Princess Viola

Nonchalantly bringing up the act of violent resistance while discussing a fun evening she had with her friends, local mom Rebecca Peters casually mentioned Wednesday to her son Miles that her bunco group had thrown Molotov cocktails at ICE the previous week. “Yeah, me and the bunco gals lit a few liquor bottles on fire and tossed them at ICE agents the other day, and I won $5 in our game!” said Peters, adding that her “lucky roll” of three sixes was the “highlight” of a lively Friday spent drinking mojitos and immolating masked federal immigration officers.

It's a lot, for books aimed at eleven year olds who want to read about kids turning into fun animals.

On the podcast, the two (American) hosts happened to get onto the topic of the post-9/11 Iraq War and their reactions to it. They were both children at the time and as such could not be expected to have particularly nuanced views of US military policy. The person who hadn't read Animorphs was unsurprised by the declaration of war; that's what you did. Someone attacks America, America goes to war. That's how a country protects itself, through military revenge. The Animorphs fan, about the same age, had been devastated and against the war from the start. War was a Big Deal and, while sometimes unavoidable, should be a last resort; a lot of people were going to die, and a lot more were going to get hurt, and no matter how the war shook out it was still going to be horrible. They attributed this perspective, of course, to the series that had taught them about the horrors endemic to war in an engaging way at such a young age -- to Animorphs.

Admitting that his prior beliefs regarding conflagrations had been formed out of ignorance, longtime U.S. Forest Service icon Smokey Bear issued a statement Monday claiming that his views on wildfires had evolved. “You have to understand, when I was coming up in the ’40s, these fires were talked about in an almost entirely negative context, and I was just a dumb cub echoing the conventional thinking of the time,”  said Smokey Bear, telling reporters that conversations with real estate owners and insurance carriers who had benefited from wildfires had convinced him to soften his stance.