Dear Friend,
Growing up before satellite and streaming services reached the rolling hills of rural Iowa, watching PBS was The Thing to do after school. Unless I had piano lessons, and then The Thing was humming along to NPR’s “All Things Considered” theme: doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo.
That’s part of why last week’s vote to rescind $1.1 billion in previously approved federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting felt personal. But it’s a decision that will, in the end, hurt all Americans — especially rural communities that still rely on public media for emergency alerts, local news coverage, and educational programming.
When Congress created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967, they declared noncommercial TV and radio in the public interest “for instructional, education, and cultural purposes.” Two years later, when Mr. Fred Rogers defended that vision and the federal funds that help make it possible, he told senators about one of the songs from his beloved show: “It’s great to be able to stop when you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong and be able to do something else instead.”
The people in D.C. today aren’t stopping — not with public media, not with private media, not with their attacks on the very principle of a free press. Because this is not only about chilling speech, quashing diverse viewpoints, or limiting expression. It’s about replacing free and critical thought with a singular, rigid White Christian Nationalist worldview.
If we permit this assault to reach its intended conclusion, it isn’t just that America’s youth will be denied access to accurate information or programming that pushes the “radical” idea that treating each other with decency and compassion is good. Creating a void in media was never the point; it’s to control the media, by filling the void with vacuous AI slop and Christian Nationalist content from propaganda outlets like PragerU.
In 2022, PragerU made its mission clear: to “[arm] parents and educators with the pro-America content they are craving” and go “toe-to-toe with massive youth media companies like PBS kids and Disney.” Earlier this month, Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters announced plans to implement an ideology test from PragerU to screen prospective teachers from certain states to ensure they share his “America First” beliefs.
Meanwhile, the White House is working with PragerU, which calls itself “the world’s leading conservative nonprofit that is focused on changing minds…” on an educational exhibit that features an AI-generated version of John Adams reciting the right-wing saying, “facts do not care about your feelings.”
This is far from the first instance of this administration — and the president himself — embracing AI to push its own radical, ideological messages. Trump has shared AI images of himself as the Pope and, just this week, of President Obama being arrested for treason in the Oval Office.
In recent months, reports from the Make America Healthy Again Commission and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have presented as fact AI hallucinations, including fictitious or otherwise inaccurate citations. Last week, we learned the Department of Defense signed a $200 million contract to begin using Elon Musk’s xAI, only days after its chatbot, Grok, started spewing antisemitic posts and referring to itself as “MechaHitler.”
And on Wednesday, President Trump signed an executive order imposing an ideological litmus test on AI companies seeking federal contracts, banning so-called “woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models.” According to the White House, that includes references to diversity, climate change, and regulatory oversight.
This order is just the latest example of the Trump Administration — and the broader Christian Nationalist movement — treating information that contradicts their conspiracy theories as proof of bias. You’ll notice Christian Nationalism is not considered an “ideological agenda,” but every other perspective is. Even basic facts backed by scientific data or the historical record are “woke.” (Did you see greenhouse gases are good again?)
Unfortunately, these attacks on the press, on media, and on reality itself are only escalating. And the attackers have shown they will utilize every tool, institution, and lever of power to stifle dissent, punish critics, and dismantle civic institutions.
We must keep pushing back to defend real expertise, real journalism, and real facts. And we must remain vigilant against authoritarian efforts to weaponize emerging technologies to entrench propaganda, rewrite history, and control the future.
In solidarity,
Melina Cohen
Director of Strategic Communications & Policy Engagement
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