Taking Down Big Bird

A major victory in the “War on Woke."

Jul 18, 2025

Doing in Big Bird, Elmo, the Cookie Monster, and Bert & Ernie.

Shortly after midnight, House Republicans voted to eliminate all federal funding for PBS and NPR over the next two fiscal years by eliminating $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

President Trump quickly praised it as a great achievement.

The most famous PBS show, Sesame Street, is a global phenomenon that has been a part of our lives for 55 years. It’s broadcast in 70 languages, viewed in more than 150 countries, and is watched by 190 million children worldwide.

Conservatives have long railed against shows like Sesame Street for what they see as “political bias.” You know, the “woke” thing, the same reason for their outrage over the new Superman movie, and their motive for going after Disneyland.

They don’t seem concerned that Sesame Street and other PBS productions help our children develop essential cognitive, social, and emotional skills that contribute to their overall development and preparedness for school.

Remember, these are the same folks who’ve been screaming for years about the perils of diversity, equity, and inclusion… preferring, perhaps, uniformity, inequity, and exclusion.

They hated it when characters on shows like Sesame Street model positive social behaviors, such as sharing, cooperation, and empathy.

They went utterly bat-guano crazy when Big Bird got a COVID vaccination in late 2021, followed by Elmo a few months later. (It wasn’t Big Bird’s first transgression. He received the measles vaccine in 1972.)

Then there’s the all-white members of Mississippi’s State Commission for Educational Television who banned Sesame Street shortly after its debut in 1970 for committing the unspeakable sin of showing little black and white kids playing together.

Please pause for a second and let that sink in. They banned it for showing little black and white kids playing together.

The ban was overturned 22 days later following a statewide public outcry.

Let’s fund masked ICE agents and internment camps instead

Meanwhile, ICE, the main agency responsible for arresting and deporting people within the U.S., is set to get $76.5 billion, nearly 10 times its annual budget.

Much of that money is for detention camps.

ICE will grow from 20,000 employees to about 30,000, and is reportedly offering signing bonuses to new recruits.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said she had the Jeffrey Epstein client list on her desk and then claimed it doesn’t exist, visited Alcatraz yesterday and exclaimed, “This is a terrific facility. Alcatraz could hold the worst of the worst. It could hold illegal aliens. It could hold anything.”