The Lorax Will Turn Your Kids Into 'Occu-Toddlers', So Sayeth Lou Dobbs

© Universal Pictures

Beware, good citizens. There are subversive messages hidden everywhere these days, planted by anti-American class warriors and nefarious Occupy Wall Street agents, and they're plotting to brainwash your children. Exhibit A: The Lorax. Yes, Dr. Seuss's children book, and the upcoming film based on it. That and some Japanese anime film nobody's ever heard of.

No one is safe.

Anyhow, that's Lou Dobbs' message: it's a variant on the classic Hollywood-is-indoctrinating-your-children trope, but even better! Now, animated movies like the Lorax are enlisting your children into Occupy Wall Street and into waging war against the rich. How does he manage such a fundamentally ludicrous insinuation? It takes a couple steps, some desperate contorting (like equating not cutting down trees to class warfare, and asserting that an animated Japanese film is somehow part of Hollywood), but he gets there! Watch:

Has Fox News completed its descent into full-on self-parody, and I just missed the memo? The line between talk show host and frantic reciter of pro-business propaganda for the conservative white middle class has never been thinner. Are we supposed to believe that actual human beings form these opinions? How is it not clear that every line Dobbs utters was crafted by producers and ex-political strategists to agitate the paranoid right?

I mean, a bunch of jowly old white guys scoffing at the supposedly radical notion that everyone should get a "fair shot", suggesting the Lorax will transform your child into a radical subversive, and exhorting you to throw trash on the movie theater floor to protest it all? It's beyond over the top. And it's supposed to pass for political commentary?

I think not. Lou Dobbs is nothing more than a wrinkly old duffel bag full of paranoid talking points. It's calculated, thinly-veiled button-pushing, and the facade is wearing thinner and thinner by the day.

Tags: Television

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