So, here is the moment I left NPR forever. Back in the day, if you spent a lot of time in your car, NPR was one of the only places to get news, so I listened regularly. It always leaned left, but if you filtered that out, you could still get an idea of what was going on. Then, Mother Teresa died. Instead of running a standard obituary segment, the announcer says, well, everyone knows Mother Teresa, so rather than recap her life, we are going to run this piece about her that we did a few years ago. The piece was as nasty of a hit piece that you could ever imagine - the short version was that the people she saved and ministered to would have been better off to have been aborted and of course Mother Teresa was fearlessly pro-life so she was doing evil instead of good. I have told this story many times and the usual reaction is, "that can't be true". But it is and I switched it off and never listened again. People say NPR has gone off the deep end, but if you are doing hit jobs on Mother Teresa the day she died (1997), you have been off the deep end for a very long time.
I was never leftwing, Chris. Though I grew up middle-class and well-educated in the midst of it. And although my siblings succumbed. It was tough going.
Glad the scales fell off your eyes early in the game. Despite the fact that organized indoctrination had been going on since the early 60s.
As I recall, Christopher Hitchens was not, to put it mildly, a fan of (Saint) Mother Teresa. And Hitch was as classically left as one could be and yet not support the Gulag.
So do I! When I am alone in the car I listen to 2 conservative talk shows but when they go to commercials I listen to NPR and swear alot. I will never give them another cent until they " become diverse!"
Not only does NPR have a far leftist agenda but they also do a lot weird obscure stories. There are some interesting ones like how seals have super strong lungs that enables them to stay under for lunger.
Similar incident; yes Left but not so obvious. Tuned into the radio two or so days after 9/11. Their chat wasn't about what was happening on the ground, but how "wouldn't it be better to see Clinton at ground zero instead of Bush." Seriously? Never turned it on again.
You are so right, Dena. The Stasi indoctrinated children/youth and then turned them against parents, to the point of the children betraying those parents to the Stasi. Not sure how they live with that when those children wake up at last....if they do. It's like a Greek tragedy.
The Chinese Red Guard and the Nazis also brainwashed children/youth to do this to parents. Even Orwell describes some of it in "1984",
When I was in a Christian college many decades ago, they had speaker who was in China during the cultural revolution and he spoke of when his city was hit with the Red Guard and how they went in and ki11ed all those who didn't succumb (professors, lawyers, etc.) and then put white smocks on the children and told them to run through the streets and apartments/neighborhoods and get the blood from those they ki11ed (some they personally knew, no doubt) and wipe it on their smocks and then go to the town square, where the children with the most red (blood) on their smocks got prizes and candy.
That's is fairly much what happened since 2016. I saw the earliest versions of indoctrination ongoing. And I witnessed ROGD occur in clusters at my DFW area high school. All the girls were outliers-very bright, some on the spectrum, deeply involved in anime and KPOP. Both Anime and KPOP have darker gender fluid subtexts that these girls deeply embraced as a way to create a group into which they fit.
You know what a modern equivalent of this is? In totalitarian families (there is a definition of totalitarianism covering aberrant group dynamics), it is possible to have a phenomenon known as Parental Alienation (PA).
PA acts in the family like political totalitarianism acts in the society. Children/youth are brainwashed by a Cluster-B parent to target with cruelty and betrayal the other loving parent. Therefore, what the Stasi and Communists could do to their designated scapegoat class, by using children, the Cluster-B parent can also do to his/her scapegoat -- the other parent. An extreme version would have been the Lloyd/Karrie Neurauter case of some years ago.
If you've never seen it, look up "The Children's Story". Produced in the 70's it was a clear illustration on how easily children can be influenced. Every parent should watch this.
Our granddaughter turned away from Sesame Street by the time she was two. If anything she liked the old Yo Gabba Gabba more because it had music and a theme to which she related. Sesame Street hasn't been a good show since Disney took over. Some of the shows aimed at young kids are now showing obvious indoctrination.
Time to reallocate the public radio airwaves. They are currently dominated by “public” radio and a few huge corporations that own large numbers of for-profit radio stations. Since the so called airwaves are property of the US taxpayers we need to claw back our property and sell it to the highest bidders. One to a customer please. And first dibs to local owners and with covenants not to sell for 10 years. The proceeds from sales will be returned to taxpayers as part of their DOGE checks.
I truly believe that any sentient human being who has spent any time at all listening to NPR knows, without a doubt, that NPR is an unapologetic propagandist organization who's raison d'être is to serve the Left in general, and the Democratic Party in particular. What I really don't understand is why we're even discussing why taxpayers should or should not continue to fund an organization that is dedicated to serving only one segment of the population?
Let the liberals who can't manage a day without having their particular beliefs validated continue to fund "their" radio station. And let our government put that money to use solving the myriad problems besetting our country today.
Bingo! I struggle to understand why the taxpayer funds Ivy League schools with hundreds of millions of dollars when they have endowments worth billions. If they want to support DEI, or antisemitism, and support terrorists with bold-faced discrimination not with my tax money.... The problem is that we are almost $40T in debt and still growing $2T annually, with a complete moral breakdown. You would think they jumped the shark with ACLU defending South American gangs from being deported. America, you need to keep the lawless, and the left judges are ok with that.
I left NPR many years ago. They became anti semitic around the second intifada in Israel. It's always a sign when any News outlet, European Country, politician (Obama)... is a blatant anti semite. That seems to come first, then more stupidity follows. It's something the world should watch for.
Anti-semitism really started to come back/rise when Obama got into office. One of the most destructive forces to come into the WH. The country to a sharp turn downward since because of him.
I hold him personally responsible for all of the dystopian and horrible things that have happened since 2008. I thank God that he picked a fight with Trump, because that’s what got Trump mad and got him to run and to never give up, because he was fighting Obama all along.
I was a daily NPR listener and regular donor in the 1990s. Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Wait Wait, Car Talk, Fresh Air. It was all I listened to on my car radio. As their coverage got more and more slanted, and their choice of stories more monotonous, I slowly tuned out. Sadly, I haven’t listened to NPR in 25 years. If I try to, it’s a miasma of left-leaning coverage and woke nonsense. No place for the general taxpayer’s money to be funneled so that people like Katherine Maher can spew their bile.
I used to listen to the CBC radio in Canada quite often keeping me company in a rural environment. There were some fantastic programs when I first came to Canada in the early 90s and I began to understand my new country through these commentators, hosts and programming. Like you with NPR, I noticed this slant and creep of woke idealism coming in, about - ooh I’m guessing nine years ago and I just couldn’t take it any longer and finally switched off. Thank goodness!
There is a big push to “defund the CBC “ - they are state funded to the tune of 1.24 billion $ per annum and of course they are basically just the Liberal government’s mouthpiece along with indoctrinating us all on how to think and what to say and when to jump up and down and who for. Puke.
“Ohh Maggie, Maggie what have you done…”.
Thanks for this Sasha. I rarely comment - I’m still loving your work and played this loudly for my neighbours to enjoy as I did some painting.!
We spend a lot of time in canada. And before sirius radio, we used to listen to NPR, because we felt more "at home" with that channel than with CBC (crashingly boring!)...and by the way, at standard news hour times, like the 6pm news, CBC could easily be running some feature on a remote punk rock band...but back to NPR...increasingly, about 10 years ago, i found myself yelling at steve inskeep....he was SO biased, even in his haughty tone, as he reported the news...and same with all things considered...i was just so over these sanctimonious and condescending people, lecturing me, on what i should think, in order to be a worthy human being....so totally over them...good riddance too...not one dime do they deserve...let them eat cake.
I am Canadian, Julia. I grew up loving CBC -- we are far more understated here than the US culture....and we like it that way.
I am also well-educated and well informed. No one could ever accuse me of being boring. Jordan Peterson and I had much the same education and many of the same abilities, actually. We turned out a lot of his sort in Canada, once upon a time. Educational standards here were once very high and rigourous. Minimal junk culture exposure.
We are the second-largest country in the world, and until recent immigration floods, we had only about 25 million people in the period you are likely referring to.
So perhaps the "boring Canada" bit was more about your personal perspective. Ahem.
Just to be clear, I love much about Americans and your grand accomplished country to the south of mine. May we always be the best of neighbours and friends. I wouldn't have it any other way. I hope everyone here feels the same.
I am not falling for the contrived insults that have sprung up from nowhere on the political scene. Messing with minds. I am not keen on that.
Back in 1979, I was part of a US Army Corps of Engineers survey crew that measured the slope of the southern shore of Lake Erie. I've walked that shore from Buffalo, NY to west of Toledo, Ohio... and I listened to CBC every night as well as Canadian stations - your radio blew away American radio - as did your rock bands like April Wine and Rush. It's a shame to see what has happened to your country under Trudeau - and Pollievre isn't a lot better - or Singh, for that matter. You need some better choices... btw, CRIK-FM from Calgary, AB is a station I enjoy listening to.
Thank you for the kind words, Streamfortyseven. Appreciated. That must have been quite the walk, back in 1979. Glad you had some CBC company. "A Little Night Music?" Jurgen Gothe and Disc Drive?
But we are introverts and the Americans are extroverts. Therefore Canadian voices tend to get lost in the roar from below the 49th.
I utterly refuse to play the current low political game of being told to dehumanize one another. Americans have a great deal to be proud of. I am happy to be your neighbour. And I thank Americans for having our back these past 60 post-war years, militarily. After we had more than pulled our weight as Allies in WWI and WWII Europe. While we keep the North populated (who else would live where it can go down to -50 C in January/February?) as a security bulwark for the entire continent.
Jurgen Gothe/Disc Drive...Now there's a personality and show I remember with great fondness. I'm in WA State. Mr. Gothe, with his quirky wit, was my emissary into classical music. I loved listening to his shows on the CBC out of Vancouver and I felt a real loss when his show left the air.
I was very fond of the CBC Disc Drive show with host Jurgen Gothe. I am in Canada, so I listened quite often. I can recall his annual Christmas show with the John Rutter fable, "Brother Heinrich's Christmas". Wonderful.
My husband was more knowledgeable about classical music at the time than I was. But I learned through the years.
Disc Drive went off the air in 2008. Jurgen died in 2015. He and his excellent show are missed.
PSA…telling people that you are well educated doesn’t bode well for many. Just share your thoughts and let us decide if you’re well educated. Some of the most well educated people I know are not anyone I’d like to hang out with in a personal or pleasurable setting.
I notice in your Substack bio that you brag about your kids, Oh Sarah. Maybe we need to take you down a peg or two over that.
Pot calling kettle black.
And I think that perhaps you have little education yourself, and are envious of those who do. They make your squirm. They probably hate hanging out with you too.
I do brag about my kids because they will inherit this earth and all those that populate it, including people like you.
I don’t have much formal education past high school, however I have a great foundation in the education of life, to include friendly criticism from others.
Congratulations are in order to you. You are exactly who many of us thought you are. Good day sir.
So...YOU can boast about whatever you wish...but it is a sin for anyone else to state their accomplishments. The resentment oozes out of you.
How about all the 20,000 Substack authors, who state their accomplishments with every article? How do you BEAR it? And why are you even here?
You seem poorly informed. Put in some effort!
You are a nasty piece of work to boot. Takes all kinds, I suppose. I have met many good people on Substack, but a number of the hugely envious troll types too.
Makes me ask why they come here. They don't want to learn. They don't even want to read. But they come to a platform where reading and writing and gaining knowledge are the name of the game.
Very odd.
Why don't you switch to some social media site that suits you better? Where they are all envious of education? Then you can all mock the well-informed types together. Seems to give you a charge.
Says the guy who announces that he was a drug and alcohol addict? And boasts throughout his bio about what a high-ranking academic he was?
That is rich! He goes berserk whenever someone else mentions even that they are educated. Does he hear himself?
Too funny! I am supposed to take my life's marching orders from William the druggie.
Pardon my ignorance, but don't people come to Substack....here we go....to READ?
And that others have to provide the writing? Did you not know this, William? Some potentially get paid for that writing, and some do it for free (I was going to say "gratis", but your vocabulary is limited).
Why do you come here? Seems that it has nothing to do with reading or intelligent conversation. Just to be an a-s.
PS I do not believe that you were an academic. At least not before the academies went severely downhill. You hardly seem able to put two real thoughts together.
I guess you failed to get tenure, hm-m-m? And then they fired you because you were always off on a bender of some sort. I wonder if you plagiarized your dissertation, even. Because you do not seem well-read or written, for someone who makes the claims that you do.
And then you go barking mad when someone else simply states they have a good education? When you go whole-hog in that department yourself...claiming that you were on college faculty.
Do you ever wear a thinking cap?
I am not sure how you ever got near being on faculty, unless your college was one of those leftwing crazy places. Or perhaps you are simply lying.
Sarah, we both agree. The truth is really very simple and undeniable: stating that one is well educated and informed exactly makes one sound uneducated and uniformed to others. It is literally a natural, instinctive reaction among the human species.
If Mr. A's was an honest mistake, or mere ignorance, his response - if he truly is educated and informed - would be to instantly recognize the mistake and humbly apologize for sounding so boorish. Thus, Mr. A reveals for the second time that he's neither educated or informed with his rabid defense of narcissism.
Somehow, Mr. A's great education didn't include Philosophy 101 or he would have learned how the smartest people are those who know how stupid they are. Socrates told us about smart people like Mr. A thousands of years ago; and yet today, we remember Socrates and not all those smart people.
I would bet that you have never read any of it....you just know a few of the basic names to throw around.
And you, Lewis Feral, sound even more envious than the other fellow. It seems to be eating you. I know the type.
Most cities have continuing education programs, in the evenings. You might look into them. I think you need it. How long since you have read an in-depth book, cover to cover? Hm-m-m? Never too late to learn.
There we have it, folks. The third example. An educated, well informed person would be responding to our criticisms of his self-proclaimed grandeur with substantive arguments. It's what such people do. It would be embarrassing to such a person to blatantly ignore the debatable issue proposed by his critics to, instead, simply rage stupid, ignorant insults at straw men he invents. An educated person would have told us why they think Socrates is wrong about people like him.
You can tell he's trapped in his own mind, in a self-delusion that words on the Internet are true because he posts them, and if stupid people like us don't believe that, he'll post the words again to prove it. HA! It takes that psychosis to instinctively accuse others of what you're doing. Mr. A is just fighting with one of his other personalities again.
I expect you'll see the fourth example next, when I ask him to actually cite the words of mine he claims make me "sound even more envious" such that it "seems to be eating" me. There are none, of course. It's probably something Mr. B or Ms. C accuses him of when he's surfing porn. But give him a minute and we'll see.
Many druggies like you are hostile. And that was a death threat. What a wonderful human being! You can get in trouble for harassing others that way, William. Did you think about that before you spouted off?
When I was a child in Canada, the state broadcaster -- CBC -- ran innocent puppet shows on morning TV for pre-school children. By 2025, they promote Trans-g-ism and sexual grooming.
For what it is worth, perhaps to put things in context, the new Prime Minister in Canada -- unelected Mark Carney -- is the globalist's globalist.
One of his grown children is reportedly Trans-g, through the notorious Tavistock Clinic in London. England. Carney was the unpopular Governor of the Bank of England for some years.
Therefore I cannot see reform of the CBC coming from him.
The evil that is NPR will continue to exist. There are plenty of leftists who will donate and there are even a ton of leftist oligarchs who will throw some bucks their way. They do not need taxpayer money.
Once the federal money is removed, the word ‘Public’ should also be eradicated from their titles. Because they no longer represent the Public, but just a sliver of it.
Over 40 years ago there was an attempt to unionize the lab technicians at Harvard Medical School. I forgot which union - I think it was the United Auto Workers, though I may be mistaken. I had a close friend who worked at HMS and who had previously been a UAW-represented union worker at a nearby GM assembly plant. He didn't want the union worker experience a second time and stated that HMS techs had a pretty good deal already. So he led an effort opposing unionization. As a good liberal Democrat (he later worked for Mike Dukakis) he approached NPR's "All Things Considered." They had been running pro-union stories about the "struggle" of Harvard workers to unionize. Would they devote a little time to the opposite side? Answer: nothing doing. NPR was all in for the union. I have never forgotten this and haven't taken their "news and analysis" seriously since then.
When did you think that NPR and PBS was other than a steaming pile of dung?There are thousands of outlets for info now and paying these people out of tax payer funds to spew their vomit is criminal. The is not Praire Home Companion. It is vile propoganda.
IMO, the Trans movement is anti-God. Trying to transition your biological sex to another is humanity saying they know better than the God-given plumbing one was born with. Placing oneself above God always leads to pain and suffering. Trans’ing is openly disobeying God. The OT and NT are littered with scripture warnings of what happens when a person or people group defy in this way.
I think it is more like the anti-human depopulation cult created by the Rockefeller family trust. Kill everyone else’s children and empty out the world of people. Excepting our children and our friends’ children.
Big problem… who will scrub their toilets? And wax their Bentley’s?
In Iran, there is another perversion. There, it is illegal to be homosexual. So, Iran is now one of the world’s most advanced trans’ing ecosystems of doctors in the world. Why? Because if you are homosexual and transition, then you can engage in homosexual behavior and relationships because one’s outward appearance ‘looks’ the opposite of one’s underlying chromosome make-up. A certain amount of gays in Iran transition in order to legally practice thier same-sex desires.
Odd. All it takes to transition in Iran is a burka. I'd expect one could transition back and forth daily. Heck, if he shaves well, his lover won't even know they're queer.
Look up Julian Huxley too. The eugenicist of UNESCO. He was a British biologist from a prominent family.....his brother Aldous Huxley wrote "Brave New World". The whole family were depraved eugenicists.
Yes, brilliant. Sasha is right that their coverage of childhood “trans” issues is the real tell, rather than mentions of Adam Schiff or number of Democrats on staff. It shows that NPR chose an evil course of behavior – – pandering to the Democratic Party line and deciding not to cover the plight of children and parents—-with predictably gruesome tragic consequences for real children and young people.
Former ATC addict. Find it vomit inducing now. But They can have their 78 liberal editors. They can have their incredibly biased reporting. But I’m not going to be forced to pay for it thru my taxes.
Funny, I was a solidly left-leaning Dem in the 80’s and 90’s and, for some reason, NPR always annoyed me. I had solid lefty credentials. But NPR annoyed the heck out of me! All of my friends worshipped Nina Totenberg. I thought she was blah. Looking back, I now suspect it was my “real” conservative self trying to break through back then. Who knows? Anyway, this is a good story, Sasha. Hoping we can please just eliminate the federal support for NPR. PBS, too.
I worked as a producer/reporter at NPR West for about eight years. I helped open the joint. I can tell you that establishment capture at NPR began long before they embraced the absurdities of DEI. I was probably a product of "affirmative action" myself—back when that meant hiring reporters and producers to attract more black listeners. My work there helped accomplish that.
But by the time I rolled in—still very green but already somewhat accomplished—the organization was already in the process of losing its soul. The run-up to the Iraq invasion was happening, and I noticed a palpable fear of asking the right questions. NPR seemed to have strict orders from on high never to push back against the Bush administration's railroading of the American people toward war—never to ask the obvious questions about the bogus evidence that Iraq harbored WMDs. Never mind the international weapons inspectors who contradicted the claims—NPR was too busy promoting the notion of Saddam Hussein as the new Hitler.
When I asked questions like, "How do we know the anthrax General Powell is offering up as evidence is real?" it was as if a record had scratched in our staff meeting. I had touched the third rail.
They would never let their audience know that the U.S. had cozied up to Saddam for years, either approving of or looking the other way as he did his so-called "Hitler thing." And only in hindsight—after several more leaders were slapped with the "Hitler" label and their nations bombed into oblivion—have I come to realize that NPR was crawling with intelligence assets steering the narrative toward endless war, I dare say, in the name of the Greater Israel project.
I was young and ambitious, and overall, I felt happy and lucky to be part of such a storied organization. By the time I left, I understood just how biased even the most respected news organizations were—just how out of touch they were with everyday people.
Lots of people long for the old NPR. But its relentless promotion of the Trump-Russia, COVID, climate, BLM, transgender, and DEI narratives has been so absurd, so all-consuming, that listeners fail to realize NPR had been bamboozling them on the big issues long before any of that.
Canada's CBC fired escaped Russian dissident Yuri Bezmenov back in the 1970s, under our first Communist Prime Minister Pierre Troodo. Though most Canadians did not realize at the time that he was Communist. Troodo, I mean.
I put the date for the start of formal leftwing indoctrination in America at 1963. JFK assassination and beyond.
So, here is the moment I left NPR forever. Back in the day, if you spent a lot of time in your car, NPR was one of the only places to get news, so I listened regularly. It always leaned left, but if you filtered that out, you could still get an idea of what was going on. Then, Mother Teresa died. Instead of running a standard obituary segment, the announcer says, well, everyone knows Mother Teresa, so rather than recap her life, we are going to run this piece about her that we did a few years ago. The piece was as nasty of a hit piece that you could ever imagine - the short version was that the people she saved and ministered to would have been better off to have been aborted and of course Mother Teresa was fearlessly pro-life so she was doing evil instead of good. I have told this story many times and the usual reaction is, "that can't be true". But it is and I switched it off and never listened again. People say NPR has gone off the deep end, but if you are doing hit jobs on Mother Teresa the day she died (1997), you have been off the deep end for a very long time.
I was never leftwing, Chris. Though I grew up middle-class and well-educated in the midst of it. And although my siblings succumbed. It was tough going.
Glad the scales fell off your eyes early in the game. Despite the fact that organized indoctrination had been going on since the early 60s.
Congratulations on that!
I met Mother Teresa nearly a half century ago. A very nice lady, exactly the type of person that leftists would view as a villain.
I remember this segment! I actually wasn’t surprised coming from NPR.
As I recall, Christopher Hitchens was not, to put it mildly, a fan of (Saint) Mother Teresa. And Hitch was as classically left as one could be and yet not support the Gulag.
I still listen in the car as part of opposition research.
So do I! When I am alone in the car I listen to 2 conservative talk shows but when they go to commercials I listen to NPR and swear alot. I will never give them another cent until they " become diverse!"
Not only does NPR have a far leftist agenda but they also do a lot weird obscure stories. There are some interesting ones like how seals have super strong lungs that enables them to stay under for lunger.
Similar incident; yes Left but not so obvious. Tuned into the radio two or so days after 9/11. Their chat wasn't about what was happening on the ground, but how "wouldn't it be better to see Clinton at ground zero instead of Bush." Seriously? Never turned it on again.
Cut off all funding for both NPR and PBS. We should not be spending one cent of taxpayer dollars on either of those leftist propaganda outlets.
Sesame Street used to make me uncomfortable when I was young. Could never quite put my finger on the reason, at the time.
Just another chapter in leftist indoctrination of America. Who would suspect Elmo and the gang?
Got to start indoctrinating the kids when they’re young, it makes them easier to control when they reach adulthood.
Yup...indoctrinating the kids is the foundation of every Communist regime.
Indoctrinating kids & turning them against their parents. Living through it in CA & WA.
You are so right, Dena. The Stasi indoctrinated children/youth and then turned them against parents, to the point of the children betraying those parents to the Stasi. Not sure how they live with that when those children wake up at last....if they do. It's like a Greek tragedy.
The Chinese Red Guard and the Nazis also brainwashed children/youth to do this to parents. Even Orwell describes some of it in "1984",
When I was in a Christian college many decades ago, they had speaker who was in China during the cultural revolution and he spoke of when his city was hit with the Red Guard and how they went in and ki11ed all those who didn't succumb (professors, lawyers, etc.) and then put white smocks on the children and told them to run through the streets and apartments/neighborhoods and get the blood from those they ki11ed (some they personally knew, no doubt) and wipe it on their smocks and then go to the town square, where the children with the most red (blood) on their smocks got prizes and candy.
It’s evil for sure.
That's is fairly much what happened since 2016. I saw the earliest versions of indoctrination ongoing. And I witnessed ROGD occur in clusters at my DFW area high school. All the girls were outliers-very bright, some on the spectrum, deeply involved in anime and KPOP. Both Anime and KPOP have darker gender fluid subtexts that these girls deeply embraced as a way to create a group into which they fit.
You know what a modern equivalent of this is? In totalitarian families (there is a definition of totalitarianism covering aberrant group dynamics), it is possible to have a phenomenon known as Parental Alienation (PA).
PA acts in the family like political totalitarianism acts in the society. Children/youth are brainwashed by a Cluster-B parent to target with cruelty and betrayal the other loving parent. Therefore, what the Stasi and Communists could do to their designated scapegoat class, by using children, the Cluster-B parent can also do to his/her scapegoat -- the other parent. An extreme version would have been the Lloyd/Karrie Neurauter case of some years ago.
If you've never seen it, look up "The Children's Story". Produced in the 70's it was a clear illustration on how easily children can be influenced. Every parent should watch this.
Ms Maher said truth was an obstacle to achieving consensus.
Our granddaughter turned away from Sesame Street by the time she was two. If anything she liked the old Yo Gabba Gabba more because it had music and a theme to which she related. Sesame Street hasn't been a good show since Disney took over. Some of the shows aimed at young kids are now showing obvious indoctrination.
Time to reallocate the public radio airwaves. They are currently dominated by “public” radio and a few huge corporations that own large numbers of for-profit radio stations. Since the so called airwaves are property of the US taxpayers we need to claw back our property and sell it to the highest bidders. One to a customer please. And first dibs to local owners and with covenants not to sell for 10 years. The proceeds from sales will be returned to taxpayers as part of their DOGE checks.
I truly believe that any sentient human being who has spent any time at all listening to NPR knows, without a doubt, that NPR is an unapologetic propagandist organization who's raison d'être is to serve the Left in general, and the Democratic Party in particular. What I really don't understand is why we're even discussing why taxpayers should or should not continue to fund an organization that is dedicated to serving only one segment of the population?
Let the liberals who can't manage a day without having their particular beliefs validated continue to fund "their" radio station. And let our government put that money to use solving the myriad problems besetting our country today.
Bingo! I struggle to understand why the taxpayer funds Ivy League schools with hundreds of millions of dollars when they have endowments worth billions. If they want to support DEI, or antisemitism, and support terrorists with bold-faced discrimination not with my tax money.... The problem is that we are almost $40T in debt and still growing $2T annually, with a complete moral breakdown. You would think they jumped the shark with ACLU defending South American gangs from being deported. America, you need to keep the lawless, and the left judges are ok with that.
So well said, JT!
As to Maher herself, she seems like a clone of Anne Applebaum and Elizabeth Holmes.
The SiliCON Valley meets the deep state.
It is if the past 30 years have actually been a eugenics program to create her.
Great article.
I left NPR many years ago. They became anti semitic around the second intifada in Israel. It's always a sign when any News outlet, European Country, politician (Obama)... is a blatant anti semite. That seems to come first, then more stupidity follows. It's something the world should watch for.
Anti-semitism really started to come back/rise when Obama got into office. One of the most destructive forces to come into the WH. The country to a sharp turn downward since because of him.
I hold him personally responsible for all of the dystopian and horrible things that have happened since 2008. I thank God that he picked a fight with Trump, because that’s what got Trump mad and got him to run and to never give up, because he was fighting Obama all along.
I agree 💯
Agree. And the Jewish libs still voted for him— twice— and then for Kamala even after Oct 7.
Democrats Jews have always voted Democrat for years knowing full well the democrats were not on the Jews/Israel side.
I stopped listening when I noted the one-sided reporting on Israel many years ago.
Some people who would be in a position to know consider him a Psychopath. Most of this type are not Hannibal Lechters up front.
Al Sharpton has entered the chat.
I was a daily NPR listener and regular donor in the 1990s. Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Wait Wait, Car Talk, Fresh Air. It was all I listened to on my car radio. As their coverage got more and more slanted, and their choice of stories more monotonous, I slowly tuned out. Sadly, I haven’t listened to NPR in 25 years. If I try to, it’s a miasma of left-leaning coverage and woke nonsense. No place for the general taxpayer’s money to be funneled so that people like Katherine Maher can spew their bile.
I used to listen to the CBC radio in Canada quite often keeping me company in a rural environment. There were some fantastic programs when I first came to Canada in the early 90s and I began to understand my new country through these commentators, hosts and programming. Like you with NPR, I noticed this slant and creep of woke idealism coming in, about - ooh I’m guessing nine years ago and I just couldn’t take it any longer and finally switched off. Thank goodness!
There is a big push to “defund the CBC “ - they are state funded to the tune of 1.24 billion $ per annum and of course they are basically just the Liberal government’s mouthpiece along with indoctrinating us all on how to think and what to say and when to jump up and down and who for. Puke.
“Ohh Maggie, Maggie what have you done…”.
Thanks for this Sasha. I rarely comment - I’m still loving your work and played this loudly for my neighbours to enjoy as I did some painting.!
NPR is a taxpayer-funded circle jerk for the wokest people in the country. Burn it to the ground.
We spend a lot of time in canada. And before sirius radio, we used to listen to NPR, because we felt more "at home" with that channel than with CBC (crashingly boring!)...and by the way, at standard news hour times, like the 6pm news, CBC could easily be running some feature on a remote punk rock band...but back to NPR...increasingly, about 10 years ago, i found myself yelling at steve inskeep....he was SO biased, even in his haughty tone, as he reported the news...and same with all things considered...i was just so over these sanctimonious and condescending people, lecturing me, on what i should think, in order to be a worthy human being....so totally over them...good riddance too...not one dime do they deserve...let them eat cake.
I am Canadian, Julia. I grew up loving CBC -- we are far more understated here than the US culture....and we like it that way.
I am also well-educated and well informed. No one could ever accuse me of being boring. Jordan Peterson and I had much the same education and many of the same abilities, actually. We turned out a lot of his sort in Canada, once upon a time. Educational standards here were once very high and rigourous. Minimal junk culture exposure.
We are the second-largest country in the world, and until recent immigration floods, we had only about 25 million people in the period you are likely referring to.
So perhaps the "boring Canada" bit was more about your personal perspective. Ahem.
Just to be clear, I love much about Americans and your grand accomplished country to the south of mine. May we always be the best of neighbours and friends. I wouldn't have it any other way. I hope everyone here feels the same.
I am not falling for the contrived insults that have sprung up from nowhere on the political scene. Messing with minds. I am not keen on that.
My best to all of us.
Back in 1979, I was part of a US Army Corps of Engineers survey crew that measured the slope of the southern shore of Lake Erie. I've walked that shore from Buffalo, NY to west of Toledo, Ohio... and I listened to CBC every night as well as Canadian stations - your radio blew away American radio - as did your rock bands like April Wine and Rush. It's a shame to see what has happened to your country under Trudeau - and Pollievre isn't a lot better - or Singh, for that matter. You need some better choices... btw, CRIK-FM from Calgary, AB is a station I enjoy listening to.
Thank you for the kind words, Streamfortyseven. Appreciated. That must have been quite the walk, back in 1979. Glad you had some CBC company. "A Little Night Music?" Jurgen Gothe and Disc Drive?
But we are introverts and the Americans are extroverts. Therefore Canadian voices tend to get lost in the roar from below the 49th.
I utterly refuse to play the current low political game of being told to dehumanize one another. Americans have a great deal to be proud of. I am happy to be your neighbour. And I thank Americans for having our back these past 60 post-war years, militarily. After we had more than pulled our weight as Allies in WWI and WWII Europe. While we keep the North populated (who else would live where it can go down to -50 C in January/February?) as a security bulwark for the entire continent.
Hats off to those on both sides of our border!
Jurgen Gothe/Disc Drive...Now there's a personality and show I remember with great fondness. I'm in WA State. Mr. Gothe, with his quirky wit, was my emissary into classical music. I loved listening to his shows on the CBC out of Vancouver and I felt a real loss when his show left the air.
I was very fond of the CBC Disc Drive show with host Jurgen Gothe. I am in Canada, so I listened quite often. I can recall his annual Christmas show with the John Rutter fable, "Brother Heinrich's Christmas". Wonderful.
My husband was more knowledgeable about classical music at the time than I was. But I learned through the years.
Disc Drive went off the air in 2008. Jurgen died in 2015. He and his excellent show are missed.
PSA…telling people that you are well educated doesn’t bode well for many. Just share your thoughts and let us decide if you’re well educated. Some of the most well educated people I know are not anyone I’d like to hang out with in a personal or pleasurable setting.
I notice in your Substack bio that you brag about your kids, Oh Sarah. Maybe we need to take you down a peg or two over that.
Pot calling kettle black.
And I think that perhaps you have little education yourself, and are envious of those who do. They make your squirm. They probably hate hanging out with you too.
Ouch! Did I hit a nerve?
I do brag about my kids because they will inherit this earth and all those that populate it, including people like you.
I don’t have much formal education past high school, however I have a great foundation in the education of life, to include friendly criticism from others.
Congratulations are in order to you. You are exactly who many of us thought you are. Good day sir.
So...YOU can boast about whatever you wish...but it is a sin for anyone else to state their accomplishments. The resentment oozes out of you.
How about all the 20,000 Substack authors, who state their accomplishments with every article? How do you BEAR it? And why are you even here?
You seem poorly informed. Put in some effort!
You are a nasty piece of work to boot. Takes all kinds, I suppose. I have met many good people on Substack, but a number of the hugely envious troll types too.
Makes me ask why they come here. They don't want to learn. They don't even want to read. But they come to a platform where reading and writing and gaining knowledge are the name of the game.
Very odd.
Why don't you switch to some social media site that suits you better? Where they are all envious of education? Then you can all mock the well-informed types together. Seems to give you a charge.
Says the guy who announces that he was a drug and alcohol addict? And boasts throughout his bio about what a high-ranking academic he was?
That is rich! He goes berserk whenever someone else mentions even that they are educated. Does he hear himself?
Too funny! I am supposed to take my life's marching orders from William the druggie.
Pardon my ignorance, but don't people come to Substack....here we go....to READ?
And that others have to provide the writing? Did you not know this, William? Some potentially get paid for that writing, and some do it for free (I was going to say "gratis", but your vocabulary is limited).
Why do you come here? Seems that it has nothing to do with reading or intelligent conversation. Just to be an a-s.
PS I do not believe that you were an academic. At least not before the academies went severely downhill. You hardly seem able to put two real thoughts together.
I guess you failed to get tenure, hm-m-m? And then they fired you because you were always off on a bender of some sort. I wonder if you plagiarized your dissertation, even. Because you do not seem well-read or written, for someone who makes the claims that you do.
And then you go barking mad when someone else simply states they have a good education? When you go whole-hog in that department yourself...claiming that you were on college faculty.
Do you ever wear a thinking cap?
I am not sure how you ever got near being on faculty, unless your college was one of those leftwing crazy places. Or perhaps you are simply lying.
Oh my. Talk about hitting a nerve.
Sarah, we both agree. The truth is really very simple and undeniable: stating that one is well educated and informed exactly makes one sound uneducated and uniformed to others. It is literally a natural, instinctive reaction among the human species.
If Mr. A's was an honest mistake, or mere ignorance, his response - if he truly is educated and informed - would be to instantly recognize the mistake and humbly apologize for sounding so boorish. Thus, Mr. A reveals for the second time that he's neither educated or informed with his rabid defense of narcissism.
Somehow, Mr. A's great education didn't include Philosophy 101 or he would have learned how the smartest people are those who know how stupid they are. Socrates told us about smart people like Mr. A thousands of years ago; and yet today, we remember Socrates and not all those smart people.
I would bet that you have never read any of it....you just know a few of the basic names to throw around.
And you, Lewis Feral, sound even more envious than the other fellow. It seems to be eating you. I know the type.
Most cities have continuing education programs, in the evenings. You might look into them. I think you need it. How long since you have read an in-depth book, cover to cover? Hm-m-m? Never too late to learn.
There we have it, folks. The third example. An educated, well informed person would be responding to our criticisms of his self-proclaimed grandeur with substantive arguments. It's what such people do. It would be embarrassing to such a person to blatantly ignore the debatable issue proposed by his critics to, instead, simply rage stupid, ignorant insults at straw men he invents. An educated person would have told us why they think Socrates is wrong about people like him.
You can tell he's trapped in his own mind, in a self-delusion that words on the Internet are true because he posts them, and if stupid people like us don't believe that, he'll post the words again to prove it. HA! It takes that psychosis to instinctively accuse others of what you're doing. Mr. A is just fighting with one of his other personalities again.
I expect you'll see the fourth example next, when I ask him to actually cite the words of mine he claims make me "sound even more envious" such that it "seems to be eating" me. There are none, of course. It's probably something Mr. B or Ms. C accuses him of when he's surfing porn. But give him a minute and we'll see.
Did you just do another hit?
Many druggies like you are hostile. And that was a death threat. What a wonderful human being! You can get in trouble for harassing others that way, William. Did you think about that before you spouted off?
A. - I've reread julia's post multiple times... I don't see where Canada, or Canadians, were described as boring.
However, I do see CBC - TV broadcaster - described as boring. I would never equate CBC, a TV outlet, to Canada or Canadians.
And btw, I do find CBC boring myself (as well as BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and NPR).
That's lovely, DM.
I think your post is boring too.
NPR is the opiate of everyone except the masses.
When I was a child in Canada, the state broadcaster -- CBC -- ran innocent puppet shows on morning TV for pre-school children. By 2025, they promote Trans-g-ism and sexual grooming.
Something went very seriously wrong somewhere.
For what it is worth, perhaps to put things in context, the new Prime Minister in Canada -- unelected Mark Carney -- is the globalist's globalist.
One of his grown children is reportedly Trans-g, through the notorious Tavistock Clinic in London. England. Carney was the unpopular Governor of the Bank of England for some years.
Therefore I cannot see reform of the CBC coming from him.
Once a fan of CBC, gave up on them about 2015...
Gone were the glory days of Gzowski, S. McLean, and Rex, when CBC was worth listening to...
I will always miss Rex.
And Vicki Gabareau!!!
Vile people following who’s agenda…?
The evil that is NPR will continue to exist. There are plenty of leftists who will donate and there are even a ton of leftist oligarchs who will throw some bucks their way. They do not need taxpayer money.
Once the federal money is removed, the word ‘Public’ should also be eradicated from their titles. Because they no longer represent the Public, but just a sliver of it.
Over 40 years ago there was an attempt to unionize the lab technicians at Harvard Medical School. I forgot which union - I think it was the United Auto Workers, though I may be mistaken. I had a close friend who worked at HMS and who had previously been a UAW-represented union worker at a nearby GM assembly plant. He didn't want the union worker experience a second time and stated that HMS techs had a pretty good deal already. So he led an effort opposing unionization. As a good liberal Democrat (he later worked for Mike Dukakis) he approached NPR's "All Things Considered." They had been running pro-union stories about the "struggle" of Harvard workers to unionize. Would they devote a little time to the opposite side? Answer: nothing doing. NPR was all in for the union. I have never forgotten this and haven't taken their "news and analysis" seriously since then.
All in for the union money.
When did you think that NPR and PBS was other than a steaming pile of dung?There are thousands of outlets for info now and paying these people out of tax payer funds to spew their vomit is criminal. The is not Praire Home Companion. It is vile propoganda.
IMO, the Trans movement is anti-God. Trying to transition your biological sex to another is humanity saying they know better than the God-given plumbing one was born with. Placing oneself above God always leads to pain and suffering. Trans’ing is openly disobeying God. The OT and NT are littered with scripture warnings of what happens when a person or people group defy in this way.
I think it is more like the anti-human depopulation cult created by the Rockefeller family trust. Kill everyone else’s children and empty out the world of people. Excepting our children and our friends’ children.
Big problem… who will scrub their toilets? And wax their Bentley’s?
In Iran, there is another perversion. There, it is illegal to be homosexual. So, Iran is now one of the world’s most advanced trans’ing ecosystems of doctors in the world. Why? Because if you are homosexual and transition, then you can engage in homosexual behavior and relationships because one’s outward appearance ‘looks’ the opposite of one’s underlying chromosome make-up. A certain amount of gays in Iran transition in order to legally practice thier same-sex desires.
Odd. All it takes to transition in Iran is a burka. I'd expect one could transition back and forth daily. Heck, if he shaves well, his lover won't even know they're queer.
Interesting
Look up Julian Huxley too. The eugenicist of UNESCO. He was a British biologist from a prominent family.....his brother Aldous Huxley wrote "Brave New World". The whole family were depraved eugenicists.
Rockefeller?
Yes. I’ll fix it. Big oil family promotes societal suicide.
Sasha, this was a brilliantly constructed segment, including your choice of music. Thank you.
Yes, brilliant. Sasha is right that their coverage of childhood “trans” issues is the real tell, rather than mentions of Adam Schiff or number of Democrats on staff. It shows that NPR chose an evil course of behavior – – pandering to the Democratic Party line and deciding not to cover the plight of children and parents—-with predictably gruesome tragic consequences for real children and young people.
Former ATC addict. Find it vomit inducing now. But They can have their 78 liberal editors. They can have their incredibly biased reporting. But I’m not going to be forced to pay for it thru my taxes.
Funny, I was a solidly left-leaning Dem in the 80’s and 90’s and, for some reason, NPR always annoyed me. I had solid lefty credentials. But NPR annoyed the heck out of me! All of my friends worshipped Nina Totenberg. I thought she was blah. Looking back, I now suspect it was my “real” conservative self trying to break through back then. Who knows? Anyway, this is a good story, Sasha. Hoping we can please just eliminate the federal support for NPR. PBS, too.
I worked as a producer/reporter at NPR West for about eight years. I helped open the joint. I can tell you that establishment capture at NPR began long before they embraced the absurdities of DEI. I was probably a product of "affirmative action" myself—back when that meant hiring reporters and producers to attract more black listeners. My work there helped accomplish that.
But by the time I rolled in—still very green but already somewhat accomplished—the organization was already in the process of losing its soul. The run-up to the Iraq invasion was happening, and I noticed a palpable fear of asking the right questions. NPR seemed to have strict orders from on high never to push back against the Bush administration's railroading of the American people toward war—never to ask the obvious questions about the bogus evidence that Iraq harbored WMDs. Never mind the international weapons inspectors who contradicted the claims—NPR was too busy promoting the notion of Saddam Hussein as the new Hitler.
When I asked questions like, "How do we know the anthrax General Powell is offering up as evidence is real?" it was as if a record had scratched in our staff meeting. I had touched the third rail.
They would never let their audience know that the U.S. had cozied up to Saddam for years, either approving of or looking the other way as he did his so-called "Hitler thing." And only in hindsight—after several more leaders were slapped with the "Hitler" label and their nations bombed into oblivion—have I come to realize that NPR was crawling with intelligence assets steering the narrative toward endless war, I dare say, in the name of the Greater Israel project.
I was young and ambitious, and overall, I felt happy and lucky to be part of such a storied organization. By the time I left, I understood just how biased even the most respected news organizations were—just how out of touch they were with everyday people.
Lots of people long for the old NPR. But its relentless promotion of the Trump-Russia, COVID, climate, BLM, transgender, and DEI narratives has been so absurd, so all-consuming, that listeners fail to realize NPR had been bamboozling them on the big issues long before any of that.
Canada's CBC fired escaped Russian dissident Yuri Bezmenov back in the 1970s, under our first Communist Prime Minister Pierre Troodo. Though most Canadians did not realize at the time that he was Communist. Troodo, I mean.
I put the date for the start of formal leftwing indoctrination in America at 1963. JFK assassination and beyond.