In a move previously signaled by a Marjorie Taylor Green fact-finding hearing that resembled nothing more than a HUAC trial from the darkest days of McCarthyism, the Klepto Kaiser finally snapped and is attempting to defund PBS and NPR for the high crime of broadcasting "woke ideology" - which at this point clearly means anything Trump and other rich white nazis don't like.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/blatantly-unlawful-trump-slammed-for-trying-to-defund-pbs-npr/

Trump demands defunding of PBS and NPR over “woke propaganda”

"President Donald Trump escalated his attack on NPR and PBS on Thursday when he signed an executive order demanding the end of all federal funding supporting the news outlets.

In his order, Trump claimed that unlike in the 1960s, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was funded to ensure Americans had access to critical news, there are plenty of news options today. He has joined other Republicans accusing NPR and PBS of promoting a left-leaning bias. In a White House statement, he ordered any agency directly or indirectly funding the outlets' allegedly "woke propaganda" to "end the madness" as soon as possible, cutting off current funding "to the maximum extent allowed by law" and declining "to provide future funding."

There's a lot to unpack here; while I may not always ideologically agree with the folks at Ars, they do still produce deep longform investigative dives into the stories they cover - a rarity in the modern media environment. Firstly, no Trump probably can't legally do this, and yes he's just yolo-ing it out into the world anyway; also, it's Friday. As the article notes, it's unclear how Trump can order the CPB to cut already-approved funding for the next two years, and we haven't even gotten into how the "whys" Trump wants to do this all violate free speech and freedom of the press rights. This is petulant manbaby dictator shit.

Additionally, it's not at all clear that Trump's illegal tantrum is going to meaningfully affect his targets, NPR and PBS, anyway. Only 1% of NPR's funding actually comes from the US government, and PBS only receives 15% of its funding from the CPB. Since Der Führer has not yet granted himself the authority to simply throw members of the media in jail for expressing opinions and criticisms he doesn't like, the funding cut is as far as he can go for now. Unfortunately however, Trump's tantrum will definitely have victims and impoverish an already appalling American media environment; particularly in rural communities where smaller stations can rely on the CPB for as much as 50% of their funding.

"Cutting off funding, Kreger said last month, would have a "devastating impact" on rural communities, especially in parts of the country where NPR and PBS still serve as "the only source of news and emergency broadcasts," NPR reported.

For example, Ed Ulman, CEO of Alaska Public Media, testified to Congress last month that his stations "provide potentially life-saving warnings and alerts that are crucial for Alaskans who face threats ranging from extreme weather to earthquakes, landslides, and even volcanoes." Some of the smallest rural stations sometimes rely on CPB for about 50 percent of their funding, NPR reported."

All of which leaves us with the "whys" which really don't require us to read many tea leaves before we find the fascist ideological policing and reactionary bullshit. Downmarket Mussolini more or less just said the quiet part out loud:

"While Trump opposes NPR and PBS for promoting content that he disagrees with—criticizing segments on white privilege, gender identity, reparations, "fat phobia," and abortion—the networks have defended their programming as unbiased and falling in line with Federal Communications Commission guidelines."

I confess that on some level it's probably amusing to picture Trump sitting in front of a TV and getting big mad when it tells him Black and trans people exist, he shouldn't bully overweight people, and the abortion bans he facilitated are hurting American women. The reality here however is that in signaling what the president doesn't want to see in publicly-funded media, he's effectively articulating a Christian Nationalist agenda. As we've discussed numerous times on this blog, the regime is not just fighting a material war to install a fascist dictatorship in our society; they're also fighting an authoritarian cultural war on our discourse, our history, and who is allowed to matter in our media entertainment complex. The ideological war Trump is trying to use state power to enforce here, is just as important to the Trumpenrich project to create a white ethnostate dictatorship under the Kelpto Kaiser, as its material expansion of the American fascist police state is.