Somewhere between declaring war on gas stoves and trying to deport American children born in Duluth, the President has found time to wage battle against the most dangerous enemy of all: Sesame Street.
Yes sir, the White House has set its sights on public broadcasting—again. This time with a vengeance. Never mind the inflation, the tariffs, the global shipping slowdowns, or the Red Sea slowly turning into a no-go zone. What this country really needs is to silence Elmo.
The proposal? Pull the plug on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—the money behind PBS, NPR, and that sleepy classical station your grandpa listens to while mowing the lawn. The annual budget for CPB is just over $500 million, which, in federal government terms, is about the cost of a single weapons system we’ll mothball before the paint dries.
But don’t let that number fool you. This isn’t about saving money. This is about sending a message. And that message is:
“We’d rather fund bombs than books, and by God, we’ll burn down Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood if it gets us one more Fox News segment.”
The Real Cost of “Saving” Half a Billion
Let’s get the numbers straight. Cutting public broadcasting won’t shrink the deficit. It won’t balance a budget. It won’t even buy a year’s worth of paper towels for the Pentagon. But it will silence rural radio stations, kill off children’s programming, and gut local news in communities where the only other options are Facebook conspiracy threads and drive-time AM radio hosts screaming about fluoride.
NPR and PBS aren’t just “liberal media darlings”—they’re the last remaining lifeline for actual facts in some parts of this country. You may not agree with every story they run, but at least they know the difference between a fact and a Facebook meme shared by your cousin, Gomer.
Sesame Street: The Front Line of the Culture War
When they say “defund,” what they really mean is “discredit.”
Because nothing drives the book-banning, flag-waving, performative patriot crowd crazier than a four-year-old learning the alphabet from a muppet named Rosita who speaks Spanish. Or a science program that tells kids the Earth might be getting warmer and it’s not because God’s mad.
This is the same crowd that says “woke” like it’s a four-letter word, thinks drag queens are a bigger threat to America than fentanyl, and now wants to make sure Curious George never gets federal support again.
The Politics of Pettiness
Let’s stop pretending this is about fiscal responsibility. This is about ideological housecleaning—sweeping away anything that challenges the party line, even if it’s a cartoon owl explaining civics to 5th graders.
This is the same old script: gin up outrage, go after the easy target, and hope the base is too distracted to notice the tax breaks for billionaires and the Defense budget ballooning like it’s on growth hormones.
Meanwhile, NPR keeps asking uncomfortable questions, and PBS keeps airing documentaries that don’t end with “America is always right, and the other guys are terrorists.”
And that, friends, is the real sin.
Final Thought
If we’re honest, this isn’t about Big Bird. It’s about big egos.
It’s about a political machine that thinks public media makes people too informed, too compassionate, and too unwilling to goose-step to a canned narrative.
So they’ll take the axe to Big Bird—not because they hate puppets, but because they fear the truth.
And for half a billion bucks? That’s one hell of a price to pay to win a culture war.