By The Ghost of HST
May 2, 2025
This morning, Donald Trump signed an executive order that effectively defunds PBS and NPR. Big Bird’s out of a job, Mister Rogers is spinning in his grave, and somewhere, a golden retriever puppy just got punted across a trailer park.
Thankfully, the real-world damage will be smaller than the headline suggests — NPR receives less than 1% of its funding from the federal government, and PBS stations get roughly 15%, mostly routed through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But like most things in the Trump ecosystem, this was never about money. This was about dominance. About pain. About performance. A boot to the ribs of anything pure.
This wasn’t just a budget cut. It was a Muppet massacre. The life’s work of Jim Henson — a psychedelic hippie puppeteer who believed empathy could be televised — just got turned into political roadkill by a man who thinks compassion is for suckers and cruelty is the only thing worth broadcasting.
“It’s not easy being green,” Kermit once said. Today, it’s not easy being brown. Miss Piggy has gone off-grid — and didn’t tell Kermie where she was going. Fozzie’s in witness protection. Grover’s building pipe bombs in a fallout shelter beneath what used to be PBS Boise. Animal was last seen screaming “DEFUND THIS!” and flipping off a convoy of MAGA trucks barreling toward downtown Manhattan. Bert and Ernie are applying for asylum in Canada.
And Elmo? No word yet, but he refilled his Xanax prescription and the crew is quietly fearing a relapse. If he asks you to “shoot him up”—don’t. He’s not kidding this time. 📹
Statler and Waldorf have barricaded themselves inside the ruins of Hooper’s Store, holding down Sesame Street with a scoped rifle and a working ham radio. They’re preparing for a siege and successfully radicalizing Snuffleupagus, who now goes by “Comrade Snuff” and reads Marxist theory to abandoned Muppets in the rubble.
Last we heard, Cookie Monster was amassing troops like a purple warlord and eyeing Target — not the metaphor, the actual store.
And while the Muppets prepare for insurgency, public media remains one of the last American institutions not owned by a hedge fund, a pharma cartel, or a Silicon Valley vampire with a midlife messiah complex. (We’re looking at you, Bryan Johnson.) It teaches toddlers to spell, dares to air documentaries about wars we started — like Frontline’s “Bush’s War” or Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” — and occasionally reminds listeners that facts still exist. Facts like climate change is real, Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and COVID wasn’t a hoax.
They hate NPR because it sounds calm and relies on facts — and calm is the enemy of the rage machine. And the facts… well, where do you think the rage came from?
They’ll cancel Big Bird if it makes the libs cry. They’ll deprive their own kids of Sesame Street just to win the comment section. There’s no ideology here — it’s a bloodsport built on spite. But what exactly are they winning? Who walks away from this with more than a headline and a half-chub?
Maybe they don’t care. Maybe this is the whole game now — jam a screwdriver into the last working gear and scream “FREEDOM” while the machine breaks.
And still, public media limps forward. Not because of politicians, but because ordinary people fund it. People with tote bags and radios and aching heads. People who believe that a nation deserves at least one institution not run by ad revenue and spyware.
But how long can that last? What other cherished, functional, beautiful things are we supposed to watch get gutted for a cheap laugh?
Will they come for the libraries next — too quiet, too public, too full of books that say the Earth is old and slavery was real?
Or the national parks — those liberal forests where the water and mineral rights haven’t yet been sold to the highest bidder?
Or the Postal Service — the original government program that delivers ballots and birthday cards without asking for a tip?
Or the interstate highway system, those socialist ribbons of concrete Eisenhower laid down so a country could feel connected — at least on a map? Is that a states’ rights issue now? We’re already hearing about truckers in Alabama being forced to prove English literacy. Seriously.
We’re not saying it’s a pattern. We’re just asking questions.
(See yesterday’s piece on Joe Rogan for the full playbook: The Rise and Fall of Joe ‘I’m Just Asking Questions’ Rogan.)
Anything public is suspect now. Anything shared is dangerous. Anything free must be a trap.
So what’s the plan here, really?
Is it smaller government — or just government that only serves the branded, the weaponized, and the blind?
Does everything else just get the boot? Or a fat budget cut?
Are we supposed to believe this is about freedom? Or is it about fear, distraction, and making sure rage always drowns out decency?
And in the near future, is the only thing left on the air going to be static, fear, and Friends reruns?
We’re not drawing conclusions. We’re not saying it’s coordinated.
Again, we’re just asking questions.
Filed from the ruins of Sesame Street, where Cookie Monster now rules the night and the only thing left in the mailbox is a subpoena. Merry Christmas in May, you savages.
