‘SKIP THE BOOK’

Kimmel Gets Drag Queen to Read Ted Cruz’s New Book to Kids

Jimmy Kimmel invited RuPaul’s Drag Race star Trixie Mattel to host “Drag Queen Storytime.”

Earlier this week, Ted Cruz officially became a four-time author with the publication of his new book Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America.

To celebrate the occasion, Jimmy Kimmel decided to poke fun at the Texas senator’s anti-“woke” bona fides by inviting a drag queen onto his program to read excerpts of the book to kids—thumbing his nose at Cruz’s past statements on drag and the LGBTQ+ community.

Trixie Mattel, who originally competed on the seventh season of RuPaul's Drag Race then went on to win the third season of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars, did the honors while sporting a hot pink jumper and blonde hair.

Spoiler alert: The children were not impressed.

“Ted’s been out trying to sell the book,” Kimmel explained. “His last book, he had to get his own campaign to buy thousands of copies to get it up the list, which is sad. So we decided that, this time, we’d help him out with an assist from one of the stars of RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

Titling the segment “Drag Queen Storytime,” Mattel arrived to a classroom full of youngsters, who didn’t seem to know what to make of their host at first. But once she got them talking and opening up, she discovered that these impressionable young minds were not being swayed toward the Cruz way of thinking.

The first section Mattel chose to read contained Cruz’s thoughts on the live-action The Little Mermaid movie, and his disappointment that it had any sort of release at all. “Instead of admitting that Disney had managed to ruin a classic, defenders of the subpar remake—including its star—accused the public of racism,” wrote Cruz, as read by Mattel. Which really seemed to annoy the kids to whom she was reading.

“But the original Little Mermaid was good and the other Little Mermaid was good—the new one,” one little boy chimed in.

“Can’t they both be good?” Mattel asked, to which the kids enthusiastically responded in the affirmative. But the same boy wasn’t done sharing his thoughts: “I just want to say out loud right now: the book is boring.”

When Mattel suggested they skip a page or two, the child retorted that they should just “skip the book.” Which seemed to be his official review. But Mattel couldn’t let the kids miss one important part of Cruz’s book: the part where he tries to explain why he stole away to Cancun (or, as he put it, “took a harmless trip to Mexico”) when his constituents were dying from freezing cold weather conditions.

The kids remained unimpressed.

When Mattel sent them all off with their very own shiny new copies of Unwoke and assured them that they could do whatever they wanted with the book, they opted to dump them into the trash.

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Jennifer M. Wood

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