X/Twitter is overflowing with tweets exposing the lockstep leftism that defines NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher. She’s in the spotlight because Uri Berliner, an NPR employee, wrote about what’s long been obvious, which is that taxpayer-funded NPR functions as a branch of the Democrat Party. However, Berliner just focused on a few political reportorial crimes that NPR committed (e.g., its anti-Trump bias, hiding the Hunter Biden story, ignoring COVID’s lab origins, etc.). What Berliner didn’t touch upon was how radicalized everything at NPR is.
A quick recap: Last week, Berliner wrote an exposé about the organization’s political bias. This matters because NPR gets almost 40% of its funding from federal and state taxpayers. NPR suspended Berliner for five days, a form of retaliation against a whistleblower that, in a just world, would have someone at the organization investigated for illegal conduct.
The head of NPR, the person where the buck should be stopping, is Katherine Maher. People have been having lots of fun exposing Maher’s radicalism. Heck, I know that I did. The great Christopher Rufo has been having a field day reviewing her old tweets, complete with rants against “cis” people, white men, white people, Trump, conservatives, etc., along with her loving tongue baths for Biden, BLM, transgenders, etc.
Image by Andrea Widburg.
Rufo also points out that more moderate Democrats are turning on NPR. Don’t be fooled, though. These same moderate Democrats will still vote for Biden. However, they’re not wrong that all of NPR has become completely unbalanced. It’s been taken over by the campus leftists.
How do I know? Because I’ve looked at the NPR site.
On the home page, you’ll see some fairly straight news headlines, although I didn’t dig into the content to discover probable bias in the reporting. However, the real fun starts when you enter into its search engine any hot-button woke term—e.g., George Floyd, transgender, LGBTQ, Trump, racism, homophobia, white supremacy, masculinity, Gaza, etc.
Do that, and you will feel as if you’ve walked into a midnight confab in an Ivy League dorm, the one where cant-speaking students reinforce their worst Marxist ideas. The Democrat lockstep at NPR, not just as to political matters but also as to every cultural matter, is staggering.
On the Code Switching podcast, which is dedicated to race, you get BLM propaganda. The three I quote below are just from the last few days:
WTF does race have to do with taxes?
It's that time of year again: time to file your taxes. And this week on the pod, we're revisiting our conversation with Dorothy A. Brown, a tax expert and author of The Whiteness Of Wealth: How The Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans And How To Fix It. She talks through the racial landmines in our tax code and how your race plays a big role in whether you get audited, how much you might owe the IRS, which tax breaks you can get, and even which benefits you can claim.
In the world of medicine, race-based diagnoses are still very real
We've probably said it a hundred times on Code Switch — biological race is not a real thing. So why is race still used to help diagnose certain conditions, like keloids or cystic fibrosis? On this episode, Dr. Andrea Deyrup breaks it down for us, and unpacks the problems she sees with practicing race-based medicine.
This right wing conspiracy theory about eating bugs is about as racist as you think
Gene Demby and NPR's Huo Jingnan dive into a conspiracy theory about how "global elites" are forcing people to eat bugs. And no huge surprise — the theory's popularity is largely about its loudest proponents' racist fear-mongering.
After the Baltimore bridge collapse, NPR took the lead in reporting that the “mayor faces racist attacks.” What were these “racist” attacks? Conservatives questioned whether the city’s obsession with DEI policies led to the disaster.
The “reporter,” a black woman, spends the entire essay emphasizing that America and conservatives are racists. It didn’t occur to her that it’s inherently racist to judge people by their skin color or that it is racist to treat darker-skinned people as so incapable that they invariably need a handicap to succeed.
Just FYI, the search engine yielded 18,788 instances of the phrase “white supremacy” and 18,037 instances of the phrase “racism.”
NPR is also all in, completely uncritically, on so-called transgenderism. “Transgender” appears 23,357 times, and “LGBTQ” appears 21,524 times. However, NPR has not yet reported on England’s Cass Review, which explodes the myth that children require so-called “gender-affirming” care.
One example of NPR’s pro-transgender bias is its loving profile of a Florida “activist” who “provides a safe space for transgender people.” There are also two reports about “two crimes” that “showcase the realities LGBTQ people face” (here and here).
Notably, one of these cases involves Nex Benedict, who had been sexually abused by her father for years…but NPR is sure that it was her transgender status, not that familial abuse (along with all sorts of other mental illnesses), that drove that poor girl to suicide. NPR also admits, when it writes of Dime Doe’s murder, that he died at the hands of someone with whom he was in a relationship.
Politically, you’ll find a hit piece against Donald Trump (159,811 search engine references, compared to only 82,690 for Biden) accusing Trump of “violent rhetoric.” The blurb also emphasizes the “long list of criminal charges” against Trump. The latter conclusory statement reveals that NPR’s staff entirely ignores the first rule of journalism, which is to suspect the government. No one at NPR has doubt that those charges might be political.
From there, NPR expresses bewilderment that Christians can support Trump. Here’s a hint: Maybe it’s because Biden supports the biologically offensive and morally insane contention that men and women can magically become another sex through wishing (including his elevating “Trans Day of Visibility” to be on par with Easter), or that this allegedly devout Catholic is all-in on abortion.
It was easy to find one instance after another of a hardcore, progressive Democrat mindset at NPR. The execrable Katherine Maher is amusing, but she’s a symptom, not a cause. The Democrat-party rot goes all the way down at NPR—and, of course, you’re paying for it.