Mark is still focusing on getting up to full strength for next month's Mark Steyn Cruise, with its grand reunion of GB News sacked presenters. However, he did enjoy this week's Congressional appearance by the PBS and NPR chief executives. They looked like animatronic sisters from a factory that specialises in churning out parodic upper-middle-class woke blondes to head public bodies. But, if you had difficulty telling them apart, the NPR lady was marginally more disastrous:
Rep. Brandon Gill brings up all of Katherine Maher's old tweets claiming that "America is addicted to white supremacy" and supporting looting, reparations, and BLM.
This woman is the blonde version of Robin DiAngelo. pic.twitter.com/w5BRyMJlHd
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 26, 2025
Maybe it would be easier to list the seven Tweets she still stands by.
If you were really making an effort plausibly to pass yourself off as a "public broadcaster" representing the full range of the American people, you would never hire Katherine Maher or anyone like her. Mark has loathed PBS and NPR ever since he set foot in America, way back when, even before Charlie Rose began strolling among his interns naked: He has always believed they should command not a penny from the public purse, and be forced to rely entirely on their awful pledge-drives - as Mark used to say on Rush, sustaining membership includes the Charlie Rose PBS bathrobe (cord not included).
The last time public broadcasting surfaced as a political issue was in the first presidential debate of the 2012 election, when, to everyone's surprise, Obama's minders forgot to switch him on before the show, and an animated Romney never seen before or since decided to go for not only Big Bird but also the PBS moderator.
However, Mark's point about the "de-monsterisation" of childhood is an important one. PBS and "Sesame Street" successfully overthrew thousands of years of children's storytelling, and replaced it with what is now the central paradigm of the west's diversity-is-our-strength suicide cult: there are no real monsters out there, just misunderstood creatures we should give more cookies to.
So here is what Mark wrote the last time a Republican butched up sufficiently to assault "public broadcasting":
Apparently, Frank Sinatra served as Mitt Romney's debate coach. As he put it about halfway through "That's Life":
I'd jump right on a big bird and then I'd fly...
That's what Mitt did in Denver. Ten minutes in, he jumped right on Big Bird, and then he took off – and never looked back, while the other fellow, whose name escapes me, never got out of the gate. It takes a certain panache to clobber not just your opponent but also the moderator. Yet that's what the killer Mormon did when he declared that he wasn't going to borrow money from China to pay for Jim Lehrer and Big Bird on PBS. It was a terrific alpha-male moment, not just in that it rattled Lehrer, who seemed too preoccupied contemplating a future reading the hog prices on the WZZZ Farm Report to regain his grip on the usual absurd format, but in the sense that it indicated a man entirely at ease with himself – in contrast to wossname, the listless sourpuss staring at his shoes.
Yet, amidst the otherwise total wreckage of their guy's performance, the Democrats seemed to think that Mitt's assault on "Sesame Street" was a misstep from whose tattered and ruined puppet-stuffing some hay is to be made. "WOW!!! No PBS!!! WTF how about cutting congress's stuff leave big bird alone," tweeted Whoopi Goldberg.
Even the president mocked Romney for "finally getting tough on Big Bird" – not in the debate, of course, where such dazzling twinkle-toed repartee might have helped, but a mere twenty-four hours later, once the rapid-response team had directed his speechwriters to craft a line, fly it out to a campaign rally and load it into the prompter, where he managed to deliver it without mishap.
Unlike Mitt, I loathe "Sesame Street". It bears primary responsibility for what the Canadian blogger Binky calls the de-monsterization of childhood – the idea that there are no evil monsters out there at the edges of the map, just shaggy creatures who look a little funny and can sometimes be a bit grouchy about it because people prejudge them until they learn to celebrate diversity and help Cranky the Friendly Monster go recycling. That is not unrelated to the infantilization of our society.
Marinate three generations of Americans in that pabulum, and it's no surprise you wind up with unprotected diplomats dragged to their deaths from their "safe house" in Benghazi. Or as J Scott Gration, the president's Special Envoy to Sudan, said in 2009, in the most explicit Sesamization of American foreign policy: "We've got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries – they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes." The butchers of Darfur aren't blood-drenched machete-wielding genocidal killers but just Cookie Monsters whom we haven't given enough cookies. I'm not saying there's a direct line between Bert & Ernie and Barack & Hillary ... well, actually, I am.
Okay, I may be taking this further than Mitt intended. So let's go back to his central thrust. The Corporation of Public Broadcasting receives nearly half-a-billion dollars a year from taxpayers, which it disburses to PBS stations, who, in turn, disburse it to Big Bird and Jim Lehrer. I don't know what Big Bird gets, but, according to Senator Jim DeMint, the President of Sesame Workshop, Gary Knell, received in 2008 a salary of $956,513. In that sense, Big Bird and Senator Harry Reid embody the same mystifying phenomenon: they've been in "public service" their entire lives and have somehow wound up as multimillionaires.
Mitt's decision to strap Big Bird to the roof of his station wagon and drive him to Canada has prompted two counter-arguments from Democrats:
1) half-a-billion dollars is a mere rounding error in the great sucking maw of the federal budget, so why bother?
2) everybody loves "Sesame Street", so Mitt is making a catastrophic strategic error.
On the latter point, whether or not everybody loves "Sesame Street", everybody has seen it, and every American under fifty has been weaned on it. So far this century it's sold nigh on a billion bucks' worth of merchandising sales (that's popular toys such as the Subsidize-Me-Elmo doll). If "Sesame Street" is not commercially viable, then nothing is, and we should just cut to the chase and bail out everything.
Conversely, if this supposed "public" broadcasting brand is capable of standing on its own, then so should it. As for the rest of PBS's output – the eternal replays of the Peter, Paul & Mary reunion concert, twee Brit sitcoms, Lawrence Welk reruns and therapeutic infomercials – whatever their charms, it is difficult to see why the Brokest Nation in History should be borrowing money from the Chinese Politburo to pay for it. A system by which a Communist Party official in Peking enriches British comedy producers by charging it to American taxpayers with interest is not the most obvious economic model. Yet, as Obama would say, the government did build that.
(Full disclosure: Some years ago, I hosted a lavish BBC special, and, at the meeting intended to sell it to PBS, the executive from "Great Performances" said he could only sign off on the deal if I were digitally edited out and replaced by Angela Lansbury. Murder, he shrieked. Lest I sound bitter, I should say I am in favor of this as a more general operating principle for public broadcasting: for example, "A Prairie Home Companion" could be greatly improved by having Garrison Keillor digitally replaced by Paul Ryan.)
The small things are not unimportant – and not just because, when "small" is defined as anything under eleven figures, "small" is a big part of the problem. If Americans can't muster the will to make Big Bird leave the government nest, they certainly will never reform Medicare. Just before the debate in Denver, in the general backstage melée, a TV commentator pointed out the presence of Valerie Jarrett, who is officially "Assistant to the President for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs," a vital position which certainly stimulates the luxury-length desktop nameplate industry. Not one in a million Americans knows what she looks like, but she declines to take the risk of passing among the rude peasantry without the protection of a Secret Service detail. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a government jet to fly him home from Washington every weekend.
The Queen of the Netherlands flies commercial, so does the Queen of Denmark. Prince William and his lovely bride, whom at least as many members of the public want to get a piece of as of Valerie Jarrett or Leon Panetta, flew to Los Angeles on a Royal Canadian Air Force boneshaker. It is profoundly unrepublican when minor public officials assume that private planes and entourages to hold the masses at bay are a standard perk of office. And it is even more disturbing that tens of millions of Americans are accepting of this. The entitlements are complicated, and will take some years and much negotiation. But, in a Romney administration, rolling back the nickel'n'dime stuff – ie, the million'n'billion stuff – should start on Day One.
Mitt made much of his bipartisan credentials in Denver. So, in that reach-across-the-aisle spirit, if we cannot abolish entirely frivolous spending, might we not at least attempt some economies of scale? Could Elmo, Grover, Oscar and Cookie Monster not be redeployed as Intergovernmental Engagement Assistant Jarrett's security detail? Could Leon Panetta not fly home on Big Bird every weekend?
And for the next debate, instead of a candidate slumped at the lectern like a muppet whose puppeteer has gone out for a smoke, maybe Elmo's guy could shove his arm up the back of the presidential suit.
~from Steyn's syndicated column, October 3rd 2012
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