SkyTree Book Fairs offer children's books to MAGA-loving parents

Whenever conservative Christians offer an alternative to anything secular—boy bands, movies, theme parks, etc.—you can expect the product to be substantively worse than the original. They just can’t compete. How could they? Injecting Jesus where Jesus isn’t needed doesn’t make anything better. The same rule of thumb applies to conservatives who want to inject their ideology where it doesn’t belong.

Enter Kirk Cameron, whose entire post-Growing Pains career has centered around trying to replicate his success in the secular world and failing in bigger and bigger ways.

His latest gambit is to offer a right-wing alternative to Scholastic book fairs.

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For those not familiar, those fairs are ubiquitous events where public school students can peruse and purchase books. Scholastic sets up the mini-libraries, sends out flyers, handles all the money, gives up to 50% of the proceeds back to the schools, and gets their books in front of millions of new eyeballs.

The problem for conservatives is that some of the books at these fairs depict real life—with LGBTQ characters, with plots revolving around racism, with age-appropriate discussions about sex, etc.—and they would rather keep kids in a bubble where they’re not exposed to any of that.

That’s why Cameron, who refers to Scholastic as “controllers in part of the woke matrix,” has been promoting “SkyTree Book Fairs” instead. It’s a bargain basement conservative version of Scholastic that (surprise!) includes Cameron’s books:

SkyTree, named after a place in Brave Books’ imaginary universe of Freedom Island, said it currently has vetted and approved more than 200 children’s books, with plans to have upwards of 500 ready for spring book fairs.

Scholastic, which holds more than 120,000 book fairs annually, offers well over 1,000 titles, including more than 100 on its list of “LGBTQIA+ Children’s Books.”

With over 1,000 books to choose from, it’s not hard to find content that some parents will object to. But the conservative Christian mentality here is to cry persecution and get the whole thing shut down rather than avoid the books they’re not personally comfortable with. (No one is forcing kids to buy books with a transgender protagonist.)

Brave Books, on the other hand, has an explicit agenda. That’s the company that puts out children’s books by Cameron, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Dana Loesch, Dinesh D’Souza, Jack Posobiec, Kevin Sorbo, and several other right-wing activists. They use a technique where hired (and unnamed) staffers write the books, but the conservative celebrities—whose actual input in these books is minimal—get to slap their names on them and treat them as their own.

SkyTree is currently celebrating the fact that one public school district has agreed to host a book fair with them this Saturday: Riverbend High School, part of the Spotsylvania County Public Schools in Virginia.

The county already has been mired in contentious debates over books in public schools, with system Superintendent Mark Taylor removing more than 30 book titles from high school libraries.

…

Cameron… is scheduled to attend a Dec. 2 book fair at Riverbend High School, from 9 a.m.-2 p.m. He will be there to do a reading from his new book and to support SkyTree Book Fairs, a nonprofit that is billing itself as an alternative to Scholastic.

In theory, replacing one book fair with another shouldn’t be a huge problem. The goal is getting kids to enjoy reading, and kids books are kids books, right? Not quite. The books offered by Cameron’s group usually celebrate “traditional” themes and just avoid all the aspects of humanity they don’t understand. They’re books in name but there’s nothing special about them. It’s content for the sake of content. None of the content released by Brave Books will be remembered in a few years. (It’s ridiculously hard to write a children’s book with any staying power but Scholastic has a long history of doing just that.)

Here’s another problem with SkyTree book fairs: They won’t even tell people what books they’re selling.

Unlike Scholastic, SkyTree doesn’t post online a list of the books it makes available at its fairs. SkyTree Book Fair Coordinator Brie Richards provided a short list that included “Brave Books.”

Her list also included hunting-and fishing-themed children’s author Kevin Lovegreen, the Daniel Tiger and Great Mouse Detective series published by Simon & Schuster and “The Smart Cookie” and “The Good Egg” from HarperCollins. She also mentioned “Star Wars,” though it was unclear what books she was referring to in the sprawling universe owned by Disney. Richards didn’t respond to additional questions.

Brave spokesperson Erin Kukowski confirmed that SkyTree carries its books “along with over 20 other publishers” but did not provide the names of those companies upon request.

That’s bizarre. It’s not like they don’t know what books they have available; their website claims they have 200+ books in their catalog “selected for family-friendly values.” They probably don’t want to release a list because the game plan will become too obvious. (Are there religious books in the mix? What’s the ratio of conservative-themed books to ones without an explicitly political/cultural agenda?) Better to get permission from a school district to set up shop and let it be a surprise, I guess.

The only thing they will say about content is that it’s anti-Whatever Scholastic Is Doing:

“It may be easier to answer what type of books they will not carry, which is anything that’s not age-appropriate, uses sexually explicit language or images, causes gender-confusion, or that’s racially divisive,” Kukowski added. “Also they will not carry anything published by Scholastic.”

Notice the ambiguity in that language. Having an openly gay character in a book, for example, isn’t sexually explicit, but conservatives could easily claim that’s inappropriate for children. Same goes for a character experiencing racism or learning about America’s past. What if there’s a book with a transgender character because good fiction represents real life? These people think that would cause “gender-confusion,” as if learning about an LGBTQ person will turn kids gay or trans. The bottom line is that kids who don’t fit a particular mold—conservative, Christian, financially afloat, usually white—will be hard-pressed to find characters in these books who look or sound like them.

I’m not worried that SkyTree will replace Scholastic. They have nothing of real value to offer. But you can bet some school districts, run by right-wing school boards or gullible enough to believe children are under threat by being exposed to challenging ideas, will accept SkyTree’s offer to come to their schools. (The company says they have over 100 schools lined up to host book fairs this spring.)

Wherever that happens, students will be worse off. The authors of many of these right-wing books aren’t interested in developing kids’ minds; they’re just using kids as a tool to advance their own beliefs. That’s why you won’t find memorable characters or gripping storylines. You’ll just find dumbed down versions of whatever’s getting posted in conservative media outlets.

As one librarian put it, “SkyTree Book Fairs and Brave Books seem to be targeting the parents,” not the children. Which means the books might sell, but the kids won’t be excited to read them. And doesn’t that negate the entire purpose of book fairs?

After I wrote everything you just read, Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby reported on an even more disturbing way SkyTree attempted to undermine Scholastic. They pointed out that a woman named Lanah Burkhardt told the Conroe Independent School District in Texas that reading a Scholastic book with a “single kiss” led to a personal pornography addiction.

Not only did she want that book, Drama, out of the hands of kids, she wanted the district to remove all Scholastic books from their libraries—and end their book fair.

What went unmentioned during Burkhardt’s rant was that she’s the “public relations coordinator” for Brave Books… and that SkyTree was promoting her speech as if they had no clue who she was.

They refer to their colleague as “this young lady,” like she’s a random person whose speech just happened to align with their entire mission.

Burkhardt also failed to mention that she was homeschooled, which raises all kinds of questions about how she accessed this book in the first place.

But the astroturfed gimmick had an effect:

The Conroe school board, after listening to her story, voted to restrict access to Drama, the Scholastic book featuring a kiss, from all students in the 8th grade and below. One of the school board members, Melissa Dungan, suggested replacing Scholastic with SkyTree Book Fairs. "All glory to God," Burkhardt posted in response to the news. 

The plan is already in motion.