power in Texas, Pennsylvania.
People were freezing to death and diving in dumpsters for food.
He tried to go to Cancun.
And blamed his daughters.
And blamed.
Why not?
That's what they're for, right?
They're women, daughters, girls.
Nick, if you somehow or another brought shame upon yourself and tried to blame it on your children, would you?
That would be it.
Yeah.
That would work.
Yeah, that would really work.
That would be very convincing, for sure.
That would be it.
But so, Ted Cruz, who is just killing it right now, Ted Cruz tweeted this tweet.
This is important.
It's a picture of after the announcement that the Dr. Seuss Company was going to stop publishing these six racist, disgusting books.
Conservatives flocked Republicans flocked to Amazon to buy a bunch of Dr. Seuss books, which, by the way, Nick, can you check your notes?
Who published those books?
Amazons?
Or Dr. Seuss's books?
Oh, yeah, who published the Dr. Seuss books that became bestsellers?
I don't know.
The Dr. Seuss company.
Okay.
That quote-unquote sells all Dr. Seuss.
So these people went to Amazon and Bought all of the books and made them bestsellers by the company that quote-unquote cancelled them.
But of course that doesn't, that's not sexy.
They have to say that Democrats did.
Oh yeah, for sure.
Even though the Democratic Party had nothing to do with it.
And of course you want to torture me by asking me more questions about Dr. Seuss.
Which I'm not going to know the answer for and I'm going to now be tortured.
I think as educators we're just, we have an inherent gene that is just absolutely tortured Nick talking about Dr. Seuss.
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