Topic: Media Research Center
In its grand tradition of hating cartoons that don't reinforce right-wing narratives, the Media Research Center has previously freaked out over the cartoon "The Proud Family" because it focuses on characters who are not white or heterosexual. So when the cartoon covered topics in black history, Elie Ehrhard spent a Feb. 7 post ranting about "anti-white hate" and so-called critical race theory:
Season two of the Disney+ children's cartoon Proud Family: Louder and Prouder premiered on the streaming service last week. The ten-episode second season is filled with critical race theory (CRT) propaganda and anti-white hate.
Critical race theory ideas and racial division are littered throughout the series, but three episodes in particular stood out.
"Reparations," the third episode of the season, has already garnered a great deal of attention on Twitter. Conservative accounts such as Christopher Rufo and End Wokeness highlighted a clip at the end of the episode in which the kids sing a rap for reparations as part of a debate team performance.
As Rufo noted, "This Disney clip is pure critical race theory, including the insane conspiracy theory that Lincoln did not free the slaves."
Ehrhard didn't explain how, exactly, a rap song about reparations involved the high-level academic concept of critical race theory. And Rufo is on record as cheering his negative narratives he helped create surrounding the term without actually defining it because "The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory.’" So citing Rufo isn't exactly the win Ehrhard thinks it is. But she wasn't done complaining:
Hatred of Lincoln and the United States in general is in full force again in episode 10, "Juneteenth." This particular episode is such a historical mess it's hard to know where to begin.
Proud Family is set in the town of Smithville, California, and in the episode the citizens plan to honor the town's founder, Christian A. Smith. But Maya (Keke Palmer), the main character with a CRT-style middle school teacher, discovers that Smith was actually a slave owner. He owned a plantation in their town.
How is that possible? Maya's teacher tells her that it is because the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to Confederate States and Union border states did not have to free their slaves.
Um...California was not a border state. It was a free state with little connection to southern slavery and plantation ownership. Placing a slave-holding plantation there is a stretch, to put it mildly.
Actually, California does have a history of slavery despite its declared status as a free state, witih blacks and Native Americans forced into indentured servitude to mine for gold. (We'll concede that there probably weren't many plantations in California.) Nevertheless, Ehrhard huffed that "the show doesn't care about reality and is more than happy to confuse children about American history."
Ehrhard finally got to the "anti-white hate" part by whining over an episode in which "a handsome black student at the school asks a white girl, Zoey (Soleil Moon Frye), to a dance. Her mostly black friends at the minority-predominant school are furious." She chooses to interpret the episode this way:
Eventually, the black boy admits to Zoey that he only dates white girls. She decides not to go to the dance with him, "especially when it hurts my friends."
Do the girls who mistreated Zoey ever apologize for their behavior towards her? No, instead she apologizes to them.
"I'm sorry, guys. I really didn't get it," she says.
So, the episode teaches non-white girls that it's okay to ostracize and mistreat a white girl if she dates a black boy. Such tolerance!
You know, Elise, not everything must be viewed through your pro-white lens. Maybe the lesson here was that the "handsome black student" was the jerk for being interested in Zoey solely because she's white.
This was followed by a Feb. 11 post by right-wing movie critic Christian Toto complaining that the "Juneteenth" episode "features a wall-to-wall Critical Race Theory-style sermonizing," though he didn't explain what, exactly that "sermonizing" had to do with CRT. Then he touted a fellow right-winger also dumping on the show:
The right-leaning host of “The Megyn Kelly Show” shared her views without any Big Tech censors to stop her or show guest Jesse Kelly.
“This is a reflection of what our culture has become, a big bunch of grievance-mongering whiners … ‘America sucks because of this, it sucks because of that,'” said Kelly, a nationally syndicated radio show host.
Kelly couldn’t contain her anger at the parade of misinformation aimed at impressionable minds.
“This is absolute filth,” Kelly said.
“The anger that they put in the mouths of these little kids….Meanwhile, as if any little kid is walking around America today, saying, ‘we want reparations,” Megyn Kelly said. “They’re trying to plant these ideas early.”
“How crazy is it that Disney is coming fresh off a year where the CEO got the ax … after all those losses they’ve chosen to double and triple down on everything that has turned off American families,” Jesse Kelly said. “It’s all activism, all the time. It’s crazy that this is allowed to go on in the boardroom.”
“They’re trying to make these children hate America,” Megyn Kelly said. “Just the racism of it. This is a channel that’s supposed to appeal, I guess, to black families. What black families? Do they assume all black families hate America and wanna demand reparations and say we haven’t gotten past slavery? Who are the black families they’re having out with?”
So it's "absolute filth" for black people to talk about racism (let alone admit that it still exists) in a way that white people like Kelly and Toto don't approve of? And this is what all this anger is about: non-white cartoon characters discussing non-white things.
