That's exactly what I'm saying: you are _assuming_ because you want to find a "woke agenda". On the other hand, Steinbeck is also an author that a contemporary Mathilda-like kid would read, while they would not read Kipling. This is the problem here: it really looks like that the equivalently probable hypothesis that it's not a woke conspiracy is totally impossible to imagine for some people, and this is a problem: they are deep in their paranoia.

I don't know if the reason is that Steinbeck is leftist or not. It is even possible that it is a woke agenda reason. What is worrying is that some people are just wanting sooo much for it to be a woke agenda, and the problem is that you can always turn everything into a woke agenda. If they would have replaced Steinbeck by Kipling, you would have said "it's because Kipling's books are talking about other cultures and Steinbeck talks about America, and for the wokes, it's bad to talk about America".

That being said, maybe I'm a bit biased, because so far, in a lot of cases, those moral panics turn out to be blown out of proportion: the "bad wokes threatening freedom" turn out to not defend the ideological position they are told they have. It may be the case here too: all this story may be just idiots who clumsily tried to keep the book relevant for what they think was the new taste.