Between February 2020 and September 2023, the federal government assigned $8.5 million to produce at least 58 podcasts, many promoting left-wing views. The finding was made by the taxpayer watchdog OpenTheBooks.com, which said the amount was part of an extensive $323.7 million expenditure on overarching projects that incorporated these podcasts. Both domestic and foreign entities received the funds.
Organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were the primary funding sources. The podcasts, which covered many topics such as history, art, literature, science, and religion, received their own shares, with several promoting far-left progressive themes.
A few of the funded podcasts include a $227,420 linguistics program that delved into the use of a new gender-neutral pronoun in Swedish and a $228,546 program that discussed the recent history of Queens during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on the Black Lives Matter movement and ‘racism.’
Another project was a $5,000 podcast sponsored by the State Department that tackles issues affecting the trans and intersex community in Zimbabwe and a $556,544 initiative from the National Science Foundation featuring pandemic-related content for children.
One $370,000 podcast on Southern history featured an episode titled, “Bedfellows Forever: How 19th-century male romantic friendships queer our understanding of historical masculinity.”
Founder of OpenTheBooks.com, Adam Andrzejewski, questioned the allocation of taxpayer money to these projects, referring to it as a “podcast tax.”
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