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I suppose this is in response to this executive order: ENDING TAXPAYER SUBSIDIZATION OF BIASED MEDIA https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/endi...

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...

This part of the EO is peculiar: “The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall determine whether “the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio (or any successor organization)” are complying with the statutory mandate that “no person shall be subjected to discrimination in employment . . . on the grounds of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex.” 47 U.S.C. 397(15), 398(b). In the event of a finding of noncompliance, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall take appropriate corrective action.”

Why is the Secretary of Health and Human Services the one responsible for this?

Because RFK Jr is considered sufficiently loyal that they are willing to follow Trump's directives without question. This is the only qualification that truly matters to Trump.

This qualification is particularly important for a role you want to use to arbitrarily punish people who aren't loyal enough.

They hand out responsibilities to whomever is most likely to agree and follow through with whatever Trump says.

Isn't it crazy that the supposed 'biased media' directly targets PBS who I know from watching children's shows as well as NOVA (it's been going for 51 seasons). These shows don't scream biased to me, they scream educational.

Education to the uneducated (or those who would prefer we remain uneducated in the face of power) can easily cast any education as "biased" against their purposes. Most people see through that for what it is, but an increasing population of Americans don't.

“It is a well known fact that reality has liberal bias.”

This is a really dumb quote.

It started under Bush Jr. And was true in its context then.

I never found it so, as going through "liberal" media I tend to see far fewer lies than I do when I wonder over to the world of mainstream conservative news.

It's a less well-known fact that criminals love chaos and grifters/scammers love the poorly educated.

NOVA regularly acknowledges the existence of climate change.

Some episodes even have the audacity to claim that humans evolved from apes and that the earth is billions of years old!

They don't even acknowledge how Unifying, Lovely, and Respectful the Declaration of Independence which started the Revolutionary War was! Where is their discussion of the Continental Army's take over airports during the War?

It was Yyyuuuuuge!

The republicans are intent on gutting education. Having an electorate fluent in science, the ability to test if statements are true or false, etc., are all in direct opposition to their agenda.

They don't know what bias is or they wouldn't watch Fox News and they don't know anything about the orgs they pile on. For example- I read New Yorker (a liberal "rag" I'm told) yet I've read lovely profiles of Amy Coney Barrett and John Thune.

One thing I've noticed is this administration is very online and this is likely a response to conservatives crying that NPR and CPB are biased, which they are to an extent (just listen to the NPR politics podcast for example).

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.

You must understand, the culture war types are so absurdly radical that BEN SHAPIRO's adult cartoon was considered "woke" because it had a gay character who was the butt of every joke, and that was not harsh enough to satisfy them.

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 absurdly radical that BEN SHAPIRO's adult cartoon was considered "woke" because it had a gay character who was the butt of every joke

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.

To these people educational is a synonym for biased. They depend on uneducated people and they have a chip on their shoulder from being between somewhat and extremely dumb themselves.

Please don't make the mistake of thinking they're equally stupid as their voters. Many of them know exactly what they are doing and why.

Totally toothless. CBP is created and funded by Congress, the president doesn't get to tell them how to spend their funds.

Ask the nih how that’s going.

--doesn't-- -> shouldn't

no one will stop him.

Have you not been paying attention to what is happening? Republicans do not care and will not stop Trump from doing what he wants.

thousands of people have been laid off due to similarly "toothless" orders

What a poor example.

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

Reality skews heavily left. Should the news be about reality or ideology?

Everybody loves communism except those who've actually experienced it.

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.

It's somewhat messier than that. While I am aquatinted with the authoritarian nightmare that was Stalin himself, and with the DDR's Stasi, and think that Marx's vision was *only* an improvement *relative to pre-New Deal era capitalism* and doesn't have much to offer to the modern world[0], there's people in ex-communist countries who yearn for a return to the "good old days" and don't see what the problem was.

(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.

PBS would say that.

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.

Perhaps a relevant context is that the 44% is highest of any UK media.

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...

Good lord. So now there's no objective truth, yes? Just which media is trusted by whom? So the government no longer has the remit to report, and to insure reportage of objective truth? My point is that while BBC may only be trusted by 45% of the population, that doesn't matter: They are doing their best to report objectively. So is PBS and NPR. You can make whatever accusations you want about trust, or bias, but can you point to a news article where PBS or NPR was objectively false? I can turn on Fox news and instantly hear lies at any moment, or at best, failure to report facts. Did you know that Fox didn't even report the stock market drop after liberation day? They just pretended it wasn't happening! Welcome to 1984. Orwell was a few decades off.

There is such a thing as objective truth. Note that NPR's former head doesn't believe that [1]. Anyway, most people in Britain disagree that the BBC does its best to report it. Here's a simple reality check: how does the BBC describe right wing politicians? Dame Andrea Jenkyns DBE is a former Tory MP, government minister and campaigner for Brexit. She has a degree in economics, spent 20 years in Parliament and she just won mayorship of Greater Lincolnshire. This is the headline the BBC went with:

"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...

I'm not sure public trust really matters. A lot of times people distrust what they just don't like to hear.

People aren't forced to pay for the BBC though. Public funding is through a TV licence rather than tax, with the licence being "required" only if you watch live TV or use the BBC streaming service. Given the other streaming services available it's very easy to watch TV without it. I've never paid.

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.

Yes, the UK is slowly backing away from enforcing the license fee (they also talk of decriminalization), partly because the immorality of it is clear to everyone and because those who don't care for it are now in the majority.

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.

What profound moral problem are you talking about? If you take your point even further, you could argue there’s a moral problem with forcing people who are distrusting of or despise the government to pay taxes at all, but it’s generally agreed that the health of a country in part does depend on revenues generated by taxes (since you need money to pay for things that benefit many people, like roads, public transit, etc.).

Yeah, the morality of taxation and the role of the state is a deep topic that has been debated for thousands of years.

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.

Maybe your argument makes sense in the US, but in many countries (like here in Germany) there do exist TV and radio that are publicly funded, trusted, and good, so yes I’m more than okay that I have to pay monthly, and in your words, “forcibly subscribed” to the ARD and ZDF. I think having trustworthy news that is accessible to everyone is extremely useful and important so even if I didn’t use them myself I’m glad to pay so that others can.

The argument makes sense everywhere. There exist in Germany TV and radio that maybe you trust and think are good, and maybe you enjoy forcing other people pay for them against their will. But there are many people who would profoundly disagree with you on that in Germany: ask any AfD voter.

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.

I really dislike this line of argument that goes like "everything is the same as everything else so why don't you oppose this?".

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.

FOX isn't a private entertainment programme, it's a channel that's focused exclusively on news and current affairs. State media is the one that includes drama, comedy etc. If your argument is based on that distinction you'll have to rethink it. If it's just left wing good, right wing bad, then you've made my argument for me!

Your lighthouse parable is still highly relevant for public broadcasters when you consider that modern public broadcasting heavily subsidize expensive original reporting that for-profit newspapers are free to and happy to republish.

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.

Yes, people who enjoy state TV like making other people pay for their enjoyment. That's immoral. Certainly, you cannot argue it's moral because you personally believe it's high quality. Lots of people in any country feel the exact opposite: that state TV damages the entire information ecosystem and is outright malign. Under what consistent moral code should they be forced to pay for it?

I don't enjoy making others pay for my entertainment. What a petty way to frame the discussion.

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.

I already showed that the UK - definitely a country in Northern Europe - doesn't have a majority that finds its state broadcaster trustworthy. We can assume those people who don't find it trustworthy don't support it, or if they do, do so only out of inertia and wouldn't care if it went away either.

> 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.

> 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".

> 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.

It's not more hyperbolic than many other claims about morality in politics.

In the US the 'press' / media is supposed to be a quasi 4th branch of government (society by the people, for the people).

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.

Unfortunately, the media is put in a position of desperate survival mode with the advent of the attention economy. Which has unsurprisingly lead to the "reality-TV-ification" of TV news, and the lazy "here's-what-is-happening-according-to-twitter-journalism" of print media.

Wait until you hear about Fox News which is funded by advertisers who make money from people's pockets.

>>The U.S. is almost literally off the chart for how little we allocate towards our public media.

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.

News can be non-political. Also throwing out your bigfoot analogies didn't really add any meaningful response to GP.

Not paying for them with public money is neutral with me; however yet again, this is illegal, only Congress can change funding for these organizations and yet Congress lets another act of tyranny go through unanswered and democracy ends not with a bang and not even with a whimper...

Yeah, this is the funniest thing about this EO.

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.

But outside donations do also have potential strings. Think how much strings mozilla has been having with the money google gives them. Of course, there's no strings attached from a legal perspective. But i dont think anyone is kidding themselves that it's not strings attached money.

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).

$100 per person per year is an insane amount of spending on an information outlet controlled by the government.

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?

That's a $1.50 too many.

When I first moved to the US (Bay Area) and discovered NPR in my first week there I almost couldn’t believe that there was such a source of high quality and thoughtful programming.

The value destruction of the last few months has been astonishing.

NPR gets the vast majority of funding (last I checked) from members. So make sure you donate at their next pledge drive.

Same for PBS and its member 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.

The largest item on their revenue chart seems to be "corporate sponsorships." You know, the companies in all those totally-not-commercials you hear on your local non-commercial stations.

https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

Earlier today, I mentioned what you commented in another forum, and wise person pointed out to me that that it's the rural stations that will be affected most by this.

When you consider the rural media options, this will be a huge shift in those markets if the funding is not replaced.

This is simply not true, at all, and NPR themselves deliberately try to obfuscate the truth.

"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.

Local radio stations are so good. I've been listening to them more in my car because they talk about local news, not the shit you read online. I haven't had a TV in ages, so this is my main way of staying in touch with what's going on around here.

There are also plenty that make their programming available online and which is of general interest. It's quite fun, engaging and informative to dip into stations in places you've never been or places you remember fondly. One of my kids recently got a globe and that led to us trying to find Antarctica's ICE 104.5 FM AFAN online last night -- without success, sadly.

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.

NPR will be fine without public funding. They will have to tighten their belt of course and can always use a donation, but they'll be okay. This is all an issue because they won't straight lie about Trump to the public like fox news does on a regular basis

If he actually cared about unbiased media, he would reinstate the Fairness Doctrine which he won't do because that would kill Fox, Newsmax, and the rest of the Republican propaganda outlets.

They are trying to reinstate it or create something sort of equivalent...but only for media they consider to be liberal.

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.

That is my point. They do not care about bias in media just like they don't care about government inefficiency or illegal immigration. There are easy wins you could make towards fixing all of these things if you wanted to but they choose not to because they don't care. They want fear, authority, and control.

Agreed. This is the root of the rise of evil in our country. I'm mostly pissed that Democrats were so short sighted to not reinstate it during Clinton or Obama. Now it is too late.

Alas, I'm confident that, if they had reinstated it, it would have been struck down by the Supreme Court by now for violating the First Amendment.

The Fairness Doctrine doesn't prevent you from saying anything, it just says for certain topics, you must also present the opposing view.

Yes. That's compelled speech which is also disfavored under the First Amendment. (It would probably be fair to say "prohibited" -- but, as always, it's complicated.)

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.

all benefitted, dem aligned media benefitted even more in crusading against Trump as it brought headlines and attention to opinion pieces. Ironically this reinforced Trump and allowed him to present himself as a victim of a witch hunt

I think the problem with that is: who defines "fair"

Is it fair to criticize Trump? What if that criticism is based on "alternate facts" according to Trump?

You don't need to define fair because that is not what the Fairness Doctrine is about. The Fairness Doctrine says on some topics, you must give or allow someone else to give the opposing view as well.

I watch/listen to a variety of news sources - CNN, Fox News, NPR, NYTimes, WSj, as well as a number of smaller podcasts and substacks.

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.

> the Fox News of the left

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.

The things is that when "news" is compared, the divisions tend to be much smaller (but still definitely there).

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.

The news portions of Fox News make shit up. They run things on the ticker that aren't real.

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.

The obvious take away is that the left needs an actual Fox News. A friend of mine actually pitched this idea a few years ago, but I was of the opinion that the left is above that and nobody would read/watch/follow it. Now I'm not so sure anymore, I think people are ready for it just for the kicks and it would actually have a big effect on balancing things out.

During the campaign for the 2016 Republican nomination for President they actually dropped several negative stories that their reporters assigned to the Trump campaign submitted, because their reporters assigned to the Cruz, Rubio, etc. campaigns were submitting a much lower percentage of negative stories and they assume the difference must be due to some flaw in their reporting.

9 years is a lot. In my home country, Hungary, dissenting in the right wing government media was possible, and happened quite often in 2012, nothing which would have reminded you of the first half of the previous century. By 2015, there was proper fascist propaganda, without any possibility to dissent. So, it was changed completely in 3 years. I would even say that any comparison in this context to anything from 9 years ago is meaningless.

I will give you that, sometimes fox news is like a ChatGPT hallucination. And the ads are unbearable - my pillow and vegetable pills.

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 :-)

The thing is NPR still tells the truth, Fox will lie non stop for an entire talk show especially their "group" shows. Watch any of those that have regulars vs say a morning show on CBS or ABC. They have more fluff pieces but those shows don't lie nonstop and stroke Trump's ego the whole time.

You won’t hear that on NPR and this is why the ‘both sides’ argument has been so detrimental to American’s perception of their media.

A news source aiming to independently investigate and report where reality stands in relation to opposing political talking points is an opportunity for bias, but you're guaranteed bias against reality if you don't do that part, is the thing.

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.

When I asked around in mixed political spaces which news sources were trustworthy, NPR was the only answer people on both sides of the political divide ever gave.

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.

I agree that NPR is "trustworthy" in the sense that what they directly say is usually reliable, what I have a huge problem with is what they leave out or how they redirect.

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.

> There are no longer "unbiased" news sources, all sources have moved to either the left or right.

> 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.

I agree there was always bias in the media. I think that back in the day, when things were not as polarized and not everything was corrupted by politics, the biases were not as large or as important - there was a lot more common ground.

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.

>There are no longer "unbiased" news sources, all sources have moved to either the left or right.

Not really true. The left has moved right as the right went extreme right.

Globally, the US "left" is pretty conservative.

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How can the left remain unbiased to truth when the right is constantly making things up? If the right is constantly lying about their agenda, is it responsible reporting to constantly report the unobjective lie? Is it unresponsible to lean out of direct regurgitation, acknowledge the pattern of hypocrisy, bring objective analysis of it, and continue to monitor it?

Under oath, with only offhand recollection of maybe facts, many people would prefer to say as little as possible. That seems only natural given the potential for accidentally lying if something remembered offhand turns out to be untrue or taken incorrectly.

Contrast with a lower stakes interview, likely prepared for at least in general if not with vetted and researched questions?

Well, she had plenty of time to reflect on what she did not remember and had a perfect opportunity in the NPR interview to address that.

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.

> today [NPR] is, to me, the Fox News of the left

Oh did they also have to pay an $800m settlement for lying?

The lie to truth ratio of Fox News is far, far higher than NPR on any news show I've listened to on either.

If you're seriously equating NPR and the corporation that paid $800M to settle with Dominion Voting Systems, perhaps your own bias is more of a problem than theirs.

I am simply comparing them on a political spectrum of progressive, left, right, etc.

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.

Comparing the obvious shakedown of CBS to the Fox lawsuit is absurd.

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.

The US is so weird right now.

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.

> 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.

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.

I'm not sure how important that is to remember. The president is issuing the orders. The president is chief executive of the country.

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.

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> the enablers and puppet masters are already planning and laying groundwork for when Cheeto Jesus drops dead. We've already lost the battle, let's not lose the war.

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.

Depends how the next generation of MAGAs works. The republican party is full of them who are backing Trump all the way. The only opposition seem to be bond traders.

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.

The civil war between the competing factions behind the scenes when he kicks it should at least make for some good entertainment. So we have that to look forward to.

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.

Do you really believe that there were no enablers and puppet masters before this administration? Serious question, and this has nothing to do with claims that Biden was mentally unfit for the office.

Even if there were, what is your point? It seems to me that lot of people have never heard of “two wrongs don’t make one right” and resort to whataboutism as if they are making some thoughtful comment. And no, “just asking questions” isn’t a great point either.

Who said it was 2? I'm suggesting this has been a problem a very long time.

Project 2025 is called Project 2025 for a reason. It isn't Project 2017.

Cutting one branch off the poisonous tree won't do much, even if it is the biggest, even if it's the trunk

Needs to be taken up at the root

My view (maybe shared by GP) is that while Trump deserves a lot of the blame, he's just a figure head over the rest of the republican party.

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.

> My view (maybe shared by GP) is that while Trump deserves a lot of the blame, he's just a figure head over the rest of the republican party.

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.

>their focus is on removing the teeth from congress

I mean, without a constitutional amendment how can that be done?

> I mean, without a constitutional amendment how can that be done?

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.

Supremely court decisions, I think.

They have more or less done it already. Most districts are firmly in control of republicans. The congress is bound to the desires of the extreme right wing. Even the threat of impeachment is now a laughing matter from Trump after 2 such attempts going to nothing.

Yep - they just have to elect enough candidates who will let Trump run amok. The majority doesn't need to agree with Trump, just enough people to avoid voting (a much smaller number). That's what we're seeing now.

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.

It doesn't reduce the responsibility but means that this is a wider agenda, not just something Trump comes up with, and so it doesn't end even if Trump is deposed.

It's very important and very transparent. Steve Bannon is out here telling the entire world what the playbook is for anyone willing to pay attention.

> The president can't pawn off responsibility to some White House staffer or think tank. An executive order is the president's order.

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.

I'm pretty sure with Trump this time around it is much less the case. In his first admin there are endless stories of the "Adults" in the room keeping him in check.

This time around he was sure to only fill his cabinet with yes men, so no one could keep him reigned in.

You're right that last time there were "adults in the room" trying to keep him in check.

This time, however, he's often doing whatever Heritage/Project 2025 tell him to do. Russell Vought, Stephen Miller, John McEntee, etc.

"he's often doing whatever Heritage/Project 2025 tell him to do."

I think Trump has only very vague opinions on most things. He is ok as long as people flatter his ego.

Curtis Yarvin, Roger Stone, etc

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Frankly I haven't seen any attempt to counter this type of opinion. Do you have any counter-arguments against whatever the Trump administration is doing right now to the US government and its citizens being out of the Project 25 playbook?

[edit] Downvote all you want, but please tell me why I'm wrong.

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I don't like that it gets flagged, because there are some insightful conversations out there.

The subject is important and the budgets of PBS and NPR pertain to the 'curiosity' guideline that Dang loves so much.

What I'd prefer to see is better moderation from users and admins alike to deal with the offending comments but not the entire thread.

I don't see how you can so easily dismiss discussion of P2025's role in this administration as just Reddit stuff.

Around 30 of this administration's cabinet members and agency heads are the authors of the parts of P2025 that covered the subject of the cabinet position they now hold or the agency they now head, and their actions are closely following the plan they laid out in P2025.

I'm not dismissing discussion about the subject.

I'm dismissing poor quality discussion around the subject.

My thoughts exactly and it makes me truly terrified.

I just want to clarify that you're responding to someone who is saying that there are "people behind Trump" - not his "advisors" aka "yes men" but rather people with lots of money and influence, but behind the scenes. This might be Peter Thiel or Curtis Yarvin or The Heritage Group. I'm not sure, and it's hard to know that for sure. But it's a bit of a separate concept from the actual Cabinet Members and what may have put checks on him in his first term.

So you're saying there's a group behind the state? "A deep state" that's _really_ pulling the strings?

When someone tends to project, most accusations are actually admissions.

Heh...it is so much worse than that.

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.

> Trump is being handed EOs that he doesn't have a clue about.

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.

Definitely, Biden certainly as well. I would argue that this is mostly a modern thing. EOs were far less common in the past and I would argue that far younger presidents often were far more in control of their admin. At the very least, they understood the paper they were signing.

Exactly. Trump is practically illiterate and is being handed things to sign. His original ideas that were pushed back on by his advisors in his first term were a different sort of idea, things like, "Why can't we just force that country to do what we want, we're the USA, we're the most powerful, we could just bomb them."

For those downvoting you for saying Trump is practically illiterate

Here he is asking the UK prime minister to read out a letter he'd been sent

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yxxpxe5qko

I've seen many people draw a comparison between Trump and Hitler (because of course - people compare everybody to Hitler).

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.

"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."

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.

Can you explain and reference sources? Otherwise it is a pretty vague comment.

I would imagine Project 2025 is a good source here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

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.

Here's a dashboard. https://www.project2025.observer/

Not a substitute for reading the doc but good for a quick overview.

Once I stated reading that dashboard (a couple of weeks ago) I could not stop. It's a real page turner. My favourite moment (spoiler):

> 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.

And a good way to keep track of their "progress" here: https://www.project2025.observer/

It's insane to me how many people argued with me that Project 2025 was democrat propaganda to smear Trump. Both online here on Hacker News and in person.

DARVO in action

The thing is, people are expecting that campaign promises are pointless blathering. That's what led many people to believe it will be just the same this time.

No, they were arguing these things are so obviously bad and wrong, Trump would never actually do these and these aren't his platform. They're just conspiracy theories by Democrats to slander Trump. So many people and news orgs kept repeating Trump's lies about how he doesn't know anything about Project 2025 and its totally unrelated to what he wants to do.

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?!

No, this happens all too often and was successful too many times to bee random. Moderate republicans used this as a tactic for decades. They always claim the thing that is happening is not happening, they always claim that opposition is paranoid.

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.

The chapter about education is a great read.

Thank you!

It's not at all vague, unless you haven't been paying attention. Project 2025, for example.

They're fully aware of Project 2025 because they have been paying 100% full attention to people like Trump who have been claiming they never heard of it and that it was Democratic propaganda. So they know exactly what it is because we told them so, we told them so, we told them so, we told them so, and we told them so again and again, and every time they just denied it harder and harder. Now they're pretending they are surprised and never heard of it either.

Project 2025 would be the most obvious answer

How do you suppose such evidence could be procured? I understand the burden of proof in terms of claims, but this is one that is, by design, difficult to gather substantial evidence for. Particularly without legal/criminal repercussions, and that's in good times when they are at least making an attempt to follow the law.

Is it? I mean it wasn't a particularly spicy statement - did anyone actually think the president wrote any of the plans he's greenlighting / signing?

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

Project 2025 is the playbook, plenty of references on line.

As with the Project for a New American Century douchebags, they just straight-up told us the bad things they were going to do to the country, and now they're doing them, and people still manage to be all, "hey, where'd all this stuff come from?!".

Our news media are terrible.

This was all widely reported, I'm not sure why you're criticizing the news media.

What was widely reported was that he disavowed Project 2025. Those denials were seldom challenged, nor were the many Heritage Foundation related people that were also in Trump's inner circles reported upon in any critical way.

There is no reason at all it shouldn't have been the only thing they'd bring up when talking to or about Trump during the campaign. Instead, they let "oh, yeah, never heard of it" slide.

I don’t agree with the premise. Should the news have refused to talk about his tariff plans or promises of personal retribution so they could reserve the space for Project 2025?

Mass deportations was right there in Project 2025, the "plan" about which Trump claimed to have no knowledge during the campaign:

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.

>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's pretty clear at this point that it's others behind the curtain running this show.

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.

Oh for sure, I don't think any of this lets him off the hook; the concern is more that the movement is significantly greater than just him. When he's out of the picture there's a whole machine ready to slot in the next guy and keep on the agenda.

By that logic wouldn't any of the presidents since Regan be fulfilling project 2025s "Mass deportations". Trump admin is behind even the previous admins total deportations at this point in the term. And they're being extremely lenient to businesses who hire illegal immigrants (which breaks the law) and even encouraging it.

> Right now I have some faith the courts in the US will stand up to this

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.

The Attorney General went out of her way to assure Cabinet members that the US Marshals would not be arresting them. So, well, that's great.

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.

The people in executive pushing unitary executive power theory. And there is a chance Supreme Court will support them at that. With such theory your AG proposal not having authority doesn’t stand (in worst case it would be presidents authority).

A chance, but I suspect not much of one.

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.)

> If we have a unitary executive, then the president is over the Supreme Court.

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.

Which is why fully moving the Marshals to a department within the judiciary would be desirable, though I think there's a significant ethical issue for the judiciary to contend with re: having to actually enforce its orders. At a sort of silly level, there's probably concern that "justice is blind" cannot mix with "justice needs to see where it's aiming if it's going to enforce anything." Judge Dredd and whatnot.

But, man, if the executive is fully on board with ignoring law, what is even the point of trying?

If we have that kind of unitary executive, that executive isn't going to care what 7 justices say. And then it's a whole new ballgame.

They always can say that the correct constitutional approach to those cases is to impeach Trump. And I'm not even sure it's exaggeration.

SCOTUS (and other courts) can deputize whoever they want pretty much. And this is what the states' National Guards are for (very scary thought)

The "states" national guard can be federalized at a moment's notice. The president need only give the order and put his signature on it. At that point, they report to the President and no one else.

This isn't theory, Alabama's was federalized some time when my dad was a kid. The president never rescinded the order.

> This isn't theory, Alabama's was federalized some time when my dad was a kid.

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.

In addition to the National Guard, there's also the State Guard (or State Defense Force in some states), which cannot be federalized.

Eh this isn't quite clear. National Guardsmen take an oath to the Constitution and to follow the orders of both the President and the Governor. Above all, their oath is to the Constitution.

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.

> Eh this isn't quite clear. National Guardsmen take an oath to the Constitution and to follow the orders of both the President and the Governor.

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.

De jure doesn't matter when the law has been tossed aside.

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.

National Guard is by definition locally- (read state-) based.

Historically, that's an important consideration in military loyalty under contested scenarios.

I think the guardrails were designed to hold someone like Trump once; and then afterwards he was supposed to be convicted of his crimes, or at least never elected again. The guardrails are fundamentally held in place by hundreds of thousands of individuals making individual decisions. People who are asked to break the law can expect that in a few years they'll be vindicated, or at least fear that in a few years they would be punished for going along with the illegal orders.

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 "original sin" of the founders was accepting the slave states. That embedded the hypocrisy that freedom was only for some people. The constitution proofed against an individual trying to seize power pretty well. It's difficult for a random Army officer or religious leader to catapult himself into a dictator position. But what it does not and cannot prevent against is determined tyranny of the majority.

There were "actually good" founding fathers who were vehemently anti-slavery and even non racist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine being the most famous example. Unfortunately, they are kept as relative footnotes in history, due to their subversive economic messaging.

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.

Indeed. There are dozens of other moments through the past ten years of Trumpism that the supposed guardrails were to prevent and did not, and in the wake of each one the custodians of those guardrails shrugged and went "oh well... I guess that's Trump."

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!"

> I'm such others have catalogued many, many more of these

One such catalog:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/lest-we-forget-the-horro...

> 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.

It was always burning since the world's been turning?

I don't think this kind of middlebrow cynicism is helpful— "ah yes, well, all politicians have their scandals, just another day in government."

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".

> 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)?

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.

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SCOTUS' ruling on Trump's presidential immunity blew a massive hole in the guardrails.

> SCOTUS' ruling on Trump's presidential immunity blew a massive hole in the guardrails.

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.)

Yes, I agree that the Trump faction gaining control of the GOP is a huge problem and without it we'd be experiencing wannabe king Trump 1.0 instead of de-facto king 2.0.

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.).

I'm very curious about the ambiguous "official acts" caveat in the decision.

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 just one person, congress and a lot of the judicial system. This isn't a one person problem. Not even close. Same way Nazis werent just a "one person" problem.

I say this as a firm conservative. The courts have so far been outstanding, despite all the inappropriate pressure. I have no doubt they will continue to be. I'm also quite impressed with conservative voters who are speaking out to their conservative representatives.

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.

The funny thing is, that the GOP is not "conservative," in any way, whatsoever. They are extreme.

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.

I also find the GOPs penchant for authoritarianism to be incongruent with their stated beliefs and values

The "party of small government" seems to want a bigger government than any other party before them

You are thinking of a different GOP that disappeared a while ago.

Parties change all the time -- Trump and Lincoln lead the same party, Obama and Jackson led the same party.

Peoples views of what that party means don't always follow.

What's amazing about this GOP, is that both Honest Abe, and Joe McCarthy, are doing 3600 RPM.

That's pretty wild.

Agreed. To me "conservative" means to be cautious and slow/reluctant to change things. The quick dismantling of institutions that's happening right now is the opposite of conservative.

In politics, conservative means keeping the status quo. This largely describes the current mainstream Democratic party. You're right, Republicans are not trying to keep the status quo. Going back to an older culture is "reactionary". Current mainstream Republicans can be described in this way.

Personal discipline, thoughtfulness, caution, integrity, wisdom, learning from the past, etc. are not necessarily features of one ideology or another.

The definition of conservative is conserving the monarchy during the french revolution.

From the start it was and remain to this day an ideology for those currently in power to conserve their power.

Oh please, not a single person besides you thinks of "conserving the monarchy during the french revolution" when using the word "conservative" besides you.

If if was not clear my point is that it evolved with the current form of government of the time but never departed from the original goal of for those in power to conserve their power.

People in power who do not want to conserve their power are incredibly rare, regardless of their professed ideological orientation.

Not that rare at all, this describes most US presidents.

While it is overly specific for modern use, it is actually much closer than what the prior poster suggested to the way the term has always been used as a political label and accurate as to its origin as one (more generally, it originally was protecting the power of the aristocracy and religious establishment against the encroachment of bourgeois liberalism; IIRC the liberal/conservative terminology was in use in regard to British politics even prior to the French Revolution, to which it was also applied; the French Revolution is where we get the Left/Right terminology that originally corresponded pretty directly to liberal/conservative though left and liberal have split a bit in more modern use, as the locus of elite power has moved, and liberalism has to a certain extent become associated with status-quo-ism related to that new locus of power), which has always been distinct from how "conservative" is used as anything other than a political label.

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I’m not in any way a conservative, but it’s a absolutely abhorrent that we’re constantly gaslit into believing conservative means chaos and abrupt change at any cost to own the libs. It takes the fear of change that is part of conservatism and ramps it up into a full blown delusion. What conservative would want massive change all at once and throwing caution to the wind? Like you said, that’s not typical conservative behavior, it’s extremist and fascist behavior. Unfortunately, conservatives went all in on supporting extremists and here we are.

> The funny thing is, that the GOP is not "conservative," in any way, whatsoever. They are extreme

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.

> 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.

> The definition of "conservative" means "not-extreme."

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.

You should disabuse yourself of the notion that concepts like personal discipline, contentiousness, and integrity are somehow "conservative" values. They are not in either sense of the word conservative.

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.

> 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.

Just a point, Europeans were the only ones to do _chaptel slavery_, i.e treating fellow humans (even if they are currently slave) as object they own and have every right over them.

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)

This is factually incorrect.

The courts have so far been exceptionally weak.

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 wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.

Yeah, that's what they said during Trump's first term. And after January, 6.

They do until they don't.

What the fuck are they supposed to do? They don't have their own independent military and police force.

Constitutions, laws, democracies are a fragile illusion that disappear the second enough people stop believing that they're real.

That’s the point they are making.

That's my point. People looking to the idea that the courts are going to somehow save this descent into tyranny aren't paying attention.

The courts have successfully enjoined a large number of actions, required the release of many people from domestic ICE custody, and ended the transfer of anyone new to El Salvador. As I'm always reminding people, the news is a highly optimized machine to deliver you the worst thing that happened today - if you're reading it as though it's a representative sample of everything that's happening, you're going to get a misleading perspective.

So, is Abrego Garcia back in the US and actually having a real trial? What of the other 200+ people who were illegally taken? Still there despite many court orders to return them?

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.

The misleading perspective is your generalization from things that have happened to things that haven’t happened. The system as it currently exists - overzealous immigration enforcement which is often but not always enjoined - cannot ship me 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.

> The system as it currently exists - overzealous immigration enforcement which is often but not always enjoined - cannot ship me to El Salvador

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.

Could you share what the courts have done? What I’ve witnessed is cowardice to hold officials accountable or in contempt for unconstitutional acts.

the scotus (and, notably, conservative lower federal judges) has ruled pretty firmly against trump on the abrego garcia case.

On the grounds that he should have been sent to literally any other country, totally inapplicable to any of the other cases without specific preexisting orders against ES specifically. And notably they have outlined exactly nothing except that the administration had better say how they plan to get him back- the SCOTUS response to the executive saying "we have no plan" was just to say again that they wanted to know the plan.

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.

> 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

Obama ordered the closure of Guantanamo on his second day in office.

Congress passed a bill with overwhelmingly support that prevented it.

Guantanamo was a legal morass on account of being under US jurisdiction: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/05/frankly-in...

That’s the El Salvador “hack.”

The now famous photo of his hands with the "MS-13" tattoo, which is the evidence of his gang ties, was taken from CECOT. It would not surprise me in the slightest if he was forced to get that tattoo there. CECOT is widely known for torturing its prisoners, and their dictator is obviously doing anything he can to make Trump happy as he's being paid millions by Trump.

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.

I'm sure Abrego Garcia is comforted by hearing they wrote some words on some paper while he's illegally in a foreign prison.

What action has been taken as a result of that ruling though? The Supreme Court might as well give the president a big thumbs down if nothing actually happens.

What independent military and police force does the Supreme Court command?

Laws are useful fictions that evaporate when enough people stop believing in them.

I'm reminded of andrew jackson's quote "[The supreme court] has made [their] decision, now let [them] enforce it..."

IMO this is the primary reason Jackson is the reactionary, hateful, right's favorite president, including Trump himself.

Go lookup the absolute horseshit video PragerU made about the battle of New Orleans.

Notably, those rulings have been ignored so far.

no doubt that is a problem.

It's the problem.

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.

"conservative voters who are speaking out to their conservative representatives."

They could have done a bit better with their voting decisions, though.

> 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.

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 problem with democratic elections to executive, house and senate is they all follow the "will of the people". In America there is a bit of a lag, but ultimately you still get to the two-wolf one-sheep tyranny of the masses.

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.

I would argue that Trump only exists as President because Congress has abdicated its lawmaking powers for the past twenty years (give or take). With a functional legislative branch it's not nearly as problematic to have an extremely liberal or conservative president, or textualist Supreme Court justices. We need a refresh of rules governing congress (age & term limits, better pay, disallowing equity trading, elimination of gerrymandering at the state level, and perhaps nationwide adoption of ranked choice voting, which would open the door to viable third parties & ruling by coalition).

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> you should be ashamed of yourself for making this happen, then lying that you didn't have a hand in it.

I'm assuming you vote mostly Democrat, and your continuing to do so in the face of DNC manipulation of elections and primaries in favor of string of dog shit unpopular candidates is certainly part of the problem. (Not to mention the DNC emails encouraging Trump being a candidate as well...) Take some shame on your head as well, nothing will change with your attitude.

Oh believe me, we're aware, and we won't be happy until both parties as they stand today have been put to the torch.

Many do, but the GP's rant indicates he's a bit clueless to this. Tossing shame at the other side with a lack of self awareness is why elections keep getting lost.

Pathetic whataboutism.

If the Democrats in power had my attitude, they'd have long since done something about the problem.

Don't blame me for having a bad attitude, or trans kids and drag queens for causing the Democrats to lose the election by simply existing.

If you had a leg to stand on, you'd have addressed the rest of the points in my post, and either agreed with my criticisms of conservatives, or been able to counter with evidence, instead of immediately leaping to totally unjustified whataboutism.

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> You have a President who is ordering the defunding of tons of groups (universities, media, aid, institutes) while not clearly having that authority

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-...

Weird is not the term for it. I'd say suspension of due process is terrifying.

It's happened before, both recently (since 2001), but Executive Order 9066 happened over 80 years ago, in the 19th century the US literally passed a Habeas Corpus Suspension Act.

America puts too much faith in its courts and constitution.

I have been saying for decades that the most active terrorist organization in the United States is… the US government.

One of those cases where it's very, very important the "the government" isn't a unified block, but a collection of a very large number of staff spread across a very large number of organizations. Only some of which have gone rogue.

Great, you're part of the problem.

10000000%

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.

That's just dumb.

Authoritarian governments and terrorist organizations are not the same thing.

Sometimes they are. E.g. Hamas is both the authoritarian government of Gaza and the terrorist organization.

> The US is so weird right now.

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.

> The weirdness started in 90s.

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.

Certainly true. Plus, I 'arrived' in America in '79 at a tender age when everyone wore k-mart suits (in two colors: egg shell, and powder blue /g).

> 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.

I speculate it started in the 1950s.

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.

Probably around the time your Gradpa started paying attention (post ww2). The 1920s and the great depression were hardly non-weird times.

The GOP voters (and maybe even the politicians!) have a different view of what a healthy society requires. Supposedly keeping womens' sports genetically pure, punishing pro-Palestinian speech, and deporting lots of people is very important for a healthy society, and justifies their behavior.

> Right now I have some faith the courts in the US will stand up to this and get the US back on track

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.

The current administration is politically powerful in one sense, they're also not particularly adept, making them increasingly unpopular and hardening others against them.

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.

Not weird. It's textbook fascism.

It's hard for people to accept it because it raises new questions about the reaction to adopt.

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.

>If it's true then you know you should resist or you're complicit.

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.

Educating yourself on resistance. Reading books about it. Talk to neighbors. Buy weapons and ammo. Be ready.

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.

Yeah, no. I'm getting my passport today. I've started looking at what's required to get a skilled work visa.

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.

The problem is that this kind of thing can follow you around if you never push back.

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.

Well given that the country has a penchant for altering history such that “you did not see/hear what you actually heard and saw with your own eyes”, there are not going to be any difficult conversations. Civil war was for “state rights” while quietly omitting the slaves part.

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.

That's exactly right. The problem with the public broadcasters is not that they are regime media, it's that they are not. Put another way, the problem is that they tell the truth. Fox News, on the other hand, is very much regime media, and constantly peddles lies. Therefore, Trump is not attacking them.

This particular move is part of the broader campaign to destroy the independent media, which as you pointed out, is textbook fascism.

All the while, I don't think I've ever loved our country as much as now because I think this is a time where our system of checks and balances can come to shine.

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.

> this is a time where our system of checks and balances can come to shine

why do you think that, all things considered?

Well, it’s an opportunity for the system to prove that it can prevent even a president with a large support base from making America fascist. I gather from your comment that you are pessimistic, but regardless of likelihoods, this is the kind of situation where checks and balances could prevent some very bad things from happening.

We shall see.

People are being disappeared, snatched up without being charged with a crime and being held in for profit prisons indefinitely. US citizens are being deported without even due process. Congress is feckless about it. The courts ask for the executive to please stop, but the executive branch is continuing to do the illegal things they've been told to stop doing.

Sure seems like these checks and balances are working out.

They are currently failing, yes. We can only hope that people look at the rest of the world and history, see how much worse it can get, and find their resolve.

I think the deadline for that self-reflection and resolve gathering was November 5th, 2024.

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The time for checks and balances working to save us has passed. There are mask wearing black shirts disappearing American citizens. The courts have ruled that “no, this isn’t allowed” and these rulings are ignored. Congress is impotent, and has been for years. There are no more checks and balances to deploy that might help.

Because we've seen federal courts unafraid to repudiate unilateral executive force.

Why don't you think that, all things considered?

Hasn't Trump already ignored orders from the supreme court regarding Kilmar Abrego Garcia?

"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.

would you prefer what’s happening in brazil?

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?

>would you prefer what’s happening in brazil?

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.

Obama dropped a bomb on a us citizen without giving him due process. How should this case be handled? Like i said, american presidents causing untold misery on some people is a tale as old as time. The point is to create a system that is, on balance, just.

>Obama dropped a bomb on a us citizen without giving him due process

>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.

> This is continued whataboutism

i think i’ve written enough to show that’s that last thing im trying to do.

It's quite literally the only thing you've done in this particular thread?

>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.

Every time the courts say Trump did something wrong, he seems to mostly ignore this and keep going, so how much does it really matter? Without strong enforcement of those checks they will stop being taken seriously.

Joining other US Presidents (FDR, Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, etc.) who did the same thing.

FDR's major lasting accomplishments that people praise him for were through legislation. Even things like the threat to pack the court would have happened through legislation.

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.

The long and the short of it is that FDR did (mostly) well-intentioned things with (mostly) good outcomes that were (mostly) widely distributed. That and winning WW2 secured his place in the historical record. But it was definitely a "move fast and break things" approach. The one that conservatives are still very mad about is gold confiscation, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn is a wild over-interpretation of the law to consolidate Federal power.

A lot of very important American freedoms were secured against the public opinion by court cases. That makes them brittle.

I believe that there is a huge difference between executive authoritarianism and consolidating power within the federal government instead of the states. While this was indeed a huge expansion of federal power through the commerce clause, it expands congress' power, not the president's.

The internment of the Japanese cannot be brushed off. That was a gross violation of power that, if Trump were to do something similar, would tear this country apart. On top of that, one of the side effects of the internment is that it's sowed a deep distrust in the federal government and the Census that continues to harm representation to this day.

They used Census data to round people up. It doesn't get much worse than that.

Well they kept them in the US that time around. We won’t be so lucky this time.

I’m hoping to shine some light on bad executive behavior, not to create a contrast that makes Trump look good relative to what FDR did.

We agree here.

[flagged]

Of course. It is one of the most evil things the US government has ever done and was driven largely by the executive. I personally think that this is a big enough black mark on FDR's legacy that he shouldn't be held in such high regard by liberals.

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.

> Trump is acting in opposition to the legislation that directs the executive to have its finger in more pies.

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.

> 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.

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.

if it incentivises congress to be more specific and reduces executive free reign style legislation in the future I'm not too terribly bothered (oh shit do we not want to give the president the authority to change tariffs in an "emergency" without defining the scope of an emergency?? yeah let's pass non stupid laws). there's lots of other stuff in this administration to be critical about.

I'm unswayed by that argument too, but I don't think it's an accurate characterization of what's happening. A government that arbitrarily withholds funds based on political favoritism is increasing its power, even if aggregate spending goes down because too many people weren't willing to do favors.

Yes, that is why I said more authoritarian.

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.

Why do we need to? It seems to me that many of these efforts to “acknowledge” other controversies in the past are in fact distraction tactics to sneak in controversial premises about the current ones. Funding research grants is absolutely not political favoritism.

> Funding research grants is absolutely not political favoritism.

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.

I feel this way as well. It's a great test to see if the founding fathers got the constitution right and more importantly to see if the people are willing to assert their right to a democracy with the powers spelled out in our constitution.

The fact that you think mythological figures that enshrined slavery in the same document which describes how people are free could have gotten the constitution "right" is very telling.

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.

In my comment I was using the Constitution and the founding Fathers as symbols for democracy to contrast the current administration which is very anti-democratic.

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.

>You can like what he stood for, but he was an equal if not (much) greater abuser of the executive office.

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?

Not the first time, but few people remember the trail of tears and all the things done around that back then.

The stalwarts have died and moved on. The weaklings are promoted. And they are buttering the president with accolades to keep him from screaming. In psych, we call this “fawning”. It is a sister to fight or flight response. But once you stop fawning, you get fired or killed.

The distributed system can only handle one point of failure, and two have failed.

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.

Theoretical question: what happens if he doesn’t do what the courts order, and the congress is too afraid to impeach him?

What happens? This. This happens, the things we're seeing.

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.

Is it a theoretical question?

This is no longer a representative democracy, but an autocracy.

Courts can deputize other people to enforce their orders

Do you think that will happen? Any idea how long?

I think if this happens it would be well after shit has very visibly hit the fan.

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

The courts aren't going to save us. No one is going to save us.

>> The courts aren't going to save us. No one is going to save us.

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-...

At some point, liberals need to remember that violence intrinsically underpins all political power, and if you're unable or unwilling to engage in it in any circumstances whatsoever, all the power that you think you have will be taken away from you.

"Strange" times is a bit of an understatement.

))) for what he views as ideological crimes.

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

How do the courts enforce their rulings if the executive branch is wholly beholden to the president? It’s already a big problem for the DoJ.

See https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-situation--formalis...

Even judge Xinis [kilmar garcia] was talking a big game, but then folded after promising 'expedited discovery' and the consideration of contempt. She delays week after week and grants the executive the right to hide under the shadows under seal so the public can't know what's happening, even though prior she bragged about forcing them to file these updates with the public.

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.

Some folks speculate that this judge in particular has realized she's either got to keep permitting delays and obvious shenanigans, or she gets to go into the history books as the judge whose case was the breaking point at which the executive went completely, mask-off lawless. Folks suppose she'd prefer someone else get that honor, so is hoping to let the government delay long enough that the case is mooted (because the dude's dead) or another case gets to that point first.

It's a very dangerous game, and she is therefore playing only the safest possible moves with the smallest possible escalation at any point. Perhaps it eventually ends in gunfire, but giving the government hundreds of opportunities to back down before then is safer. Each individual step by the judge has to appear as reasonable as possible so as not to be over-ruled by SCOTUS.

It’s all just appeasement, and will end the same way it always does.

He who dares, wins. And there are a lot of fat cowards out there with zero balls right now.

I guess this is why it's called a constitutional crisis and not a constitutional opportunity

> How do the courts enforce their rulings if the executive branch is wholly beholden to the president?

That's the point of the separation of powers.

separation of powers require the people in gov't to enforce the separation.

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.

Like I said, that's the point of the separation of powers. Enforcement isn't a power the judiciary has.

I'm not quite clear on how your comment responds to mine?

Supreme court and many other courts have judicial armed officers of the court that are part of the judicial branch; they can enforce contempt or orders of the court. But of course they are way overpowered by the number of LEO in the executive.

> Supreme court and many other courts have judicial armed officers of the court that are part of the judicial branch;

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.)

The other courts in this case would be bailiffs who are judicial officers in some states.

The design of the system is such that there are several dams so any particular one doesn’t need to hold forever. It’ll hold for a few years, but not a few decades, and hopefully the flood will recede.

The term is "checks and balances." They never function in ideal fashion, but they have failed us badly enough in the past to spill a million gallons of our own blood. I am nowhere near prepared to say they have finally failed us now; for any American so to assume is defeatism, and so to behave is culpable cowardice.

> Right now I have some faith the courts in the US will stand up to this and get the US back on track

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.

The Courts have no enforcement power. If the Executive proves unwilling to accede to court orders, the Courts don't have the legal ability to use violence to compel the Executive.

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.

> Multiple states want his ass on a platter for crimes in their jurisdictions outside of his function as President

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.

Correct. This is why I take his "jokes" about a third term quite seriously.

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.

The executive branch has ignored the courts a few times, basically saying "What are you going to do about it?".

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).

The President controls the most powerful military on Earth.

What do the courts control? Where are their guns?

Judges/Courts control the offices that control the military and the executive. Without the rule of law, you do not have a military, you have a militia. If you think a military staffed by patriots, 70% minorities and 1st generation American immigrants, are going to bow down to a dictator and their illegal, immoral orders, you probably watch too many movies and play too many games...

That's why the only "viable resistance" would be a high-ranking military-person with a tank battalion and thousands of soldiers who are willing to follow his conviction of "I'm going to perform insubordination because I believe my commander in chief is an enemy of the constitution, follow me if you believe the same", and then have a plan to besiege the White House/Capitol.

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...

The police will have a hard time dealing with any large-scale armed insurgency, even if all the insurgents have is small arms. They simply don't have the numbers.

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.

What are they fighting a civil war for? Cheaper gas? More fast food? There is nothing now or in the near future that would fracture the country enough to fight. Once commerce stops, people will lose their collective minds. You cant tell Americans how to park, how to dress let alone what to eat or drink or do. Good luck with the collective will needed to fight for an ideologue in the 21st century.

> Good luck with the collective will needed to fight for an ideologue in the 21st century.

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.

There were only a few thousand people at 1/6. There are 40mm people in CA, just as an example. 300mm Americans are not going to bow down to a man who wants to be king.

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.

One of the first orders of business was asserting the executive branch (really the white house) was the final authority for the executive branch on what a court order or court ruling ‘means’.

He just has to say ‘nuh uh’, and as long as people want their jobs, that’s it.

> and as long as people want their jobs

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.

The idea of “checks and balances” is that systems have the strength to counteract systems.

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.

The idea of the 3 branches is that there are systemic incentives for ‘bad people’ (which is a fundamental normal state, btw) to have incentives to screw up the bad people in the other branches. Not that ‘good people’ (an idea which most of the founding fathers would have considered a naive fantasy) would use it to save everyone.

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.

> 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.

He and his administration already ignored a Supreme court ruling, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

Just like President Lincoln who pretty much did as he pleased:

https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=lin...

Right now I have some faith the courts

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 US is so weird right now.

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.

Looks dicey:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-attorney-general-bondi-t...

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/white-ho...

Ramping-up authoritarianism. Since he had a whole party who was shielding him from every single law he broke, even up to corrupting the supreme court. He's now completely unfettered. As far as I'm concerned, his actions frequently have no legitimacy, and he's too shortsighted that he wouldn't expect the same treatment when he leaves office if democrats grew spines.

The 2026 midterms will be essential in checking his power.

Do you expect free and fair elections in 2026?

i do, and i expect the gun toting NRA people to actually enforce elections, if there's even a whiff of trying to maintain power. Otherwise, they'd be gun toting hypocrites.

You mean the same guys who do shit like this?

https://www.wired.com/story/antifa-social-media-rumor-forks-...

No they won’t be hypocrites for doing nothing, they’re standing by while their team wins. Carrying loads of guns is a good way to make sure that happens.

Yes. It's structurally hard for the federal government to subvert elections since they're run by the states, and Trump hasn't historically shown any interest in doing so for elections he's not personally a candidate in. Musk's trial balloon for stochastic electoral bribery didn't work.

Which party controls the majority of state's governments, I ask you?

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.

If you know history, it’s not weird at all. This is literally the way fascism happens.

there's no saving grace here until rubber meets the road and ICE, among others, start being arrested.

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.

The structural problems that got us here, like our system of elections, a Supreme Court that's got at least a couple members that are obviously being bought and seeing no consequences for it, the courts cutting off the possibility of curtailing or even tracking private cash in elections, and right-wing radicalization pipelines via engagement-focused feed "algorithms", are none of them likely to be addressed even in the most optimistic scenarios.

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.

> 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

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?

I find that many of us, somewhat passively, including myself, have been using the term "strange" to describe the American poltitical situation. I think this is to avoid using more charged political terms that are actaully more accurate like fascist, authoritarian, dictator... These are dictionary words which are increasingly apropos.

As long as they don't start proudly calling themselves that...

Oh, we've been there for a while.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cpac-banner-domestic-terro...

> I think this is to avoid using more charged political terms that are actaully more accurate like fascist, authoritarian, dictator

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.

This is true, but attacks on the democratic presidents have been just as moronic.

This is moot to the boy-who-cried-wolf point; the thoughtfulness of criticism towards Republicans doesn't matter right now because criticism towards them in the past has been sufficiently thoughtless. There is a lesson to be learned there.

The anti trump money groups have infiltrated HN or you really think the government today should be spending money on CBS?

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I have some faith the courts in the US will stand up to this

The courts have no recourse if Trump decides to ignore them, as he already has.

> The US is so weird right now.

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.

bhouston says ">Saving grace is that his is not widely popular...<"

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!

There's a bug in the US system to do with having a crazy person elected president but congress people either like the crazy he's doing or afraid of his brownshirts.

Is it unusual for an executive order to claim something like this without any citation or reference?

> 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.

I'm a big supporter of NPR but you don't need to look hard to see their progressive bias.

I don't think bias is the right word. It's more that a station not bound by corporate sponsors better has the ability to reflect the voice of the people, and Americans generally lean progressive when you ask them directly about policy.

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 utterly mind blowing how facts and the truth are now labeled a “progressive bias” in the US.

It’s like you have to cover stuff up, deny and lie to be a conservative.

> It’s like you have to cover stuff up, deny and lie to be a conservative.

Depends which conservative is the president, now.

> their progressive bias

Is this what we're calling "truth" now?

I listen to planet money and a few other podcasts. They seem pretty fair to me. The only way I could maybe see a progressive bias is that they have representation in their staff of racial and sexual minorities. I see no issue with that.

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.

does NPR have any token conservative pundits or voices on their broadcasts or shows?

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...

It is important not to just have someone to represent a viewpoint, but also that they are equally "good" at it (I'm not sure what that means!). One way to be biased is to have someone incompetent represent a viewpoint - creating a strawman that is easy to knock down.

There have been loads of others but here is a prominent and slightly ironic example of what you are asking about: Tucker Carlson built his early TV career in large part as a conservative pundit on PBS.

> does NPR have any token conservative pundits or voices on their broadcasts or shows?

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.

It's shifted so far right that looking at news headlines gives me anxiety that we're in a bad enough time / timeline that modern events will be chapters in future history books; assuming we still have books (in any form).

> I'm a big supporter of NPR but you don't need to look hard to see their progressive bias.

"Reality has a well known liberal bias." — Stephen Colbert, 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ-a2KeyCAY&t=4m11s

Well the comedian said it, case closed.

What he's alluding to is that currently conservative voices seem utterly incapable of just not lying. Fox has progressed from a bias, to misinformation, to now just straight up disinformation.

When that is the other "side", then honesty will seem biased. The middle is would be something like lying 25% of the time.

While I don't watch NBC or CNN (they talk about 5 minute topics for 2 weeks), I notice often that a progressive bias, as far as I understand, is not immediately bending the knee to any rightwing pushback. It shouldn't be biased to say climate change is real, for instance, but that has been politicized so much that it's seen as a progressive bias. It's only in recent years that Republicans have switched from "It's not real" to "well doing something about it is too hard."

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...

No, all of the Trump EOs are like this. It's basically a Twitter rant on better letterhead, but with guns behind it.

It is not at all unusual for a Trump EO to look like this. Almost all of them really do read like propaganda.

Most other administrations were more... considered in their choice of language.

To wit, during the BLM riots of 2020, NPR published a piece on how looting was a legitimate form of protest. I mark that as the moment they lost both my trust and my attention. A very sad, eye opening moment for me.

What in the world are you on about? They published an interview with an author who had - admittedly - controversial takes looting. You make it sound like they were telling people to go smash windows.

It's telling that you chose not to link the actual piece: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...

The “admission” was not part of the original publication. They added both that note and changed the title well after the fact.

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.

If the best you can do is that they occasionally interview left leaning authors with out-there views, I don’t know what to tell you.

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...

bad media literacy. they even included a trigger warning for readers like that:

> 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 "admission" is irrelevant and was plainly included to appease readers like yourself. Did you actually read the piece? It's unmistakably an interview - not an article, and certainly not an editorial. It's difficult to understand how anyone could read it and arrive at such a distorted conclusion.

Right — they’re lending credibility that leftwing extremism is a valid viewpoint, but you’re unable to name a similar example of rightwing extremism they’ve hosted.

That’s classic bias.

Your assertion that I am "unable to name a similar example" is as baseless as it is puzzling, given that no such request was made. Regardless, it took me roughly eight seconds to find an interview with a Christian fundamentalist expressing an equally "extreme" viewpoint.

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/31/nx-s1-5077780/extremely-ameri...

Giving an interview isn't "lending credit" to. By that logic, the best media would be one that repeatedly tries to hide the truth, because showing the truth must be giving credence to it. This is a kind of doublespeak - freedom is censorship.

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!

Surely if you are concerned about platforming you'd be concerned about the literal actual self-described fascists and white supremacists platformed by various now mainstream right wing news outlets, right?

Was it this? On August 27, 2020, Natalie Escobar for Code Switch interviewed Vicky Osterweil about her book In Defense Of Looting. The segment was titled "One Author's Argument 'In Defense Of Looting'", and was subsequently retitled "One Author's Controversial View: 'In Defense Of Looting'".

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/vicky-osterweil/in-...

Here's a link to the diff between first publication and today: https://www.diffchecker.com/CJz1Bn51/

That's an awesome tool

Lol.

"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.

Are you sure that article wasn't an interview with an author who wrote a book that took that stance? Having a conversation with someone who has arguably extremist views is very different from holding that extremist view.

Funny, I was told "if a Nazi sits down at a table of ten people, there are eleven Nazis at that table" for years (and in particular by NPR listeners), but suddenly there's now a use/mention distinction for platforming extremist views when it's your side that does it? Color me shocked at the hypocrisy.

> platforming extremist views when it's your side that does it?

Irony it's called "viewpoint diversity" when your side does it, and "platforming extremist views" when the other side does it.

Sorry, but exactly what point are you trying to make here? Are you suggesting that NPR has never interviewed - say - Christian fundamentalists (they have)? Are you suggesting that they should interview more of them? What, precisely, would make you happy here?

As I've been told for the last decade, "everything is political" therefore NPR can't provide unbiased or neutral coverage of anything, therefore there should be no federal funding of NPR or PBS. Ideologues and corpirations donate more than enough money to sustain both without the pretense of impartiality provided by federal funding.

If "everything is political", then eliminating federal funding from NPR and PBS doesn’t solve the problem - it guarantees that only corporate and ideological interests shape the narrative. Public funding exists not to claim perfect neutrality, but to create a space where journalism isn’t entirely driven by profit motives or partisan agendas. Strip that away, and you’re not removing bias - you’re institutionalizing it.

Journalism, and specifically NPR, is already driven entirely by corporate and ideological interests. Your supposition that federal funding helps remove bias is trivially disproven by the last decade of coverage of NPR, where I literally (literally!) have not been able to turn it on without race, gender, or Trump being mentioned within a minute (it became a game). To be fair, there was one exception. and that was a replay of a David Foster Wallace interview from 2003. Which was immediately followed by a current interview with two women talking about white men's obsession with Infinite Jest and how their podcast was helping deconstruct toxic masculinity or something like that. The comparison in quality was stark.

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.

If your position is "I don't care anymore", then you're not making a principled argument - you're venting. That's fine, just don't pretend it's a policy stance.

"When I am weaker than you, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles." likewise isn't a policy stance, it's naked hypocrisy.

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.

You're not actually critiquing hypocrisy - you're just deciding whose version of it gets a microphone. Pulling public funding doesn't eliminate bias, it just ensures the only voices left are the ones with capital to shout the loudest.

Is it? Show me a similarly soft pedaled, deferential NPR interview of a right wing extremist.

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.

> Show me a similarly soft pedaled, deferential NPR interview of a right wing extremist.

not making a very good argument with this

> Show me a similarly soft pedaled, deferential NPR interview of a right wing extremist.

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.

Harvard and UNC lost at the Supreme Court when sued over their DEI programs being illegal discrimination.

Comparing calling out that illegal bigotry to people trying to justify looting is precisely what people are saying is biased.

If true, that is insane and if presented as factual those involved should be fired. But throwing the baby out with the bath water is not sensible.

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.

I can’t be sure but I assume they’re talking about this: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...

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.

peoples' media literacy is so bad

That acknowledgement was tacked on well after publication. Even interviewing this person was an absurdity and revelatory of the kind of bias at npr. Truly insane.

> revelatory of the kind of bias at NPR

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.

> That acknowledgement was tacked on well after publication.

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?

Right, these people are essentially arguing in favor of censorship. Basically, we should water down views and filter out extremists. Which is a great way to make insane people seem rational... which I think is a media phenomena we should all be familiar with by now.

I'm not sure what article about looting is being referenced, but NPR did interview author Vicky Osterweil about her book "In Defense of Looting". It would be extremely surprising to hear that NPR endorsed looting as a form of protest. The interview was definitely not an endorsement.

That was not the official position of NPR the organization or even an opinion piece by an NPR employee, it was an interview with an author.

This is known as platforming

That’s true, they had someone on for an interview. If that’s your biggest gripe, some random topical interview they had several years ago, then I’m not really sure what you’re looking for.

A similar rightwing interview.

Sure, here you go: https://www.npr.org/2024/08/31/nx-s1-5077780/extremely-ameri...

You don’t have to agree with this take, but it has historical precedent and merits discussion. In popular culture, “Do The Right Thing” (controversially?) posed the question back in 1989. And Black leaders have been talking about it since the 60s: https://jacobin.com/2020/09/martin-luther-king-riots-looting...

Ah yes, one piece of free speech justifies deleting the entire station.

Also, I mean... They were right actually?

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

It doesn’t have to be deleted. It just shouldn’t be funded by taxpayers.

I suppose you’d feel the same if Fox News said J6 was a legitimate political protest, right.

Which branch of government is Fox News taking EOs from again? Ah, no, it's the other way round.

Completely irrelevant and unfounded. I was responding to this:

> Ah yes, one piece of free speech justifies deleting the entire station.

Well, they did say that and continue to say that. And, the president has literally pardoned the insurrectionists... so...

How is interviewing an author, and explicitly saying this is one author's view, the same as the three biggest hosts on Fox explicitly saying J6 was a peaceful protest and not an insurrection, even as they privately decry it as a disgusting and dangerous day for the GOP.

[flagged]

Offering a poor example in support of your argument is as futile - if not more detrimental - than disregarding the question entirely.

It's not an example. It's not even close. You can and should want something more substantial than this if you're going to make such a sweeping conclusion!

That tweet from NPRPublicEditor has probably something to do with this: https://x.com/NPRpubliceditor/status/1319281101223940096

Always a good idea the actual text of these things, to get a true idea of what is actually being changed and why:

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.

From my understanding other presidents, on both sides, have pushed the boundaries/limits of executive orders but, as far as I understand it, his use is unprecedented. I had to read the wiki on them, but it's not supposed to be used outside of the executive branch unless supported by law or the constitution. I guess the grey area is "implied" in the below portion from Wikipedia.

"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 is a shame the US Presidency is arguably hurting the US by reducing its soft power, education, national defense.

It has failed to argue that it is in a National Emergency of Invasion as justification for deporting citizens and aliens without Due Process.

All news organizations come with an editorial perspective or bias. Why is this so difficult for news organisations to admit? (I’m an NPR listener, by the way.)

The way to fight Trump is to form mutual defense pacts. For example, the Big Ten schools are forming a mutual defense pact [1]. All media should form a similar pact. Trump is attacking CBS 60 Minutes, New York Times, PBS, etc. Instead of giving in (big mistake, bully demands more), or fighting alone, they should form an alliance.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/big-ten-michigan-schools-moves-11...

This administration will find itself suddenly a fan of antitrust actions if that becomes widespread.

15% from federal funding? Doesn’t sound too bad? I thought it was more like 95%. They will survive.

Lots of member stations are massively dependent on CPB. Without CBP funding those stations they'll go dark.

They’re like any public institution when funding is cut.

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!”

As the other commenter explained, CPB will survive, but the shave will kill some local stations that receive their funding. That's a severe impact for some areas, and something they obviously want to avoid.

I'm fine with U.S. pulling back funding for CFPB. I always found it ironic that corporate supported CSPAN has done a great job of informative programming while CFPB/NPR is barely listenable/watchable.

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.

If you want to remove public funding for public broadcasting, do it through the US Congress. The president does not have this authority.

This is quite sad. PBS and NPR were jewels of the American system. The right-wing has latched on to the message that all public-funded media that isn't right-wing-biased is _bad_ and are trying to kill it everywhere.

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.

The issue in Canada is that the CBC, despite having excellent journalists, investigative, local, and otherwise, and being an invaluable resource to many small communities, is overwhelmingly (but not entirely) biased in favour of one political party and whatever identity politics are currently the mainstay of their image. And it’s the party that nearly always campaigns on increasing their funding.

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.

Some of this stuff bugs me as well, but there's no good reason to defund an organization with some problems when you can fix it instead.

I read the poster's comment more closely and they sound paranoid tbh.

Paranoid about what? The things I’ve mentioned have been noticeable across the political spectrum for years.

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.

> And it’s the party that nearly always campaigns on increasing their funding

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.

Inserting it into every conversation is an example of them playing to certain audiences, particularly when it’s being mentioned in a way that appears to be checking a box versus being relevant or substantial.

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.

I mean sure the diversity angle could definitely be about playing to certain audiences. Climate change ain't though. You believing it's proof of that tells us about your own biases.

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?

Perhaps you’re assuming that I’m a climate change denier or that I take issue with it being discussed because I included it as an example. Neither is true. My point is that there was a period of time when listeners would tune in and hear things like “Coming up in the next hour, how climate change is impacting the Jazz scene in Toronto’s entertainment district!”. Perhaps they’ve dialed it back recently but it was the equivalent of keyword stuffing in radio form, and rarely anything worth listening to when considering a coast-to-coast audience.

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.

What's sad is that something that can take decades to build, can take a single term to destroy. Some things are not easily reverted when power changes. Sometimes it reminds me of a ratchet tool. One side can turn it and make changes, but the other side can only maintain status quo, and then the other side gains power again and turns it further.

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.

A lot of Canadians seem to think the CBC is overly biased but that the BBC is less biased, but the BBC is actually more biased than the CBC.

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.

The CBC is biased in the sense of what they won’t include in a story, or not cover until they’re the only Canadian news outlet not covering an event. You will never see the CBC break a story about something that makes the Liberal party or a person or group they consider marginalized look bad. Only once CTV, Global, NatPost, G&M have it on the front page will CBC cover it and usually leave out certain things that might be off-putting to marginalized groups or Liberal supporters.

The good news is that the President has no authority whatsoever over the CPB, so they will likely not cut any funding to either of these.

At the end of the day, if the people in the executive who push the button to transfer the money decide to listen to the president over the courts or congress it doesn’t matter what the law says.

Yeah I remind my right wing friends that the "legacy media" practices "journalism" where the journalists are expected to engage in ethical practices including properly sourcing and researching their stories.

Unfortunately these things get attacked because they're primarily enjoyed Americans who happen to be left-leaning. Ideologues will argue these outlets are "brainwashing" Americans but I find that to be absurd argument. Listening to Terry Gross interview Maurice Sendak isn't going to turn you into some left-wing communist.

It's the "reality has a left wing bias" problem. The modern right relies so heavily on misinformation, misdirection, hyperbole, and outright dishonesty that anything approaching objectivity is seen as biased.

> This is quite sad. PBS and NPR were jewels of the American system. The right-wing has latched on to the message that all public-funded media that isn't right-wing-biased is _bad_ and are trying to kill it everywhere.

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".

> 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.

Reality is left-leaning because right-leaning is narratives created from human fear of the unknown. Their marching orders frequently come from billionaire robber barons who own too much, and want to tell the public that's OK.

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.

He keeps doing illegal things because there is absolutely no penalty for being unlawful

Congress fully funded CPB (NPR, PBS, etc.) through September 2027

in the Continuing Resolution PASSED THIS YEAR BY THIS CONGRESS

People love the idea that the pendulum always swings back but that is survivor bias. The graveyard of history is filled with civilizations where the pendulum failed to swing back the last time. I have no faith that the US is exempt from history, but that doesn't mean we can't at least try to defy it. No reason we can't at least try to push the pendulum back one more time and put in place better safeguards. Get out there. Vote because you still can. Write your representatives because you still can. Boycott because you still can. Tell people they are wrong when they spout hate and lies. Do the things you still can because it is now clear that there are things you can't do freely and that list, unfortunately, is growing.

Questioning why something gets down voted is a great way to get more down votes, but I gotta ask, why did this get down voted? Is this just a bot going and down voting anything that appears against the current administration? I am now taking a stand so I really don't care about karma points. If you down voted my comment, or this one, tell me why. Democracies die without discussion so share you disagreement and discuss it. That would actually be a great feature for HN, no down vote without a comment or you loose a karma point yourself.

Bold of you to assume that voting will be able to change anything - will future votes not be rampant with corrupt practices? What controls will still be in place to ensure that?

Use it or loose it. Voter fraud has never been an issue, it has been voter disenfranchisement that has been the biggest problem. It is very likely that elections going forward will see that trend rise dramatically all while keeping people, incorrectly, focused on fraud. Either way, don't give up. Vote. Get others to vote. Help them get over the hurdles placed in front of them to block their voting. It is possible to make a difference even if it is harder now than it was before.

I don't disagree, but as a Brit I can't really help. It just looks very worrying from this side of the pond and I hope you can rescue your country.

Another lame attempt at ruling by decree. The CPB was deliberately designed with guardrails to avoid partisanship - the president appoints board members, and no more than five from the same party.

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.

> 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.

NPR is about as far from neutral as media gets, both in topics they choose to cover and in editorial bias.

> NPR is about as far from neutral as media gets

Really? While Fox and OAN exist? Care to provide any examples of that non neutrality?

I want off this train. I’m voting, protesting and only spending my money at places I know are not actively supporting Trump and. It rolling back DEI, (looking at you Target). Still feeling pretty helpless that it’s only going to get worse for us and for my children’s future.

Not much of a quote.

> “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...

What is “the left’s cultural position?”

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.

Please give, say, five specific examples from the last 30 days.

I am sorry but what the fuck does a balanced programming look like? Having an openly racist host spewing shit about women and immigrants?

the most openly racist thing I have heard on NPR was a talk show host accusing a surprised German linguist of "turning my relatives into lampshades" on live air

Congress isn't forbidden from exercising editorial control (can Congress forbid itself from doing anything except via constitutional amendment?). They forbade the executive branch from doing so whilst simultaneously imposing rules on what the CPB may fund.

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.

Seen on Bluesy "The NPR/PBS executive order is a sign of weakness. Republicans were going to put that cut into a rescission bill, which has been delayed as reconciliation took precedence. The likely story is that Republicans found that they didn't have the votes for it, so Trump had to go it alone."

It’s a sign of weakness because trump has to squash the truth from being broadcast so he can stay in power and do whatever he wants.

Plenty of identical example in history, none of them lead to good things.

The idea that Congress can set up agencies that are outside the control of the Executive needs to be revisited. It leads to rogue, unaccountable bureaucracy.

They are, at minimum, accountable to congress, therefore that is a lie.

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 entire point of the constitution is to remove control from the Executive.

The point was to eliminate the concept of a king. The president was meant as a figurehead, with almost no power.

I find the whole discussion here that Trump is Hitler propagated by our government is quite amusing, yet again reaffirming 1960s, 1980s, 2000s were inconsequential. Asch paradigm still dominates our reasoning after so many years of grinding for liberal values.

Funny because PBS and NPR bend over backwards to coddle Trump and his circle and to not seem oppositional. NPR national daily shows in particular cover Trump's shenanigans like the are reviewing the new BTS singles.

They too get to learn that appeasing bullies does not work. At best you're sending them away for today, but they'll be back for your lunch money tomorrow.

Yep, I stopped listening in the run up to the 2016 election as they made clear they were going to make space for both siding misinformation, lies, and the emotions of those who were fully bought into the propaganda machine.

I find it a shell of its former self.

The thing that made me want to smash my car radio was Nina Totenberg reporting on Supreme Court cases. Just like so much of the rest of the American political center, Nina Totenberg is twenty years past her expiration date in ability to rise to the moment.

I heard of a study done in trump's first admin. It said this will hurt rural communities far more than urban. So as usual Trump supporters will be punished more than non-trump supporters.

They won't be punished. They're listening to wingnuts on AM radio, not NPR news stories.

Have you checked that? As it turns out, public radio is very popular in rural areas.

May I also point out that your assumptions and stereotypes only serve to reinforce others’ entrenchments.

> 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"

For the sake of clarity, I’m not being nice and don’t expect it from others. I do however respect your contribution to the conversation and opinions.

And they'll blame liberals for it anyway. Why does Trump care?

You can say all you want about NPR or PBS being "left-leaning". But isn't this just a symptom of them telling the truth vs the lies that are spouted out of this administration every single day? If you report the truth now, I guess you're "left-leaning" or "biased" vs reporting whatever the admin says as fact with no comment or fact checking.

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.

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From the perspective of outside democracies it is almost laughable (or "cryable") to call the U.S. a democracy.

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.

> 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.

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.

A fair critique, at least of national US politics.

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....

The electoral college system and it's winner-takes-all implementation in most states means that the vast majority of US citizens are disenfranchized - they are given the illusion of voting with that vote in fact being used against them -majority wins all of state's electoral college votes.

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.

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Convincing yourself that Trump is just dumb is a big part of why we're in this mess.

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.

If you listen to him speak, he is not a smart person. What baffles me is how and why you'd think he was anything but an idiot.

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?

And none of that has kept him from achieving his goals.

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.

This is an amazing take. You're actually equating his position as a political puppet to being smart. And worse, you actually think he is!

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Did you consider that 30% of Americans are complete lunatics? Trump isn't clever or smart, he's batshit insane and appeals to the barely literate and *-ists that have been programmed with a bloodlust by Fox for two decades.

35 percent of all statistical quotations are made up

The bell curve is hard for some people to grasp...

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I guess you can applaud Trump for taking the high ground here, but what he should have done is fired NPR and PBS's leadership and replaced them with rightwing equivalents. Maybe then Democrats would finally understand why it's so offensive to use taxpayer money to fund political propaganda.

He doesn't have the power to fire NPR or PBS leadership. Just because he's president doesn't mean he can make decisions for independent organizations.

I think you mean he shouldn't have the power. What we are seeing is that he is ignoring the law, and the supposed system of checks and balances, of the three branches of government, and ultimately the US constitution, is ill-prepared to deal with the combination of a rogue president who is supported by his own party.

if you would cease to exist without public funding you are not and indipendent organization

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RIP USA. Probably.