A CEO calling his own company's past a "mistake." A 47-page report designed to be cited, not read. The pressure campaign that broke Facebook
Parker Molloy at The Present Age:
On Tuesday, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos sat in the Dirksen Senate Office Building to answer questions about his company’s $83 billion bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s studios, HBO, and HBO Max. The hearing was supposed to be about antitrust. And some of it was! Sen. Mike Lee, the Republican chairing the subcommittee, called the deal “extraordinary in both scale and potential consequence” and pushed Sarandos on whether YouTube really counts as a competitor. Sen. Cory Booker raised concerns about any single company gaining that much control over American entertainment. Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked about subscription pricing. These are real questions about a merger that would reshape the entertainment industry. They deserve a hearing.
But several Republican senators had a different agenda. Sen. Eric Schmitt pulled up a Netflix social media post from June 2020, made in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. He presented it as though Netflix had issued a statement reading “To my white friends, guilt, shame, embarrassment.” In fact, the post promoted a video by Brandon Kyle Goodman, a writer on Big Mouth and co-star of Feel The Beat, that carried that title. Schmitt asked Sarandos what it meant. Sarandos, who said he was unaware of the post, didn’t correct the mischaracterization. Instead, he called it a mistake. “As I said, sir, we have no political agenda,” he told Schmitt. “Posting something like that would be quite political. Right, I would agree. Yes, and I would hope that wouldn’t happen again.” The CEO of Netflix, under pressure from a senator, publicly disavowed his own company’s social media activity from six years earlier. The post in question was a statement of solidarity with Black Americans during a period of nationwide protests against police violence. Sarandos called it a mistake and promised it wouldn’t happen again.
Schmitt wasn’t done. He accused Netflix of “promoting DEI and wokeness,” cited examples of what he called “race swapping” in Netflix shows, brought up the French film Cuties, and had an aide hold up a headline from Glenn Beck’s The Blaze reading “Netflix Merger Would Create A Woke Media Monster.” He then delivered his closing argument: “Why in the world would we give a seal of approval or a thumbs up to make you the largest behemoth on the planet related to content? It seems as though you have engaged in creating not only a monopoly of content potentially, but the wokest content in the history of the world.”
Sen. Josh Hawley took a similar approach. He asked Sarandos why Netflix content for children “promotes a transgender ideology,” then claimed that “almost half” of Netflix’s children’s programming features “highly controversial, highly sexualized material.” CNN noted that Hawley didn’t provide a source for that statistic. Sarandos called the claim “inaccurate” and said he had no idea where it came from.
The “almost half” figure traces to a December 2025 report from Concerned Women for America, a conservative advocacy organization that opposes LGBTQ rights. CWA claimed that 41% of G-rated and TV-Y7 Netflix shows contain LGBTQ content. Their methodology is opaque: no named researchers, no published classification criteria, no inter-rater reliability testing. When a show like She-Ra and the Princesses of Power gets counted because two characters kiss in the final season, and that gets lumped under “highly sexualized material aimed at children,” you’re looking at a document designed to produce the largest possible number. The point was never to withstand scrutiny. The point was to be cited. And that’s exactly what Hawley did. By the time it landed in the congressional record, it was a statistic attributed to a United States senator.
But Hawley and Schmitt weren’t freelancing. The culture-war attacks at the hearing echoed an anti-Netflix report produced by a conservative outlet originally created by the Heritage Foundation, which had been shared with allies ahead of the Tuesday hearing. Deadline reported that senators Cruz and Schmitt “seemed to be pulling directly from” the report, and that the head of the organization that produced it had pre-written questions for senators to use during the hearing. That report is called Fedflix: Netflix, The Federal Government, and the New Propaganda State. It runs 47 pages. It was produced by the Oversight Project, an investigative arm of the Heritage Foundation (though it became formally independent last year). Its central claim is that Netflix holds “an outsized role in socially engineering millions of Americans into a predisposition to accept preferred leftwing ideological dogma.”
[...] The irony is that Netflix isn't left-wing propaganda. This is the company that has made Dave Chappelle one of the highest-paid comedians in the world, defending his anti-trans specials against internal and external criticism. This is the company that won the bidding war to adapt JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, producing a prestige film about the life story of the man who is now Vice President. Netflix is a platform that hosts content across the political spectrum because that's what a streaming service with hundreds of millions of subscribers does. But the accusation was never meant to be accurate. It was meant to be useful. What to watch for: board changes, political donations, content shifts, new advisory roles for conservative figures. If the Facebook timeline is instructive, these won’t arrive all at once. They’ll come gradually, each one rationalized as a reasonable accommodation, until one day a company that features Heartstopper and Disclosure and Pose has quietly stopped platforming shows like that altogether.
[...]
What “propaganda” means in practice
The language in the Fedflix report is deliberate. The Fedflix report is part of a coordinated rhetorical project that treats the mere existence of LGBTQ people in media as an act of aggression against children. It’s not subtle about this. Section VI is titled “SOCIAL ENGINEERING: LGBTQ+/TRANS IDEOLOGY PUSHED IN CONTENT AIMED AT MINORS.” The framing is identical to what we saw in Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, in the harassment campaigns against drag performers, in the threats that caused Target to pull Pride displays from store entrances and move them to the back.
In 2023, Target had been selling Pride merchandise for a decade. Then came the coordinated backlash: viral posts making false claims about products being marketed to children, threats against employees at stores across the country. Target responded by removing merchandise, shifting displays away from high-traffic areas, and eventually announcing that its 2024 Pride collection would only appear in about half of its stores. The designers who had created that collection were left feeling, as one told the Bay Area Reporter, “angry and betrayed.” Target had asked them for their coming-out stories as part of the creative process. Then, when the pressure campaign arrived, the company folded. This is what corporate capitulation looks like from the inside. A company invites LGBTQ people to participate in something meaningful, then abandons them when a sufficiently loud group decides their existence is controversial.
Netflix sits at a different scale, but the dynamic is the same. Netflix has 177 LGBTQ characters across its streaming service, according to GLAAD’s most recent count. That’s 48% of all LGBTQ characters on the eight major streaming platforms tracked. Heartstopper is concluding with a feature-length film in 2026. The platform has been, by any measure, one of the most significant venues for LGBTQ storytelling in the history of television. The Fedflix report explicitly identifies this as a problem. So do the senators who read from Heritage Foundation talking points during the hearing.
The question is whether Netflix will respond the way Target did. The way Bud Light did after featuring trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a marketing campaign. These companies didn’t face antitrust review. They didn’t have a massive merger hanging in the balance. They capitulated under pressure that was purely reputational. Netflix faces all of that and more.
Netflix is about to pull a Target: appease anti-LGBTQ+ reactionaries in a bid to get their merger with WBD approved.
