Nickelodeon kids’ show Blue’s Clues has decided to celebrate Pride Month by making what is probably the most relentlessly LGBTQ-inclusive childrens’ cartoon the world has ever seen.
The three-minute video, starring an animated version of Nina West, one of the stars of RuPaul’s Drag Race, features a bouncy little musical number spelling out the assorted people animated animals who fit under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, from lesbian alligator mommies to trans beavers to non-binary dolphins.
Here’s the video:
While the video is getting cheers from many in and around the LGBTQ+ community, it’s also, rather predictably, inspiring angry if sometimes incoherent reactions from assorted homophobes and transphobes and the occasional QAnon fan convinced that Nickelodeon is trying to groom their children.
Right-wing blogs and other media sites took aim at the video as well.
“Woke Capitalism Promotes Polyamorous Parenting,” declared The American Conservative, warning parents about Nickelodeon’s
animated drag queen singing a tribute to polymorphous perversity, and encouraging children to sing along too. … this is about teaching preschoolers to accept chaotic sexual desire as good. Do you want your four-year-old to ask you, “Mommy, what’s ace, bi, and pan?” Then you’d better not let them watch Blue’s Clues.
“Nickelodeon’s ‘Blues Clues & You’ releases ‘predatory’ LGBT parade video featuring drag queen,” shouted the Christian Post, quoting a transphobic child-development “expert” who warned that
Blue’s Clues’ introduction of sex and gender material indicates either a troubling lack of understanding about the basics of child psychological development or that the show’s writers and producers intend to groom children toward early and developmentally inappropriate encounters with sex and gender topics.
Meanwhile, the Moonbattery blog describes the Blue’s Clues video as
yet another attempt to indoctrinate kids to embrace sexual deviancy …
Nothing could be more perverted than exposing kids to leftists’ grotesque sexual ideology.
Those young enough to watch this stuff won’t understand what “nonbinary,” “ace” (asexual), “bi,” “pan,” et cetera mean. Maybe liberal parents are expected to fill in details that for now can’t be televised. Or maybe the idea is to establish positive connotations in the minds of rug rats so they will be eager to study pansexuality when public schools incorporate it into the grade school curriculum.
Reactionary Canadian site the Post Millennial warned that the powers-that-be at Nickelodeon had also slipped in “a microphone with the revolutionary “black power” fist symbol etched as an emblem.”
As the Western Journal sees it, the video is so over-the-top in its inclusivity and
so obviously propaganda that it seems more like a parody of modern leftism than it does subtle indoctrination on Nickelodeon. It’s more like a humorous riff on how conservatives might view today’s television programming than what even the most progressive children’s show looked like just a few short years ago.
Similar articles appear on other right-wing media sites ranging from Breitbart and RedState to The Gateway Pundit and Alex Jones’ InfoWars.
The most, well, imaginative analysis of the video has to come from Zach Heilman at Red Voice Media, who is convinced that “Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues Is Targeting Babies & Preschool Kids with Transgenderism & Pedophilia.” Indeed, he argues that the video is filled with hidden symbols — in particular, the triangle-shaped spiral that QAnoners and other conspiracy theorists think is a symbol for “little boy lover.” But the screenshots he uses to prove his point all feature regular spirals in the artwork, not triangular ones; in one case he flags the number “6” as a possible symbol of pedophilia.
I think too much TV may be turning Heilman’s eyes (or perhaps his brain) to mush. The Blue’s Clues video is pretty much stuffed with symbolism (mostly in the form of various pride flags) and its agenda is crystal clear — to celebrate all those in the LGBTQ+ coalition and help kids make sense of the world. There’s really no reason to make shit up. But that’s how all these guys work, imagining patterns that aren’t there.
Happy Pride, everyone!
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Sheesh. Some people just can’t see a parade without wanting to poop on it.
I hope everybody who wants to has a joyously wonderful Pride Month. Y’all stay safe.
@Waywatcher, although this is not a direct answer to your question, there’s a quote I read many years ago which stuck in my mind, and which I often think of when conservatives display a creepy fixation on pedophilia:
The quote is from “Sexual Abuse in Christian Homes and Churches” by Carolyn Holderread Heggen.
@Moggie:
@Dalillama:
The bit about the fist as an IWW symbol makes perfect sense to me. A number of organization still use derivatives of that. In particular, I’ve been by an IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) building a few times, and its logo is naturally a fist with one (or more) lightning bolts clenched in it.
@Crip Dyke:
I salute you for managing to make my brain collapse under a dozen-idea collision with that one line about ‘trans beavers’.
Communism. Because Communist countries are traditionally so open and welcoming to LGBT+ folk?
Pedophilia. Like those staunch conservatives Matt Gaetz and Roy Moore?
@Crip Dyke: my keyboard thanks you for that spit take. Some of my best friends have trans beavers! Okay, it’s only one of them, and a couple acquaintances. (I mean, maybe? It’s not like I go around inquiring about the content of people’s undies.)
@Moggie: why am I not surprised?
Happy Pride, everyone. Let your whatever color flag fly.
That was some real cute shit, and I liked it.
I bet they’re having a cow at today’s Google home page. So many pretty flags!
I don’t see any flags there. Just one black ribbon. Was that yesterday, or something?
I don’t have a four-year-old, but as for the question…why not? Perhaps it would be tough explaining asexuality to a kid who might not have an idea of sexual desire yet, so I’d maybe say that not everyone falls in love in the same way.
But yeah, it baffles me how many people think it’s bad to tell kids about queer people. And, no, it won’t magically make them gay if they’re straight, just as how learning about straight people didn’t magically make me (totally) straight (I think I only learned the word bisexual at age 14, but I could tell from around 11 that I could be attracted to both girls and boys).
Gah, this annoys me. But the video is cute and heartwarming.
These people couldn’t figure out that a blue girl-dog MIGHT have some gender nonconforming friends?
Speaking of flags, I saw a variation of one of those black-and-gray US flags a few months ago while doing a food delivery. Only this flag had a grayed out rainbow color scheme on it, bearing the legend ‘We the People means ALL the People’. I found it an interesting bit of reclamation, at least in my opinion.
And semi-OT: Republican challenger Omar Navarro (who wants Maxine Waters’ Congress seat) claimed that the presence of an obviously gay character in the new movie Cruella ‘ruined his childhood’. This prompted a response from actor John Stamos, who stated that he hoped Navarro didn’t watch the sitcom Full House growing up, since that was about three guys under one roof raising kids in San Francisco and might have ruined his childhood on that.
https://www.comicsands.com/john-stamos-omar-navarro-cruella-2653207193.html
This prompted a bunch of other Twitter users to list other media shows with ‘LBGTQ+ themes’ that would’ve ruined Navarro’s childhood (under his definition of said concepts, that is) if he saw them back in the 1980’s. TV series like My Two Dads, Three’s Company, Bosom Buddies, and the movie Three Men and a Baby, amongst other things.
Rod using old-timey Freudian terminology caught me off-guard — actually Googled “polymorphous perversity” to make sure I was remembering it right. It’s extremely weird even by his standards. I mean, he might as well be saying Blue’s Clues will exacerbate your daughter’s penis envy or something. Is this some sort of Jordan Peterson effect?
It’s clear he doesn’t really understand what it means or how it relates to child development. It’s going to bother me wondering where he got it
The power fist with the fingers showing is communist propaganda.