Corporation for Public Broadcasting Statement Regarding Executive Order
cpb.org
cpb.org
I would add that PBS has this to say about public media funding:
> The U.S. is almost literally off the chart for how little we allocate towards our public media. At the federal level, it comes out to a little over $1.50 per person per year. Compare that to the Brits, who spend roughly $100 per person per year for the BBC. Northern European countries spend well over $100 per person per year.
> And it really shows in the health of their of their public broadcasting systems. They tend to view those systems as essential democratic infrastructure. And, indeed, data show that there is a positive correlation between the health of a public broadcasting system and the health of a democratic governance.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-the-history-of-p...
Why is the Secretary of Health and Human Services the one responsible for this?
This qualification is particularly important for a role you want to use to arbitrarily punish people who aren't loyal enough.
no one will stop him.
Some episodes even have the audacity to claim that humans evolved from apes and that the earth is billions of years old!
It was Yyyuuuuuge!
The obvious problem is they are conflating one or two programs with _the entire organization_. I grew up on PBS watching Arthur and Clifford and I'm sure they put out tons of quality content to this day. It's just when Trump thinks of that org he just thinks of the politically biased parts (ie a couple of shows and podcasts that cover Washington politics) and not the massive other parts that provide quality content.
They do not want LGBTQ people to be acknowledged in any way, or be allowed to exist.
They would ban the Golden Girls if they could. They WILL try.
So I was curious and went searching, and I assume you mean the animated "Chip Chilla" series which has drawn some unflattering comparisons with Bluey.
However I didn't find that particular character or critique, maybe somebody else will have better luck.
It was produced by DailyWire+, which is a media firm founded by Ben Shapiro.
It only made 6 episodes because the market it shot for, right wing people who hate "woke" rejected it. There is plenty of market for those people consuming what is essentially ragebait and hate content.
They don't seem to want to consume actual media though. Right wing grifters have been trying to target them for a while with "alternative" content, but they don't actually want to enjoy anything. They just want to watch Ben Shapiro tell them that woke is bad, liberals are evil, and "Go woke go broke".
This is the same market that Russia Today was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to people like Tim Pool to shout at.
Ironically the reception seems to be it could be an average show if it wasn't so intent on yelling about how much it hates "woke". It's brought down by the amount of virtue signalling it does.
Back here in reality the BBC is trusted by only about 40-44% of the British population, and actively distrusted by around a quarter. The true number who trust it is probably lower, as those polls suffer volunteering bias and other problems that push responses to the left when there's no ground truth to weight to.
There's a profound moral problem with forcing people to pay money for media they actively distrust or despise. There's certainly no link between "health" of a democracy and the funding level of state-funded media, unless you're the sort of person who defines a healthy society as one where everyone believes the government all the time.
Nearly everyone accepts that taxation is justified for some cases where you can't really avoid benefiting from the expenditure, the textbook example being public goods like defense (you can't opt-out of benefiting from the defeat of an invading army) or a lighthouse (you can't stop a sailor who didn't pay from seeing it).
And post-communism most people accept that taxation is not justified for many other cases, for example, using tax money to gift the president a private golf club would not be moral (he can buy golfing time with his salary or prior wealth). The benefit only accrues to the user in that case, and they can easily pay for it themselves.
In the past you could argue that state media was more like a lighthouse, because signals were broadcast from towers unencrypted and there was no way to restrict reception to people who paid. So, pass a tax and make everyone pay if they own any kind of receiving device at all.
But technological progress has changed everything. It's now easy to restrict broadcasts to only people who paid for them. TV/radio is no longer like a lighthouse, it's now more like a magazine and therefore it's immoral to tax fund them because they're not public goods anymore. You wouldn't be happy to find the government had forcibly subscribed you to the Wall Street Journal, right? You'd point out that people who want to read it can just buy a copy themselves. Same thing for TV/radio.
Again, to see this, just consider how you'd feel if FOX News launched a German version and you were forced to pay for that against your will. Would you find that moral? Don't try and claim subjective quality judgements make a difference; obviously plenty of people think FOX News is high quality, that's why they watch it.
Okay, but Fox News is obviously fundamentally different because it's a private entertainment program. That's why it's bought out and influenced by the ultra-wealthy. It's a propaganda program for capitalists. You can't just say that's "the same" as a neutrally-funded public program.
You can't "sell", so to speak, public services. That's why republican generally oppose it - they can't give a slice to their cronies so they don't want it. The problem with things like SS, which the right has attacked and attempted to dismantle the second it was written into law, isn't that it's "unfair", it's that it's not private. If you actually look at the proposals for dismantling SS, they all involve privatizing it, aka stealing it and handing out slices to their cronies.
Things like PBS and NPR getting public funds and being allowed to exist is a problem to the right because it means it can't be bought and controlled like Huff Post or Fox can.
Nobody actually thinks Fox is high quality. That's not why they watch it. They just perceive other news to be just as bad, and it's cathartic to hear their own lies screamed back at them.
No, that's not my argument.
My argument is that public and private media have different incentive structures so you can't just compare them like that.
And, in addition, the right hates anything public. Of course they want to dismantle public media, because that's what they do. They want to dismantle public schools too, and social security. Because then they, and their friends, can get their slice. The problem with public programs is that rich can't buy them.
And this isn't an unfair characterization of the right, this is their explicit goals. Again, with SS, the second it was made into law it was under attack by the right. They'll lie to you and say "it's insolvent! It doesn't work! We need to privatize it... if me and my cronies control it, then it would be much better!" But of course, what happens is they sell it off, you don't get your retirement, and the money gets stolen. They know that, that's why they want to do it.
> FOX isn't a private entertainment programme, it's a channel that's focused exclusively on news and current affairs.
See, this makes me think you're trolling. Come on now.
A core reason for having a robust public broadcasting system is that it lifts the quality of the entire information ecosystem.
Saying this as a Norwegian. I happily pay around 200/300 dollars a year for it out of my taxes.
You'll find broad/majority support for state broadcasters in Northern Europe. The business model of for-profit digital news production is not economically viable outside of certain niches or clickbait/ragebait. Doubly so in small countries with just a few million citizens.
Free, broadly available, non-commercial journalism is a critical part of our society. Some would say paywalling a baseline of local knowledge constricts civic participation and is immoral. But that's a lame value judgement and should rightfully be dismissed.
> The business model of for-profit digital news production is not economically viable outside of certain niches or clickbait/ragebait
State media is much more than just news, so are you agreeing at least that all of the non-news production should be defunded?
But, of course it's viable to do for-profit news. There are plenty of successful private news companies out there that aren't niche. You are welcome to define all news you dislike as ragebait but that's clearly not an argument, it's just a "lame value judgement".
> Free, broadly available, non-commercial journalism is a critical part of our society
It's not free and it's not non-commercial. People are paid to produce it via ordinary commercial contracts, and then people are forced to buy it. Nor is it a critical part of society. Society did just fine before state media was a thing. Meanwhile the injustice upon innocent people remains, and the existence of it harms society itself greatly via other paths as well.
> Meanwhile the injustice upon innocent people remains, and the existence of it harms society itself greatly via other paths as well.
Your hyperbole is exasperating. I'll pass.
Such organizations are important for the voting public to remain informed and thus elect with an informed choice.
... It would also not surprise me if ~25-35% of the US population 'did not trust PBS / NPR' because they didn't like what they heard and thus preferred to disbelieve the sources.
It wasn't always quite that bad, it used to be the same stuff repeated for people in venues like lounges at airports or restaurants that wanted to cater to business crowds.
Then around 2001 there was that terrorist attack on the US ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks ). Networks did 24/7 'news' coverage; ever more of a spectacle as time dragged on. In recollection their need for attention, to excite and draw in eyeballs, probably helped with the implicit goal of 'terrorism' to instill terror.
Rather than behaving as rational adults, digesting a negative event, reflecting on what could be done differently ( do not negotiate with terrorists, do not remain passive sheep on an airplane, and FFS lock the cockpit doors ); everyone 'blinked' and caved. Freedoms and liberty were traded for news as entertainment, security theater, and excuses to enter wars 'on terrorism' with unclear goals and objectives.
The 'Internet' probably didn't help in offering a cheaper and supposedly 'better targeted' venue for ads. Other than informative ads (X exists, it can do Y), I find the entertainment focus to be intellectual junk food and noise against the signal. It would probably be a public good if that were heavily regulated.
As for other public broadcasters, in e.g. Finland Yle is trusted by 82%, by far the highest for any media.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/45744-which-media-out...
Not really sure why skewing left would improve trust ratings either, unless you're suggesting that people on the right don't trust any media, or only trust media that is right wing coded. The BBC is definitely not a left wing outlet by the standards of the UK.
Nonetheless, there's no reason not to go all the way. There should not be a TV license, let alone one enforced by criminal law. Regular subscription and video scrambling systems are enough and have been for years.
The BBC is very strongly left wing and even its own employees recognize that. Look at the positions they take on a wide range of issues and you'll find they're all Labour positions or to the left of Labour.
I can't find any evidence of BBC employees calling it "far left", all I find when searching for that is right wing people calling it far left for not agreeing with them enough as well as some more "scientific" analysis that seemed to show it having a right wing bias. Most news bias raters put BBC as centre or centre left (it probably is centre left by US standards).
Looking at the top 3 stories now, two don't have any obvious political slant, Australian elections and arrest of terrorism suspects, whereas the 3rd is about local elections and starts with lots of quotes from Reform UK about how well they're doing. Perfect opportunity for a far left org to insert criticism, downplay, or just not report on them, but seems like pretty straight down the middle reporting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43881222
But as you just discovered, there are endless examples.
Dismissing criticism of BBC bias as "right wing people calling it far left for not agreeing with them enough" is almost tautological: yes, that's what bias looks like, the people it's biased against will disagree with them a lot. Not because they're just wrong and the BBC is just right, but because the BBC fires right wing journalists and hires/promotes left wing journalists who then tell themselves that left wing beliefs are True and right wing beliefs are False and thus the news should automatically be left wing. It has been like this for years.
A few more simple examples of institutionalized bias:
1. During Brexit Nick Robinson wrote an article saying the Today programme no longer has any obligation to balance its coverage of Remain vs Leave; i.e. stating in public writing that the BBC is biased.
2. Many on the right don't believe climatology is scientific or accurate, but the BBC has a written policy of refusing to interview or platform such views. They just systematically forbid it and have done for decades. They only report the left's view that there is a crisis. That's political bias.
3. The BBC broadcast a documentary about Palestine in which the child narrator turned out to be the son of a Hamas official.
4. BBC on the US election: "On the campaign trail, Donald Trump drove his message of fear all the way to the White House but it was based on a misconception. Rather than an invasion, America has long been dependent on the work of these migrants in agriculture and manufacturing, making them both essential and dispensable…For his opponents these feel like dizzying and dark times."
Of course if they discover they have a journalist who criticizes the left they fire him immediately citing neutrality (see Chris Middleton).
All this makes a mockery of the concept of public service broadcasting. The BBC is gonna die, it's inevitable, and when it does, it will be because its staff relentlessly abused the public for decades by exploiting the tax based nature of its service.
Just for the record in case someone stumbles across this in future. Chris Middleton worked freelance for the BBC and was let go for making a parody song criticising the winter fuel payment cuts. The figure criticised is ostensibly left wing, but repeatedly criticised for being too centrist/right wing compared to where Labour usually stand and his previously stated position. That's what happened here, the person fired was criticising him from the left, i.e. their political stance was too left wing for the BBC (or maybe the BBC doesn't allow strong political stances in any direction).
"Reform UK's Andrea Jenkyns is the new mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, marking a return to politics for the former Gregg's worker and Miss UK finalist"
She's 50 but the BBC's audience hears about what she did as a teenage girl. It's not an isolated incident. Nobody serious tries to argue the BBC is neutral, fair or objective anymore. Reform is the highest polling party in Britain, it's awful to make all those voters pay money to an organization that openly hates them.
> Did you know that Fox didn't even report the stock market drop after liberation day? They just pretended it wasn't happening!
Yes they did:
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6370983289112 "Stock markets crashing in response to tariff announcement"
[1] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/04/17/npr_ceo_k...
Right?
- You claimed Fox never reported on the stock market crash, something easily disproved with a five second web search.
- You claimed having two sources yields 99% accuracy, a made up number.
- You claimed NPR, BBC and PBS have to show their sources, although they regularly report single-sourced or anonymously sourced stories.
- You claim you can hear a falsehood within one second of turning on Fox.
You're in the habit of routinely inventing numbers whilst criticizing others for perceived failures to be accurate. Given you're talking about the importance of an informed populace that's ironic and embarrassing.
Decades of the Republicans chipping away at public broadcast funding resulting in public broadcasting having to ground itself firmly in outside charitable donation. Of all the ostensibly-federal organisms, they (and the Post Office, thanks Amazon) are best-situated to be outside direct monetary government influence.
Hopefully, the public broadcasting donations are from various small amounts from many viewers, and collectively they are less corrupting. But this isn't guaranteed, and during economic recessions, these sorts of sources tend to dry up (and get replaced with big money sources, and thus their agendas).
As a German, we are forced to pay much more than that, about 220 euro annually. Only a small percentage actually goes into news and such, most are entertainment programs. I don't know anyone who is younger/my age that is in favor of it or consumes it. It is basically the boomers forcing us to subsidize their shitty crime shows.
Annually they collect about 9 billion euro, no surprise the author of that piece creams their pants at the prospect of being able to fuck the population over like that. I mean how much money can you reasonably expect for reporting news?
People who can't afford food and clothes are forced to contribute to the insane salaries of the moderators of some of the shows. They're also not unbiased at all, they skew heavily left. The system is pretty rotten, can't wait for there to be a reform of it.
/rant
My wife and I were visiting a Western European country and watching the street from our balcony. Outside there was a parade of communists rallying for an upcoming vote. Well, my wife is from an actually communist country, and wanted to warn all those people that they would not have been allowed to parade or demonstrate in the country she's from. And would probably be a lot hungrier.
(And hunger probably wouldn't be a big thing today: the communist eras most associated with that were fairly early into the process of transitioning away from agrarian and towards industrial societies. Probably would be less choice of food, but there would likely still be enough food, unless they started seeing every failure as a sign of sabotage like Pol Pot did. Which is a thing I'm worried about with Trump, because that failure mode is not limited to just communists).
[0] because the modern world treats women as equals and we have universal education (which was novel for the era Marx wrote in), and trade unions are a thing. This gets most of the benefits without the various different failure modes that come with different kinds of Communism.
Its pretty heinous, especially for those of us who simply don't consume mainstream Austrian media in any form.
However, there is nothing to be done. The tax has to be paid.
ORF is heinous propaganda, and I despise it, as I do with all mainstream Austria media, which is inexcusably corrupt.
The value of public broadcasting to me is 0, but I do occasionally get exposed to NPR thru other people listening to it and it appears extremely biased to me. My favorite example was when a woman who is quite "woke" politically turned off some NPR program about the perils of patriarchy that i was involuntarily listening to. I asked why and it was too cringe even for her.
Why would I want to pay for that?
So? This is no justification for spending any particular amount of money on public media.
We also rank near the bottom on spending for Bigfoot observational studies and head-regrowth technology.
Perhaps the burden should be on folks to justify why we would want politicians to spend any money at all on public media.
I love Sesame St and Mr Rogers as much as anybody - I grew up on that stuff. It was great. But certainly folks can see how this could gradually move into more politicized topics where it's better for the government to stay entirely out of it. And frankly, any form of "news" is on the wrong side of that line. Of course, it's theoretically possible to provide entirely factual news - but I would in no way trust any government (or entities funded thereby) to deliver it. Far to risky.
At this point it's probably best to zero out all the funding, and then come back later and see if there is a genuine need for some form of public broadcasting.
The value destruction of the last few months has been astonishing.
The elephant in the room is that these stations must be supported. I've been donating to a few stations for many years and have recently donated to others and will continue to do so as long as I'm able. If I somehow wind up with an estate worth anything, I'd also love to be able to will something to one or more stations.
The only truly worrying part of the EO for me is the "The heads of all agencies shall identify and terminate, to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, any direct or indirect funding of NPR and PBS."
Some of the most interesting work we've done has been almost completely funded by the Department of Education.
The station I work for has many sources of revenue but I suspect this will harm some smaller stations.
https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...
"NPR's two largest revenue sources are corporate sponsorships and fees paid by NPR Member organizations"
NPR member organizations are government funded, and then that government funding rolls back up to NPR. So, they're mostly funded by ads and the government. Source in other comment.
When you consider the rural media options, this will be a huge shift in those markets if the funding is not replaced.
Of course, as I'm sure many here know, the Fairness Doctrine was previously upheld in Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC. So it's not totally clear cut. But I expect the current Supreme Court would have a very different view.
The FCC for example has been threatening to revoke broadcast licenses of media it says are biased. No conservative media have received these threats.
They consider bias any reporting, no matter how factual, that contradicts anything the administration has said, now matter how objectively wrong it is.
Is it fair to criticize Trump? What if that criticism is based on "alternate facts" according to Trump?
There are no longer "unbiased" news sources, all sources have moved to either the left or right.
I used to have respect for NPR, today it is, to me, the Fox News of the left, and no different than other sources. I do not have a problem with that, it is what it is. But it should not be funded with taxpayer money.
Try listening to the president of NPR at the congressional hearing and then her interview on NPR done shortly after that hearing. For the former, she was unable/unwilling to express any opinions, nor was she able to recall anything she personally said/posted for the past two years. For the latter, she was fed a series of flattering softball questions clearly made to make her and NPR look good. That is not news or reporting, it was NPR doing PR for NPR.
Contrast with a lower stakes interview, likely prepared for at least in general if not with vetted and researched questions?
Watch the Senate hearing. This was not a person that did not want to make an offhand statement. This was a person who clearly did not feel comfortable with what she knew she said to "her audience" but not comfortable when it came to a public audience. Many, many times. She sounded like someone repeatedly pleading the fifth.
My opinion, of course.
When I watch Fox News it's usually pretty easy to spot several things that are simply made-up per day. Including entire stories.
You hear much of that on NPR?
[EDIT] FWIW I think NPR news is god-awful, because they focus way too much on horse-race politics crap and Monday-morning quarterbacking campaigns, I suppose because they're so scared shitless by accusations of bias that they prefer to fill time with topics that are neutral and don't deal with actual issues at all, because we've been in a place for decades now where dealing with real issues in a serious way makes appearing "biased" against Republicans totally unavoidable.
But people don't think of NPR news and Fox News news. They think of (and what they actually pay attention to) are the opinion shows that dominate the ratings. That is where the gulf is huge and things are totally out of control.
It's much more tame in the 10 minute segments of running down headlines for the day, but people don't engage much with that anymore. Not as exciting as being told how right you are.
It's also largely opinion shows, which are entirely political. NPR is very much not that.
When people make these kinds of comparisons, I wonder if they actually watch Fox News (and if they fact check it, if they do, or just assume "oh yeah all this is true and the only reason nobody else except far-right sources mention it is because of bias") or if they're going by reputation and making assumptions. It's wildly bad as a news source, in fact.
Most folks haven't thought about that too much, though, and/or haven't had much education in politics and media, so "fair and balanced" and "we report, you decide" resonate as slogans, rather than smelling fishy.
This is more than made for by the interviews - Trump, Vance, Harris, Zelensky, the doge team, etc.
Speaking of unbearable, NPR's "soft stories" are invariably about someone's sob story. Ok, I get it, there are a lot of hard luck stories out there, but they seem to relish in misery.
All in all, neither are great, but none of the mainstream media are. I do like "All in" podcasts :-)
Not really true. The left has moved right as the right went extreme right.
Globally, the US "left" is pretty conservative.
After reading it for several years after, its reporting it somewhat reminds me of the BBC. I think its relative bi-partisanship is something that should be cherished instead of trying to crowbar it into a particular bias.
A perfect example of this is in my previous post. I was listening to their "interview" with their CEO, and the interview was put into context of her recent senate hearing (which I knew nothing about). She sounded like a reasonably well informed CEO with good intentions, doing what is best for the public.
I decided to listen to her senate hearing (which I would not have even thought of doing because I did not even know she did this), and came out with the opposite impression - someone who obfuscates, lies, and should not be responsible for the public good.
Was there anything said in the NPR issue that was incorrect or a lie ? No. They are a lot smarter than that. They are clever people who think they are smarter than everyone else, but are not to be trusted.
This is independent of lawsuits. There are a number of news outlets that have settled lawsuits - ABC, CNN, CBS (imminent), Newsmax, to name a few. Yes, Dominion was a large one. None of these change where these news outlets sit on the political spectrum.
The original discussion has to do with political bias and whether the government should be funding politically biased news organizations. NPR is a politically biased news organization. So is FOX. So are all of these organizations. Only NPR gets government funding.
There seems to be a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram between people who (1) claim to get their information from "a wide variety of news sources" (2) apparently believe that every source is equally trustworthy.
Oh did they also have to pay an $800m settlement for lying?
> Try listening to the president of NPR at the congressional hearing and then her interview on NPR done shortly after that hearing. For the former, she was unable/unwilling to express any opinions, nor was she able to recall anything she personally said/posted for the past two years. For the latter, she was fed a series of flattering softball questions clearly made to make her and NPR look good. That is not news or reporting, it was NPR doing PR for NPR.
These two statements don't go hand in hand. It makes it sound like previously media people were robots without opinions. They only had "unbiased" coverage on their minds. And now, because the head of a company like the president of NPR has opinions, we should write off the whole org. They can no longer be considered "unbiased".
Lets be real. There was always a bias in media. Sometimes it was used by the government to spread an agenda. This isn't a recent trend. You don't need to find an NPR PR interview for that.
What is new though is people engaging in false balance and bothsideism. Sure, NPR President might have some leftist view. And sure, they might have a leftist lean to their reporting. The question is whether it is "Fox News of the left". Objectively, no. There is no proof for example, that the company knowingly spread lies and when in court admitted to it and paid a $787 million dollar settlement. You can still dislike their coverage but lets not pretend there is equivalency here.
Today, there is extreme polarization, and it is probably impossible to provide a single news source that is "objective" or "unbiased".
I am not making an ethnic or political judgement here. And, yes, I know there will be those who say you have to make a judgment because there is only one viewpoint today that is correct, that the other side is just lying and distorting. And which direction this goes depends on who you speak with.
For me, the only way to maximize what little understanding I have of the world is to go to various news sources. And I am not talking about understanding in the sense of listening to different viewpoints (which is part of it), but actually getting all the "facts", and by "facts" I mean actual events/stories. What people leave out is as important as what they put in.
I am well aware of Fox's issues. And NPR seems like the "nice guys". And I learn things from both that I could not get from one alone. And maybe Fox has more sinister lies and misrepresentations than NPR, and it is my job to sort through that. But for me, I feel Fox is pretty far to the right for me, and NPR is very far to the left for me in their viewpoints and in what they choose to present. So, for me, they are similar, for others, maybe not.
I don't care if the CEO is left leaning or right leaning. But both Fox and NPR conveniently leave out a lot of the story that does not align with their views.
And I do not believe either should get government funding. When we had a society with more homogeneous views, maybe it was ok for the government to fund news sources that provided something that fit within the views of the majority of the population. That is no longer possible.
You have a President who is ordering the defunding of tons of groups (universities, media, aid, institutes) while not clearly having that authority and often doing so for what he views as ideological crimes.
Also arresting and trying to deport people for things that are not clearly crimes (newspaper op-eds, etc) and without due process.
Very strange times.
Right now I have some faith the courts in the US will stand up to this and get the US back on track but I worry that dam may not hold forever.
Saving grace is that his is not widely popular, although that is more for his tariff moves than for the others.
It’s important to remember that while the President issues the orders, there are other actors behind the scenes writing them for him. They have goals that go beyond a single man considering ideological crimes.
Every American owes it to themselves to familiarize themselves with the project and its aims, because a number of its authors are the ones wielding power right now.
Some examples on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505433
> It’s “real” in the same way as Steele Dossier was real.
> As far as I can tell it’s just a smear device along the lines of “when did you stop beating your wife”, or fake “dossier”, or “Russian collusion”
And even if you were dumb enough to think "this is just puffery, he wouldn't do things this terrible", why are you voting for the guy arguing he's going to do terrible things?!
This is just people who want republicans to win and either support the project or who do not care about whatever one way or the other protecting the party.
Not a substitute for reading the doc but good for a quick overview.
> Abolish the Federal Reserve and move to a "free banking" system.
Don't let that reveal dint your interest. In the Handmaids Tale such a long list of horrors would have bored the reader, but in the Administrations blueprint for the USA that already has 41% of the items off in just 100 days it's riveting reading.
I can resist pointing out another highlight for me:
> Lessen child labor regulations to allow "teenage workers" to work "inherently dangerous jobs".
In sure Project 2025 is sustained to become a true classic.
If anything, I was kinda confused why he called that into question, the job of the president is to decide whose plan is getting executed at any given time, not actually do the planning himself
Our news media are terrible.
https://www.aclu.org/project-2025-explained
Dude can barely string two sentences together— can't tell when a photo has been annotated and has no idea what Signal is. Thinks "groceries" is an old-fashioned word. It's pretty clear at this point that it's others behind the curtain running this show.
Honestly, the fact that he's now surrounded on all sides by Curtis Yarvin acolytes should have us deeply concerned. I fear someone with that ideology who's maliciously competent coming to power.
It doesn't matter who else is running the show in his name in the same way that it didn't matter who else was running the Biden administration. He's more than just culpable by association. Stop trying to infantilize the man. He's old but he's nowhere a stupid as everyone makes him out to be. He is callous and vindictive and expects loyalty in all things. He hates all forms of liberalism including the Republican ideals of liberal democracy and believes himself to be above the law. It's his administration, even if he doesn't seem to know about or even care about all the details.
This time around he was sure to only fill his cabinet with yes men, so no one could keep him reigned in.
Trump has no idea what he is doing, it has been very clear in interviews.
In the first admin, it was the adults in the room, the thing is, it's not yes men this time...it's the villians in the room. Trump is being handed EOs that he doesn't have a clue about.
For all the talk about P2025 and denial of any relation to it, they have done roughly 50% of the actions in the project already with more on the way. ~2/3rds of all his EOs have been in the plan. Virtually everyone related to the project is now in the admin - the head of the FCC literally wrote the 'FCC' section and boy is it an attack on everything the EFF holds dear.
I think what is notable is that it seems to have gotten more bold - the plan called for reducing USAID, not killing it for example.
And Yes, page 246, killing funding for PBS.
Here he is asking the UK prime minister to read out a letter he'd been sent
Probably like every president before him.
No president like CEOs can know everything about the organization they head. They are mostly the face and mouthpiece, and depend on chiefs and VPs to tell them what needs to be done according to the agenda that CEO or president has put forth.
This time, however, he's often doing whatever Heritage/Project 2025 tell him to do. Russell Vought, Stephen Miller, John McEntee, etc.
I think Trump has only very vague opinions on most things. He is ok as long as people flatter his ego.
The president can't pawn off responsibility to some White House staffer or think tank. An executive order is the president's order.
Is it useful to look at the people who wrote or lobbied for the order? Perhaps if you want to want to understand the context of an order. But none of that context mitigates the president's responsibility for any order. At the end of the day, it is a single person exercising their sole authority to issue executive orders.
Their success in some way is tied to trump right now. Nobody else seems to captivate his base in the same way, and they've made most of this about a man and less about a movement. So it's entirely possible this dies when he does.
The great thing about wannabe dictators is they don't allow the new generation the space to grow and take over, so there's no clear line of succession (Vance doesn't have it yet)
But the democrats seem completely at a loss, and the mid terms are only 18 months away.
I expect it to make the film Death of Stalin look like a depiction of an amiable, staid, and sensible process purely in service of the public good, by comparison.
It's not like Trump is sitting on the toilet writing executive orders or tweets. These are initiatives championed by the elite conservative leadership, they just have a convenient "bad guy" that the rest of the country can focus their hatred on.
Don't think for a second that Vance wouldn't continue digging the same holes if Trump dropped dead.
Exactly this.
Debated at length in the 2016 election cycle and onward since. The Republican establishment didn't (and doesn't) love Trump as a politician, but they love that he puts them in power, and they have been trying to figure out how to reproduce that kind of popularity in a candidate since (and largely failing). He's the best bet of the far-right folks behind the scenes to implement their policy, and he doesn't give a shit about all that stuff as long as he can enrich himself.
The one silver lining is the bit about not being able to reproduce his popularity - which I assume is why they've all been so aggressive in trying to remake the federal government. They've got until the midterms to grab all the power they can. It seems likely they will face a backlash and a lot of seats will swing, so their focus is on removing the teeth from congress, while state level actors try and push through enough new laws that they can prevent loss of seats in the midterms.
I mean, without a constitutional amendment how can that be done?
Then they just have to keep that small number of people in power through whatever means. Even if congress swings enough to have anti-Trump votes, he'll just ignore whatever Congress says, and force it into the courts (which are packed increasingly with Trump friendly judges). That's how it happens.
1. Ignore the laws passed by Congress, and rule by executive decree
2. Experience no consequences, and thereby
3. Establish and institutionalize the idea that Congress is meaningless and decorative.
What documents say the law is doesn't mean anything if it what the people with guns do doesn't reflect what those documents say.
He gets to press the enter key sure, however that doesn't stop his cabinet from passing the executive order over for him to execute.
Needs to be taken up at the root
All dictators/authoritarians have a whole layer of very capable people under them that will implement orders from above without thinking about ethics or morality. But they will do a good job. Hitler had people like Himmler and Speer, Stalin had Beriya and many others (don't know names). The interesting thing is that these people will also do well in democracies. A lot of ex-nazis in Germany turned into good democratic people (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Filbinger). You also have these people in companies where for example layoffs are done in the most humiliating way.
But what I don't think people remember is that a guy like Hitler didn't just show up and "make a dictatorship". He was an opportunistic guy who showed up when Germany's democratic, constitutional republic was weakened by a poorly-functioning congress, and most of the actual power was concentrated in the executive branch. When the time came, Hitler wasn't the one who passed the Reichstag Fire Decree allowing him to suspend the freedom of the press and jail his political opposition. That law was passed by president Hindenburg.
Hitler didn't create a dictatorship. He was handed one on a silver platter - by an ailing 85 year old man with too much power.
See https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-situation--formalis...
The court folds and folds when they realize they can't actually impose what they ordered. I am taking note. The executive definitely is taking note -- Marc Rubio on live TV angrily taunted the judge.
That's the point of the separation of powers.
If the whitehouse is using federal agents to force an action that is directly contrary to court judgement, those agents should have refused orders tbh. They need to know what separation of power is, and the citizens need to also be outraged regardless of political affiliation.
The problem is that some citizens _are not outraged_ (at least, not enough), and those federal agents are following orders from the whitehouse directly regardless of consequences. So a judge's words right now is only as good as the paper it's written on.
I'm not quite clear on how your comment responds to mine?
The Supreme Court, but not lower federal courts, has its own police department, but its legal authority is limited to security for the Supreme Court building and grounds and the Supreme Court justices, and to make arrests for violations of federal law as necessary to those two functions. They do not enforce orders of the court unrelated to those functions.
(For lower federal courts, these functions are performed by the US Marshals Service, a DoJ agency, which also does enforce other court orders; but, that's an executive not a judicial-branch agency.)
I do hope this experience will lead to people re-evaluating their love of FDR. You can like what he stood for, but he was an equal if not (much) greater abuser of the executive office.
why do you think that, all things considered?
Why don't you think that, all things considered?
"Judge scorches Trump admin for stonewalling in Abrego Garcia deportation case" is just one recent headline.
From my outside perspective, your checks and balances do not appear to be working. If they do work, I can't help but wonder what is taking so long.
there are cases where the president has made the lives of individuals miserable in every presidency we’ve lived through. Stating that this is a terrible fact of life and doesn’t justify the harms.
what kind of powers do you envision the judiciary having to rectify these wrongs?
I prefer not to do what aboutism.
>what kind of powers do you envision the judiciary having to rectify these wrongs?
Isn't that supposed to be figured out already? What is "checks and balances" if they can just be ignored? Impeachment for ignoring supreme court orders would be one example.
>american presidents causing untold misery on some people is a tale as old as time
This is continued whataboutism, which I'm simply not interested in participating in a conversation with.
>The point is to create a system that is, on balance, just.
Sure! Why not start now. I'll be eagerly watching, and hoping, that you guys figure it out.
i think i’ve written enough to show that’s that last thing im trying to do.
I mean, that may be your intent, but so far you've brought up Brazil and Obama in a conversation about Trump ignoring the courts orders and said nothing about Trump ignoring the orders.
We shall see.
Sure seems like these checks and balances are working out.
There are some highly visible examples of direct executive action that I hope everyone today sees as authoritarian (japanese internment being the really big one). But FDR's expansion of the executive is the opposite of what Trump is doing. Trump is acting in opposition to the legislation that directs the executive to have its finger in more pies.
They used Census data to round people up. It doesn't get much worse than that.
We agree here.
But is also undeniable that when liberals praise FDR they are talking about things like new deal legislation which ultimately originated from congress during his presidency, which makes the "well you guys like FDR so why do you hate Trump" argument just miss completely.
A lot of very important American freedoms were secured against the public opinion by court cases. That makes them brittle.
is that so true? i don't doubt that in probably 10-20% of the cases this is so, but i would bet that in the vast majority of cases the legislation as written is flexible enough that picking an amount of action that is zero is within the bounds of the law.
i am watching trump carefully for the moment when he turns some dark corners (the abrego garcia case being one) but i am unswayed by the argument that the government reducing its own power is somehow more authoritarian in contrast to an administration that convinced congress to create authority for itself out of whole cloth, which quite clearly goes against the 10th amendment.
We need to acknowledge other authoritarian or authoritarian-lite practices that have gone under the radar for decades, like funding elite colleges (is that political favoritism?), or political influence through NGOs, or even "doing things for the greater good" through unaccountable NGOs like "broadband equity", where there is no explicit charter for the government to do such things.
It's political favoritism in the same way that giving LMH or BA contracts is political favoritism. There's nothing magically "special" about science. And having been there, its just as corrupt, just as wasteful, and generally not in the public interest. It's mostly in the interest of professors that want to fuck around on their pet topics. look up leo paquette and homme hellinga, if you doubt my insider knowledge on this matter (they are just the tip of the iceberg and easily verified in terms of what I've seen). that's not even getting into more touchy subjects like the maze of conflicts of interest in an actually "politics-al" topic like lab leak investigation. whether or not you believe in the lab leak hypothesis you HAVE to acknowledge that the gatekeepers in the investigation are so entangled that it makes good faith truthseeking basically impossible.
While that may be true; is that actually within the spirit of their respective laws? Passing legislation that directs the executive to do something, but then letting the executive just slow-walk it until it's moot seems counter productive.
No, the US constitution is not right. It has tons of problems with it, and needs a significant update to clarify it and avoid a supreme court legislating by imagining what slaveowners a few centuries ago might have thought about a problem.
I understand that the constitution/founding fathers are very flawed - but to most people they still serve as symbols of the core principles of this country. As you've mentioned, if you scratch the surface the reality is very different. If you have better examples that aren't as flawed, I'd genuinely like to hear them.
Absolute horseshit.
The majority of the New Deal was done through congress, with broad support of a SIGNIFICANT amount of the legislative body, which had just seen massive Democrat wins in the 1932 election specifically to do so. The American people gave his administration this power because Americans were tired of watching people die in ditches, watching their parents suffer through old age with zero support.
1 out of every 5 Americans were unemployed. That's a conservative estimate.
They were tired of this being the case in a country with literal "Robber barons".
There is absolutely no parallel to the current administration, who barely won election, who does not have such a commanding control of the legislative (though they do control it), and who personally appointed a significant quantity of the current supreme court.
There is no vast economic harm that Trump was elected to fix. He is openly defying and ignoring court orders, which FDR did not do.
You are spouting lies. Where did you ever get such an incorrect view of history?
I feel like it has to lead to a standoff of some group with guns saying they're following the courts/defending the constitution against another group with guns saying they're following the orders of the president (just like those Nazis who were "just following orders"). I need to print t-shirts with "Is it a coup d'etat yet?" to sell to the onlookers when this happens (in theory I could start selling these now).
He just has to say ‘nuh uh’, and as long as people want their jobs, that’s it.
so it comes to this, where people would have to take a stance, and it requires personal sacrifice on the part of those taking a stance. However, that is what it means to serve.
Individuals attempting to counteract systems is a much, much taller order. People are multifaceted, and those that dissent can be replaced nearly instantly with someone who won’t.
I’m not saying it’s pointless, and individuals asked to do horrible things should do nothing, but it’s much much harder to resist on an individual level than to rely on the leverage that counteracting systems can provide.
Unfortunately these checks and balances have been eroded to the point where they are no longer effective.
They are supposed to be 3 selfish pillars fighting each other to what is likely an actually reasonable state, not 1 or 2 pillars of ‘hero’s’ fighting evil. Which notably, presenting the executive as the ‘hero’ here is exactly what Trump is trying to do to squash what limited resistance he is getting.
What do the courts control? Where are their guns?
Anything smaller will just be someone which the police can deal with.
But coordinating thousands of people is hard, and any plan would leak easily and be discovered by that alcoholic wife-beating Fox News reporter. We might hear generals being fired or moved in the coming months/years of this regime.
If I had to put money whether I'd see scenes like this in DC: https://youtu.be/pF8gyC-XD-w , I'd have to consider whether American military people are brave or they'd just be "followers of orders".
Alternatively, maybe some governors will direct their national guard to defend against what they've deemed to be illegal action done by a federal organ. Hopefully the military will show restraint if being asked to shoot fellow Americans, but hey, if MAGA has also infected the military, maybe they'll see defenders of blue states as "woke-mind-virus-infected cowards" and gleefully shoot them.
Where's that book/article that says the US is already in the next civil war...
Look at the January 6 mob...
I can imagine there's the willingness to fight for democracy or the return of the rule of law, or just "to see those corrupt scumbags be punished", people had food in 2020 but still went to the streets because of the police murder of George Floyd.
People who think we'll end up in an armed conflict with some authoritarian enemy, watch too many movies and game too much. If there is a war, it will be financial and electronic. Americans call 911 when their internet goes down, they are not going to be led into a war against their fellow Americans let alone the world because of something like DEI or Juan the illegal. Instead, they'll rise up and take these billionaires and the politicians down.
In US in particular, this is further exacerbated by the kind of weaponry that civilians have access to. For example, a .50 BMG anti-materiel rifle is perfectly legal to own in most states. So is HEIAP ammunition for it. This combination can, with some skill, take down (unarmored) helicopters. And yes, there are people who have this kind of stuff.
As far as the military, when discussing these scenarios, keep in mind that their choices, in addition to "support the president" and "oppose the president" include "do nothing". I wouldn't be surprised if that is exactly what's going to happen in the even of a full-fledged constitutional crisis escalating into paramilitary violence.
I think "the guardrails will hold" thinking is flawed when you have someone who is willing to completely side step the system and push the limits.
We're not actually sure what holding someone from this administration in contempt even looks like functionally since U.S. marshals are under the DOJ.
I'm much more worried about the guardrails when people like that get re-elected: suddenly going along with the illegal action is by far the safest thing to do.
The intellectual foundations of Thomas Paine run through the thinking of Henry George and Andrew Yang, among many others. All listed figures are basically footnotes in the dustbin of history - and humanity will pay a dear cost for ignoring their voices.
Emoluments, tax returns, the porn star, lying under oath, J6, "fake news", losers and suckers, bone spurs, snubbing Carter, crowd size bullshit, grab em by the pussy, obvious nepotism, lock her up, separating families at the border, "very fine people on both sides", "stand back and stand by", sparring with Fauci, now jailing judges, deporting people off street corners, letting Musk gut government agencies, etc etc.
And that's just off the top of my head; I'm such others have catalogued many, many more of these that I'm forgetting, but yeah... good luck to anyone who can look at a list of these things and be like "ah yes but that was all in the comfortable past, surely the guardrails that failed on every one of those previous instances will somehow hold now. Hooray!"
It was always burning since the world's been turning?
What other major US politicians in our lifetimes has had even a quarter of this and retained their office through it? Do you think after all this that Trump would go down for spying on political opponents (like Nixon in the 70s) or receiving sexual favours from an intern (like Clinton in the 90s)? It seems pretty clear to most observers that he would not, and that means the goalposts have shifted, perhaps quite considerably.
Therefore, it is a serious matter and worthy of thoughtful consideration about how to deal with in the present and safeguard against the future. Not something to be waved away with "just more burning".
Uh, Clinton factually did not "go down" for that, he was impeached and acquitted for things related to it, and served out his full two terms, and left office as the most popular outgoing President in the period that polling had been conducted up to that point.
One such catalog:
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/lest-we-forget-the-horro...
Congress needs to transition the US Marshals to the judiciary or expressly codify that the AG has no authority to direct their actions. Won't happen, but it's what Congress needs to do.
If we have a unitary executive, then the president is over the Supreme Court. I suspect that at least Justices Kavanough, Barrett, and Roberts (along with the liberals) would have a problem with that.
(Some of the liberals might be on board if the president was Harris rather than Trump, but no way are they going to agree with it while Trump is president.)
No, the Supreme Court is not part of the executive even under unitary executive theory.
OTOH, the US Marshals Service is part of the executive, and, under unitary executive theory, Congress attempting to dictate who within the executive branch can direct them must fail, as the President has absolute and unconditionally delegable authority within the executive.
But, man, if the executive is fully on board with ignoring law, what is even the point of trying?
This isn't theory, Alabama's was federalized some time when my dad was a kid. The president never rescinded the order.
The loyalties of the individuals, units, officers will choose sides on their own. I'm not holding my breath on the military being willing to enmass defect against an authoritarian though.
Historically, that's an important consideration in military loyalty under contested scenarios.
Both SCOTUS and a Governor saying that their oath to the Constitution compels (or at least authorizes) a certain course of action would be convincing to some, I'm sure.
It's quite clear that the Constitution expressly gives the President command of state militia when called into federal service, and Congress the power to specify the conditions for that, and that the Congress has specified procedures for that in law which rest solely on a Presidential determination. Each of those is black and white in law and has been demonstrated in practice as well.
That's not to say that that constrains what can actually happen in a Constitutional crisis: that's what makes Constitutional crises possible -- the black and white rules are not self-enforcing and require human decisions to align with them, and humans are always free to decide to do something else.
It was federalized and ordered to stand down after the governor had deployed it to prevent integration of a school under a federal court order. But Eisenhower didn't rely on that order alone, he also deployed the 101st Airborne to enforce the order (both the federalization of the guard and the deployment of the 101st Airborne were based on an invocation of the Insurrection Act.)
While there is a layer of legal theory around it, when it becomes an issue, it is really a question of whether the State -- both its government and the individual members of the guard -- are willing to engage in armed conflict with the federal government for whatever the dispute is at hand, more than any other consideration.
It read like a consensus opinion that left room for the Supreme Court to put additional limits in place... if it came to that.
Not really; aside from the various limitations on it (full immunity only for a few core Constitutional functions, case-by-case immunity for other "official acts" depending on impact to function of the office, no immunity aside from that), criminal prosecution after leaving office is almost never the decisive constraint on Presidential action, and that's all the immunity applies to.
What blew a massive hole in the guardrails is the a faction fully supporting Trump being an authoritarian dictator unbound by law securing full control of the GOP, and the GOP securing a two-house Congressional majority. (It doesn't hurt that they also control a majority of state legislatures and a near majority of states both legislature and executive helps here, too.)
But while technically you're correct, the implications of that ruling was that Trump could not be held accountable for the Jan6 attempted coup, giving him a huge boost to do whatever he wants with impunity. The significance was more psychological than technical. I don't believe we would see such bold power grabs by Trump if the SCOTUS had ruled against him.
Because it's clear the strategy now is 1) break all the rules; 2) let them sue; 3) if it ever makes it to SCOTUS our chances are decent, besides the fact that by the time it makes it through the courts to SCOTUS it will be too difficult to reverse what's been done. And in the meantime, use all the power of the Exec Branch to neutralize anyone who might oppose (legal firms, gov agencies, states, federal judges, etc.).
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cpac-banner-domestic-terro...
Because those words have been overused to the point of no one caring anymore. For those too young to remember, George W. Bush was _also_ called “literally Hitler”, a fascist, dumbest man alive, you name it. The left’s go-to of labeling every single Republican “Nazi” for decades is partially to blame here.
Ultimately though, despite many many calls not to do so, Congress has goven the executive branch unheard of powers. Executive power needs to be reigned in tightly and then Congressional power needs to reigned in as well. We need to push for Federalism.
It doesn't matter what the courts say if the executive can disregard that. But this is exactly what they are trying to achieve with this whole "unitary executive" BS, and willing abettance from Republicans in Congress.
Laws are useful fictions that evaporate when enough people stop believing in them.
The government is imprisoning people indefinitely (forever?) for unproven allegations and misdemeanors. They should be able to file habeas petitions for unlawful imprisonment. The courts are doing fuck all about it because the government is contracting to a foreign country to physically imprison them. That's crazy.
This doesn't sound too dissimilar from the Guantanamo bay situation, which Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden all kept going
That’s the El Salvador “hack.”
Congress passed a bill with overwhelmingly support that prevented it.
This is just a conspiracy theory but it highlights the need for due process. Without it it is very easy for governments to fabricate whatever narrative they want.
Go lookup the absolute horseshit video PragerU made about the battle of New Orleans.
The definition of "conservative" means "not-extreme." It is not just "not-liberal." It means being thoughtful, cautious, sticking with the mainstream, learning from the past, not discarding learned wisdom, etc.
Things like anti-abortion, hate-brown-people, put-women-back-in-the-kitchen-or-the-bedroom etc. stuff is often described as "conservative," because so much old culture had it, but these days, they are no longer "mainstream" principles.
I tend to be somewhat "centrist." Some of my own personal values could be construed as "conservative" (like personal Discipline and Integrity, insisting on writing very good-Quality code, or not spending money that I don't have), but I also have values that lean left (like an expansive worldview, not insisting on taking away the Agency of others, etc.).
The wrecking ball that DOGE is running through our government, right now, is not "conservative," at all.
Certainly from a political standpoint, republicans (or their equivalent in other nations) have often used these concepts against women, minorities, and the mentally ill as a means of shirking their obligation to help their fellow human. In my observation, they never make much of an attempt to live up to them in their own lives. (e.g. YOU are a welfare queen, but I am an entrepreneur who needed to take a government bailout).
On the other hand, if "conservative" means "old-fashioned" to you, then there is also no reason to believe that the people before us were morally superior to us today. My reading of history leads me to believe quite the opposite.
Hey, if we wanted to go back to real old-fashioned (pre-columbian) American values, then we could have human sacrifice, multi-god-animistic-religion, slavery (the Europeans weren't the only ones to do that), etc.
Other form of slavery were either topologically or chronologically limited. This wasn't the case for European chaptel slavery: your sons and daughter were also property, and changing localtion did not indure you to another lord, but gave him right to pursue you across the world (also, chains were mostly used during triomphs, but chained slave were in practice extremely rare, even in mines)
The "party of small government" seems to want a bigger government than any other party before them
Peoples views of what that party means don't always follow.
That's pretty wild.
From the start it was and remain to this day an ideology for those currently in power to conserve their power.
The word that describes them the best is reactionary. As a political ideology it fell out of favour some time in the late 19th, early 20th century with the fall of the various reactionary regimes (Austria under Metternich, Imperial Russia).
But the GOP, and some other parties looking to them for inspiration, are reactionary. They are opposed to any social progress and want to go back.
I see it as exact opposite.
The "left" parties have long abandoned social progress and are now regressing. Support or racism (affirmative action), terrorism, violence against women, violence against Jews, violence and rioting in general, denial of science, against meritocracy, against freedom of speech.
Technically, while going back to meritocracy, equality, freedom of speech is "reactionary", I'd definitely term it progress.
No, it really doesn't. I mean, yes, that's a definition of "conservative" in common language, but it has never been the definition of "conservative" as a label of political ideology; like many words, "conservative" means different things in different contexts.
Saying, in a discussion of political ideologies, that "conservative" means "not extreme" is like saying in a discussion of programming paradigms that "functional" means "designed to be practical and useful, rather than attractive". That is absolutely a definition of the word, but not the one relevant to the context at hand.
As a political ideology label, "conservative" was defined in reaction and opposition to liberalism and the outward distribution of power away from traditional institutional, hereditary, economic, and religious elites that it represented, and refers to the defense of the privilege and power of such elites and the traditions that sustain and emanate from them within the politico-economic system.
Now, over time since then, as there has been more progress made by liberal and other newer forces against the elites of the time that distinction arose, and even sometimes against the newer elites that arose because of early liberal successes like the bourgeoisie who displaced the feudal aristocracy as the ruling class in the capitalist world, to see their own power somewhat eroded in the transition to mixed economies, there has come to be a distinction sometimes made between plain "conservative" being the a sort of mostly-status-quo-ist defense of current elites that mostly opposes weakening their power and favors very modest steps to shore it up, versus reactionaries that favor more extreme action either to deeply retrench the power of status quo elites or to actually wind back power to past-but-currently-displaced elites -- but even in that terminology reactionaries do not stand in opposition to conservatism but simply stand further out in the same direction. There is a good argumen that the GOP was transitioned over time from plain conservative to outright reactionary, but that's not a change in direction.
Personal discipline, thoughtfulness, caution, integrity, wisdom, learning from the past, etc. are not necessarily features of one ideology or another.
Hey, you're not allowed to send those people on the plane! The plane already left even though I told you not to send it? Well, you gotta get them back! You're not sending them back? I'll just keep telling you that you have to do it, that'll really show you!
Oh, pretty please, would you return that man you illegally sent to that torture prison? No? Oh, ok, well would you at least just talk to me about it in daily reports? No? Oh, ok. I guess he'll just die there. Oh well.
The courts have asked for those people to be released from ICE custody, they haven't complied with a lot of those requests. The courts have asked for them to stop abducting people off the streets without cause but they continue doing it.
Its not a misleading perspective when it's the actual facts and reality. You're acting like well he only send a few hundred people to a torture prison so far, no big deal I guess. He's only deporting some US citizens without due process. He's only arguing having court cases for some crimes is too cumbersome so we should ignore due process for those crimes.
When will they end up charging you with a crime that's too cumbersome to prove in court and thus you no longer get due process? When your imprisonment gets publicized for how terrible it is, will you also be happy to have people shrug off that reporting as a "misleading perspective"?
Every one of those things should be klaxons sounding in the streets.
We'll see if there really aren't any more transfers to El Salvador.
It’s true that there’s a big danger of someone building a different system that could change that! Preventing that from happening is the key political challenge of today. But effective prevention requires accurate reasoning about which components of society can do what. One of the best ways to ensure there are more transfers to El Salvador is to spread the narrative that courts are powerless and nobody can stop the administration from doing it.
These people had no due process. If you have no due process, you too could be sent there. You'll argue, I'll just show them I'm a citizen. Who are you showing it to? Who are you proving it to? Who goes to review that? Which court reviewed these people's legal status? Which court reviewed the crimes Abrego Garcia was guilty of? Which court will review your case while you're already on the plane before you can even contact a lawyer?
Many of these people have lawful status in the US. They had their lawful status rescinded without due process and were trafficked out of the country without due process. Thinking "that can't happen to me!" is lemming ideology.
US citizens are already being removed from this country without due process despite having due process rights. And you're suggesting I shouldn't talk about it. That me talking about it ensures the next planes leave somehow.
> One of the best ways to ensure there are more transfers to El Salvador is to spread the narrative that courts are powerless and nobody can stop the administration from doing it
It has already been proven the courts are powerless to prevent it -- its already happened! The court told them to stop, the executive branch went ahead anyways, the court said to bring them back, and yet they're still there. Me pointing this out isn't ensuring those planes continue, Trump and his administration remaining in office ensures those planes continue.
Other than your theoretical arrest and expulsion from the country everything I've stated has already happened and is continuing to happen despite what the courts have said. After the first plane that was told it wasn't allowed to leave left and was doubly and triply clarified these planes aren't supposed to go, another plane left. Despite what the courts said. You really think the court opinions are what's holding up the next plane? Why didn't it stop those other planes?
And why would Trump stop? What, he's going to be impeached? As if that hasn't happened before. Congress isn't going to remove him despite him continually breaking the law.
I can guess the reason: your name is white-sounding. The system's mostly been shipping people who seem Hispanic to El Salvador.
Constitutions, laws, democracies are a fragile illusion that disappear the second enough people stop believing that they're real.
They do until they don't.
Sensible people will realize that separation of powers means nothing when the same party holds both powers. R House + R senate + R SCOTUS + R executive => unlimited executive power.
The only brake on this is the SCOTUS, but that only works when you actually have a scotus that is empowered to uphold the constitution.
They could have done a bit better with their voting decisions, though.
This particular move is part of the broader campaign to destroy the independent media, which as you pointed out, is textbook fascism.
If it's true then you know you should resist or you're complicit. A lot ot of 20/30/40 something Americans are going to have very difficult conversations with the new generations in 30+ years.
Resist how exactly? Protest? We're already protesting. They're barely being covered in the news. Armed resistance? Yeah that's gonna work out so well against a militarized police state.
Look through history, from the fall of rome to wwII, and those that came out best during those crises had the good sense to flee to somewhere better.
Have difficult conversations with yourself about what you're ready to do. Have the same conversations with your partner. With your family, friends, neighbors who you know are also against this.
My personal line is when the admin starts imprisoning and renditioning people that don't agree with them, and we basically heard a congressional committee make approving comments about that this week. If it starts happening, well, time for me to cash out and move abroad.
I left Russia 20 years ago for very similar reasons. I didn't think I'd be facing the same choice in US, yet here we are.
There's a difference, though. In Russia, liberals are something like 10% of the population - the groupthink is really authoritarian overall, so there was no realistic hope of fighting back in any meaningful, non-symbolic sense. But I don't think that's the case for US. The majority of people here don't want to live in an authoritarian dictatorship. Their problem is that they don't (yet?) understand that the traditional arsenal of legitimate political tools available to citizens of established democracies - things like voting or peaceful protests - becomes ineffective once authoritarians become sufficiently entrenched, and so you have to move on to other means of resistance.
Even today when the impact of tariffs are clear people rattle off everything to cover their bases - It will bring back jobs. It will create negotiation leverage for US. (If it did and China ate some of those tariffs what jobs are coming back to the US). These same people will deny their role in the mess they are creating.
Otherwise, it's just a lot of harms being created and not resolving to anyones benefit. This is accelerationist entropy not being stopped but slowed.
It's like saying, we're only going to give you one paper cut per day.
I think when Trump suggested at a rally that his supporters could shoot his opponent if she won, and that didn't immediately end his political career, we were in new and extremely dangerous territory to a degree that most failed to appreciate. Nothing short of fixing the structural problems above will get us out of it. If Trump doesn't manage a fascist takeover, we're just buying time for the next person who tries. Under the current culture and legal circumstances, one can clearly run and govern as a fascist and still see significant support.
that reminds me of the scene from Batman Begins, where falcone says he could shoot someone, and the some off duty cop sitting near him at the restaurant would not have batted an eye: https://youtu.be/4DjGB-wPGkc?t=25
does art imitate life, or life art?
The people who are out here saying "totalitarianism was the inevitable consequence of federal standards for feces in bologna" are exactly the problem in America today.
Authoritarian governments and terrorist organizations are not the same thing.
America puts too much faith in its courts and constitution.
The 2026 midterms will be essential in checking his power.
https://www.wired.com/story/antifa-social-media-rumor-forks-...
There was immense ratfuckery by those states; purging voter rolls of as many people as they could, trying to kill vote by mail, outright threats of poll workers (which very few people were prosecuted for), illegal politicking at the polls, and a literal phone call to induce a governor to falsify their election results.
170 Republican House reps voted to ignore the election of 2020. We are already past "free and fair" elections.
Donald Trump pardoned all the criminals who were attempting to storm that vote and delay/kill it. That was their intended goal. They tried to have Mike Pence abducted
Christ, the 2000 election was stolen by Republicans! The brook's brother's riot was Roger Stone's baby! Al Gore won the state once the ballots were actually counted.
I don't mean to sound hysterical but I don't share your faith for two main reasons:
- my faith in the Supreme Court diminishes with every year. It is clear a majority are far more motivated by ideology than a straightforward reading of the law
- Trump can just ignore the courts. We're not there yet but all signs show we're going in that direction. The end point of that trajectory is the involvement of the police and/or the military. I really, really hope we don't go there.
At that point, it comes down to whether Congress will impeach and remove. If Congress will not impeach and remove, the Courts are defanged and we functionally have (at least) four years of Executive rule with no legal check on that authority. If Congress will impeach and remove, it comes down to whether the Executive complies.
If the Executive does not comply...
... the point is, a lot in the American system actually hinges on the Executive's consent. And the man in the chair right now has no incentive to consent (he knows the moment the chair is no longer his, the weight of the American legal system will come down on his head and he'll at least spend the rest of his life in court cases if not incarcerated. Multiple states want his ass on a platter for crimes in their jurisdictions outside of his function as President).
It's a very dangerous time for the American Experiment, existentially.
if this were truly the case, then the orange man will fight to remain in power indefinitely. There should and need to be a civil war 2.0 if this happens - lest the bastion of western democracy falls (and it will, if that comes to pass).
Then china is the least of the USA's problems. But perhaps this is the engineered outcome desired by russia, if you would believe the conspiracy theory that trump is a foreign asset.
It is not even necessary he be, formally, a Russian foreign asset; his actions would be beneficial to Russia whether or not they actively supported him. It cannot be overstated: he is a man who believes in will-to-power logic, has consistently operated on the principle of "whatever they let me get away with is good," and has no incentive to ever stop being President.
We must save ourselves.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." [1]
Freedom is not free.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/edmund-burke-did-...
You should not. The courts are doing a reasonable approximation of their job, but have no independent enforcement power against the executive and the executive is not being particularly fastidious about compliance with court orders, and there seems to be no willingness either for lower executive officers to comply regardless of direction from above or for Congress to force accountability.
Too many judges have the same Federalist Society/Heritage Foundation ideology around expanding federal power. We've also seen the Trump admin drag its feet around complying with or outright ignore court orders.
The weirdness started in 90s. First it was cultural (TV in 90s, Jerry Springer et al). Then it was electoral (hanging Chads anyone?). Then it was constitutional (Patriot Act). Then it was psychological (all those spooks running various "alt" Q etc.). And now it is lobotomy time. Took almost 3 decades but here we are.
There was a move to make Business about numbers over People, per my Grandpa's "Back In My Day" speeches he used to give me. He blamed the MBA (no offense to MBAs) for encouraging money-over-people thinking.
This then leads to GOP appearing to value winning political power for itself over building a healthy society, in my view.
He and rest of my family of that era were deeply impacted by racism, ideological weirdness as you put it. Immigrants, refugees.
Makes me sick seeing what the GOP and their racist base are doing today. Wishing I had the balls to join in some legal actions against those turkeys.
I think this is mostly just an artifact of when you starting paying attention in your life, discounting what happened before, you are likely around 50 years old.
Remember there was the Vietnam war casus belli that was faked, the student protests and shootings, and Nixon spying on his opponents and before that there was the red scare, the Hollywood black list and segregation in the South.
I think weaving together complex set of events like this is too much like the mistake people make in a lot of "evolutionary just so" stories. The degrees of freedom are too large and it is hard to establish true causality in a realm of potentially infinite causal links just by conjecture.
I think it is easier and more productive frankly to see what levers and pressures one had right now on the government and then try to influence those.
I think government is always in tension between opposing forces and you'll align with some and against others depending on your background, disposition, position in society and your particular perspective of kinship.
> Remember there was the Vietnam war casus belli that was faked
That's not weirdness. We did that back in the day in Cuba and the Spanish-American war. Weirdness in this context is a nation changing its character, in a "weird" way.
The vastly provided rationale for all shutdowns is combatting anti-semitism, not any vague "ideological crime." However, the definition of anti-semitism has now expanded so much that even advocating for food for the hungry, DEI, anything, is all somehow anti-semitic
The leader is net split and doesn't care about most of the cluster and the "zookeeper" is happy with the leader.
If the zookeeper doesn't select a new leader the cluster is going to stay in this state.
This is no longer a representative democracy, but an autocracy.
I.e. when militias take up arms by themselves, perhaps a court would “authorize” their actions with something like this.
I don’t think any judge will voluntarily be the spark that ignites a civil war
He's already defying multiple court orders and the Congress is not impeaching him. Oh, some of the politicians are introducing articles of impeachment, but you can see quite clearly that this won't go anywhere.
He and his administration already ignored a Supreme court ruling, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=lin...
For example, they if they were reliable negotiators they could be leveraging power to get historic wins over how Universities are structured. But because they're not reliable negotiators, these universities have to fight like cornered animals.
Similarly, deporting people with the Alien Enemies Act might have snuck by a conservative supreme court. But the administration seems completely unwilling to show that there is room for remediating mistakes. They've annoyed even conservative Supreme Court members who don't seem eager to support the power grab.
If they were smart they'd also be doing things that made the economy strong, not intentionally harming people and creating a fairly universal thing to bitch and moan about - tariffs/high prices.
On the one sense GOP has had a strong negotiating position historically, as they're the party willing to burn it all down. But eventually you get to a point of unreliability as negotiating partner, that there's no appeasement to be had, and you have to go all in on opposing them.
But it really isn't. It is odd compared to living memory, but across the centuries this sort of things has happened many times. We had similar discussions after 9/11 (deportations/torture/limitations on rights). A little further back there was the red panic of the cold war. All the nixon-watergate-vietnam stuff. Before that, all the nasty things done to various peoples during WWII. Today seems shocking but is actually rather normal historically. The US moves in and out of authoritarianism regularly. And every time, everyone thinks "this time is different" when it really isn't.
You have to read into this line from the article:
> Congress directly authorized and funded CPB
He may not have the authority, but his influence over certain congress people and CPB board members can get the process moving.
Also, I have always wondered why CPB cannot just cut federal ties and become a sponsored non-profit?
During all shows you always hear or see that they are sponsored or have grants from major Fortune 500s, private families, and other institutions.
Also, whenever this defund topic comes up, CPB always says, "we receive very little from the fed, so our funding is not much and can be ignored." Well now is the time to put up and split from the US federal government officially.
https://www.propublica.org/article/big-bird-debate-how-much-...
The courts have no recourse if Trump decides to ignore them, as he already has.
Ummmm, he was elected President in a resounding defeat for Democrats. And if the election were held today the results would be the same or even worse for Democrats:
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-11-06/trump-defe...
"Trump trounced Harris in all the “blue wall” and Southern battleground states and maintained leads in Arizona and Nevada, prompting a torrent of anguish among Democrats. "
Today we continue to hear the "torrent of anguish among Democrats", who spout the same solutions they did preelection.
Sad!
You think the US is weird? Wait until you hear about what Lincoln did in his time, ha! Even weirder than that thing about committing high treason to create a kingless country with a sovereign elected by the gentile masses of all people! And all that just for "unjust" taxes for wars made and won in their own territories, tsk. There's a good reason why they call it the American "experiment"; because experiments are weird.
> You have a President who is ordering the defunding of tons of groups (universities, media, aid, institutes) while not clearly having that authority and often doing so for what he views as ideological crimes.
> Also arresting and trying to deport people for things that are not clearly crimes (newspaper op-eds, etc) and without due process.
But in all seriousness, I don't see how the end of funding is weirder than the end of it, especially given the history of the the country. I don't see how the status quo is somehow more legitimate. The President is the only elected official of the government. Congress passes laws, and the judiciary can only issue judgements and have no power over the purse nor the sword. The president has the authority to decide where the money goes and how it is attributed and how the laws are executed. The same goes for the non-citizens who reside in the US under the privilege of a visa or other executive permissions; the legal precedents about this are quite clear that the President has broad authority to decide who gets to stay or not. "Due process" defers to the question to which process is due, in the case of illegal aliens there is none except what the executive decide what is due, except for the determination of the illegal alien status in itself.
> The CPB fails to abide by these principles to the extent it subsidizes NPR and PBS.
> Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter.
> What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.
Honest question, does NPR have any token conservative pundits or voices on their broadcasts or shows? I know they have a lot of minority representation. As usual, Trumps proposed solution is idiotic. But maybe there could be an unofficial settlement to make sure all perspectives are heard?
Assuming this is even a problem…
The attack on PBS seems ridiculous.
They used to (e.g., Bob Edwards, who founded Morning Edition) but the Overton Window shifted out from under them. Steve Inskeep today lies somewhere in the center-right (a fiscally conservative Never-Trumper is my brief take on him) but that’s not right enough to count as a conservative these days.
They do the same format almost all news shows do where they introduce an issue and have two people with opposing views discuss it (there was a recent one about fossil fuels and renewables which I can't find...). This format doesn't always fall along "conservative vs other" lines though, because issues aren't necessarily that simple.
They also have one on one interview with Republican lawmakers as well. This one is from today's Morning Edition: https://www.npr.org/2025/05/02/nx-s1-5383297/rep-jeff-hurd-d...
"Reality has a well known liberal bias." — Stephen Colbert, 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ-a2KeyCAY&t=4m11s
When that is the other "side", then honesty will seem biased. The middle is would be something like lying 25% of the time.
A better example of a bias would be texts from Fox news anchors privately trashing Sidney Powell as a lying hack while they, simultaneously, plan to boost her appearances to make election interference seem more plausible [1]. Or saying they can't fact check Trump anymore [2].
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/all-the-texts-fox-ne... [2] https://www.mediaite.com/news/this-has-to-stop-now-new-bombs...
Most Americans wanting to tax the rich/large corporations: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/19/most-amer...
Wanting to legalize marijuana: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/03/26/most-america...
The government should supply universal healthcare to Americans: https://news.gallup.com/poll/468401/majority-say-gov-ensure-...
It’s like you have to cover stuff up, deny and lie to be a conservative.
Depends which conservative is the president, now.
Is this what we're calling "truth" now?
Oh and to my original point, why is this not cited or linked to in the executive order? I think it would strengthen it if anything.
This is an interview with an author that NPR acknowledges as controversial, not NPR presenting the author’s opinions as fact. But I doubt the distinction matters in the current rhetorical environment.
I could happily cherry-pick any of the multiple times they’ve interviewed controversial, evangelical Christian leaders and come to the opposite “revelation.”
> That acknowledgement was tacked on well after publication.
Retractions and postscripts are an accepted feature of journalism.
The original title was "One Author's Argument 'In Defense Of Looting'".
https://web.archive.org/web/20200827191914/https://www.npr.o...
> Even interviewing this person was an absurdity and revelatory of the kind of bias at npr.
So news organizations should not cover things which may seem sensational, especially those which are being actively talked about in the context of the current news cycle?
That, or the Boston Tea Party should be reframed as an illegitimate form of protest against His Majesty and His Majesty's Representatives In the New World.
When, oh when, will American classrooms stop teaching that those looters were just honest young men fighting for their freedoms? I'm tired of this propaganda in our public schools. /s
> Ah yes, one piece of free speech justifies deleting the entire station.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/vicky-osterweil/in-...
"because they had to appeal to all these new Black and Brown nations all over the world" was updated to "because they had to appeal to all these new Black and brown nations all over the world".
Glad that they clarified that for me.
It's telling that you chose not to link the actual piece: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...
https://archive.is/2020.08.27-191914/https://www.npr.org/sec...
The mere fact that they platformed such an extreme, insane viewpoint is the issue. If you can find a similarly sympathetic platforming of a far right nutter by NPR, maybe I’ll take you seriously. Show me one NPR story about the J6 riots that contorts this far to justify and I’ll concede the point entirely.
I listened to NPR for over 20 years and the bias became gag worthy toward the end.
That’s classic bias.
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/31/nx-s1-5077780/extremely-ameri...
Part of whole, unbiased programming is giving interviews to people on the edges, to extremists. If you don't do that, you're intentionally augmenting the story. People do this with the right all the time. They'll purposefully ignore the extremists, which in turn creates an image that such groups are completely rational. For example, news did this constantly with covid denialists like Qanon. They seem just like skeptics of the government... when you ignore the jewish space lasers and 5G covid vaccine. And then that backfired when Qanon attempted a coup. Um, oops!
> This story was updated on Sept. 1, 2020. The original version of this story, which is an interview with an author who holds strong political views and ideas, did not provide readers enough context for them to fully assess some of the controversial opinions discussed.
The core programming, things like The Sound of Ideas, Marketplace, Morning Edition, the hourly news updates, etc hardly have “gag worthy” bias.
Regarding platforming a J6 insurrectionist: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/21/g-s1-29188/new-npr-series-a-g...
"hand-wringing about looting" -> "condemnation of looting"
"bemoaned the property damage" -> "denounced the property damage"
"Korean small-business owner murdering 15-year-old Latasha Harlins" -> "Korean small-business owner [killing] 15-year-old Latasha Harlins"
Someone else in this thread posted a diffed view of the interview demonstrating how NPR reshaped the article a week after publication. Very, very instructive.
not making a very good argument with this
Steve Inskeep did 30 minutes with Steve Bannon this week. They did a piece with Chris Rufo yesterday (he's the guy that got right wing media to start freaking out about CRT, and then DEI). But please, do go on clutching your pearls about the WORST POSSIBLE THING EVER: PROPERTY DAMAGE!! Nope, not civil rights violations or gleefully platforming some of the most objectively harmful viewpoints on modern politics, nope, it's PROPERTY DAMAGE that is absolutely the most important possible thing to get upset about.
Comparing calling out that illegal bigotry to people trying to justify looting is precisely what people are saying is biased.
The time for caring about and preserving civic-level notions of neutrality and objectivity was a decade ago. I don't care anymore. If wingnuts want to unduly influence Americans through broadcasting, they can do it like everyone else--without taxpayer dollars.
It's a free country so people are afforded the right to be hypocrites, but nobody is entitled to receive public funding when doing so.
Irony it's called "viewpoint diversity" when your side does it, and "platforming extremist views" when the other side does it.
Most other administrations were more... considered in their choice of language.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/endi...
It doesn't take away CPB's money - it just tells them that they can't fund NPR and PBS anymore, but NPR only gets about 1% of it's funding from CPB anyway. I couldn't find the number for PBS.
Congress fully funded CPB (NPR, PBS, etc.) through September 2027
in the Continuing Resolution PASSED THIS YEAR BY THIS CONGRESS
"The delegation of discretionary power to make such orders is required to be supported by either an expressed or implied congressional law, or the constitution itself"
If something were to be de-funded, it should be done by the congress as that's where it was initially funded right?
It seems to me the our checks and balances are failing. The judicial branch, at least at the highest level, seems to be mostly supporting him, even when they don't have much or any constitutional ground to do so.
It has failed to argue that it is in a National Emergency of Invasion as justification for deporting citizens and aliens without Due Process.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/big-ten-michigan-schools-moves-11...
Before cuts: “really folks, the public funding we receive is barely anything at all, why even bother, it’s a rounding error in the big scheme of things.”
During cuts: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING THIS IS GOING TO DESTROY US AND DOOM THE COUNTRY!”
IMO, it really goes to show, it's not necessarily funding sources, but a matter of leadership/authority. The captain steers the boat so to speak. I've always been impressed with Brian Lamb.
We are constantly fighting the same battle in Canada where the right-wing accuses media of being left-leaning, while most major news outlets are actually American-owned and slant right a lot of the time.
We are truly in a post-fact world now.
I'm at the other side of the world, but one example from my local area is the municipality selling off and privatizing lots of stuff. When the worm is out of the can, you can't get it back in.
If we actually swallowed the red pills, we'd all be slaves with no ownership, no education, and no rights. The same thing they frequently accuse socialism of.
I love(d) the CBC. I grew up watching it every day, and listening to it on the radio in the car. Some of the programming is still fantastic, but tuning into a national broadcast funded by the taxpayer, one would expect by chance alone to go more than 5 consecutive minutes without hearing someone bring up “black”, “queer”, “indigenous”, “climate change” or having every caller or interview be some sort of spokesperson or research chair with one of those words in their title. Combined with things like job listings explicitly but professionally saying “white men need not apply”, most reasonable individuals would say they turned certain dials a little too far left for anyone listening that’s not a young progressive or outside of an urban core.
They also tend to leave out facts or context from certain topics and news stories where including it may reflect poorly on certain groups or a person of a certain identity. Lying by omission for the greater good is an editorial decision they’re comfortable with, leaving those who use it as their sole news source with stances that align broadly with progressive beliefs of systemic XYZ or discrimination in events where it’s a spurious assertion when considering details they leave out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CBC_Radio/comments/1ao0ie1/what_the...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskACanadian/comments/18cz52m/why_d...
Etc.
Pointing out why many people take issue with the modern state of CBC, particularly all of their non-news content, doesn’t put one in opposition with the things they’re prioritizing.
Sounds like there's an obvious way for any party to get good press from the CBC /s
The fact that you think "climate change" is an evidence of bias betrays your own bias.
I refrained from including in my original reply that another issue is that those they’ve increasingly tailored their personas/programming to legitimately can’t see any issue with how CBC has changed in the last 10 years. Whether that’s because they’re not old enough to remember the CBC when it was far more dry and neutral I’m not sure.
Also I missed this in your original comment
> Combined with things like job listings explicitly but professionally saying “white men need not apply”,
This sounds shockingly illegal. Do you have an example?
As far as the job posting controversy it has happened a few times, the worst being where they put “any race except Caucasian” in a casting call for a kids tv host, and “preference given to women etc” on most others. It’s legal in Canada though you’re not supposed to say the quiet parts out loud like the former example.
It's pretty hard to argue that PBS and NPR do not have a left wing bias. The closest thing they'd have to a conservative voice would be bringing in a token anti-Trump (generally former) Republican.
NPR's legal affairs correspondent was close friends with Justice Ginsburg. The latter even officiated Totenberg's wedding. Do you really think she could give an unbiased report on anything involving the court? Get real... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Totenberg#Conflicts_of_in...
Real question is, why are we subsidizing it all?
If the masses want to consume left wing dribble, let them fund it themselves. The right already does that for conservative talk radio. Let the market decide.
PBS would always make mention of support from, 'Viewers like you". When in reality it was from "Tax payers of which 50+% likely do not agree with funding this content".
'Viewers like you' send in donations that public broadcasting stations use to purchase rights to broadcast NPR/PBS programming or programming from whatever other sources they want. The CPB doesn't dictate what the stations can broadcast they provide resources so that they can broadcast. The money they get from the CPB usually goes to cover operational costs, which donations may not cover, especially in rural areas.
A lot of Canadians also think the CBC is too expensive but it is less expensive than the BBC and public media in most of the EU. The British government pays BBC $100/person/year. The Canadian government pays CBC $29/person/year.
NPR and PBS fact check their reporting and have real journalists. Fox News lies all of the time on the air and has media personalities as hosts. Yes, of course, there's no absolutes and some hosts or shows are more biased than others, and people make mistakes. Hosts show their biases unconsciously sometimes too. If your host lives in New York for instance, their views are shaped by that, vs if they live in Kentucky.
But this politicization of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service is ridiculous and just shows how much this administration is trying to get us into a post-truth world. Facts matter!
Don't succumb to this Culture of Fear.
There is a reason the US has three branches of government instead of one despite misguided individuals that believe otherwise.
Whether they are “co-equal” depends on who you ask but it is a lie to claim they are not accountable when their accountability is to congress directly via funding.
The point was to eliminate the concept of a king. The president was meant as a figurehead, with almost no power.
If you've listened to NPR or watched PBS, you know they're about as neutral as you can get while still covering both mainstream sides.
This style of governance is so lazy - instead of working through Congress to change the law, he tries to bully an independent board into doing what he wants. It's also so easy to oppose, the board can just ignore it.
NPR is about as far from neutral as media gets, both in topics they choose to cover and in editorial bias.
Really? While Fox and OAN exist? Care to provide any examples of that non neutrality?
> “CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority. Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.
“In creating CPB, Congress expressly forbade ‘any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors…’ 47 U.S.C. § 398(c).”
I listen to NPR every day, have for over fifteen years. There is a lot more yelling at the radio these days. They are very open with their bias. They only promote programing that services the lefts cultural position. There is not a shred of balanced coverage here. They treat their economic and moral theory as accepted and undisputed fact. This isn't news anymore.
Congress is forbidden from exercising editorial control, but is China? Love when they choose to push articles like this, or focus on Tik tok "stealing data" rather than "shamelessly influencing our children" with that data. https://www.npr.org/2025/01/15/nx-s1-5260742/tiktok-china-re...
This looks like a thorny legal tangle indeed. It would appear incoherent lawmaking to insist that no "officer of the United States" can "exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors" whilst simultaneously legislating that it may not "contribute to or otherwise support any political party."
Who is meant to enforce that rule exactly, if nobody who works for the US government is allowed to exercise any supervision or control? A literal reading would say that even the DoJ may not prosecute any infraction of the political neutrality rule, thus violating the principle that nobody is above the law.
Please give, say, five specific examples from the last 30 days.
I find it a shell of its former self.
May I also point out that your assumptions and stereotypes only serve to reinforce others’ entrenchments.
This is often repeated but I can't see how it could possibly hold true. Demonizing the other side has worked splendidly for republicans. Voters don't seem to care. Sure, they'll act all up in arms about "deplorables" (spoiler: they were then and are now, Hillary would have probably gone further by doubling down on that) but republicans say horrible things about democrats or people they see as "other" and it doesn't matter to their "family values" (a fully unmasked lie) voters.
I'm tired of people pretending "If we were only a little nicer to the people trying destroy the country this never would have happened"
Plenty of identical example in history, none of them lead to good things.
Trump knows very well how to achieve his goals. The problem with Trump is his lack of any discernible ethics, morality, or compassion. Not his lack of ability to gain power and accomplish his goals.
Everything about him and his actions and words reek of stupidity. He does not hold any understanding of the complexities of anything. He does not write. When he does, he misspells and uses incorrect grammar. He does not read. He has rudimentary understanding of basics. Etc.
So why is it that you find him to be intelligent? What exactly does he say or write that would lead you to this conclusion?
He has a genius for communication and persuasion that is undeniably effective. He understands the weak points in our political system and attacks them directly.
He's dumb when it comes to things educated people care about. But he's smart when it comes to getting what he wants.
Some of the most fundamental traits of an healthy democracy that the U.S. doesn't have:
* the US doesn't have real alternation in power: only 3 other democratic countries in the world have the same duopoly of political parties the US has: Japan, Mexico and South Korea. These 2 parties have an absolute control of the political process. Democrats have all the means to block the rise of any socialist or Green party. Republicans have all the means to block the rise of a Libertarian party. Healthy democracies are not like that; parties rise and fall according to the changes of worldviews.
* the US doesn't have real separation of powers: in a democracy the courts of law are supposed to work independently of the other branches. But in the US, judges are political agents loosely affiliated to the parties duopoly. They are elected to lower courts by party affiliations, with campaigns financed by the political parties. They rise in the courts' echelons by cultivating and nurturing this partisan loyalty. They are partisan agents in disguise. No other country practices this corruption of democracy principles.
* bribing politicians is legal in the US. It is called "campaign financing" and it is ok and stimulated. No other country in the world accepts that.
So, yes, the US is not a real democracy in any meaningful definition of the word. It's not far from Russia or other countries where you can also put a vote in the box, but that won't affect the outcome of the election.
State and local democracies, which are extremely impactful to education, housing, roads, and most services Americans touch day-to-day, are quite different from the national news and face different challenges.
However, I think your comment on campaign donations is incorrect. Donations are allowed in many OECD countries. See for example https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/anti-corruption-and-int....
What exactly do you mean here? Looking up the limits on corporate and individual donations to political campaigns in several other countries it appears that many have looser limits than the US.
For individual donations this includes the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, probably Brazil (the limit is based on the donor's previous year income), India, and South Korea.
Several with looser limits on corporate donations include the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, and India.
Where the US seems to stand out is in Super PACs. I didn't find anything really similar elsewhere.