Day: May 29, 2025

The New York-area PBS station WNET has scrubbed its archives of at least three educational TV episodes that discuss transgender identity and drag expression, The Intercept has learned, as Congress and the Trump administration target public broadcasters with attempts to strip their funding.

The station’s educational program “Let’s Learn” became an object of ire for the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency this spring over the 2021 episode “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish,” in which the drag queen and children’s author Lil Miss Hot Mess sings about drag performance to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus.” The subcommittee’s chair, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., opened the “Anti-American Airwaves” hearing in March by claiming that “PBS News is not just left-leaning, but it actively uses taxpayer funds to push some of the most radical, left positions like featuring a drag queen on the show” and calling Lil Miss Hot Mess a “child predator” and a “monster.”

Far from defending the programming, PBS CEO Paula Kerger distanced the broadcaster from the show. 

“The drag queen was actually not on any of our kids’ shows,” she said, claiming the episode made it to the PBS website by mistake and had already been removed. PBS followed up with a letter that said it had “removed all remaining references to the Episode” online on March 26, 2025.

But it wasn’t just PBS: The New York member station that produces “Let’s Learn” — which had stood by the episode under scrutiny in previous years — then quietly removed the episode across its platforms, according to an Intercept analysis. WNET also erased two other episodes about a children’s book featuring a a transgender protagonist, the analysis shows.

WNET did not respond to requests for comment. A PBS spokesperson reiterated Kerger’s claim that the episode was uploaded by mistake and said its removal was unrelated to the current political climate, but did not respond to questions about why over 250 other “Let’s Learn” episodes are still available for viewing on the official PBS website.

Public broadcasting was an object of U.S. conservative wrath for decades before the Trump administration. But as the current government has intensified its attacks, PBS has engaged in other recent examples of self-censorship. PBS removed a scene in which Art Spiegelman discusses an anti-Trump cartoon from a documentary about the artist, and it pulled a gaming documentary with transgender themes from planned syndication — then relisted it after The Atlantic asked about the deletion. But the erasure of WNET’s programming on drag and transgender culture shows the effects reaching a local level, where the station that produced the episodes elected to take them down — despite previously having defended them.

After premiering in the spring of 2021, “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish” quickly garnered social media outrage and news coverage. Following the first round of backlash, WNET added a disclaimer on its YouTube channel and the “Let’s Learn” website, noting that the series is “not funded or distributed by PBS.” 

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But at the time, WNET defended the episode, telling Fox News that Let’s Learn “strives to incorporate themes that explore diversity and promote inclusivity, which are relevant to education and society. Drag is a performance art that can inspire creative thinking and the questioning of stereotypes.”

The outrage didn’t go away: Two years later, Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt explicitly mentioned the episode when he vetoed a bill to extend funding for his state’s PBS station. 

Despite all the attention, WNET continued to make the episode available — until this year. 

An Intercept analysis showed that following the DOGE hearing, WNET quietly removed all mentions of the episode across its platforms. 

The original episode page now displays a generic error message, reading “Oops! The page you are looking for was not found.” “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish” no longer appears in a list of episode titles, and the video is listed as private on the WNET Education YouTube channel. WNET also instructed search engines not to list the episode’s old webpage. 

Aside from removing “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish,” WNET has additionally removed at least two more “Let’s Learn” episodes, The Intercept has found. 

In the November 2020 episode “Max and the Talent Show,” author Kyle Lukoff reads his book of the same name. The story concerns a white transgender boy named Max who helps his Black male friend Steven prepare for a talent show and “find the perfect gown, shoes, cape, and tiara,” according to the School Library Journal. The journal calls the book “an excellent choice as an early reader with an LGBTQIA+ theme.” 

WNET removed that episode and another, called “Brain and Same Both Have Long ‘A.’” That hourlong episode also features “Max and the Talent Show,” which students read in order to “practice sounds with the long ‘a.’” 

Although it has been erased from PBS and WNET platforms, “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish” can still be viewed via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. 

The post PBS Station Wipes Drag and Trans Content After DOGE Outcry appeared first on The Intercept.

Landlords who own buildings with one or more rent-stabilized units are now required to post signs informing tenants that the building contains rent-stabilized apartments — a move aimed at empowering tenants to fight illegal rent hikes, demand better living conditions and restore illegally deregulated units.

The Tenants Transparency Act, also known as Intro 1037, was introduced by Council Member Sandy Nurse (D-Brooklyn), and passed the City Council with a supermajority of 49 votes on May 28.

The law, which takes effect in 2026, also requires landlords of rent-stabilized units to submit an annual filing to the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) and provide each tenant with a copy, ensuring tenants are aware of the status of their units. Landlords who fail to file may face penalties.

They must also post signs in English and Spanish in common areas of the building. The signs will inform tenants which authorities or organizations to contact — such as the DHCR and its Office of Rent Administration — to check the status of their unit and its rent history.

Nurse, who represents Cypress Hills, Bushwick, City Line, Ocean Hill, Brownsville and East New York, told Brooklyn Paper that when she moved into a rent-stabilized building in 2021, she wasn’t informed that her unit was subject to the Rent Stabilization Law of 1969 — and her landlord attempted to overcharge her by 20%.

“The only way I found out eventually by looking it up and finding that, in fact, it was rent-stabilized, but also that the landlord hadn’t registered the unit,” Nurse said, stressing that as a city council member focused on housing justice issues, she was equipped with the tools to dig deeper into the rent history of her apartment. “Imagine you don’t know any of that, so you’re just getting overcharged. And this is a simple tool that once it’s implemented [and] in effect, tenants will at least be able to check.”

If tenants discover they live in a rent-stabilized apartment and were overcharged, they can contact their elected officials, who can connect them with organizations that help navigate the court system to challenge the overcharge.

“The reason we’re doing this is because so many people just don’t know that their unit is rent stabilized, and that has led to harassment, illegal rent surcharges, overcharging, and eventually that can lead to eviction,” Nurse said.

Nurse said some residents have already told her that, because of her initiative, they learned their apartment is rent-stabilized.

“Information is power,” the pol said. “Even if a broker is taking you to the building, they’re not going to tell you it’s rent-stabilized. The landlord has no interest in telling you it’s rent-unstabilized.”

The Brooklyn Council member also introduced legislation, Intro 1294-2025, alongside Council Member Chi Ossé (D-Brooklyn), and in partnership with Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. If passed, the law would require the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to create a website with publicly available information on all individuals convicted of larceny by deed theft in New York City.

According to the New York State Attorney General’s office, the New York City Sheriff’s Office received nearly 3,500 deed theft complaints between 2014 and 2023. More than 1,500 of those were in Brooklyn, many in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick, where property values are skyrocketing. Many victims are Black and Brown homeowners, stripped of the generational wealth they spent their lives building.

“We hope this is also a source of information and education for people who might be getting a door knock or solicitation,” Nurse said. “We’re really excited to expose these criminals because that’s what they are. They’re thieves. They’re stealing generational wealth from people, and specifically Black elders.”