When the last Democratic president, Barack Obama, took office more than a decade ago, Fox News seized on inane culture-war fodder intended to outrage its viewers. The network’s popular host Sean Hannity aired a segment warning against Sesame Street’s “soft bigotry” toward conservatives and its supposedly gay, liberal agenda; Glenn Beck set his sights on Glee, suggesting the popular musical series was a “nightmare” contributing to the destruction of “the values we grew up with”; and a Fox News contributor claimed that a J.Crew ad depicting a mother painting her son’s toenails could lead to the total abandonment of gender roles and cause young men to stop “[protecting] the nation by [no longer] marching into combat against other men and risking their lives.”
While America has changed drastically since Obama’s first term, Fox News has not. Less than two months have passed since Joe Biden’s inauguration, and the network is already responding to the country’s new era by obsessing over similarly absurd and imaginary battlefronts. Even as the coronavirus pandemic approaches its one-year anniversary this month, and more than half a million people in the U.S. have died and counting, Fox News is preoccupied with fighting back the woke mobs who are hellbent on erasing every cultural signifier beloved by conservative America.
Fox News spent Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday treating the supposed “cancellation” of beloved children’s book author Dr. Seuss like a 1A story. The network spent an hour and nine minutes of airtime on the supposed cancellation of Dr. Seuss on Tuesday—more than twice as long as its coverage of the coronavirus vaccination effort on the same day, according to a Media Matters report.
Last week Fox News decided that The Muppet Show was the latest cultural entity to be victimized by cancel culture––an overreaction in light of a content disclaimer being added to the streaming versions of some episodes. After Hasbro announced its Mr. Potato Head product would become gender-neutral, the network then aired numerous outraged segments aimed at the toy company’s decision. “I haven’t gotten past the assassination of Mr. Potato Head,” said Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz earlier this week, adding that the same people were now “trying to take out Dr. Seuss.” (In reality, most Dr. Seuss books are still very much in circulation and will remain so; The Muppet Show is still fully available to stream on Disney+; and Mr. Potato Head has not been assassinated.)
The Dr. Seuss-gate began last week, when the Daily Wire claimed that a Virginia public school district was taking “marching orders” from a progressive group “demanding that Dr. Seuss be canceled,” as it requested that the annual Read Across America Day drop its connection to the author. In fact, the county school board had merely suggested that its schools “not connect Read Across America Day with Dr. Seuss’s birthday exclusively.”
This news was followed by Dr. Seuss Enterprises announcing that it would stop publishing and selling a few C-list books that many conservatives lamenting their loss have likely never read: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer. According to the group’s statement, the decision to stop publishing those titles came last year as a result of a panel review of his work. Not only do the books include racist stereotypes toward Asians and Black people, but they also don’t come close in popularity to classic works like How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Green Eggs and Ham, or The Lorax, so it seems that Dr. Seuss Enterprises was making a preemptive decision to ensure it did not lose any customers or business opportunities due to its namesake author’s less notable and more problematic works.