AXIOS BURIES THE LEDE: In his column at Spectator World, “Cockburn” concludes:

President Trump signed an executive order last night withdrawing government funding from PBS and NPR. “Neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens,” the order reads.

The move ends a longstanding debate over why, exactly, the US government was pumping money into outlets that so regularly and vociferously espoused very progressive viewpoints. A fact sheet circulated by the White House highlighted some of the most egregious examples: a PBS station in New York that produced a kids’ program about drag queens, including one called “Lil’ Miss Hot Mess”; a PBS segment on “wokeness” and “white privilege,” and an NPR interview about why genderqueer and trans people love dinosaurs that name-checks the “trans-ceraptops.” How educational!

Spectator contributing editor Stephen L. Miller has been banging the drum for the defunding of NPR for years. “The world will be a great place when our schools have all the funding they need and NPR and PBS need to hold a bake sale,” he told Cockburn this morning.

Cockburn understands the lamentations about how the executive order is another “attack on the press” – but it could have been worse for them. Imagine if Trump had treated the outlets like the Kennedy Center and installed a top loyalist at the top? Would it have been less of an affront to norms to have a Kari Lake-led PBS or a Sebastian Gorka-run NPR? (Gorka may find himself otherwise occupied, if speculation that he’s under consideration to be the next national security advisor prove true.)

Compounding the media’s woes is the fact that the White House is getting into the content aggregation game. This week, while much of the media struggles for traffic and audience capture, White House Wire was launched, as a more MAGA alternative to the Drudge Report. “I’m considering a $1 trillion lawsuit!” Matt Drudge told Axios.

Wait, the real Matt Drudge? He’s actually alive? Has Axios confirmed this? Wouldn’t they have many questions about what happened to the site that bears his name in recent years?  A year ago Outkick.com noted, “No One Can Find Matt Drudge.” If Axios has tracked the reclusive former conservative down, don’t they owe it to the readers to get to the bottom of what happened to him? Or as Don Surber asked in December of 2023: Merry Christmas, Matt Drudge: Did you flip because you were bored, you sold the site, or you feared the FBI?

RICK MCGINNIS: Truth, Myth or Both? Getting History Right in Battle of Britain:

The film made $13 million on a $14 million dollar budget (not helped by the cost of the aerial unit) and only turned a profit years later with home video sales. There’s been plenty of pictures set during the Battle of Britain made since then, but Hamilton’s film is still the only one that’s about the whole of the battle as a hinge upon which history turns and not just a backdrop.

“Given time,” [Michael] Korda writes, “all historical events become controversial*. That is the nature of things – we question and rewrite the past, glamorizing it or diminishing it according to our inclinations, or the social political views of the present.”

“Nobody in academe,” he adds, “gets tenure or a reputation in the media by examining the events of the past with approval, or by praising the decisions of past statesmen and military leaders as wise and sensible.” And yet nobody has managed to debunk the victory of Dowding and the RAF over Goring’s Luftwaffe. “As at Trafalgar,” writes Korda, “the British got it triumphantly right” and that might explain the longevity of Guy Hamilton’s Battle of Britain – a deeply unfashionable film that we’d never be able to make today.

Read the whole thing.

* Tucker Carlson, Kier Starmer, and David Lammy could not be reached for comment.

SAVAGE:

Why, it’s as if:

More here: Trump’s AI photo dressed as pope breaks internet: ‘Seeing is believing.’

I didn’t even know he was Catholic…

UPDATE:

HOW WE GOT HERE: The Spygate Top 20: A Hall of Shame.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The New Democratic Purity Test: Anti-Israel Or Else.

Let’s be honest here: the timing of these “concerns” and the article’s publication is suspicious. The same media figures who vigorously defended Fetterman’s fitness for office during his campaign are now wringing their hands over his mental state. What changed? Obviously, his positions on key issues like Israel and border security didn’t align with the radical left’s agenda.

The article’s author, Ben Teris, actually undermines his own narrative when he admits, “I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired.” In fact, Teris noted that Fetterman appeared engaged and excited during their hour-long conversation.

So I guess cognitive impairment isn’t a big deal, but supporting Israel is? Let’s be honest: this isn’t a story about John Fetterman’s health. It’s about how fast the left cannibalizes its own the moment someone dares to step out of line. The second a Democrat breaks ranks with the party’s radical orthodoxy, every concern Republicans ever raised—once mocked or dismissed outright—suddenly becomes fair game. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

It’s Joe Biden all over again.

We spent months exposing the very real (and very obvious) cognitive impairment of John Fetterman during the 2022 campaign, and yet the media went to incredible lengths to say that everything was fine.

As Jim Geraghty wrote yesterday:

Let me get this straight: Back when Fetterman could barely speak during the debate, his medical condition was no big deal, and certainly not a reason to keep him out of elected office. But now that he’s speaking more clearly, but taking positions that irritate progressives, now his staffers think something’s not right with his brain? From what everyone else can see, Fetterman’s in significantly better shape than he was in 2022 and early 2023. (Last year I interacted with him briefly in the Fox News green room.)

I hope Fetterman’s in the best position possible, and I hope he’s following the instructions from his doctors. But both the staffer concern and New York Magazine’s attention on Fetterman’s health are remarkably conveniently timed.

Not just New York magazine — the Daily Beast, the HuffPost, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsweek, MSNBC and the New York Times all quickly joined the leftist dogpile yesterday. As our friends at Twitchy wrote, “What a difference Fetterman holding up an Israeli flag makes.”

(Matt Margolis’ article on Fetterman at the first link is just for our VIP members; please use the discount code LOYALTY if you’ve been thinking of becoming a supporter.)

ATTENTION, DOGE:

SANDY’S WAR: AOC taunts Tom Homan after DOJ referral threat over deportations: ‘Come for me, do I look like I care?’

“Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dared border czar Tom Homan to haul her to court on Friday,  months after he threatened her with prosecution for trying to impede President Trump’s mass deportations.

“Tom Homan said he was going to refer me to DOJ because I’m using my free speech rights in order to advise people of their constitutional protections. To that I say: Come for me. Do I look like I care?” the Bronx and Queens Democrat told attendees at a jam-packed town hall in Jackson Heights, Queens.

There’s “nothing illegal about it — and if they want to make it illegal, they can come take me,” she declared.

In February, AOC hosted a webinar and shared a “Know Your Rights” pamphlet with her more than 12 million followers on X to give illegal immigrants tips to evade the feds.

Homan told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” in an interview that month he had been “working with the Department of Justice and finding out” who was seeking to block deportations.

“Maybe AOC is going to be in trouble now,” he cautioned, noting that immigration authorities are looking out for those who “cross” the line into abetting illegal aliens unlawfully present in the US.

AOC apparently believes her constituents aren’t in the Bronx and Queens, but El Salvador:

At least for the moment, she seems determined to live out the lead image in this week’s Power Line Week in Pictures:

Of course, that could change, as the need to keep generating clicks and hot takes warrants. In in 2019’s “Sandy’s War,” Kevin D. Williamson wrote:

“Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” is, at 16 syllables, a mouthful. The day before yesterday, she was “Sandy,” a pleasant-seeming young woman who liked to dance, worked in a bar, worried about her family, and chafed that her advantages and elite education (Boston University shares Case Western’s academic ranking and is significantly more expensive than Princeton: Is there a more appropriate preparation for life in Washington?) left her struggling, obscure, and unsatisfied. And so she set after glory and personal significance in politics, to which she is relatively new — the hatreds and grievances she dotes on are obvious enough and familiar enough that one assumes she has been in possession of those for some time. They are not newly acquired.

If you spend enough time around politics and/or media, you have seen this figure before. Years ago, a young woman beginning what would turn out to be a successful turn on the Washington cursus honorum asked me, earnestly: “Is it wrong to want to be famous?” I asked her what she intended to do with the celebrity she sought — for what purpose did she want it? “Why?” The question obviously had never occurred to her. I might as well have asked her why she wanted two eyes rather than one. She has a lot of Twitter followers now.

Back then, Sandy’s cause du jour was radical environmentalism; now it’s defending illegal immigration and MS-13. The causes change, but the goal remains the same: getting as much PR as possible, as quickly as possible.

On the other hand, sometimes leftist intersectionality intersects in ways that PR-seeking opportunists weren’t expecting: The Left Protests Itself as a Pro-Palestine Nurse Relentlessly Berates AOC at Her New York Town Hall.

HOLDAYS IN HELL: US issues ‘do not travel’ warning for 21 countries — here’s what you need to know.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Aurora’s driverless trucks are making deliveries in Texas.

After years of testing and validation, Aurora says its first fully autonomous tractor-trailers are operating on public highways in Texas. The company’s Class 8 trucks are now making customer deliveries between Dallas and Houston, having already completed 1,200 miles “without a driver,” Aurora said. The clients for these initial trips are Uber Freight, the ridehailing company’s trucking brokerage, and Hirschbach Motor Lines, a carrier that delivers time- and temperature-sensitive freight.

Aurora CEO Chris Urmson said he rode in the backseat during the first truck’s inaugural ride, which he called “the honor of a lifetime.”

“We founded Aurora to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly,” Urmson said in a statement. “Now, we are the first company to successfully and safely operate a commercial driverless trucking service on public roads.”

Aurora said it plans to expand its driverless service to El Paso and Phoenix by the end of 2025.

Driverless trucks were once expected to precede robotaxis and personally owned autonomous vehicles in mass adoption, considering that highways are vastly less complex than city and residential streets. But self-driving truck operators have run into hurdles involving the technology and regulation that have delayed their public debut. Some companies, like Embark Trucks, TuSimple, and Locomation, have gone out of business, while others have cut plans to deploy driverless trucks as timelines have stretched into the future and funding has dried up.

Moreover, public opinion toward autonomous vehicles has trended downward, thanks in part to missteps of companies like Tesla and Cruise. But like Waymo, Aurora has placed its hopes on a measured, conservative approach to commercialization, as well as an emphasis on safety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lzgE4QMRuM

I’m very old school when it comes to this sort of technology — this is my preferred definition of Aurora trucks without a man behind the wheel inside the cab:

ROGER KIMBALL GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Kilmar Abrego Garcia is no martyr.

As the indignant clamor of Judge Wilkinson’s rhetoric suggests, the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia has afforded plenty of opportunities for high dudgeon. “Trump has let his inner Hitler off the leash! He is a threat to our cherished constitutional order!” The volume on both sides has been cranked up to eleven. Trump could usefully dial things back. He is famed for “the art of the deal.” He should bring that skill to this controversy and defuse the situation.

The Dems have seized upon Garcia as a martyr-in-waiting: a moral life jacket whose buoyancy they are counting on to save them. It won’t work. The suggestion that Senator Chris Van Hollen was sipping margaritas with Garcia in El Salvador was custom-made for next season’s GOP attack ads.

As commentator Ann Coulter observed, he has locked up the “face tattoo vote.” The public at large, however, is not smiling. Van Hollen and other members of the canonization committee for Garcia have made a strategic political error described in the late 1960s by the political scientist James Q. Wilson: they have confused their audience – the media and other repositories of correct opinion – with their constituency, the people eligible to vote for them.

A friend observes: they are like a school of dolphins whose ability to navigate by echolocation has been scrambled. Having lost the thread, they are about to beach themselves, there to heave and shudder in impotent, out-of-office irrelevance.

Trump aide Stephen Miller made the DNC-MSM an offer they’ll never accept this week:

“Each and every one of you that sides over and over again with MS-13 terrorists…choose to live in condos or homes or houses as far away from these kinds of gangbangers as you possibly can.”

“If I offered any one of you a rent free home with no taxes to pay in any of these gang neighborhoods, and I said, your neighbors are MS-13 terrorists, or Mexican Mafia, or Sinaloa Cartel or Tren de Aragua, I couldn’t pay you to live there!”

“But yet you, with your coverage, are trying to force innocent Americans to have these people as their neighbors and that one day their daughter may be abducted from their home and raped and murdered!”

Martha Raddatz could not be reached to see if she would take up Miller’s offer.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: MS-13 Wing of the Democratic Party Edition.

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME:

Shot:  California’s high-speed rail leaders sound alarm over project’s financial future.

As California’s High-Speed Rail Authority awaits word from the Trump administration over its future support for the train, leaders who oversee the project sounded the alarm about its financial viability.

The authority’s board of directors voted Thursday to approve contracts for the development of Central Valley station designs and to solicit and approve construction bids for the Fresno station. Ahead of the votes, board member James Ghielmetti raised concerns over the potential loss of funds from the Department of Transportation and the risk of moving forward on payment commitments when federal funding is in jeopardy.

“I’m very nervous about receiving the federal funding,” Ghielmetti said. “I want to make sure my fellow board members are aware that if the federal money does not come through, somebody’s got to backstop these contracts.”

—The L.A. Times, yesterday.

Chaser:

NOT REALLY SEEING ANY DOWNSIDE HERE: Promise?! The Economist Says the UN Could Run Out of Money In Mere Months and the Jokes Write Themselves.

SPRINGTIME FOR THE BEEB: ‘We’ll burn Jews like Hitler did:’ BBC contributor in Gaza celebrates Jewish civilian death.

BBC Arabic journalist Samer Elzaenen has called for Jews to be burned “as Hitler did,” The Telegraph quoted him as saying in a Saturday report.

Elzaenen, 33, who has been reporting from Gaza, has been posting a series of statements on social media that condemns Jewish people, and has also called for violence against them, the Telegraph added, noting that his social media activity in the past 10 years has endorsed and celebrated more than 30 attacks on Israeli Jewish civilians. The social media posts were originally unearthed by The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).

He has appeared on the Arabic-language branch of the UK public broadcaster more than a dozen times since Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023. He called the Hamas terrorists who entered Israel that day “resistance fighters.”

Well, somebody’s auditioning for a sweet gig with Reuters: “Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters, the British wire service, has ordered his scribes not to use the word terror to refer to the Sept. 11 atrocity, the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz reports (second item). ‘We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist,’ Jukes writes in an internal memo. ‘To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack.’”

TRUMP SIGNS EXECUTIVE ORDER TO END TAX MONEY FOR ‘RADICAL, WOKE’ PBS AND NPR:

Late on Thursday night, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to cut taxpayer funds to PBS and NPR through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The text was posted on the Trump team’s “Rapid Response 47” account on X.

It said: “@POTUS just signed an executive order ENDING the taxpayer subsidization of NPR and PBS — which receive millions from taxpayers to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’”

The executive order includes this argument:

Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options. Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.

At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage.

Since PBS and NPR are funded by all the American people, it should reflect the viewpoints of the people, and instead, after Trump was re-elected, both networks have doubled down in their anti-Trump animus. This was the top of the NPR home page on Thursday morning:

Given that NPR views America as having been born of Original Sin, they should be thrilled to no longer have to take such dirty money to keep the lights on: Perfect Timing! Here’s a Propaganda Parade From NPR and PBS Just As Trump’s EO Ends Gov’t Funding.

Exit quote:

“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”

— Katherine Maher (NPR CEO)

pic.twitter.com/nCfDcyPJjf

— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) May 2, 2025

UPDATE:

Taxpayers will no longer support a media executive who believes that the First Amendment is the "number one challenge" to advancing left-wing propaganda. https://t.co/Oq6UvJQkVI

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) May 2, 2025

FLORIDA, MAN!

Only in Florida

pic.twitter.com/z8gI40uVga

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) May 2, 2025

MARK HEMINGWAY: The Downfall Of 60 Minutes And The Biggest Media Scandal You’ve Never Heard Of.

According to the Times, “Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is eager to secure the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to Skydance, a company run by the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison.”

Supposedly, Redstone has also expressed a desire to settle Donald Trump’s case against 60 Minutes over allegations they deceptively edited their interview with Kamala Harris last fall. Though the Times is loathe to discuss it, there’s also lots of speculation that Redstone, an observant Jew, was less than thrilled when 60 Minutes recently ran an offensively stupid segment where veteran reporter Leslie Stahl asked a freed Israeli hostage if his Hamas captors starved him unintentionally because Hamas ran out of food. It’s well established that Hamas steals and hoards all the food and aid coming into Gaza, and it beggars belief that anyone, let alone someone who gets paid millions by a news network, would think a terrorist organization deserves the benefit of the doubt. And further, that layers of producers and editors would put this on the air.

There may be some truth to any or all of these accusations about what’s motivating Paramount and Redstone, but if Paramount is attempting to politicize 60 Minutes‘ reporting, at least they’re trying to make a buck out of it. Bill Owens spent 26 years at 60 Minutes, eventually presiding over a news operation that has willfully corrupted itself to the point where its bias has turned the show into a laughingstock. In at least one instance that I am familiar with, Owens played a pivotal role in a gross journalistic failing at 60 Minutes that ultimately helped a Democratic presidential candidate evade responsibility for an international incident that got Americans killed.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Progressives Warn That John Fetterman Suffers from Acute Pro-Israel-itis.

New York Magazine’s Ben Terris saved the most important part of his extensive profile of Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman for last: “I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired,” he wrote in its concluding paragraphs.

That is not the impression that a reader would have gathered from the worried former Fetterman staffers, jilted progressive activists, and anecdotes detailing the senator’s declining mental health that preceded this observation.

The piece paints a portrait of a broken man, a shadow of his former self, plagued by depression and demented episodes. None of that was especially apparent to Terris’s sources in the immediate aftermath of Fetterman’s 2022 stroke, a period when only his political opponents acknowledged the extent of the senator’s injuries. Rather, it seems that his impairment only became impossible for the left to ignore after Fetterman made himself into a stalwart Israel supporter.

The piece observes that Fetterman “surprised” and alienated his progressive “base” beginning on October 18, 2023 — eleven days after the worst one-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and nine days prior to the start of major IDF ground operations in Israel — when he rejected the notion that Israel should decline to respond to the October 7 massacre. It describes the “gutting betrayal” his erstwhile staffers felt when Fetterman declined to blame Israel for the slaughter of its own citizens by Hamas terrorists. It reveals the extent of the internal revolt that was kicked off when Fetterman objected to a progressive boycott of Israeli hummus by noting how nonplussed those same activists were to the “rape of Israeli women + girls.” After all, the truth hurts.

In accordance with the prophecy:

RIP: Ruth Buzzi, the Lady With the Handbag on Laugh-In, Dies at 88.

TO BE OVERTURNED BY A JUDGE IN 3..2..1…: Breaking: President Trump Signs “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media” Executive Order to Defund NPR and PBS.

OUT ON A LIMB: Gender dysphoria should be treated with therapy instead of transition treatments, massive Trump-ordered HHS report urges.

THE TIPPING POINT: Democrat’s ‘grotesque’ blanket statement about Latinos sends internet ablaze.

A Democratic congressman from the South is in hot water after claiming he did not defend migrants getting deported, ‘because I’m not a Latino at the Home Depot.’

‘First, they came for the Latinos outside of the Home Depots trying to get work so that they could feed their families,’ Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., said during a congressional hearing on Wednesday.

‘I didn’t say anything about it, because I’m not a Latino at the Home Depot,’ the Democrat continued.

The lawmaker appears to have been making his own version of a poem by a Martin Niemöller.

The work, titled ‘First They Came,’ talks about how officials in Nazi Germany began persecuting communists, socialists and Jews, before the eventually ending with chilling phrase ‘Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.’

Johnson clearly sought to connect President Donald Trump‘s approach to deportation to being akin to Nazi atrocities.

‘Then they came for the Hispanic looking folks wearing hats backwards with tattoos, and they deported them to El Salvador,’ Johnson recited.

‘I didn’t say anything about that because I don’t wear my hair backward, and I don’t have any tattoos, and I don’t look like a Latino,’ he added.

* * * * * * * *

‘Man…..that’s hard to watch,’ another X user, Brian Hastings, commented.

‘I’m sure he thought it would be dramatic and cool. But he seemed to realize, about halfway through, that he looked like a complete idiot, taking eloquent, historically meaningful words, and making them meaningless.’

Another wrote: ‘They are trying to draw a parallel with the Holocaust. Despicable.’

Flashback: Hank Johnson Worries Guam Could “Capsize” After Marine Buildup.

UPDATE: Tennessee bodycam of ‘Maryland man’ traffic stop shows troopers’ hands tied despite smuggling clues. “The Tennessee Highway Patrol released body camera footage of its 2022 encounter with Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, where state troopers suspected he was involved in human trafficking.”

RADICAL CHIC: THE BOY BAND ERA: Luigi Mangione: The Musical. Seriously. How Far Can the Left in This Country Descend?

LEE SMITH: David Horowitz, 1939-2025.

I asked him about the upcoming election, Trump, and the global paranoia his campaign had given rise to. He asked of his fellow Republicans, “Don’t they understand the seriousness of this election?” He saw the left primarily as a secularized religious movement rather than a political one. “It’s a faith that seeks redemption in this life with itself as the savior,” he said. “It’s such a beautiful dream, what lie would you not tell and what crime would you not commit to realize it?”

Radical Son is a narrative driven by crimes and lies. He’d helped his friend Betty Van Patter get an accounting job with the Panthers, and Newton had her murdered. That kept Horowitz out of politics for a while, as he wondered if the left could “take a really hard look at itself—the consequences of its failures, the credibility of its critiques, the viability of its goals.” He wrote, “I already knew the answers, although I wasn’t ready yet to draw the appropriate conclusions.”

His parents had not wanted to ask those questions, so when it became impossible to ignore or excuse Stalin’s crimes, they were crushed—they’d nurtured lies great and small for decades. In the Tablet article recounting my afternoon with David, I wrote that, with his parents’ failed political commitment in mind, he’d “resolved not to be played for a sucker.” Now I see that was a coarse formulation, and false. There was nothing calculated about his reevaluation of his place in the political realm. He lived by his sense of what was true and what was good, as he records in Radical Son. It’s a work of profound psychological acuity, whether he’s describing Newton, his parents, the character of an ex-wife, or his failure to see his own faults as clearly as he sees others’.

The fact is that throughout his career, first on the left and then on the right, Horowitz’s main theme wasn’t really politics; rather, it was family. Along with fellow former leftist turned conservative Peter Collier, he wrote several histories of great American families, including the Rockefellers and the Kennedys. Many consider A Cracking of the Heart, his memoir of his late daughter Sarah, to be his best book. Conservatives generally argue, with good reason, that leftist policies are designed to break the traditional family structure. But David believed that failures at home generate the psychological chaos at the heart of the leftist project to undo civilization and remake it in the image of barbarism.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: