Independent: Sesame Street's Pinko Puppets Brainwash Our Kids

The U.K. Independent publishes this must-read piece on Ben Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, which is out Tuesday. Watch this space for more on this important book:

That’s the claim by a right-wing author who says he’s exposed a left-wing plot behind some top TV shows

The TV series Friends undermined family values; Sesame Street taught ethnic minorities about civil disobedience; Happy Days had a subtle anti-Vietnam subtext; and the 1980s cop show MacGyver tried to persuade pistol-packing Americans that guns are bad. That, at least, is the considered opinion of Ben Shapiro, an investigative author and right-wing columnist who will publish a detailed exposé tomorrow telling how Hollywood producers, writers and actors have been secretly using TV to promote what he calls a “radical” left-leaning political agenda.

Shapiro’s book, Primetime Propaganda runs to 416 pages and revolves around comments by 70-odd industry heavyweights who he approached for interviews. The book promises to “profile the biggest names in showbusiness over the past 50 years” and includes a series of “gotcha” moments, in which the architects of the best-watched TV shows of modern times tell how they tried to use the medium of broadcasting to, as Shapiro puts it, “shape America in their own leftist image”.

“I was shocked by the openness of the Hollywood crowd when it came to admitting anti-conservative discrimination inside the industry,” Shapiro told The Independent on Sunday. “They weren’t ashamed of it. In fact, some were actually proud of it.”

The book’s contents will only add weight to allegations – often aired by conservative Americans – that Hollywood is the exclusive domain of leftie propagandists. Earlier this year, Republicans called for funding cuts to the public broadcaster NPR after one of its executives was secretly taped calling supporters of the Tea Party “racist”.

Among Shapiro’s most revelatory interviewees is Marta Kauffman, the co-creator of Friends, who recalls how she hired a “bunch of liberals” to run the programme to “put out there what we believe”. In 1999, she admitted casting the actress sister of Newt Gingrich, the prominent Republican, to play a preacher at a lesbian wedding because she wanted to annoy conservatives.

“When we did the lesbian wedding, we knew there was going to be some flack,” said Kauffman. “I have to say, when we cast Candice Gingrich as the minister of that wedding, there was a bit of a ‘fuck you’ in it to the right-wing, directly.”

Full article here.