“Retard strength.” That’s how Steven Crowder responded to the news that toy giant Mattel has released a Barbie doll with Down syndrome.

“This doll is breaking barriers,” said Barbie Senior Vice President and Head of Design Kim Culmone, to which Crowder responded, “Yeah, with retard strength,” before laughing at a woman with Down syndrome happily posing with the new Barbie.

Not only is this rage click-seeking shock jock response callous, ignorant, and entirely unnecessary, but there’s a deeper layer here that must be acknowledged if conservatives are to have any meaningful hope for winning the culture war they claim to care so much about.

The release of a Barbie with Down syndrome is a win for a conservative culture.

Why? Because it actively humanizes a group of human beings who are currently the target of a resurgent eugenics movement within the pro-abortion camp, which would prefer to abort every supposedly unwanted person with Down syndrome before birth.

With its new Barbie, Mattel is essentially debunking the horrific view that people with Down syndrome are not valid humans who deserve the right to life. Broadening the options for children in the doll market is hardly a nefarious consequence of mindless diversity and inclusion initiatives, especially when they add humanity to an otherwise ignored group of people.

In other words, Mattel released a pro-life Barbie doll, and conservatives should be celebrating this move, not chortling like moronic teenage boys about “retard strength.”

Ultimately, Crowder’s response is a symptom of two fundamental problems within the conservative movement.

The first problem is a careless rush to judgment regarding the actions of every single corporation, viewing their decisions through a relentless lens of anti-wokeness.

Another example of this is the recent claim that corporations are attempting to erase motherhood by giving customers the ability to opt out of Mother’s Day emails. If you pump the brakes and allow yourself to actually think for a moment, it’s fairly easy to separate the woke from the nonwoke (or even anti-woke). Rather than this being a conspiratorial Big Corp attempt to undermine biology, could this be an empathetic acknowledgment of the fact that Mother’s Day is emotionally painful for those who, for example, recently lost their mother?

The second problem is an almost parasitic desire to recycle the words and actions of others to squeeze as many clicks out of the news cycle as possible, with no regard for the damage done to our supposedly shared political and cultural objectives.

For many commentators, the calculus is simple: A person or a company does something that could be painted as woke, and so commentators must react. If they do not react, then they miss an opportunity, and negative reactions are far easier and far more effective — as long as short-term attention is the only goal.

Steven Crowder claims to be pro-life, having argued against abortion on multiple occasions. But if he is truly pro-life, why would he dismiss those elevated by Barbie as “retards,” thereby embracing the pro-abortion movement’s view that people with Down syndrome are not equal?

Ian Haworth ( @ighaworth ) is the host of Off Limits with Ian Haworth .