MRC Melts Down Over A Cartoon Lesson On Racism

In the grand tradition of the Media Research Center melting down over cartoons, we have an Aug. 10 post by Gabriel Hays enraged that the PBS cartoon “Arthur” dared to attempt the utterly benign thing of teaching a lesson about racism:

Apparently Elwood City, Arthur the aardvark’s hometown, has a racism and police brutality problem. 

During a recent episode of longtime PBS Kids favorite Arthur, two of the show’s central characters discuss seeing a video of police killing a black person and discuss their feelings of anger and confusion over it.

PBS’s embrace of Marxist Black Lives Matter propaganda involved the publicly-funded network producing a three-minute clip of Arthur chiding our “racist” country on August 4.

During the clip, Arthur the aardvark and his best friend, Buster the rabbit, talked candidly about the horrors of “racism” against “black people” because of a recent viral video of police brutality. They spoke about how “scary” it was to witness the George Floyd video, essentially, and then get a lesson from one of their adult mentors how racism “boils” their “blood.”

The fun kids’ show opened their anti-racist lesson with a distressed video chat between Arthur and Buster. The titular character asked the rabbit, “Did you see that video?” to which his friend replied, “Yeah, I just watched it. It was awful! I can’t believe someone would be hurt like that, just because they’re black.”

Uh, what? Isn’t every single character in Arthur some sort of woodland critter? Hearing Arthur and Buster talk about “black people” makes no sense.

Hays leaned into his employer’s utter hatred of the mere idea that black lives matter, insisting that “we’d recommend that the characters and animators at PBS watch this universe’s version of the George Floyd body cam footage to see that the victim resisted arrest for a long time and realize it offers no evidence that racism was involved either.  And there are also a few crime stats these young’ns could look at to dispel their fear at the great BLM lie.”

Hays then huffed that the school lunch lady, Mrs. MacGrady, “touted divisive BLM mantras, like telling the boys, ‘it’s not enough to say, ‘I’m not racist, it’s not my problem,'” but he didn’t explain how such a phrase was “divisive.” He concluded by ranting, “We don’t know, PBS, but you seem only a hair shy from telling kids to go to “peaceful” protests. Why are we the people funding this garbage?” He then demanded that his readers “contact the PBS public editor” to “let them know how you feel about this.”

Why doesn’t the MRC make links for readers to complain about MRC content so readily available? Because Hays’ ludicrous meltdown over teaching that racism is bad certainly warrants one. (We’d do it, but they hate us so much that we’re blocked or muted on much of their social media.)

“Arthur” is a major MRC target for some reason; last year, it raged that the show featured a teacher marrying his same-sex partner meant it pushed “the gay agenda,” whatever that means.