Yet Another Reason Not to Send Taxpayer Money to PBS

After almost 20 years, PBS is reviving its fan-favorite Reading Rainbow kids educational show—this time, with a cast of woke hosts. 

If you were looking for another reason to justify the defunding of PBS, now you have one.  

Reading Rainbow, trademarked by the Western New York Public Broadcasting Association, first aired in 1983 to help kids continue reading through the summer to keep their minds sharp and avoid the “summer loss” phenomenon. The read-along show ran for 26 years until funding dried up in the 2000s.   

But on Monday, Reading Rainbow posted a short video announcing a new season—meeting with fanfare from entertainment outlets like Hollywood Reporter and People Magazine and racking up nearly 20,000 likes on X within the first 14 hours.  

The show announced a new host, Mychal Threets, one of PBS’s resident librarians and one of the most famous librarians on TikTok.  

Threets is also an outspoken warrior for keeping LGBTQ books in schools.  

“They [kids] want characters who are black, characters who are Asian, characters who are LGBTQI plus,” said Threets. “They want to see unhoused characters”—“unhoused” being woke speak for homeless. 

Last year, Threets embarked on a 10-state tour to put an end to the so-called “book burning” of conservative activists like Moms for Liberty, whose only sin was saving unsuspecting children from being sexualized in theclassroom.  

Threets also went to D.C. to petition Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., and Sen. Laphonza Butler, D-Calif., to keep these books on the shelves. 

“I’ve been able to just talk to library kids, talk to library grown-ups and remind them to be their best weird selves and it’s OK to not be OK,” he said.  

Whether or not he encouraged these librarians to be their “weird selves” around children is unclear.  

“When we challenge books or ban them,” Threets said, “we eliminate opportunities for people to find out about themselves and others because that’s all books are.” 

No one on the Right wants book burning. (Yet another example of the Left’s inauthentic color commentary.) The fight that Moms for Liberty championed centered around ensuring minors weren’t exposed to age-inappropriate sexual content and Marxist critical theory.  

The fight is to protect childhood innocence, something librarians should sympathize with. 

Threets, who has made a career out of surrounding himself with children, is known in large part for his mental health struggles. The Guardian reports that he undergoes “anxiety, depression, PTSD and panic disorder.”  

Reading Rainbow’s social media post also promises “new friends”—presumably guest hosts to read books to children—in the new season. Those hosts include 14-year-old Bellen Woodard, whose claim to fame is that she created the “first inclusive school supplies brand & ‘skin color’ crayons.” 

The video highlights her book about those inclusive crayons, called “More Than Peach” —clearly suggesting that race will be a focus of the new season. 

TIME Magazine profiled Woodard, from Leesburg, Virginia, naming her the “world’s first crayon activist.” She was motivated, TIME wrote, by the time a white elementary school classmate asked for a “skin color” crayon (presumably meaning the peach color), launching Bellen’s supposedly self-driven career of inclusion. 

Woodard’s crayons are permanently installed at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture and inhabit an exhibit at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. 

Woodard wrote a book published by Scholastic called “Ballet Brown,” in which the young black girl (presumably Woodard) buys tights and shoes to match her skin color, despite what was portrayed as a racist underpinning of traditional pink ballet attire.  

Her activism isn’t crayon-exclusive. She also authored a blog post titled, “Rest in Power George Floyd,” lamenting “trauma of systemic racism & injustice.” 

This isn’t the first time the hosts of Reading Rainbow have advocated for bringing politics and sexual topics into the classroom. LeVar Burton, the original host of the show, directly encouraged young children to read the kinds of books that Moms for Liberty and commonsense parents have been fighting against. 

“Read banned books!” Burton said on the Trevor Noah show.  

He encouraged kids to read a children’s book about gay penguins, denying that the content implied any sort of sexuality. 

The announcement of Reading Rainbow’s new season—slated to release on a YouTube channel owned by Sony Pictures Television—comes after President Donald Trump cut $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR—thus effectively defunding both. 

PBS can’t help but inject race and politics into content for elementary school kids and ruin a classic educational show. Just ask Sesame Street. 

The American people made it clear in November: We are sick and tired of financing woke propaganda, especially in schools. 

To Trump, for slashing PBS funds: bravo.  

The post Yet Another Reason Not to Send Taxpayer Money to PBS appeared first on The Daily Signal.