If there’s one thing I’ve learned from working in American politics, it’s this: things can always get dumber.
No matter how far you think the woke warriors have overextended themselves, there will forever be a fresh new hell that makes you scratch your head and ask, “is this the final straw?”
Mr. Potato Head is the latest example.
If you missed the saga, Hasbro last week had decided America’s favorite cartoon spud is insufficiently inclusive and elected to neuter him. Mr. Potato Head briefly went genderless and people were asked to refer to the toy simply as “Potato Head.” Perhaps because this caused some to be confused that Hasbro might be referring to CNN’s Brian Stelter, Hasbro backpedaled.
As far as I know, there was no grand controversy surrounding the gendered potato toy. But somebody at Hasbro presumably called a very important meeting to discuss the implications of the company’s heteronormative tuber, and together, the brain trust likely concluded that he could be bad for business if the LGBT community decided to cause a stir.
We don’t know what exactly Hasbro had planned for Mrs. Potato Head or their three Potato Head children. With “Potato Head” coming out as non-binary, I assume Mrs. Potato Head would have filed for divorce. After all, xe/xim/her would no longer have been the man she married. After all those happy years together, it would have been a shame to see the Potato Head family torn apart in such an unseemly manner.
Hostage to the Woke Left
While it’s easy to poke fun, there’s something truly sinister behind Mr. Potato Head’s recent gender-bending. There’s a massive groundswell among the nation’s woke elite, peddled by multinational corporations, academia, and the federal government, to placate the “social justice” mob. Major institutions are being held hostage by the woke Left, and they don’t have the stones to say “Enough is enough.”
We are long past the point in America where normalcy is no longer the norm. Nothing that is considered traditional, including something as innocuous as a family of plastic potato toys, will be allowed to stand. Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head and their three children too closely resemble the traditional family unit that the woke Left has tagged for total destruction.
The Alphabet Mafia, which is obsessed with scantily clad drag queens reading books to children in public libraries, ensuring that no three-year-olds turn four without examining whether their biological sexes match their perceived genders, and forcing Christian bakers to make them wedding cakes, is one of the “social justice” groups leading the charge. This pernicious group in particular is aimed at eradicating the nuclear family. After all, how can we live in a just society if Mr. Potato Head remains a strong male head-of-household?
Hasbro does not have any real interest in what is called “social justice” or the causes of the political Left. Hasbro does, however, have an interest in making money. It is not acting in good faith by pretending to care about Mr. Potato Head’s gender identity. It is simply playing the same trick that every major corporation in America has played, or will eventually be forced to play.
Leftists used to be half-smart, back before their brains were turned to mush by sociologists and other fake scholars in the academy. They used to be skeptical of the institutional power of the federal government and major corporations. While that skepticism still exists to a certain degree, it has become inextricable from the demands of the various “social justice” interest groups.
So, for example, the same Left that used to hate foreign wars is now more than happy to let the federal government bomb innocent Syrian civilians, so long as they have been ensured by the federal government that the pilots dropping the bombs can identify as transgender.
We still see a fair bit of skepticism from the Left about the criminal justice system, but only insofar as it can claim systematic unfairness towards minority groups. Don’t expect today’s Left to question why the federal government is holding mostly peaceful protestors without bail for the crime of trespassing at the Capitol. Those victims of an overbearing government are white Trump supporters, and the Left is more than happy to watch them rot in jail.
Virtue Signaling on the Cheap
Corporations have become wise to this surface-level skepticism of power, and they have adjusted accordingly.
It’s why Bank of America, one of the targets of Occupy Wall Street (which was in itself only a half-hearted attempt by the few remaining true liberals to hold big banks accountable, and resulted in more prosecutions for rapes among the occupiers than it did of criminally negligent Wall Street executives) changes its Twitter profile photo to a rainbow flag during gay pride month—formerly gay pride week, and formerly gay pride day. It’s why Oreo, owned by Nabisco, tweeted “Trans people exist,” as the U.S. Senate debated the Equality Act last week.
It is much easier for giant corporations like Hasbro, Bank of America, and Nabisco to placate the “social justice” mob by extending meaningless platitudes than it is to face the mob’s wrath. And they don’t think they have to worry about your wrath. They have done the calculations, and under the guise of “corporate responsibility” and “commitment to diversity,” they have bought off the formerly-skeptical Left with cheap signals of virtue.
We will continue on this way for the foreseeable future, with the current left-wing government facing little scrutiny from its constituents, and major companies like Amazon facing even less, as long the company keeps banning the sale of books by right-leaning authors in a nod to their leftist worshippers.
One has to wonder what Mr. Potato Head thinks of all this.
I’m not sure whether he is a Republican or a Democrat, but I am sure that he voted for Joe Biden, probably in a swing state, and likely with an absentee ballot. By now, he probably realizes that he’s simply a pawn in a game much larger than himself.