You may have heard the Mattel toy company is redoing everyone's favorite kids' TV show about a big purple dinosaur, Barney & Friends.
That means one thing--conservatives are losing their minds for no reason.
After a long hiatus, Barney is back except this time the show will change to an animated format instead of a person in a giant dinosaur suit.
Of course, to conservatives "change" automatically means "woke," and "woke" means "whatever thing I have decided is offensive today for arbitrary reasons I cannot and will not explain but are definitely racist and transphobic."
So the right is mad because they're convinced based on zero evidence whatsoever that Barney & Friends is now going to be a show where a nude domintarix leads five-year-olds in a Black Mass while reading The Communist Manifesto or whatever.
People like Brigitte Gabriel, Chairwoman of far-right anti-Muslim organization ACT For America, immediately took to Twitter to complain about the supposed woke-ification of Barney & Friends, for which there is no evidence, as seen below.
The uproar is rather absurd because the original Barney & Friends was already pretty "woke" in the first place, at least as the word was defined by the Black people who coined it before conservatives co-opted it to be a catch-all for whatever they don't like.
The cast of the show was racially and ethnically diverse to a degree that would seem progressive today, let alone in the 90s and early 2000s. And Barney taught kids about ideas like love and acceptance and kindness, which even Republicans still liked back then.
In announcing the reboot, Josh Silverman, Chief Franchise Officer and Global Head of Consumer Products at Mattel detailed what viewers can expect from the new Barney & Friends:
"We will tap into the nostalgia of the generations who grew up with Barney, now parents themselves, and introduce the iconic purple dinosaur to a new generation of kids and families around the world across content, products, and experiences."
Yeah that... just sounds exactly like the original Barney & Friends except animated.
Ah ha! But! Mattel Television SVP and General Manager Fred Soulie said of the reboot:
“[It will] reflect the world that kids today live in so that the series can deliver meaningful lessons about navigating it."
See that's how they get ya. Conservatives don't want to reflect "the world that kids today live in," they only want to reflect the world as it was back in like 1950, when everyone who wasn't a white cisgender straight Christian man didn't have any power. No wonder they're mad.
Anyway, if this all seems absurd to an extent that's laughable, you're not alone--Twitter had a field day roasting this newest conservative outrage.
Anyway, someone reset the countdown clock till the next conservative faux-outrage.
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