Hide your televisions, cancel culture is coming after cartoons now. A rain-soaked academic idiot at the University of Washington has decided that — I promise I’m not making this up — SpongeBob Squarepants may, in fact, be the embodiment of all that is evil.

FoxNews.com:

“SpongeBob SquarePants,” which celebrated its 20th anniversary on Friday, has millions of fans around the world, but one University of Washington professor is clearly not among them. For a recently published academic journal, the professor, Holly M. Barker, wrote an article “Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom,” in which she offers a different take on the affable sea sponge. “SpongeBob Squarepants and his friends play a role in normalizing the settler colonial takings of indigenous lands while erasing the ancestral Bikinian people from their nonfictional homeland,” the article reads.

Clarifying for those whose child-rearing missed the Nickelodeon era: SpongeBob Squarepants is a kid’s cartoon.

Fiction.

Not real.

One of the more ridiculous aspects of life in early 21st-century America is that we spend a fortune to send our kids to schools to be educated by people who are complete morons.

It is almost certain that Professor Yoohoo here truly feels that she is offering an intellectual salvo in the fight for international justice.

It is even more certain that she is in desperate need of some fiber in her diet.

Barker’s beliefs come from the idea that the show is set in a version of the real-life Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. During the Cold War, natives of the area were relocated and the American military used the zone for nuclear testing. The area remains uninhabitable to this day. That history has given rise to fans’ theory that Bikini Bottom is inhabited by creatures who owe their mutation to that testing. Barker stated that as an “American character” allowed to inhabit an area that natives had no choice but to leave, SpongeBob showed his privilege of “not caring about the detonation of nuclear bombs.” Barker also points out the cultural appropriation of Pacific culture, with Hawaiian-style shirts, homes in the shapes of pineapples, tikis and Easter Island heads, and the sounds of a steel guitar perpetuating stereotypes of the region.

I’ve done shows for the military all over the South Pacific. I even spent several days doing gigs in the Marshall Islands, which have the most amazing beaches I have ever seen. At no time did I see tikis, Easter Island heads, or anybody playing steel guitars.

What’s most insidious is that the social justice freakshow people truly believe the things they say. They really believe that a cartoon is planting seeds of oppressive American war-lust in the minds of 8-year-old children.

Being able to see that much misery in something as benign as a cartoon about a talking sponge has got to be an awful existence. This woman’s day-to-day routine is her purgatory.

SpongeBob Squarepants is one of those great kid’s cartoons that features as much humor to entertain the adults as it does the kids. That was the genius of the old Looney Tunes days. It’s fun, and liberals hate fun.

It’s also on Amazon Prime Video now, so I’m going to go have some fun.

___

PJ Media Associate Editor Stephen Kruiser is the author of “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower” and “Straight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.”