Fox News Wigs Out

The other day I learned from a talk show host that another talk show host, Bill Maher, had declared that children were being used as “cannon fodder.”

Given the timing, you might think the topic was the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. 

But Maher, whose monologue aired a few days before the massacre, wasn’t talking about children as actual cannon fodder in this land of more guns than people. He was talking about a culture that encourages kids to be “anything other than straight.”

The three hosts of “Fox & Friends Weekend” took up this theme last weekend in connection with a book called “Big Wig” that Pizza Hut has included in its “Book It!” reading incentive program (read books/ get free pizza).

“Big Wig,” according to publisher Simon & Schuster, is a picture book that “celebrates the universal childhood experience of dressing up and the confidence that comes with putting on a costume. And it goes further than that, acknowledging that sometimes dressing differently from what might be expected is how we become our truest and best selves.” As entrants in a costume competition, a child and his wig “are an unstoppable drag queen team!”

“Pizza Hut has gone woke,” lamented “F&FW” co-host Will Cain. Promoting drag, he said, is an “amoral step that we’re taking as a culture.” I think he meant “immoral.”

Misquoting Maher, host Carley Shimkus said – this was after Uvalde – that children were being used as “cannon fire” in the culture war. Possibly she doesn’t know the word “fodder.” But maybe she just misspoke.

Host Pete Hegseth decided this was the perfect moment to hawk his own book, which apparently explains how cultural Marxists – not 18-year-olds with assault rifles, not bigotry, not antidemocratic chicanery – are destroying “the fabric of our country.” 

Normally, I ignore the “Sabbath gasbags,” as the brilliant Calvin Trillin once called TV’s weekend parade of talking heads. But I was alerted to the hysteria over Pizza Hut’s “wokeness” and “Big Wig’s” transgressive message by my daughter Sylvie, who happens to have edited the book (written by Jonathan Hillman and illustrated by Levi Hastings). She also wrote the publisher’s description that “F&FW” read aloud to shock its audience at Pizza Hut’s complicity in indoctrinating America’s children into the world of “transgenderism and drag.” 

(Neither the word “drag” nor the word “trans” appears in the book. Unless a grownup tells them otherwise, kids will read it as a story about dressing up.)

Echoing Bill Maher, Shimkus attributed the growing number of people who identify as gay or trans to social media and peer influence, to the age-old teen impulse to rebel and shock, and to the trendiness of various gender and sexual identities and orientations. 

Also following Maher, Shimkus questioned why, if being trans is natural, we’re seeing so much regional variation, with many more trans youths in places like California and New York than elsewhere – a silly point, it seems to me, since people are more likely to express their authentic selves in places that are more accepting of their doing so.

Maher, at least, acknowledged that plenty of LGBTQ+ folk are being true to who they are. Our Fox friends did not. For them, a book like “Big Wig” is another in a string of imaginary or exaggerated threats – like voter fraud, bad dudes at the border, and government attempts to trample on Second Amendment rights — that, taken together, can be used to justify retaining or seizing power by any means necessary. After all, the future of the country is at stake.

The sad thing is that the future of the country is at stake, precisely because those on the far right prefer to distract us with imaginary threats than confront real ones. What makes Shimkus think “the world is spinning out of control?” Pizza Hut’s endorsement of “Big Wig!”

(Here, freedom lovers, it is worth noting that no one is forcing anyone to read this book and no one’s tax dollars are being used to promote it.)

As for me, I strongly doubt that a picture book is going to play much of a role in steering a child into an “alternative lifestyle.” “I yam what I yam,” said Popeye the Sailorman. Cain, Shimkus, Hegseth and their ilk cling to the belief that only the masculine male-feminine female binary is natural and all other identities are cultural, which is to say, matters of influence and indoctrination.

What ought to be obvious by now is not that more people are choosing “nontraditional” gender identities, but that more people feel safe expressing the gender identity they were born with. 

So a book like “Big Wig” isn’t part of a “progressive plot,” as Pete Hegseth claims, but of actual progress toward acceptance of the many ways we humans can be our “truest and best selves.”