Article Originally Posted on RedState.com
Sourced from: https://redstate.com/jenniferoo/2022/08/05/exclusive-dinesh-and-debbie-dsouza-partner-with-brave-books-for-new-childrens-primer-on-the-evils-of-socialism-n607165
Brave Books is taking the world by storm with their children’s books, joining forces with conservative thought leaders, activists, politicians, and social media influencers to seed conservative values and concepts to the next generation.
Dinesh and Debbie D’Souza are the latest conservative thought leaders to add their voices to the Brave Books Saga. The D’Souzas are partnering with Brave Books in their newest Saga 2 story, Freedom Day The Asher Way, about the evils of Socialism and the freedom and benefits of a capitalist system. Released on August 1, Brave Books is offering this title as their “Book of the Month.”
In an interview with RedState, Dinesh joked that Brave Books ambushed he and Debbie and held them hostage until they agreed to write a book, but the truth of the matter is that both the D’Souzas are appropriately suited to the Brave Books platform. as a scholar, policy analyst, bestselling author and award-winning filmmaker is well-known and venerated nationally and internationally.
Debbie is a Hispanic immigrant (her mother is Mexican-American, her father, Venezuelan) who is determined to educate her fellow Latinas and Latinos in the importance of voting for conservative principles, and not a party that time after time has betrayed family, community, and traditional values that most Hispanics hold sacrosanct.
Debbie is also a former K-12 instructor, so the concept of instilling principles, character, and values into children through storytelling is not only familiar, but fundamental.
“I’m a former school teacher,” Debbie revealed. “I’ve taught kindergarten through 12th grade and so it came very natural to me to want to do a children’s book, and I thought it was a, you know, a pretty cute and easy concept. So, that’s where the idea came for me to co-author it.”
But the subject matter stems from Dinesh’s latest book, United States of Socialism, which was obviously written for adults. The challenge, of course, is distilling a worldview such as Socialism into bite-sized chunks that could be explained to, well, a third grader.
“You’re not going to introduce them ideologically to Socialism, but Socialism travels under the banner of a “Fairness,” Dinesh explained.
“This is fair, you know, everybody should get an equal share. If prices are too high, the Socialist government should be able to just bring them down. Why would you charge so much for this?
“So, two of the Socialist concepts, which is one: what’s fair? And the second one: we’ll call it ‘price fixing.’
“You know they’re elaborated in my book for adults, but I think what was ingenious about Brave is they’ve helped us to craft a story that took these ideas and brought them down to the level of kids.
It’s a simplified version that tells the story in a way that kids can understand, but also find amusing and entertaining.”
Debbie expanded on this from the perspective of how children learn:
“Well, you know children, children learn through play and they also learn through storybooks, so even though the concept of Socialism itself is a little bit too high level for them, they know a little bit about fairness.
“They know right from wrong at probably the age of five.
“They can, they know that if somebody takes their toy away, it’s not a fair thing for them to do, and so this concept is created so that children start seeing the effects of being fair and not being fair. So, that by the time they get to, I guess maybe the age of 10 to 12, they can actually start understanding the concept of Socialism and how it either hurts or helps somebody.
“In this case we want to point out that it hurts people.”
Stories rule the world, and while they are one of the primary ways that children learn, in adults it’s how we understand life and the world around us. As a child, I was addicted to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Aesop’s Fables, and Greek and Roman Mythology. As an adult I see those same stories transmogrified and inserted into modern storylines all the time.
As Solomon said, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
The Left has understood this and have used it effectively. The Right has only lately started to employ this strategy to seed truth and build conservative values into our young. With the Left’s perpetual indoctrination steeped into our educational systems and libraries, the Right has some catching up to do, and Brave Books is allied with our best storytellers: the conservative influencers, activists, and thought leaders who are already speaking to the issues of the day, in order to punch down and break through to the next generation.
Freedom Day The Asher Way follows Asher, who is determined to create the best Freedom Day ever—even though he’s running low on funds. When Asher chooses to tweak the market to make everything cheaper, he runs into some issues, and learns the hard way that the free market is the best bet for both the buyer and the seller.
“I think it’s important to have this type of conservative children book,” Debbie said.
“The Liberals are really making end roads with children’s books. In fact, I heard the other day that there’s a book called Jack (Not Jackie), it’s a transgender children’s book. So, we’ve got to take back our culture, we’ve got to take back our children, and by doing more books like this type of book, I think, is very important for our young. And as I said, when I was a teacher, I felt it very important that children learned moral values and they just aren’t being taught anymore.”
“So, parents have to take that type of teaching in their own hands and so, by subscribing to Brave Books, I think it’s a great way to do that.”
Dinesh proffered this final thought.
“In earlier decades, the problem we had to deal with was Relativism, which is the Left essentially saying, you know, who’s to say what’s true or who’s to say what’s right?” Dinesh explained.
“But now we’re dealing with the active promulgation of a kind of anti-morality.
“So, the Left is promoting open perversity. And so, this is a much more serious assault than merely saying, “we don’t know where morals come from,” or “different people each determine for themselves their own morality.”
This is the kind of stuff that we debated and worried about and argued about in the ‘90s and early 2000s, but it’s now where our cultural debate is today.”
Brave Books is refusing to cede this debate to the Left. Since their start in 2021, Brave Books has reached over a hundred thousand homes with their picture books, and are looking to expand their reach with several new projects. Board books for toddlers, and a series of tween and teen novels, are in the works. There are also rumors about an animated TV show, as well as a podcast for parents about raising children in the midst of an adversarial, Leftist culture.
To learn more about Brave Books, or to purchase Freedom Day The Asher Way, visit Bravebooks.com.
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