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A new editon of the classic word game Scrabble prompted complaints from the hosts of Fox News' The Five who labeled it "woke" and "anti-human" over its banning of racist and LGBTQ+ slurs and its emphasis on fun rather than scoring.
Scrabble Together, manufactured by Mattel, introduces several new features aimed at enhancing the social aspect of the game. Players can now form teams, spell specific "goal" words, and receive hints to improve their skills.
While the classic Scrabble scoring system remains intact on the game board's underside, the emphasis is shifted towards collaborative play rather than individual competition.
Fox News host Jeanine Pirro ignited the discussion by criticizing the game's perceived "dumbing down" to cater to the "woke" generation.
You can watch what happened in the video below.
‘The Five’: Scrabble dumbs itself down for the ‘woke’youtu.be
In remarks to liberal co-host Jessica Tarlov, Pirro noted that Scrabble Together removes certain words and bans racist and LGBTQ+ slurs from tournaments, insinuating that the changes are driven by a desire to avoid hurting players' feelings:
“They have removed certain words. They banned racist and LGBTQ slurs from the tournaments, but there are also new words, you know, that the woke generation would be very comfortable with. So is this more about wokeism, this new Scrabble, or is it about … ADHD and the fact that they need friends and they need hints and they can’t spell?”
Tarlov expressed support for the removal of offensive slurs from the game but faced pushback from her colleagues. Despite acknowledging Scrabble's difficulty, she suggested that Mattel's intention was to create a "lighter version" of the game.
But her co-host, the more conservative Greg Gutfeld, despite admitting to never having played Scrabble, condemned the absence of scoring in Scrabble Together, equating it to being "anti-human":
“Playing a game without scoring — even if you suck at something — is so anti-human. It’s like scoring is part of your DNA. Y’know? You need to keep track!"
"I’m the world’s worst tennis player… I love keeping score when I play tennis, even when I lose 6-0, because I need to keep score.”
After Pirro commented that she's "surprised this new Scrabble didn’t come with four trophies, so everybody feels they won," co-host Jesse Watters said that removing slurs is "unfair," adding:
"I've played Scrabble a few times. I'm more into games like Yahtzee. Those games are more for people with an intellectual capacity who can really calculate winning and losing."
"Scrabble is for people who pretend to be intellectual, who actually can't compete in the real world."
Many criticized the segment.
Fox News rarely misses an opportunity to declare that even the most innocuous things have gone "woke."
Last year, network personality Ainsley Earhardt was mocked online after she complained Xbox—a video gaming brand created and owned by Microsoft—is "going woke because of climate change" after the company announced a new default setting that regulates gaming consoles' power usage to protect the environment.
This development appeared to annoy Earhardt, who claimed Xbox is "going after the kids," suggesting efforts to protect the environment and address climate change are nothing more than a "woke" agenda.
The network also made headlines after David Marcus, an opinion columnist who has pushed COVID-19-related conspiracy theories, wrote a screed accusing the creators and writers of Star Trek: Discovery of delving into "woke politics."
Marcus accused the show's writers of "electioneering" by featuring former Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams in a cameo as the President of the United Federation of Planets.