Done with NPR and PBS?

The US government is. The Senate voted to defund the lunatic broadcasters. And yes, today’s episode is brought to you by the Letter ‘D.’

D is for Defund. This image (NPR / Twitter, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons!) refers back to a “state media” labeling squabble as Elon Musk took over Twitter and a whole new configuration of the state emerged.

That collection of lawn-sign liberal television broadcasts and blue-city radio programs that grew in my lifetime from neutral, if nerdy, paint-by-numbers PBS shows and kitchen dispatches on NPR to become a dominant form of commute consensus-building for leftist causes and deep state operations has lost a chunk of change and the support of U.S. government as of Thursday afternoon, July 17th. The Senate voted to approve a bill that eliminates $1.1 billion in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

It’s hard to say what was the last straw, as the plastic straws had already been eliminated, along with the pronouns “he” and “she” in public radio/tv-land. But the arrival in 2024 of Wikimedia’s Katherine “the number one challenge …is, of course, the First Amendment” Maher as CEO of NPR certainly spelled doom to the enterprise calling itself a fact-based disseminator of news while thwarting stories like the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” and promoting the idea that any Wuhan research oopsies were a debunked conspiracy theory.

Yet, $1 billion short, NPR and PBS will soldier on with their virtue-signaling empire. They’ll continue to ask us to burn our books, if they fall under the category “western civilization.” And yes, as they fundraise like crazy to make up the deficit of public funding, they’ll retain the word “public” in their titles. Which, luckily, allows us to continue to use all of the acronym parodies already in circulation — NPC radio being my favorite.

In honor of the moment, today’s episode of Ayns Rants is brought to you by the letter “D.”

Dunking (it’s time!)

The White House got the ball rolling all the way back in April, 2025, in a post at the .gov address that can only be considered riposte. “For years, American taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidizing National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’” They list a collection of doozies, ranging from “Washington Week” assessing Biden’s mental state as “quite astute” to NPR educating the nation on genderqueer dinosaur enthusiasts (see below) to cannibalism as the next great culinary trend to, of course, a feature fascinated by humans who just can’t stop wearing animal costumes, “the furries.” The article closes with news bullet points, including a note on the firing of Juan Williams and a 2024 Media Research Center study that found PBS’s coverage of the Republican National Convention was 72% negative, just a little bit biased compared with coverage of the Democratic National Convention, which was was 88% positive.

Decolonize (do!)

You may wonder why the fiction you pick up from the bookstore displays no longer appeals? Well that may be because it doesn’t actually use any of the “craft” long associated with the form — like, um, telling a story. It was an NPR commentary that actually clued me into why: narrative itself is racist, it turns out. “You may have seen the phrase ‘decolonize your bookshelf’ floating around,” Juan Vidal notes of the trend that was all the rage — and I do mean rage! — in 2020. “In essence, it is about actively resisting and casting aside the colonialist ideas of narrative, storytelling, and literature that have pervaded the American psyche for so long.” So don’t just burn the books. Reject the idea of “story” itself.

So romantic? Courtesy Unsplash.

Dating (don’t!)

How I felt for the 20-somethings locked in their dormitories or zoom rooms and convinced that if they did anything except order in and doom scroll they were ending humanity. NPR was super helpful during this time in advising the youth to stay put and shut up — or face the fact that you are killing granny. If you do venture into the forbidden world of intimacy, remember, do it with your mask on, explaining: “Canada's chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tham, became the latest among several health officials to suggest that when it comes to getting physical with a partner, people should wear masks and avoid kissing. New York City health officials also encouraged people to engage in positions facing away from one another to avoid the exchange of breathing particles. That's because a primary mode of transmission is mouth-to-mouth, so to speak — particles breathed out by someone infected, then inhaled by someone else.” Yes, NPR is suggesting it’s doggie-style or not at all.

Doors (what?)

Among the many aspects of Design in the crosshairs of grievance culture’s diet phobia — the smallness of airplane seats, the tightness of seat belts, the outrageous undersizing of restaurant tables (!) — one in particular comes as a surprise. Our culture is so fitness-crazed that we make passageways — doors themselves — so unreasonably tiny that a person larger than 3-ft. wide cannot even pass through! No wonder people don’t get out to buy fresh vegetables from the grocery store. The front door won’t allow egress. So Door Dash it is. You do have to read it to believe it.

Dinosaurs (yep.)

Then there was the time WBUR elucidated how wrong it was for women to use a dinosaur emoji when it was trans people who owned the dinosaur emoji. (Though in this place called reality that exists outside of NPR and Reddit, only boys under 5 care about the many varieties of the extinct species.) One wonders how this didn’t turn into a 10-part NPR investigative report.

All the way back to 2001 (and further), Fauci under oath represents “the science.” (The United States Department of Health and Human Services, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Doctors (but of course…)

NPR loves Experts, and their favorite kind are Doctors! But only certain Doctors. Doctor Jill Biden is a good one. Doctor Jay Bhattacharya — the reasonable fellow who now directs the NIH and helped draft a report saying full-scale lockdowns might not be the best answer to Covid — he’s on the NPR naughty list. But best of all, of course, is Dr. Fauci, who — despite his need for an Auto-pen pardon and his handling of beagles and his evasion of Freedom of Information Requests and his disputatious owning of the Science — NPR cannot get enough of the man, succumbing to his hagiographic history re-write just this year.

And let us also not forgot other notable Doctor moments courtesy PBS — that time when Dr. Sanjay Gupta and friends went on Sesame Street with CNN and spoke directly to the innocent children about how wonderful Covid Vaccines are for them. (Some recent positive movement on that front came just today — the FDA rejected the Moderna jab for healthy children.)

See below: Sesame Street: The ABC’s of Covid Vaccines

There’s so much more, and — sadly for us — NPR and PBS will just keep the hits coming. What are your faves?

Do go ahead and tell.