With competent execution, this could be a great children's book! The premise is not realistic—no sane parent would conclude their child is _literally_ a walrus _because he said so_—but it's a kind of non-realism common in children's literature, attributing simple, caricatured motivations to characters in order to tell a silly, memorable story. If there happens to be an obvious parallel between the silly, memorable story and an ideological fad affecting otherwise-sane parents in the current year, that's plausibly (or at least deniably) not the _author's_ fault ...
-But Matt Walsh completely flubs the execution by making it a satire rather than an allegory! The result is cringey right-wing propaganda rather than a silly, memorable story that I could read to a child without feeling ashamed. (It's well-known that the left can't meme, but that advantage doesn't secure the outcome of the culture war if the right can't write children's literature.)
+But Matt Walsh completely flubs the execution by making it a satire rather than an allegory! The result is cringey right-wing propaganda rather than a silly, memorable story that I could read to a child without feeling ashamed. (It's well-known that [the left can't meme](https://unherd.com/2021/08/why-the-left-cant-meme/), but that advantage doesn't secure the outcome of the culture war if the right can't write children's literature.)
Rather than being a silly non-realistic children's-literature grown-up, Johnny's mother is portrayed as being duped by social media. ("But Johnny's mom's phone said it's not just pretend / 'Only a bigot would say that! How dare you offend!'", with angry emoji and inverted Facebook thumbs-up icons bubbling out of her phone into the scene.)
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