SALON

Andrew Leonard

Monday, Dec 5, 2011 8:36 PM UTC

How “The Muppets” made Occupy Wall Street

Call it the triumph of Comrade Kermit. Fox Business News rips the lid off a dastardly Communist puppet plot VIDEO

By

Topics:

How Vladimir Lenin, Kermit the Frog and Chairman Mao

A specter is haunting America: the specter of Communist Muppets!

Don’t you dare smile! I just watched, mouth agape, a segment on the Fox Business “Follow the Money” show that definitively exposed the new Muppets movie as yet another example of liberals trying to brainwash your kids against capitalism. And boy, let me tell you, the scales have fallen from my eyes. Rupert Murdoch’s boys are on to something! When the evil masterminds behind this film decided to name their oil baron villain “Tex Richman” they were without a doubt shamelessly attempting to undermine everything that is right and true about the United States of America.

“Is liberal Hollywood using class warfare to brainwash our kids?” asked Fox.

Well, duh. Of course! As the Media Research Center’s Dan Gainor pointed out during the segment, it is mere child’s play to trace the nefarious connections from the Muppet attack on a successful oil executive (c’mon, is Hollywood ever going to have a new idea?) to the Homo sapien-hating philosophy at the heart of “The Matrix” — the notion that “mankind is a virus on poor old Mother Earth.”

“You wonder why we’ve got a bunch of Occupy Wall Street people wandering around the country?” asked Gainor not so rhetorically. “They’ve been indoctrinated for years by this kind of stuff.”

Yes, that’s right, Fox Business just devoted seven minutes of precious airtime to a critique that not only connected “The Matrix” to “The Muppets” (and “Cars 2″! and “Syriana”!), but also reminded us that oil is a good thing because we need it to fuel our ambulances; and threw in a slam at Occupy Wall Street, for good measure. This is a level of brilliance that has heretofore not been regularly associated with this network. But really, I can’t tell you how glad I am that someone has finally had the balls to put a stop to this calcified “let’s put on a show to save something precious from the nasty job creator” plot nonsense. It may be one of Hollywood’s oldest tropes, but that doesn’t make it right.

I know some of my readers might actually believe that Texas oil money is largely responsible for destroying the climate of poor old Mother Earth and transforming the U.S. political system into a dysfunctional train wreck. Tut tut. What better evidence do we need to prove that long before Kermit and Miss Piggy turned to the dark side of dialectical materialism, your impressionable little minds were being warped against the free market by “Gilligan’s Island” and Bugs Bunny?

Even the most enlightened are not immune! When the Fox segment turned to Andrea Tantaros to discuss the long slide of “Sesame Street” into socialist propaganda, Tantaros lamented herself straight into the self-reeducation camp.

“Why can’t liberals leave little kids alone? Why does there have to be a political message. I thought ‘Sesame Street’ was supposed to be about sharing and being nice to people …”

Is she even listening to herself?! Sharing is COMMUNIST. That is what Karl Marx was all about! And bottom line, that’s all the Occupy Wall Street protesters want. What part of “redistribution of wealth” does Tantaros not understand?

Clearly, the Children’s Television Workshop has been insinuating itself into the hearts and minds of our nation’s youth from day one. Maybe, just maybe, they’ve become a little more obvious about it in recent years. But isn’t that the kind of thing you’d expect when a vast economic catastrophe that just happens to occur during the the administration of President Tex Richman leaves millions of people unemployed and exacerbates income inequality to its worst point in a century?

Whoops, it looks like the Muppets have gotten to me, too. Insert maniacal laughter here.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 25 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

Andrew Leonard has been working at Salon as a technology reporter, editor, blogger and staff writer for quite a bit longer than he ever anticipated being employed by an online magazine -- 15 years. He's enjoyed the luck of becoming obsessed with the Internet just before it broke into mainstream

consciousness and the housing bust just before it precipitated a global economic collapse. Prior to becoming a Salon lifer he freelanced for a wide variety of publications, from Newsweek to Rolling Stone to Wired, and wrote a book, "Bots: The Origin of New Species". He lives in Berkeley, Calif., with his two children and he likes to ride his bicycle up hill.

Continue Reading

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Latest Tweets

Recommendations