Do you think tax dollars should be used for this type of programming?
May have been a forced trade. A woke cancel culture zealot might have said we want these 8 things on PBS or we will attack all your funding. PBS weighs it out and makes a risk assessment and says we can give you this one thing ( the least punitive thing to them on the list) but we will never give you the other 7, that's the deal. Now PBS can say they have something woke as a defense to any future accusations.
The times in business where your hand is most forced is when money chokes out and when you are just starting. When you are just starting, you have to take clients, compromises, contracts, jobs and situations you'd turn down in any other circumstance. With a blown out economy and a horizon of future instability, I'm sure donations to PBS have been down in general. COVID changes some of their filming and projects lists. It all adds up.
When PBS Newshour is compromised, then I'll worry.
It's easy to say Company X bent the knee but these situations are extremely complex. Taking on this show might have been the difference between laying off a certain number of PBS rank and file employees or not. You also have to weigh out all the possibilities in a protracted public war over something like this.
A lot of "negotiations" just turn into structured buyouts. PBS says "Here's your woke token, now go away and leave us alone."
Best response is what I've said to Conservatives from the beginning. Unite and demonetize. Individual firefights in the dark don't help win a war. A lot of valued contributors at Parler were invited off the site into other platforms long before the shut down. No heavy hitter there believed Parler would last. All of the major discussions I was a part of discussed demonetization.
1) A competitive web browser that would filter out all anti-Conservative/anti-Republican sites and businesses and/or hard ID them as such. If Don Lemon has a cousin with a restaurant then it's turfed. It might not go out of business. But if it loses 20 percent of it's potential customers because they will never see it on a web page listing then that's a problem. This is why I said Sigmund Bloom should delete the PSF entirely. A lot of this would run on various algorithms as well and if the risk is having 10-20 million people not see your commercial site period, that's a problem. The Coinbase CEO saw this coming long before many others. I pushed for an exemption list because there's a lot of deeper context before you turf people for good. I want more due regard shown than the radical left has shown their opposition.
2) Mirror services and platforms when possible. If all hardware stores are woke, then Conservatives/Republicans need to find a way to have a hardware chain friendly to it exist. This is why Ben Shapiro and Daily Wire, right or wrong, have produced a movie ( Run Hide Fight) and signed Gina Carano to a movie deal. They want to cash in Conservatives who want to spend their money with other Conservatives.
3) Hard vetting and active relentless investigation. When you see politicians getting caught doing something on camera that blows up, that's not a coincidence. Obviously there are political paparazzi, but both sides have investigators bird dogging their opposition around the clock. Once you find something, you release it to the public. On my end, I said it matters if it's true, it has to be true. I saw some argue to use the exact same tactics as the current MSM, but I don't agree with that. If you have the facts and you stick to the facts, eventually it will shine through any other defense in front of you.
What I dislike about the radical left is the bent ideology that the public cannot be trusted to come to their own conclusions and need to be led to the "right outcome" Because I dislike that, I also understand there are things many people aren't going to want to see or be exposed or have their kids be around it, but there is value in coming to your own conclusion on what is not acceptable to you.
I disagree with the radical left that everything needs to be "fair" at all costs. Life isn't fair. Nothing can make it fair. Trying to force "fairness" is just virtue signaling for leverage. But I also believe we cannot practically remove all unfairness either. We have to pick our battles as Conservatives.
If Conservatives unite and start demonetizing, that has a better impact, a better effort to results ratio, than these small conflicts abound. Yes, I get why small conflicts can turn into large ones if left unchecked, but you have to go after the money first. Once you take the money, everything else falls into place. For example, if I want to change FBG, I can argue morality all day long. I can argue semantics and split hairs. But if I can give or take a thousand subscribers on my own, then that generates traction.
I don't like it personally. I have nothing against the LGBT community. Many of them have struggles I'll never truly understand. Many of them have suffered in ways I'll never understand. Like any group, some within will be shining examples. Some will be good people. Some will be mediocre, probably lots of them. Many will offer nothing good nor nothing bad, they are just warm bodies in the masses. But also some of them are just plain bad people. Because any group is a range and has a cross section of real life people within it. It extends beyond a bedroom and into a question of the human condition. I refuse to see them all as victims or targets or zealots or heroes. Because I will not rob them of their humanity to do it.
But whether or not I like it, doesn't change the question - Is this the right fight at the right time for Conservatives?
I've said this for 15 years here, everything is resource management. You have limited time, money, energy and will power to fight. You have to known when and where to make your stand. I don't believe this issue is it.