Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) took to Twitter to demand the U.S. Department of State’s funding be cut over a small grant that will partly go to putting on a drag show.
“The Biden regime is spending $20k on drag shows in Ecuador,” she wrote. “Note to self: the Department of State has excess funds that need to be cut next year.”
Her mention of “next year” is a reference to her belief that Republicans will win majorities in both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections next month.
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The Biden regime is spending $20k on drag shows in Ecuador.
Note to self: the Department of State has excess funds that need to be cut next year.
— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) October 20, 2022
Boebert’s tweet isn’t entirely correct; only part of the five-figure grant is going to drag shows.
She is referring to a $20,600 grant given to the Centro Ecuatoriano Norteamericano (CEN) de Cuenca that started in September. The website USASpending.gov – a federal website – says that the grant is “to promote diversity and inclusion.”
The site says that the money will go to hosting three workshops (the topics aren’t mentioned), a two-minute documentary, and “12 drag theater performances.”
A Fox News article about the grant says that the CEN has gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars in State Department grants in the past. But this appears to be the first time that the right has even noticed that those grants exist.
Several right-wing news sources – including Fox News, The Blaze, American Military News, The Post Millennial, and The Daily Caller – have already published articles about the grant.
Rightwing author James Lindsay – who is best known for writing a fake academic paper and who was recently suspended from Twitter for calling LGBTQ people slurs – said that the grant is “an act of political warfare.”
“It’s telling that the US State Department is using drag queens to do cultural transformation in other countries, which is an act of political warfare, because they’re doing the same thing on America’s schoolchildren,” Lindsay told The Post Millennial.
Drag, of course, has existed in Ecuador and Latin America since before the September grant.
