I’m offering three examples of widely followed stories where I believe we faltered. Our coverage is out there in the public domain. Anyone can read or listen for themselves and make their own judgment. But to truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step inside the organization.
Some Men Just Want To Watch The World Burn
We pretend our president’s not deep-fried; our deficit’s not a ticking time-bomb; and it’s OK that our kids can’t really read…
The Oyster Bunny
4th Turning
It’s global crisis wildfire whack-a-mole now.
Ever since the United States achieved superpower status, the world gets a little wobbly whenever the president here is weak. Our current chief executive is run by committee. The bad people in the world know that they won’t be getting any decisive moves from the United States in response to anything they do, so they’re acting up.
Gosh, if only we’d been warned.
The Army has started doing something about recruitment, replacing “woke” recruiting ads featuring diversity with more traditional ads featuring white men jumping out of airplanes, which led some wags to suggest – probably correctly – that this means they expect to have to fight soon. But it won’t be easy to undo the damage of recent years, including the wanton betrayal of Americans, and foreign allies, in Afghanistan. People noticed, and you can’t turn on a dime after something like that.
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Electric cars will decide the outcome of the American election
If Joe Biden loses to Donald Trump this November, he can apportion blame towards his administration’s many unforced errors, from the botched Afghanistan bug-out to the mess at the southern border. But the biggest blunder of all has yet to fully reveal itself: the ill-conceived drive to push electric vehicles into making up over three-fifths of all car purchases by the 2030s.
Just last week the administration issued a draconian mileage requirement, one of many ‘nudge’ policies attempting to usher in an all-electric future. Replacing a massive $3 trillion industry with a singular technology represents a severe economic threat under any circumstances, but ramming through changes just as EV sales are slowing is nothing less than madness.
Truinnerashuvaduprezure!
Biden remembers crossing the Key Bridge “many many times commuting from the state of Delaware either by train or by car.”
Related: Let’s meet the Commissioners for the Port of Baltimore…
Clown Show
So what was the leader of the free world up to this week? And the next president?
The Censorship-Industrial Complex
If the woke regime felt that its reign was under threat, and believed itself justified (if not morally obligated) to defend itself, what wouldn’t it do to retain power?
It might seek to break, bankrupt, and jail its political opponents and those who would dare defend them via lawfare; obstruct justice for political “made men;” and delegitimize and destroy any institution that would dare stand in its way. That effort is already afoot.
Another line of attack might be to weaponize every public and private power center against those who would back its political opponents — demoralizing if not terrorizing the electorate into submission, or dividing it so it can more easily be conquered. That effort too has been humming along.
Still another line of attack might be to wage information warfare against the public in a bid to prevent it from fully understanding the nature and extent of, let alone discussing, the ruling regime’s depredations. It would do so not only by propagandizing via de facto regime media but by crippling alternative sources and prohibiting citizens from freely sharing news and views anathema to the ruling regime.
Grab a coffee.
Don’t Mess With Texas
The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire
BOMBSHELL: America’s top intelligence agency sent the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Pentagon a memo that celebrates an official who says “crossdressing makes me a better intelligence officer.”
The world’s most powerful intel apparatus has been hijacked by woke feds. Here’s the proof.
I, Napoleon
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@libsoftiktok: Drag Queen ‘Shangela’ who was invited by Kamala Harris to the White House to celebrate Pride Month was just accused of multiple s*xual ass*ults.
The Most Interesting Man In The World
But why let a little thing like your country’s main adversary breaching the servers of a nuclear reactor company and one of its puppet companies coming up to buy that same company a year and a half later through your son get in the way of making money?
The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire
More: what’s the point of an Army that can’t operate overseas in war?
We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us
I have long been wondering about Qatar’s willingness to host Hamas’ leadership post-10/7.
As non-Western as Qatar is, the Emirate has been working assiduously to court Western approval and is hardly a radical Islamist state. This is not to suggest the regime is liberal or Liberal, but rather that they aren’t exactly Iranian-style fanatics. The state is pretty much what you would expect in a country that is in a dangerous region filled with radicals but with an elite who are Western-educated and resolutely capitalist.
I had long suspected that Western governments had given implicit approval for Qatar’s hosting of the radical Islamist terrorist group’s leaders in order to use it as a back-channel to Hamas.
Maybe the US thought the Qatar/Hamas relationship would yield the release of the hostages. But it’s been more than five months and 134 Israelis are still held in Gaza. It’s time for Qatar — and Turkey — to stop harboring Hamas’s top terrorists.https://t.co/yjYw9M5N9s
— Israel War Room (@IsraelWarRoom) March 14, 2024Surprisingly, it turns out that I was right. […]
That this story leaked is likely due to Qatar’s frustration with the enduring criticism it has suffered since 10/7. The country has been accused of coddling Hamas’ leaders–and no doubt it sure looks that way–and given the country’s obvious efforts to court Westerners, it surely rankled.
Of course he did: Biden Embraces Schumer’s Speech Castigating Netanyahu
HAMAS must be running short of American funding: US frees up billions in sanctions relief to Iran as Tehran proxies wreak havoc in region
Margin Of Fraud
Hard to argue: The corruption in Fulton County, Georgia is some of the worst in the nation.
Rematch
It’s official: Trump clinches delegate majority for GOP presidential nomination, setting up Biden rematch
Scratch A Democrat
Biden makes the blunder of answering whether and why Hamas would want a ceasefire.
More: Embrace the stupid
“The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups”
https://thehill.com/opinion/4517470-dei-killed-the-chips-act/
The Biden administration recently promised it will finally loosen the purse strings on $39 billion of CHIPS Act grants to encourage semiconductor fabrication in the U.S. But less than a week later, Intel announced that it’s putting the brakes on its Columbus factory. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has pushed back production at its second Arizona foundry. The remaining major chipmaker, Samsung, just delayed its first Texas fab.
This is not the way companies typically respond to multi-billion-dollar subsidies. So what explains chipmakers’ apparent ingratitude? In large part, frustration with DEI requirements embedded in the CHIPS Act.
Commentators have noted that CHIPS and Science Act money has been sluggish. What they haven’t noticed is that it’s because the CHIPS Act is so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.