Let’s explain. During the last gasps of March, a gaggle of hard-right provocateurs tried their hand at a children’s storybook hour in what would seem to be a conservative response to Drag Queen Story Hours. According to children, Drag Queen Story Hours are fun and hilarious. According to fascist Republicans, those are the cause of society’s moral decay. Remember when society’s moral decay used to be blamed on rock music? Then it was Dungeons & Dragons? Well, now it’s cross-dressing, of the Bugs Bunny slash Tom Hanks slash Dana Carvey slash Dustin Hoffman slash Bob Hope variety. Of course it is.
The event was semi-documented by internet meanie Amanda Trap House, and it was a ride. Did you know that Posobiec, child actor turned far-right pseudocelebrity Kirk Cameron, internet hate-and-bomb-threat incitement troll Chaya Raichik, and Trump press secretary for some reason Sean Spicer have all “written” children’s books? And they’re all “written” as part of the same cinematic talking animal universe? Now you do, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
This powerhouse quartet took over the Washington, D.C. area Cleveland Park Library reading room in late March in order to out-drag-queen themselves to a crowd of “15 children and one sullen teenager”. The real discovery of the day, however, is that children’s books aimed at grooming young conservatives are freaky.
That leads us to what you knew was coming: A thorough reading and book review of all these books! Ha ha no, I don’t hate myself that much. We’ll focus on one—Posobiec’s “The Island of Free Ice Cream.”
The Island of Free Ice Cream is published by creepy conservative publisher Brave Books as “Book 3” of “Saga One,” or the “Freedom Island Saga,” but the only thing you need to take from that is that Posobiec’s entry is only one of a whole series of hard-right books in which the good guys fight off communism, or tolerance, or “culture,” and at the end of the books there are some suggested family exercises to do so that you can make sure your little goblins have properly learned to hate whatever you tell them to. It’s a full-on grooming operation, but in this case, the grooming is good because conservatives say so, that’s why.
It’s also almost assuredly not the case that Jack Posobiec “wrote” any of this. Brave Books seems to instead attach ghostwritten books to hard-right fringe “authors” like Dana Loesch, Dinesh D’Souza, Michael Flynn, and others in order to put fascism’s wackiest cranks in front of your child’s unwilling eyeballs. The names on the book covers won’t matter to child readers; these books really exist so that adult fans of those batshit far-right conspiracy cranks can gift something to their youngest relatives without missing a single chance to be giant assholes about it.
We have not purchased a copy of “The Island of Free Ice Cream.” It is our longstanding policy to not give money to far-right conspiracy cranks even for the purpose of making fun of them, and we’re certainly not going to break that rule for the likes of Posobiec.
Fortunately, at least as of this writing, the entire text of the book can be discovered thanks to at least one plucky young Youtuber who used it for her own children’s book reading and who apparently hasn’t yet been sued into oblivion by a coterie of pro-Nazi lawyers. Score! Nicely done, young broadcaster; your service will be remembered.
The Island of Free Ice Cream was published in September of 2021, just over half a year past the failed Jan. 6 insurrection that Posobiec fueled with his “Stop the Steal” conspiracy claims. That’s going to come into play. Posobiec used to be an OAN commenter before teaming up with the even more explicitly fascist Turning Point USA, but to date, his most infamous claim to fame was his promotion of the utterly unhinged “Pizzagate” hoax, a hoax that eventually led to a gullible believer storming a pizza restaurant in search of imaginary child slaves being held in a basement that didn’t exist. In other words, he’s a complete and total turd.
Shall we begin, then? Sure, let’s do this thing.
The animals of Rushington are happy–until the wolves promise free ice cream. Asher the Fox doubts that the wolves can deliver on their promise, which springboards him into a wild adventure, exploring wealth, poverty, and the wonders of a free market. Follow Asher’s exploits, and experience the lesson with your own family through the games and discussion questions included in The Brave Challenge at the end of the book.
That’s the Google Books blurb for this Posobook, and I’m going to tell you right off the bat that the adventure is not wild, there is no exploration of wealth or poverty whatsoever—not so much as a single word of it—and the biggest wonder of the free market on display is the miracle of a frequently unhinged hoax promoter whose claims have been responsible for acts of real-world violence getting a contract for an ostensible children’s book, of all things.
But on we go. There are probably going to be some errors of spelling and punctuation here because we’re relying on closed captioning rather than buying the damn thing, but that’s all right. It’s not like anyone’s going to notice.
Rushington was the happiest city in all of Wiggamore Woods.
Okay, stop, stop. Yes, the first thing we need to get past is that the name of this city of maximal freedom and prosperity is Rushington. We can’t be sure that this is meant as a homage to the late far-right radio crab Rush Limbaugh; it could also be a nod to Canadian superband Rush, for all we know, and that’d make a lot more sense than naming a city after a known pill-popping layabout.
It hopped and popped, whizzed and whirled, buzzing and
Gonna skip that part. I think the point is that Rushington has a lot of electrical problems. That’s what you get when nobody in your free market paradise believes in government-backed safety regulations.
The busiest spot of all was Rushington Market. You could buy anything at the market: cookies, goodies, and gadgets galore. The animals of Rushington loved to buy and sell all sorts of things but no one sold more than Asher the fox.
Here we are introduced to our main character, a backpack-wearing but pantsless fox that represents all that is good and pure about capitalism. Everyone, meet Asher.
Asher is an Ayn Randian hero that seems to vaguely represent Elon Musk, but an alternate reality version of Elon Musk who’s actually good at inventing things and who the public actually likes.
Asher invented cranes for building, tractors for plowing, and special tape for fixing just about anything. His finest invention was the freezer that let cows turn their milk into the most delicious ice cream you’ve ever tasted.
Gonna have to interrupt here to note that while we’re perfectly willing to accept that this fox is the Flex Tape meme guy, the critical part of making ice cream is not the brand of freezer you use. There are other ingredients besides milk, and—oh, forget it. Sure, Asher here invented cranes, tractors, Flex Tape, and ice cream. That’s what you can accomplish when you give up on finding pants that fit.
Because Asher’s inventions made everyone’s lives better, he had the biggest booth in the market. [Not even REMOTELY how that works either, Jack.] The animals of Rushington couldn’t have been happier …
UNTIL.
… until a pack of wolves came to town.
We don’t get much exposition in this book before the villains are introduced, but to be fair this is a children’s book and this age group isn’t much for worldbuilding chitter-chatter.
Our villains are the wolves.
The wolves are communists.
The wolves dress entirely in black, possibly a reference to antifa if antifa went around wearing very neatly tailored all-black military uniforms, which they do not. Like most of the rest of the animals in this story, the wolves do wear pants, which strongly suggests that this isn’t a world in which animals tend to not wear pants because of the extra tailoring time required. Asher here wakes up in the morning and instead makes a conscious decision to go around naked from the belt down.
That’s pretty weird, but we’ve hit on one of the book’s major themes: modern society’s sometimes ambiguous and conflicting views towards pants. Couldn’t tell you why. This is Pobowhatever’s world, not mine. Or maybe it’s the ghostwriter’s. Or maybe both of them together?
Now, though, we’ve got the setup for our book’s major conflict. Asher the fox is the inventor of nearly everything good and just in the world and is single-handedly responsible for the existence of decent ice cream; the black-uniformed wolves are jerks and communists here to do some evil.
“You poor little animals,” the wolves snarled. “Your market isn’t fair. You all work so hard but Asher has the biggest booth. We come from Utopia Island, which is so amazing that we don’t even need a market. Everyone gets the most delicious ice cream you’ve ever tasted, for free. If you put us in charge, we’ll make Rushington an even happier place to be.”
The illustration here has the black-clad antifa wolves looking evil while holding up a sign: “FREE ICE CREAM FOR EVERYONE*”
Okay, so first of all … “FREE STUFF” is not what communism is. It’s what people who believe in secret pizza restaurant sex crime tunnels think communism is, however, which is all that matters to this crowd. We’re going to let it slide for the moment while we see where this goes, but we know Jack’s wolves here represent “communists” because Jack explicitly said so in his own library book reading.
The central premise of communism is not, however, that everyone gets free ice cream. Communism consolidates markets and places the state in charge of the means of production, such that—okay, no, we’re not going to do this. We’re not going to get an Orwell-quality anthropomorphism-based dismantling of the flaws of communism from a guy who thinks pizza restaurants have secret sex crime tunnels and that whichever Democrat last popped up on a news ticker is in charge of the sex tunnels. Sure, they’re all communists, whatever.
Asher warned them that the wolves’ promise sounded too good to be true, but the animals drooling and dreaming of free ice cream decided to vote. After Judge Catinpaw counted the votes Mayor Blenson declared that the wolves now controlled Rushington.
Well, that went rather smoothly. The votes having been tallied, it’s time for Freedom Island’s traditional post-vote purge of political enemies.
Then the wolves put Asher on a catapult and recited the chant:
“With a snap and a kick and a powerful swish,
you’ll fly through the air and land with the fish.”And they launched Asher right out of Rushington.
Eep. First off, that’s a terrible chant. It’s not a chant that wolves, in particular, would want to be associated with, and there’s no particular point in having a chant at all. Rhymes do nothing here. Either have a rhyming children’s book or don’t, but don’t go all Dr. Seuss on us for a grand total of twenty words and then pretend none of it happened.
That aside, we can gather here that catapulting someone into the ocean is this world’s preferred method of execution. It doesn’t quite get spelled out because this is a children’s book, but they certainly don’t have a catapult on hand just to make enemies wet. This is an attempted murder.
It’s also becoming apparent that Rushington is a considerably darker place than our authors are letting on. We’ve been led to believe this is a buzzing, popping, tenuously electrified paradise. Still, everyone agreed to let the wolves murder Asher right quick when promises of free ice cream entered the picture. This is not a healthy society—and, apparently, it’s one that never had any free speech rights, to begin with. Otherwise, Asher here wouldn’t be facing a firing-into-the-ocean squad for the dire crime of … questioning campaign rhetoric.
So there we have it. A kind of dark end, for a children’s book, but maybe the lesson here is that—
Thankfully, Asher brought along his handy-dandy hang glider.
DAMN IT, ASHER.
Yeah, that’s right. Asher’s always sporting a little backpack monogrammed with a big capital A; it turns out that among the accessories Asher keeps inside is a red, full-sized, monogrammed hang glider. As one does.
So now we’re seeing that these communist wolves are just all kinds of incompetent. Can you imagine that conversation, as Asher here sails off over the horizon?
“Frank. Did you check the prisoner for hang gliders before loading them into the catapult?”
“Of course. I mean, I thought I did. I didn’t look in the backpack, I guess.”
“Frank, the prisoner condemned to landing with the fish, is currently soaring through the air on a red hang glider with a four-foot high monogrammed letter A on it.”
“I do see that, yes. I think we should leave this out of our report.”
After gliding for two days and two nights,
Got it, magic hang glider. Don’t care.
Asher landed on a strange and distant island. Animals hid in the alleyway shadows and there wasn’t a smile for miles. Soon, Asher stumbled upon a long line of animals, where a dog named Pepper was very hungry.
This would be Utopia Island, homeland of the communist murder wolves.
Confusingly, Pepper here is drawn as a flower-power hippie with a pink bandana and a sullen teen expression, and that’s the one person in line Asher the fox is immediately drawn to and wants to hear from. Not the duck right behind him, or the seal behind that. Asher sees this line of animals and picks the depressed androgynous hippie as the societal representative of this strange new land.
Also confusingly, Asher now appears to have a vintage SLR camera hanging from his neck, but we never hear anything more about this. He doesn’t seem to use it. It doesn’t seem to be for journalism purposes, or for documenting the plight of Blossom-fashioned dogs looking sullenly at their surroundings. I’m not sure what to make of someone who straps on a backpack and an unused vintage camera every morning but draws the line at pants.
Pepper, who is very hungry, is wearing pants. The animal in front of Pepper is wearing pants. Not Asher, though.
“I’m so hungry I could eat my pants,” said Pepper. Asher heard his stomach growl, too.
Okay, what? That’s where this is going? Pepper only put on his little denim shorts in case he needed a snack later? I bet Asher feels stupid now; he left home without a valuable emergency ration.
“The wolves said that everyone in Utopia was full with free ice cream.”
“Yes,” agreed Pepper. “That’s what the council of wolves promised, but they take all the ice cream for themselves. Now we can’t buy or sell at the market and all the wolves give us is this mushy moldy macaroni.”
There we go. There’s our sharp critique of Soviet-style communism. Take that, George Orwell.
Actually, though, this sounds like your standard-issue authoritarian corruption, not communism? It sounds a lot like Putinism, a kleptocracy in which top government cronies steal all the ice cream, nobody gets to buy or sell anything anywhere unless they’ve pre-arranged it so that their local oligarchs get a piece of the action, and everyone else in the nation gets to eat dirt and dream of what it must be like to have indoor plumbing.
But the American far-right loves Putinism, and gushes over how great Putinism is and how manly their macaroni-fed military recruits are, and they specifically love Putin’s regime because under Putin’s rule, Pepper and the other flower-wearing hippies get the crap beaten out of them on street corners. Pepper is a free spirit who needs to be crushed good and hard, say conservatives. Why’s Asher even giving him the time of day?
Just then a goat began to squeak. “I can make food for the animals if you open the market and let me! Hurry, hurry, before we all eat our pants!”
AGAIN WITH THE PANTS.
“Oh,” snarled a wolf. “A market won’t make your tummies full. This goat must be punished for his lies.”
The wolves recited their chant: “With a snap and a kick and a powerful swish, you’ll fly in the air and land with the fish!” And they launched the goat out of Utopia.
Hey. Hey Asher. You know what would have really helped here? If SOMEBODY HERE HAPPENED TO OWN THEIR OWN HANG GLIDER. IMAGINE HOW GREAT THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN.
Nope. That goat is dead now. Asher had an opportunity to save the free-market goat, but it would have required some capital expense on his part. If he rescues the goat himself, there’d be hang glider wear and tear to consider, and if he loans the goat his hang glider, there’s a chance he’s not going to get the hang glider back.
So Asher, captain of industry and the hero of all free markets everywhere, sits himself down on his naked furry butt and watches Mr. Goat become fish food.
One by one the wolves slunk away from the crowd. Curious, Asher and Pepper snuck in behind them.
Don’t strain yourself there, Asher. Wouldn’t want a muscle cramp or anything.
“That went very well,” snarled the top wolf.
Top wolf? So now we know there’s a wolf hierarchy, one that Asher has effortlessly stumbled into the highest levels of, and this will be exactly the first and last time this comes up, so honestly, there’s no point mentioning it at all.
Now none of the animals were there to speak up, and the wolf chuckled. “When we finish taking over Rushington and the rest of Freedom Island, everyone will be terrified of us and our catapults.”
Finally, the communists—sorry, the wolves—have revealed their evil plan. They’re going to make people terrified. Of catapults, mostly.
I mean … okay? Sure? You don’t really need to take anything over to make people afraid of murder weapons if you’re using them for murder. That feels like a fairly weak motivating force when contemplating world domination. “I want to corner the world ice cream market” might be a good motivator. “I want to be in charge of everything because that seems fun” could pass as a motivation.
Asher learning that the big baddies’ big bad plan is to make people afraid of them and their catapults doesn’t really come off as a plot-altering revelation. It’s still better than that whole pants subplot, though.
The council shrieked and cheered, but Asher muttered “Not if I can stop them.” So he and Pepper set to work.
Welcome back, Asher. Good to see you’ve rested well after watching the goat get murdered.
Asher built a secret submarine that he and Pepper used to escape Utopia
Asher invited the other animals to escape using his secret submarine as well, but after they pointed out that Asher’s submarine was much too small to carry them all, Asher got super mad and called them all pedophiles on Twitter.
and make their way to Toke-a-Toke.
Pepper the flower-print hippie dog was apparently in charge of deciding their first stop, and Pepper feels good about his choice. No apparent complaints from Asher, either. Gonna just leave that one where it lies.
There, a friendly singing elephant helped them carry a cart of supplies to Rushington. The wolves had just gathered up the last of the animals’ food when Asher arrived.
The accompanying illustration here has a dozen or so Black Bloc wolves guarding a small mountain of food, and now this doesn’t seem like it’s about “communism” at all. This is just a heist movie. This is “Ocean’s Eleven” if the wolves played all the main characters and the goal was an eight-foot-tall pile of fruit.
These wolves were running a confidence game the whole time! They were running for office so that once they were installed in the Rushington White House, they could just steal everything that wasn’t nailed down! None of them gave a damn about the politics!
“You took away the market that had everything we needed and now we’re starving!” said the animals. “When do we get ice cream?”
Hey, this book is pretty accurate. If a buffoonish con artist and his crew take over the country and screw everything up to the point of societal near-collapse, a large segment of the people who voted for it will still be gullibly wondering when their free ice cream will be showing up.
Asher leaped into action. “Animals of Rushington! The wolves are lying! They have stolen what you made and they’ll keep stealing everything you will make if you let them! I’ve been to Utopia and guess what? There is no free ice cream!”
You know what would really have helped, Asher, is if you had taken some pictures of Utopia to help prove your case. Maybe take a picture of that floating goat corpse. Wait, in this new picture he doesn’t have his camera anymore. God, the continuity errors are just everywhere in this thing.
“We don’t want you to be in charge anymore!” said the animals. “Let’s vote!”
“Too late,” growled the wolves. “If you want your city back you’ll have to fight for it!”
Aaaaah, and here we get to the reason this book was written—the reason this book was released in 2021, and with a top hoax-spreading far-right seditionist slapped into the “author” slot so that it could be marketed to the right sort of people.
The animals of Rushington had an election! But bad people won! And now the bad people will be in charge forever unless the good, kind, and strictly free-market devoted animals of Rushington start murdering their enemies!
There we go. There’s the “lesson” of Posobiec’s book for young tots. Sometimes elections are bad, kids, and your only recourse is to grab some metal poles and start beating people to death.
Recall elections? Please, this free-market city can’t even stomach safety standards. A balancing judiciary? Pfft. Our author’s world has been hand-tailored so that violent rebellion is the only plausible and good path forward; every other option has been stripped away with a gruff explanation that it’s “too late.”
This part gets a little graphic, in an anthropomorphized animal cartoon sort of way. There’s no question that this attempt to overthrow the wolfian government is a violent insurrection.
Bam! Wow! Pow! Zing! Wham!
And everybody starts clubbing each other.
But it’s for FREEDOM, so it’s okay.
At last Rushington was free. Judge Catinpaw said the wolves were guilty of lying
Hmm? That’s what the wolves did wrong, huh? Not the part about the catapult murder of their political opponents, or the large-scale theft of every scrap of food in the city, or the apparent declaration that elections were now null and void after they won exactly one (1) of them?
No, they have been found guilty of making insincere campaign promises.
and for their punishment they were all loaded onto Asher’s newest invention, a super-powered catapult.
See, though, Asher did not invent the catapult. That’s already been established. Asher may say he invented the catapult, or might claim that the catapult he built is more super-powered than all the other catapults that exist, but at best, somebody else invented the catapult, and Asher just came up with some incremental improvements.
This is a good lesson to learn about capitalism, kids. Everyone says they’re the inventor of everything because showboating, not inventing, is the name of the game.
The animals of Rushington recited a chant:
“Four legs good, two legs better?”
“With a snap and a kick and a powerful swish, you’ll fly into the air and land with the fish.”
Aaaaand all the wolves are murdered. Asher probably warned his animal friends to search the wolves thoroughly for hang gliders, that being a thing Asher in particular would know to look for, so it’s not likely any of the wolves were able to escape their off-page watery doom.
Because this is a society in which all wolves are evil, period, Asher and the people of Rushington have not, by coincidence, just committed an act of genocide. It’s framed as an act of good genocide, to be sure; this is a hard-right imagined world in which some animal species are simply evil and there’s nothing you can do about it except to execute them all. Now there’s a lesson your little conservative book-lovers can curl up with at night, hmm?
Again, what we’re learning here is that the difference between the murderous lying wolves and the rest of Rushington is … not much, to be honest. Nobody’s got a problem with joining in public chants during sketchily premised state executions; the only disagreements are about who should be murdered on any particular day.
Asher nearly got turned into fish food for telling the truth about somebody else’s political promises. The election winners did get turned into fish food for lying when making those same promises.
In fact, it looks like the only state-sanctioned executions in the Jack Posobiec & Friends Freedom Island universe are for speech. Not for starving people, not for attempting to quash future elections, but for saying rude things. This town’s whole system of government consists of canceling free speakers with extreme malice while literally calling it Freedom.
I’m not saying the bad guys weren’t doing the worst crimes here. They clearly were, what with the food theft and catapultings. But the line between the good and bad guys is a lot more blurry than I’d want to see in your average children’s book. I dunno here, Jack. I think you’re sending some real mixed messages here.
The most mixed message of all is that the guy who promoted the Pizzagate hoax has supposedly written a book advocating for state-sanctioned murder of people who make false claims in public. Uh, buddy? Did you and the ghostwriter ever exchange emails on this one?
Rushington was safe at last.
The hell it was. You’ve got a society here filled with gullible jackasses who would throw away most of society if they thought they could get free ice cream out of it. There’s no way this will not be a mess going forward.
But when Asher received a mysterious letter, he knew this wasn’t the end …
… and blah blah blah, sequel fodder. Stay tuned for the next book, in which some other fascist wannabe smokes a pound of weed and writes down whatever story beats come to them.
The illustrations are smartly done, though. Full points to the illustrator.
Let’s bask in one last illustration, in fact. Unfortunately, the book’s last image consists of fireworks, the night sky, and yet another picture of Asher’s pantsless fox butt.
No, our storybook’s hero doesn’t even get his face on the book’s last page. He’s just a piece of free-market meat, and his naked butt will be the last thing your child sees as they drift off to sleep at night. Thank God foxes have tails or we’d be staring right at Asher’s most recently digested meal.
So then, that is our full, mostly complete, and (probably mostly but not quite) error-free reading of Jack Posobiec’s presumably ghostwritten illustrated children’s book. It’s just like being in a library book room, except in our version Sean Spicer isn’t standing off to the side hoping the kids will notice him.
Because this is a conservative children’s book, it closes out with alleged exercises and activities you can do with your child in order to cement the lessons Jack Posobiec’s ghostwriter believes they need to know. There’s no leaving things to chance here; on the off chance that your child is a bit too thickheaded to understand the more complicated nuances of this book about an Ayn Randian hero murdering the crap out of lying communists, this is the part where you tell them those lessons straight-up and conduct fun little activities in which you punish them if they aren’t following along.
After an exercise in which children are expected to earn “BRAVE Bucks” for opening a pretend spa at which you give them tasks like “rub my feet,” or “get me a robe,” or “walk on my back,” for example, Jack suggests you test the “customer service” your children are providing you by being an asshole about it.
Be assertive! Don’t be afraid to push your kids’ patience and even take back part of their BRAVE Bucks if the service is poor. This game should teach them how much customer satisfaction affects the success of a business in a free market country. Make sure to keep it competitive between Team BRAVE and Team Wolves so they don’t get discouraged.
Remember, parents, the only way to properly crush your kid’s individualism and spirit is to teach them that assholes are everywhere and sucking up to those assholes is going to be what keeps food on their future tables. Go a bit nuts with it. First you give them the BRAVE Bucks, and convince them that BRAVE Bucks are their new reason for living. Then you take the BRAVE Bucks away, to teach them that when mommy wants a foot massage she means you’d better damn well put your heart and soul into it.
What the exercises don’t particularly mention, at least not the ones visible on the publisher’s public site, are any tips for knowing when democracy has failed and you need to start beating people with blunt objects. That seems like an oversight; while the activities for Jack’s still-probably-ghostwritten children’s book are focused on convincing your child of the wonders of the free market while simultaneously destroying any notion they have that the people with money will not be assholes to them just for the fun of doing it, a plain reading of the illustrated text seems to suggest that the authors thought an entirely different set of lessons were going to be taught.
Jack’s Lesson One: If you are important, you can get away with not wearing pants. It doesn’t matter if the rest of society is pretty clear on the need to wear pants; if you are important enough, rules like this become optional.
Jack’s Lesson Two: Violent insurrections against political enemies are Good if your enemies are communists, or if they’re not actually communists but you can call them communists anyway, which you always can because anyone who listens to Posobiec isn’t going to be sweating the fine details.
Whether it’s the first lesson or the second that Jack Posobiec deems more important is a bit unclear. I recommend asking him the next time you see him.
What is clear, however, is that this book absolutely needs to be pulled from library shelves. I didn’t raise my child to be groomed into believing proper government consists of a pantsless furry waging violent war when an election doesn’t go his way, and I don’t understand how conservatives can write a full book about eating pants while complaining that other people’s pronouns are The Real Problem Here.
Seriously, we’re in the middle of a nationwide conservative “grooming” freakout over a book about a real-life same-sex penguin couple raising a chick. A book in which a pants-hating titan of the free market commits genocide, though, is what conservatives are now presenting as the wholesome alternative?
No, and ick. If conservative parents want to teach their kids such things then they should do it in the privacy of their own homes, not in schools or library book rooms. Keep this violent furry filth away from the rest of us.
