May
2
2025

One Small Cheer for Trump…

Let us go direct to the NPR site for the good news: Trump orders end to federal funding for NPR and PBS.

President Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's board of directors to "cease federal funding for NPR and PBS," the nation's primary public broadcasters. Trump contends that news coverage by NPR and PBS contains a left-wing bias. The federal funding for NPR and PBS is appropriated by Congress.

The executive order, like many that have been signed by the president, could be challenged in court.

"Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter," the executive order says. "What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to tax-paying citizens."

The article goes on to note that NPR stations get about 10% of their funds from federal funding. For PBS stations, it's about 15%. So this isn't a death sentence ("unfortunately").

Let me recycle a couple quotes from a Pun Salad article last month from Michael Chapman at Cato: End All Taxpayer Funding of CPB, NPR, PBS.

President Donald Trump is not a libertarian, but some of his policies for downsizing the federal government certainly fall in the libertarian column. This is true, for instance, of the administration’s drive to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which helps to fund PBS and NPR. Scholars at the Cato Institute have called on Congress for decades to stop subsidizing the CPB. With enough political momentum behind them, perhaps Congress can get it done this time.

“Republicans must defund and totally disassociate themselves from NPR & PBS,” said Trump on Truth Social on April 1. In late March, he told reporters that he “would love to” defund PBS and NPR. “It’s been very biased. The whole group … and it’s a waste of money especially,” he said.

And later in the article:

“We wouldn’t want the federal government to publish a national newspaper,” Cato’s David Boaz testified before Congress in 2005. “Neither should we have a government television network and a government radio network.” Congress should “terminate the funding for CPB,” he added.

Boaz, author of The Libertarian Mind and former Distinguished Senior Fellow at Cato, further testified, “If anything should be kept separate from government and politics, it’s the news and public affairs programming that informs Americans about government and its policies. When government brings us the news—with all the inevitable bias and spin—the government is putting its thumb on the scales of democracy. Journalists should not work for the government. Taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize news and public affairs programming.”

I also pointed out that back in the previous century we really did have a (sorta) national newspaper sponsored by the "Committee on Public Information". Like many bad ideas of the era, it was the brainchild of Woodrow Wilson and (Wikipedia says) "the first state bureau covering propaganda in the history of the United States."

But not the last. Yesterday's news also brought word of the modern "national newspaper" published by Uncle Stupid: the White House Wire. It's the only newspaper Trump needs to read!

And four boos for Trump:

  • George Will is on target: The Trump GOP’s attacks on universities advance the left’s agenda (gifted link).

    Even academics are educable, so universities might emerge from their current travails improved — more willing to include intellectual diversity on campuses, or at least be more circumspect about impeding it. This is the good news.

    The bad news: Republicans rejoicing about breaking academia to the saddle and bridle of federal government supervision demonstrate that we have two parties barely distinguishable in their shared enthusiasm for muscular statism. As “conservatives” mount sustained attacks on left-dominated educational institutions, they advance the left’s perennial agenda — the permeation of everything with politics.

    Such statism will extinguish the core conservative aspiration: a civil society in constant creative ferment because intermediary institutions — schools, businesses, religious and civic organizations — are given breathing room, and are free to flourish or fail without supervision from above by a minatory central authority.

    Will is in favor of "protecting Jewish students from campus antisemitism." I'd go a little farther to expose and fight universities' race-biased admissions and hiring.

  • Is Trump a RINO? It's getting tough to tell, according to Jim Geraghty: Trump Echoes Bernie Sanders in Opposing Consumer Choices. He resurrects Bernie's horror about the capitalist cornucopia encountered at Walgreens and Foot Locker: "You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country."

    I can't imagine how nonplussed Bernie was when…

    Taking questions during a cabinet meeting, President Trump shrugged off the possibility of empty shelves or limited selection as a result of a trade war with China:

    I told you before, they’re having tremendous difficulty because their factories are not doing business. Uh, they made a trillion dollars when, with Biden, a trillion dollars even a trillion one with Biden, selling us stuff — much of it we don’t need. You know, somebody said, “oh the shelves are going to be open.” Well maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.

    This is a really, really bad defense of the likely economic consequences of the tariffs and trade war with China. Remember, the ships stopped leaving from China to America’s West Coast ports, and the amount of trucks leaving Los Angeles last week was comparable to Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, usually the lowest-volume days of the year.

    Bernie: "Those putzes stole my shtick!"

    More economic incoherence to come, unfortunately…

  • Sounds like the worst Marvel movie ever. Veronique de Rugy imagines this supervillain team-up: The Doll Tyrants and the iPhone Fantasists (gifted link).

    The first degrowth president  of the United States, President Trump, recently defended his tariffs with this gem: “They have ships that are loaded with stuff we do not need” and “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.” Meanwhile, his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, former CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, lamented: “We invent the iPhone, which is awesome. Why do we let everyone else build it? Why can’t we build it here? . . . We need hundreds of thousands of Americans who work in those factories.”

    \

    It’s hard to overstate how economically ignorant, politically tone-deaf, and philosophically tyrannical these statements are.

    Note the "gifted link", number one for the merry month of May. Vero does not hide her disdain.

  • And for more on that… Liz Wolfe is also unimpressed with the administration's efforts to drive us down the Road to Serfdom: Howard Lutnick wants more Americans to work in factories.

    I am not cut out for the factory life: Sorry to disappoint Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who apparently has big plans for us all.

    "You go to the community colleges, and you train people!" he says, before listing two universities—Arizona State University and Grand Canyon University—that are decidedly not community colleges. "It's time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. You know, this is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here. You know, we let the auto plants go overseas. Now you should see an auto plant, it's highly automated but the people, the 4-5,000 people who work there, they are trained to take care of those robotic arms."

    Not just you working there, but your kids and grandkids! Is that what you always dreamed about, or was it a nightmare?

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