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'#Notinvited': CPAC Declares Muppets Won't Be Welcome At Next Year's Conference

'#Notinvited': CPAC Declares Muppets Won't Be Welcome At Next Year's Conference

Reprinted with permission from DailyKos

Republicans have expanded their list of people to hate on to include muppets. Last Thursday, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) posted not one but two tweets that barred Elmo, Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie from attending their conference. That's right: CPAC took to Twitter to remind fictional characters they were not invited to a conference they have never been invited to before.

While they are wacky enough not to need a reason to randomly tweet at puppets, these conservatives were allegedly triggered by a tweet shared by Big Bird's Twitter account encouraging children to be vaccinated.

"I got the COVID-19 vaccine today!" Big Bird's tweet read. "My wing is feeling a little sore, but it'll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy."

Following the tweet, Sen. Ted Cruz amongst other right-wing minions took to accusing Sesame Street of pushing "government propaganda," but of course CPAC had to take it further: They decided not only to shame and ban Big Bird, but come after the whole crew.

I doubt that the Muppets ever had plans to come to the conference in Orlando, but the fact that CPAC even thought to tweet it is hilarious. One tweet even featured the hashtag #notinvited. We get it, you don't want Muppets at your conference, CPAC.

Not to mention they even made flyers with images of the Muppets to enforce the ban. They must really have a lot of time on their hands.


But Big Bird advocating getting vaccinated is not the only issue CPAC has with the Muppets. After PBS announced that its newest cast member to join Sesame Street was Asian, CPAC organizer Matt Schlapp shared his disapproval.

"What race is Ernie is Bert," Schlapp tweeted. "You are insane PBS and we should stop funding you."


But a tweet wasn't all Schlapp did to complain about the show's newest Muppet. He was so concerned that he had to go on Fox and Friends First.

"I grew up watching, and it wasn't ever about race. It was about learning lessons and learning to read and learning tolerance," Schlapp said. "And they want to inject race."

He also dove into the topic of gender.

"And by the way, this whole question about gender into everything, one of the Muppet characters had a son, and the son wanted to be a daughter, and they just won't stop with their push for woke politics," Schlapp said.

When asked by NBC News about his stance and why he wanted to defund PBS due to Sesame Street, Schlapp stood his ground and even took some stabs at National Public Radio (NPR), a publicly funded nonprofit media outlet, accusing the organization of wanting to "be in arms in the socialist movement."

"Sesame Street needs to go back to the time when a show was devoted to a letter in the alphabet, and not the latest woke fad," he told NBC News. "We all loved Bert and Ernie without the foggiest idea of the racial demographic they may have represented. Afterall, Ernie is orange. The taxpayers deserve a big rebate. If PBS and NPR want to be in arms in the socialist movement, they need to pay their own way."

While PBS receives some public funding, it is also significantly funded through private donations and grants.

The conservative hate isn't new to PBS, though. According to The New York Times, since its earliest days, PBS has been accused of liberal bias by conservatives including President Richard Nixon, who criticized the public broadcasting channel during his presidency.

Sesame Street has been making headlines for years, not only with its advocacy of increasing participation in the census, but the promotion of conversations regarding health, inclusion, and race.

The Muppet has been praised for letting Asian American children see a character like themselves on screen, but Schlapp slammed PBS.

Of course, like any other time a conservative takes their stupidity to Twitter, Twitter users had something to say about CPAC's outrageous tweets. Most of the retweets the organization had were from those mocking them.

Honestly, good for the Muppets. Who wants to attend CPAC anyway? At least we got some laughs from these tweets.

Fox News Pushes To Defund PBS After 'Sesame Street' Adds Asian American Puppet

Fox News Pushes To Defund PBS After 'Sesame Street' Adds Asian American Puppet

Fox News is promoting a conservative campaign to defund the Public Broadcasting Service for "bringing race into" its programming and encouraging viewers to get vaccinated. At the center of conservatives' latest culture war is Sesame Street, the iconic children's television show.

In a Thursday Fox & Friends First appearance, American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp called to defund PBS over the network's attempts to make its programming more inclusive of race and gender identity. Schlapp specifically attacked the producers of Sesame Street for recently adding an Asian American puppet to its regular cast of characters.

"They're trying to bring race into Ernie and Bert," Schlapp said, referring to two male puppets who live together on the fictional Sesame Street.

On Monday, Sesame Workshop announced that it would introduce the character Ji-Young — the first Asian American puppet in Sesame Street history — as part of an upcoming special titled See Us Coming Together. The show's producers told the Associated Press that the new character is part of an effort to teach children how to be a good "upstander."

"Being an upstander means you point out things that are wrong or something that someone does or says that is based on their negative attitude towards the person because of the color of their skin or the language they speak or where they're from," Wilson Stallings, executive vice-president of Creative and Production for Sesame Workshop, told the news outlet.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States has seen a wave of hate crimes against Asian Americans. Bystanders have often played witness to such attacks without stepping in to stop them, leading some advocacy groups to organize bystander intervention training sessions. Former President Donald Trump, for his part, has fanned the flames of racist violence by repeatedly using the term "China flu" to refer to the virus.


New Public TV Star Pat Buchanan Crusaded To Defund PBS

New Public TV Star Pat Buchanan Crusaded To Defund PBS

Pat Buchanan, a white supremacist and anti-LGBTQ bigot, will soon co-star in public television’s relaunch of The McLaughlin Group. Buchanan has spent decades calling for the defunding of public broadcasting. He even made it an issue in his 1992 presidential campaign by attacking PBS for having “glorified homosexuality” because it aired a documentary about gay Black men.

PBS member station Maryland Public Television (MPT) recently announced that it “will market, promote, and distribute the program nationally through an agreement with American Public Television, a leading syndicator of programming for U.S. public television stations. The McLaughlin Group will begin airing exclusively on public television stations nationwide and digital platforms in January 2020.” The program, which was briefly relaunched last year on Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s D.C. station, also featured Buchanan as a panelist in its prior iterations.

Media Matters criticized MPT for giving a platform to Buchanan given his toxic history. Buchanan, for instance, has complained that the United States is “committing suicide” because “Asian, African, and Latin American children” are replacing whites; said that undocumented immigrants are conducting a “third world invasion” of the country; defended Adolf Hitler as “an individual of great courage” who didn’t want to go to war; and argued that homosexuality should be “contained, segregated, controlled, and stigmatized.”

Baltimore Sun TV/media critic David Zurawik rebuked MPT for Buchanan’s inclusion, writing: “I cannot help thinking: Just what America needs right now, another platform for an incendiary voice from the right who predates Donald Trump on some of the president’s most controversial views. And he’s brought to you by public television.” Esquire writer Charles Pierce also criticized the station for bringing back Buchanan at a time when white supremacy is “literally getting people killed.”

A spokesperson for the station gave the following statement to Media Matters in response to questions about Buchanan’s history: “Public media provides a big tent for the expression of many points of view. The McLaughlin Group has been a long-time staple on public TV. It’s a program series viewers appreciate for its wide range of views and perspectives, as well as the lively debate on issues that takes place among its panelists.” McLaughlin Group host and conservative writer Tom Rogan, meanwhile, attacked Media Matters as “being insane as usual.”

Buchanan has been one of the most vocal critics of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the federal government-funded nonprofit which provides support for public broadcasting. Buchanan himself has frequently appeared on public broadcasting, including on the original McLaughlin Group, which aired on many PBS stations. (Like with the upcoming relaunch, PBS did not produce the original McLaughlin Group.)

When Buchanan unsuccessfully ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992, he aired a bigoted campaign ad attacking public broadcasting because it aired a pro-gay documentary.

In 1989, Black documentarian and gay rights activist Marlon T. Riggs released the film Tongues Untied. The American Film Institute wrote this year that the film “broke new ground by mixing poetry, music, performance and Riggs’ autobiographical revelations. Giving voice to communities of black gay men as they confront racism, homophobia, and marginalization, the film was embraced by black gay audiences for its authentic representation of style and culture, as well its fierce response to oppression.”

Buchanan, however, demonized the film and its inclusion on public television. As The Associated Press noted at the time, he produced a campaign ad featuring “scenes of undressed gay black men from a Public Broadcasting System documentary ‘Tongues Untied’ that was partially subsidized by the National Endowment of the Arts.” A narrator stated: “In the last three years the Bush administration has invested our tax dollars in pornographic and blasphemous art too shocking to show. This so-called art has glorified homosexuality, exploited children and perverted the image of Jesus Christ.” Buchanan’s 1992 campaign specifically opposed federal funding for the arts. In an April 9, 1992, CNN interview (via Nexis) about the ad, campaign chair Bay Buchanan said of arts funding: “It shouldn’t be federal government level at all. … This is something that should be supported by the private sector and if it doesn’t hold up, it means the community doesn’t want it.”

PBS stated at the time of Buchanan’s ad: “It’s unfortunate that the ad presents images out of context. It’s ironic that the film addresses the issue of tolerance.”

Riggs responded to Buchanan in a March 6, 1992, New York Times op-ed, which began: “Patrick Buchanan’s most controversial campaign ad has given politics a new cast of characters to demonize, then scapegoat. The specter of Willie Horton has returned, but this time, at least in Mr. Buchanan’s distorted view, he is a leather-clad bare-chested, sadomasochistic homosexual dancing shamelessly in the street.” Riggs died in 1994 at the age of 37 from AIDS complications.

Buchanan also fought against public broadcasting while working in politics as an aide to President Richard Nixon. He wrote in his 2017 book Nixon’s White House Wars that “taxpayer TV was becoming an upholstered playpen for liberal broadcasters” and that he had unsuccessfully “urged Nixon to terminate all federal funding. After he left office, he told me he should have done so, leaving those who cherish what public broadcasting has on offer to pay for it themselves.”

He has repeated those calls to defund public television as a commentator. (Media Matters has campaigned against efforts to defund public broadcasting in the past.)

During a February 15, 2005, edition of MSNBC’s Scarborough Country (via Nexis), while discussing controversy over a PBS cartoon featuring lesbian parents, Buchanan said: “All government funding ought to be phased out. Then PBS, like us, Joe, ought to be allowed to do what it wants to do, put on the programs it wants, as long as we the taxpayers are not paying for it. And I think that’s the solution to PBS.” In an October 2010 syndicated column, Buchanan urged congressional Republicans to defund PBS and NPR (which have purportedly shown “consistently leftist bias”), saying that if they don’t, “the tea party folks should start recruiting candidates to run against GOP incumbents in 2012.”

‘Sesame Street’ Joins HBO, In Sign Of Children’s Shows’ Value

‘Sesame Street’ Joins HBO, In Sign Of Children’s Shows’ Value

By Ryan Faughnder, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Tyrion Lannister, meet Big Bird.

HBO, the network behind decidedly not-kid-friendly shows such as “Game of Thrones” and “True Detective,” says it will now air Sesame Street.

Time Warner Inc.-owned HBO on Thursday announced a deal with the nonprofit Sesame Workshop to make the next five seasons of the long-running educational program available on its cable channels and streaming services.

New episodes will continue to air on PBS, the series’ home of 45 years, nine months after they debut on HBO.

The Sesame-HBO deal comes as digital rivals including Netflix, Amazon and Hulu have been ramping up investment in children’s programming to go after crucial young viewers.

Hulu last year expanded its distribution deal with Nickelodeon owner Viacom Inc., adding shows including The Ren & Stimpy Show and Hey Arnold!

Netflix this year has added seasons of classic educational shows such as “Bill Nye the Science Guy” and “Reading Rainbow.” The streamer teamed up with DreamWorks Animation in 2013 to make original kids’ shows.

Not to be outdone, Amazon is looking to beef up its own crop of children’s programming. Its Amazon Studios arm ordered six new young-skewing pilots in May.

Financial details were not disclosed, but the new funding from HBO will let Sesame Workshop greatly increase its output. Sesame Street will go from 18 episodes a year to 35, and the nonprofit will produce a new spinoff series for HBO. An additional educational series will also be developed, the companies said.

The deal comes as a welcome relief for Sesame Workshop, which has come under financial pressure from declining DVD sales. The organization has historically funded its operations from product licensing revenue, which has been relatively stable, and its struggling DVD business.

The organization has previously received about 10 percent of its Sesame Street production financing from PBS, which will no longer have to put up that money.

“Over the past decade, both the way in which children are consuming video and the economics of the children’s television production business have changed dramatically,” said Sesame Street co-founder Joan Ganz Cooney, in a statement. “In order to fund our nonprofit mission with a sustainable business model, Sesame Workshop must recognize these changes and adapt to the times.”

HBO is also getting the rights to 150 old “Sesame Street” episodes that will be pulled from rival streaming services. Those episodes will continue to exist on PBS’ kids app and air as reruns on member stations.

Photo: “Sesame Street” characters Abby Cadabby, Grover, Elmo, Cookie Monster, and Bird Bird, via Facebook.