Diversity is not inherently good or bad, it’s just a mixture of unlike people or things coming together to form a single unit.
However, if you were to ask the left, diversity is the ultimate good. The only way something can be approvable is if any singular group consists of people of various ethnic backgrounds, sexualities, and genders. Ask them if ideological diversity is okay, and they may call you a Nazi.
So intense is the left’s mission to make sure everyone is represented (center-right people being the exception) that they’ve invaded children’s shows, and have attempted to make sure that diversity is even represented in inanimate objects personified.
You may be familiar with the children’s show Thomas the Tank Engine, the show that involves one of the main characters being a train. Trains do not have a race. They’re just trains. However, the Thomas the Tank Engine creators have jumped on the “diversity is everything” bandwagon and attempted to create a black female train so that black children could also feel represented in the train community.
You have no idea how ridiculous I felt writing that last sentence.
I’m not the only person who thinks this is ridiculous. So does NRA TV’s Dana Loesch, who expressed that opinion on an episode of her show “Relentless” with a touch of humor.
“Thomas the Tank is now bringing gender balance to the show by adding girl trains. Seriously. One of those trains, Nia, will be from Kenya to add ethnic diversity to the show,” said Loesch. “And — which that by the way, that’s where it gets really strange to me because I’ve looked at ‘Thomas and Friends,’ at their pictures, and I see gray and blue. Am I to understand this entire time that Thomas and his trains were white? Because they all have gray faces. How do you bring ethnic diversity?”
The screen switched from a train sporting what was supposed to represent African-style patterns and a feminine face, to a photoshopped image of trains on enflamed tracks wearing KKK hoods.
“Oh, was it because, I see it. It was the white hoods,” joked Loesch. “And the burning train tracks. OK, fine, fair point. Fair. I get it. Thomas the Tank Engine has been a blight on race relations for far too long. Clearly, this is overdue. Right? Seriously? With trains,” said Loesch towards the end of her rant, accompanied by the image of the ‘Thomas & Friends’ characters donning KKK hoods and seated atop burning train tracks.”
For the leftist media, this was too much of a knock on their version of diversity to ignore. Smaller blogs like Crooks and Liars and WXII-TV to national outlets like the Huffington Post and the New York Times wrote about Loesch’s horrible attack on Thomas the Tank Engine’s…train of color?
“Even by the standards of today’s political culture, it was a startling image: the talking trains from the children’s television show “Thomas & Friends,” wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods,” wrote NYT’s Niraj Chokshi.
“NRA TV’s Dana Loesch attacked “Thomas & Friends” for introducing an African tank named Nia, going so far as to show the children show’s characters with Ku Klux Klan hoods on their heads,” wrote Jenna Amatulli of HuffPo.
So horrified was the leftist media that Loesch would make a joke about the DIVERSITY OF TRAINS that the left had to get the word out from every outlet possible.
There comes a point where we as a society have to stand back and wonder if we’re taking things a bit too far. In this case, the left did it twice.
The first was to make sure that trains had a race. Diversity is fine, but being so obsessed with it to the point where slapping African patterns on an object and saying that object is black is somehow going to make black children feel like they’ve been included is ridiculous. The children who typically watch these shows are too young to care anyway, but let’s not dismiss the fact that they’re trains. They didn’t have a race until race was injected into the show.
I’ll also add that if a show with any leaning to the right had done this kind of thing, they would be raked across the coals for engaging in stereotypes and accused of “cultural appropriation.”
The second was in reaction to Loesch’s humor about the first point. Loesch obviously wasn’t promoting racism, nor was she celebrating the KKK. She was clearly mocking the fact that people are so race-obsessed that those who make a children’s cartoon went as far as they did. The joke was pretending that Thomas the Tank Engine was so filthy with racism that it needed this change-up of racial inclusion in trains.
They say that having to explain a joke means the joke wasn’t funny. Loesch’s joke was actually funny, it’s just that the people who are offended by it don’t seem to understand how humor works, or what jokes are. If they did, we wouldn’t see all this pearl-clutching from the left.
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