All things considered, National Public Radio represents the left wing of American journalism. Conservatives, of course, have known that for years. It took a veteran NPR editor with an ax to grind and some resurfaced tweets to drive home the point that the “Fresh Air” of public radio stinks with leftist bias.
So the question is: Why is the American taxpayer paying for this Pravda?
Some lawmakers are saying enough is enough.
Katherine Maher has a golden résumé, with stints and affiliations at UNICEF, the Atlantic Council, the World Economic Forum, the State Department, Stanford University, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She was chief executive officer and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. And, as of last month, she is CEO of National Public Radio.
For a large portion of my adult life, I was a regular, even devout, listener to America’s National Public Radio. Funded by taxpayers and donors large and small, NPR has been a cornerstone of US liberal culture since it was founded in 1970. The NPR tote bag, given out to listeners who make a donation, has long been a staple in every bien pensant neighbourhood from Boston to Brooklyn to Berkeley.
The “longshoreman philosopher” Eric Hoffer once observed, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” This course of corruption has been ubiquitous in U.S. history, but especially characterized the postwar period. In contemporary times, the post-Cold War period, it is accelerating and now reaching terminal velocity.
SOUTHWEST FLORIDA — Kali Fontanilla repeated the lesson title to herself one last time — “‘A Com-plete History of Slavery in America’” — sipped her peppermint tea and hit record.
“Hello, Exodus students,” she said, addressing the group of 90 fifth- through 12th-graders who would eventually watch the video as part of their lessons from the Exodus Institute, an online Christian K-12 school Kali and her husband founded in 2021 with the motto “Exit Public Education.” The video, which Kali was recording in her guest bedroom-turned-office, was the latest in a special enrichment program dubbed the “Young Patriots Academy,” which aims to “debunk the ‘woke’ lies taught in most public schools,” per the Exodus website.
Kali, who is half Black and half White, had a particular target that Friday: what she calls the left’s unquestioning advocacy of reparations, the theory that the government should pay restitution to descendants of enslaved Americans.
Wall Street Journal news-industry reporter Alexandra Bruell broke a story on Friday about managers at The New York Times struggling with the intolerance of new employees who are “applying ideological purity tests” to stories on “sensitive topics like the transgender community and social justice.” Those kids coming out of college don’t bow to the wisdom of their elders who may still want to portray themselves as neutral and independent of ideological camps.
The cops now care more about offensive tweets than burglaries.
Are the police interested in actually policing anymore? Last week, it was revealed that it now takes officers across the UK up to 28 hours to respond to a burglary. The waiting time for the police to respond to break-ins has reportedly doubled in two years. And all this is after the police declared in 2022 that they would start treating burglaries as a priority crime and attend all domestic burglaries.
Is it sexual harassment to say a man looks ‘fit’ in his speedos? Apparently so.
This, at least, was the ruling of an employment tribunal in the UK this week. Nikoloz Papashvili, a male teaching assistant, successfully won a sexual-harassment claim against his female headteacher, Shelagh O’Shea. Papashvili has been awarded £9,309 in damages for the horror of enduring lewd ‘remarks and innuendos’ from the older and more senior O’Shea.
Britons struggling through the ongoing cost-of-living crisis might struggle to understand why more than £750,000 (€880,000) of taxpayers’ money has been handed to an academic research paper on “Comics and Race in Latin America.” But this is simply the tip of the iceberg.
A story is beginning to unfold in the British media about how “tens of millions of pounds” is being given to what GB News’ Patrick Christys described as “pointless woke academic research.” One project on “the Europe that gay porn built” has received particular criticism, although only after it was awarded £841,830 (€981,000)—again, from the taxpayers’ purse.
A majority of Canadians reject “wokeness,” according to recent polls. But more than that, a new paper in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology reveals something else — a male-female dichotomy. It is women who, for unclear reasons, disproportionately promulgate and buttress such progressive ideology. These findings are not surprising to anyone who has loudly opposed the politics of woke — myself included — and who has had largely female wrath visited upon them for their heresy.
Social work is a regulated profession because its practitioners can have a substantial impact on a person’s life. They can be the difference between keeping your children in a custody dispute. Their reports can help or hurt refugee claims, or a person’s ability to obtain cosmetic gender surgery. Given the delicate issues at play, one would expect the profession to stay out of politics, but this is not the case.
One of the more egregious examples of the politicized Canadian classroom can be found in the halls of L.A. Matheson Secondary in Surrey, B.C. There, the classroom of an anti-oppression curriculum specialist is coated with social justice posters: ones that decry colonialism, ones that inflame racial politics and one that even likens prostitution to regular physical labour.
Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland are among a collection of children’s stories that have been given a university trigger warning for “white supremacy”.
York St John University has added the disclaimer to a collection of historical children’s books, including works by JM Barrie, Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne.
Readers are warned that classic tales for children may contain offensive examples of “white supremacy”. Adventure stories and well-known novels written in the 19th and early 20th centuries are likely to include “colonialist narratives”, the message adds.
There are troubling signs that the space agency is prioritizing gender and race in the name of “equity.”
Want to go to Mars? NASA is recruiting. Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA, consists of “simulated one-year Mars surface mission[s]” located right here on Earth, based at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The upcoming mission will be the second of three simulations.
Last month, as a part of a social event for current students in the department of chemical and physical sciences (CPS) at the University of Toronto Mississauga, I offered to run an activity popularized by American academic Peter Boghossian: Spectrum Street Epistemology.
h/t Sweetpea
