The headline in the Hollywood Reporter reads "Fox Business Network Calls Muppets Communist", followed by the deeply dispiriting words "Debate Goes Viral", which here we may take to mean: "Gains Perverse Legitimacy Because Lots of People Clicked On It". It is just the latest in a series of claims about children's films having a leftwing agenda. Last month a New York Post writer described Happy Feet 2 as "Kiddie Karl Marx". Sorry, I forgot to say SPOILER ALERT.

If you haven't heard the story yet let me take you – with a heavy heart – back to Friday, when Fox Business Network anchor Eric Bolling announced that the new Muppet movie featured a character named Tex Richman, a greedy oil executive who wants to drill under the Muppets' theatre. The discussion that followed didn't just typify the Fox News mission to recast the outside world as leftwing propaganda; it threatened to usher in a whole new paradigm of stupid.

"Liberal Hollywood depicting a successful businessman as evil – that's not new," said Bolling. He asked his guest, media-bias alarmist Dan Gainor, if Hollywood was deliberately trying to brainwash kids.

"Absolutely," said Gainor. "And they've been doing it for decades." He pointed out that oil could be used to "light a hospital" or "fuel an ambulance". "They don't want to tell that story," he said.

Bolling's Fox News colleague Andrea Tantaros chimed in, saying: "I just wish liberals could leave little kids alone." Bolling wondered aloud why the Muppets couldn't, for once, "have the evil person be the Obama administration". It only remained for him to throw up his hands and cry: "Where are we? Communist China?"

Am I now brainwashed, or could it be that under this new rubric of idiocy, the whole thing suddenly makes perfect sense? After all, even a brief examination of the Muppet canon reveals a definite and longstanding liberal bias:

The Muppet Movie (1979). The Muppets head for liberal Hollywood, portrayed here as some kind of collectivist paradise, while a businessman, a Colonel Sanders-type fast food magnate, is once again the antagonist. The notion of slaughtering a pig (in this case, Miss Piggy) is treated as if it were equivalent to murder. Thank you, veggie-nazis.

The Great Muppet Caper (1981). The Muppets travel to London, home of socialised medicine. Features some squatting.

The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984). I didn't see this one, but it's clearly about the Muppets joining some sort of terrorist network, which may sound funny to certain leftwing intellectual freedom-haters, but I think it's just sick.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992). Based on a story by Charles Dickens, whose other work was known to demonise workhouses, prisons and the wealthy. On the plus-side, the film itself promotes private charity over state intervention, but the overall message is that poor people got that way through no fault of their own, and need rich people to bail them out.

Muppet Treasure Island (1996). Treats the entrepreneurial wherewithal of freelance treasure hunters as "piracy". Why, for once, can't the bad guy turn out to be an overzealous environmental regulator?

Muppets From Space (1999). This film posits an essentially godless universe where certain Muppets turn out to be space aliens and is, in its own way, as anti-Christian as any Harry Potter film.