Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) accused NPR and PBS of turning kids transgender ahead of a subcommittee hearing she is chairing where she will accuse the broadcasters of being “anti-American.”

PBS and NPR receive part of their budgets from the federal government – the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which runs both PBS and NPR, receives about $500 million in federal funding each year, or about $1.60 from each American, on average. The stations have been the targets of rightwing ire about excessive government spending for decades, despite the tiny impact they have on the federal budget.

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Now that Republicans have a federal trifecta, though, it looks like they’re trying to end even the small amount of funding that public broadcasting gets. And to justify the funding cuts, Greene is accusing them of “transing children.”

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“I’m looking forward to holding the hearing tomorrow at 10 a.m. where we will be shining an intense spotlight on how Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars have been used by PBS and NPR, and the type of public broadcasting programs and radio shows they have been pushing across the country for decades,” she said on NewsMax yesterday.

“It has leaned further and further left, so much so that they now have Drag Queen Story Time instead of good old Sesame Street,” she continued. It’s unclear what she is referring to. PBS Newshour aired a segment that discussed Drag Queen Story Hour in 2019, but PBS doesn’t regularly air drag queen programming. Meanwhile, Sesame Street is still on the air.

“They are now part of transing children, brainwashing children about gender, which proved to be one of the most important issues in the 2024 presidential election. That was a big loser for Democrats.”

According to the announcement of the subcommittee hearing, PBS and NPR’s CEOs will have to “explain why the demonstrably biased news coverage they produce for an increasingly narrow and elitist audience should continue to be funded by the broad taxpaying public.”

“These partisan, so-called ‘media’ stations dropped the ball on Hunter Biden’s laptop, downplayed COVID-19 origins, and failed to properly report the Russian collusion hoax,” she said, citing rightwing conspiracy theories. “Now, it is time for their CEOs to publicly explain this biased coverage.”

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