Over the past several months, the pretender to the throne currently occupying the White House and his lackeys in Congress have rushed to defund and silence media outlets such as National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Services (PBS)—outlets which they perceive as little more than a bunch of commie talk. But in their zealous glee, these public media ransackers seem to have overlooked one small but significant detail: They forgot to take Carl the Collector into account.
The highly acclaimed animated PBS Kids television show, which debuted last November, stars a racoon with autism named Carl, who loves to collect everything from autographs and pet rocks to bottle caps and sweaters. He lives in a place called Fuzzytown along with his friends, including Lotta, a fox with autism who excels at art and music, but is hypersensitive to sounds, smells, and food textures. There are also twin bunnies named Nico and Arugula, and an adventurous, hyperactive, and impulsive squirrel named Forrest, who has a tree nut allergy.
“We hope Carl and his friends will encourage empathy and understanding,” Zachariah OHora, the show’s creator and executive producer said during a press tour last summer, “and ultimately show that everyone benefits when we recognize and embrace our differences.”
I imagine the Congresspeople who (at the behest of the pretender) rescinded more than $1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—which helps fund NPR and PBS—thought they were sanitizing the airwaves by ridding them of supposed leftist propaganda.
But that doesn’t appear to be what has actually happened. Carl the Collector has not only survived the administration’s attempt to obliterate PBS, but has continued its rich depiction of children with disabilities and developmental differences. In October, PBS premiered a groundbreaking new Carl character named Paolo, an autistic and mostly nonverbal raccoon who loves outer space and who communicates with the help of a speech tablet. Paolo is the first character on a PBS Kids show to use an augmentative and alternative communication device, and is voiced by Odin Frost, a person who actually is autistic and nonverbal and uses a talking box to communicate in daily life.
This must all be very upsetting for the pretender and his wrecking crew. Here we have a PBS show that is not only chugging along, but adding trailblazing new characters, in spite of the efforts to shut down its whole platform.
Carl the Collector’s target audience is children ages four to eight, which makes it an especially dangerous form of propaganda—it preys upon our most vulnerable citizens, indoctrinating their impressionable young minds with leftist notions of the value of diversity and inclusivity. Before you know it, there will be young people going around believing that, as the show’s creator said, “everyone benefits when we recognize and embrace our differences.”
And we surely can’t have any of that.