Trump’s push for total thought control across the US continues by calling for the defunding of NPR and PBS.
While Canadian Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre has been trying to pretend that he’s not just another Trump act-a-like, Trump and Poilievre just can’t stop having mirroring policies. Trump pushed his notorious slogan, “Make America Great Again”, Poilievre gently altered the phrase to be at least one step removed from “Make Canada Great Again”. Trump has DOGE that is ripping the countries institutions apart, Poilievre said on the campaign trail that he would do something similar to DOGE and cut “waste” to pay for his campaign promises.
Today, you can add another way that Poilievre is just like Trump. Poilievre has long called to “defund the CBC” for years now. The logic behind it is simple: reality has a way of hurting the reputations of right wing politician’s. So, the solution is to ensure that facts can’t be reported and replace those news outlets with right wing rags who will do whatever it takes to distort reality to make right wing politician’s look good. Of course, it’s one thing to buy out private sector news outlets and meddle in their journalism independence, but quite another to try and influence a public broadcaster.
Indeed, Conservatives have long tried to pack the board with right wing representatives to sway the editorial process, but that has only had a limited effect on things in the end. As a result, right wing politician’s have taken to creating a whole campaign to “defund the CBC”. For right wing politician’s, this seems to be the best way to control the narrative.
For American’s, the broad strokes are pretty familiar sounding. Republican’s have been pushing to control the narrative for decades now, but the success has been somewhat limited. So, the new plan is to simply destroy any journalist that has the audacity to report on anything contrary to praising the glorious leader. Enforcement of thought crimes, if you will. This includes using politically motivated “investigations” to go after journalists for the crime of publishing reports that don’t praise Trump enough, silencing news organizations for not being pro-Trump enough, litigating reporters for thought crimes, pushing to remove legal protections of journalists, and, more generally, calling for the jailing of perceived political opponents among other things.
Today, we are learning that Trump has also renewed calls to defund NPR and PBS. From Reuters via Yahoo! Finance:
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he would love to see federal funding end for news outlets NPR and PBS.
When asked if he would be interested in defunding and taking away taxpayer dollars sent to the two outlets, Trump said, “I would love to do that. I think it’s very unfair. It’s been very biased the whole group.”
Obviously, this is just one component to a broader crackdown on journalists trying to do their jobs. It’s also merely a component to try and control all thought in the US more generally. After all, Trump has already pushed to crack down on judges for the crime of ruling against his personal interests, cracking down on lawyers for the crime of representing Trump’s political opponents, and weaponizing governmental organizations to go after people posting thought crimes on the internet (good luck with that). It’s all part of this broader war on free speech in general as Trump seeks to seize total control of the United States in a massive big government takeover. As a result, freedom of expression is under the most unprecedented attack in living memory in the US. It’s terrifying to watch this unfold.
