“When Pierre goes down, he goes down in flames”

— Punch line to old aviation joke

The Republicans finally did something great that I thought they never would have the stones to do. They reduced the funding for the government-controlled media outfit called The Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Hallelujah!

CPB was established half a century ago with the good intention of providing television and radio services to rural America in a day long before cable TV and megawatt radio stations made television and radio ubiquitous, and long, long before the internet made them obsolete.

Fine.

Then they expanded into children’s programming like Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, to give children an alternative to Saturday morning cartoons.

Fine. But notice the inevitable expansion. Taxpayer-funded enterprises have a way of doing that.

Then they expanded into cultural offerings like Masterpiece Theater and British comedy.

Not so fine. Why do the wealthy elites who watch Masterpiece Theater and British comedy (or is it “comedy”?) need taxpayer subsidies? And why do we allow cultural offerings selected by semi-government bureaucrats and apparatchiks to use taxpayer money to undermine the competing cultural offerings on commercial TV and the internet?

Then they went woke.

Everyone knew CPR was woke, and then a long-time editor wrote a piece for The Free Press (you should check out TFP, by the way) that amounted to a full blown exposé. He revealed their conscious attempt to bury the Hunter laptop story, to trumpet the false Russian collusion story, to dismiss the lab-origins of COVID, and so on. NPR had become a Democratic government mouthpiece.

He reported that at the headquarters of their radio arm, NPR, there were 87 registered Democrats and 0 Republicans. Unsurprisingly, Democrats were staunch supporters of NPR, and vice versa. Republicans, not so much.

For that exposé, NPR suspended the editor temporarily and ostracized him permanently. Consider the Pravda-esk irony that a government organization charged with reporting news punishes an employee for doing exactly that, because the particular news he dares to report is that the organization is biased in reporting the news. He ultimately resigned.

This week, the Republican Senate voted to claw back about a billion dollars in taxpayer-money allocated to CPB over the next two years. All Democrats voted against the claw-back. Two purported Republicans joined them, but the measure passed the Senate and later passed the House. It’s now on President Trump’s desk for signature.

So, what will happen? CPB and its labyrinth of entities have always simultaneously maintained that (1) they receive hardly any taxpayer money, and (2) taking away their taxpayer money will cripple them.

Both are lies. They do receive a lot of taxpayer money – a billion dollars over two years isn’t chicken feed – and they will not be crippled by losing it. If nothing else, the Democratic National Committee will toss them a few hundred million, directly or laundered through George Soros and his minions.

The CEO of NPR had a few choice words:

“I’m so done with late-stage capitalism.”
“America is addicted to white supremacy.”
“White silence is complicity.”
“I’m grateful those who have pointed out my phrasing could be understood as trans-erasure.”
“Horses inspire awe and foster a sense of identity. More kids should have access to these incredible animals. But most horse spaces are white spaces.”
“I know that hysteric, white woman voice. I was taught to do it. I’ve done it. That’s whiteness”
“What is the deranged racist sociopath ranting about today? I truly don’t understand.”
“Donald Trump is a racist.”

Oops, those are her tweets over the years. Gee, how could anyone accuse them of bias?