Last week, I blogged about a long-time employee of taxpayer-funded National Public Radio, who lamented his employer’s turn from moderately leftist to far-left extremism. He himself was a leftist, but he was getting concerned that NPR had lost any appearance of being a news organization. He expressed hope that the new incoming CEO would be moderate. He was wrong.

Here’s an excellent article from City Journal about the new CEO, written by anti-woke activist Chris Rufo:

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.

Mere weeks into this new role, Maher has stepped into controversy. Long-time NPR senior editor Uri Berliner published a scathing indictment of the self-professed “public” media service’s ideological capture. Rather than address the substance of these criticisms—which will ring true to anyone who has listened to NPR over the past decade—Maher punished Berliner with a five-day unpaid suspension. (Berliner announced his resignation from NPR earlier today.)

And here is what Rufo’s article is about:

I have spent the past few days exploring Maher’s prolific history on social media, which she seems to have used as a private diary, narrating her every thought, emotion, meeting, and political opinion in real-time. This archive is a collection of her statements, but at a deeper level, it provides a window into the soul of a uniquely American archetype: the affluent, white, female liberal—many of whom now sit atop our elite institutions.

Her tweets about how feminism and global warming validate her failure to marry and have children are very amusing. It’s what you would expect from someone with no earned STEM degrees, and no private sector work experience.

But here is the best part of the article:

The most troubling of these conclusions is her support for radically narrowing the range of acceptable opinions. In 2020, she argued that the New York Times should not have published Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed, “Send in the Troops,” during the George Floyd riots. In 2021, she celebrated the banishment of then-president Donald Trump from social media, writing: “Must be satisfying to deplatform fascists. Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.”

As CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher made censorship a critical part of her policy, under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.

In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” These speech protections, Maher continued, make it “a little bit tricky” to suppress “bad information” and “the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”

Maher’s general policy at Wikipedia, she tweeted, was to support efforts to “eliminate racist, misogynist, transphobic, and other forms of discriminatory content”—which, under current left-wing definitions, could include almost anything to the right of Joe Biden.

If you are wondering what she did to the NPR whistleblower, she suspended him without pay, and he later resigned, after an uproar from the mob of whiny diversity hires who work at NPR.

Because I work in IT, I am used to working with people who have earned STEM degrees, years of work experience in the private sector, and knowledge of how to solve real-world problems. But occasionally I have a brush with a white female receptionist or administrative assistant or HR generalist, and this is how they talk. Their university experience hasn’t prepared them to produce value for customers. They’ve just memorized a bunch of left-wing slogans and gotten good grades for parroting them. They don’t actually know which policies obtain which results. This talk-your-way-through-life strategy doesn’t work well for most people as far as earning money in the real world. But if you come from a wealthy family, then you can survive, because you have connections to other wealthy people.

Should taxpayers really be forced to subsidize an organization led by a trust-fund baby, who has grown up into an uneducated, unskilled, radical leftist activist?

Would a bank close your account just because they don’t like your Christian religious beliefs or conservative political beliefs? I try to choose my banks by looking at their political donations. On that score, Bank of America, J. P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and US Bancorp are all bad banks. But is there any evidence that banks discriminate against Christians and conservatives?

Here’s an interesting article written by Reagan Reese, over at the Daily Caller:

One of the left’s biggest political targets recently found himself “de-banked” with no warning and little avenue for recourse, the Daily Caller has learned.

John Eastman, once an attorney for former President Donald Trump, was de-banked twice in the span of several months by two prominent financial institutions, Bank of America and USAA, he told the Daily Caller. His accounts were closed as he faced substantial backlash for his work advising Trump around the time of the 2020 election.

Eastman said he had switched most of his banking from Bank of America to USAA, a company that provides financial services exclusively to military veterans as well as their families, due to the former’s “wokeness.” Both corporations are federally insured, and Bank of America was bailed out with billions of dollars in taxpayer funds during the global financial crisis.

Bank of America alerted Eastman in September of 2023 that it would be closing his accounts, a letter obtained by the Daily Caller shows. Shortly thereafter, USAA notified Eastman in November that his two bank accounts with the company would be closed, a separate letter shows.

“And then two months later, we get a similar letter from USAA saying that they’ve decided that they’re going to close your account and they did like three weeks later,” Eastman told the Daily Caller. “And so that was where all of our automatic payments were coming out of, all our automatic deposits. So it was a real pain to shift everything. We had to get a new bank account opened and shift everything over.”

Republican leaders are concerned about Americans being de-banked for their political views:

A number of red state attorneys general — including from Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Indiana and Montana — voiced their opposition to the de-banking trend after the Daily Caller laid out Eastman’s situation. Many of the state AGs pointed to politics as a potential reason Eastman’s accounts were closed.

And it’s not just talk. According to the left-leaning UK Daily Mail (archived), Republican leaders are holding the leftist banks accountable:

A dozen Republican-led states plan to send a letter to Bank of America demanding an explanation for why it allegedly de-banked Christian and other conservative groups.

The letter obtained first by DailyMail.com, led by Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, demands that the financial institution turn over documents related to its account cancellation policies and requested that the bank update its terms of services to not discriminate against clients with certain political or religious beliefs.

The notice comes after it was revealed that Bank of America sent the FBI and U.S. Treasury private consumer financial data to help the agencies investigate crimes related to the January 6 Capitol protest.

‘Unfortunately, Bank of America appears to be conditioning access to its services on customers having the bank’s preferred religious or political views,’ Kobach writes in the letter to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan obtained by DailyMail.com.

‘Your discriminatory behavior is a serious threat to free speech and religious freedom, is potentially illegal, and is causing political and regulatory backlash.’

‘Your bank needs to be transparent with and assure us, its shareholders, and others that it will not continue to de-bank customers for their speech or religious exercise.’

[…][T]he memo details several instances of apparent discrimination against Christian groups where Bank of America canceled their accounts.

Here are the Republican governors who signed it:

The letter is co-signed by officials from Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas and Utah.

If you are looking for a bank that donates to the Republican Party, you should check out opensecrets.org. I think it’s important for Christians and conservatives to choose wisely when they choose what state to live in, what company to work for, and which bank to bank at. It really is important to choose wisely.

Normally, I do not care about Bill Maher’s occasional bouts of sanity. He’s a secular leftist clown. He doesn’t know how the world works. He chooses policies with his feelings, based on how it makes him look to other people. But this time, I really think that he put some effort into his rant against Canada. And I agree with him that American voters will vote smarter if they look closely at Canada.

This article from the Toronto Sun explains what happened:

During a monologue last week on Real Time With Bill Maher, the late-night personality compared Canada to America and carefully demonstrated how high unemployment, unchecked immigration, skyrocketing debt and lack of productivity are seeing the country falling further and further behind its G7 counterparts.

Unemployment and air pollution:

Maher then compared the unemployment rate in America (3.8%) and Canada (6.1%), and revealed that his neighbours to the north has more cities with worse air pollution than in the U.S.

Housing shortage:

“Last year, Canada added 1.3 million people, which is a lot in one year — the equivalent of the U.S. adding 11 million migrants in one year. And now, they’re experiencing a housing crisis even worse than ours and we’re sleeping in tents. The median price of a home here is $346,000. In Canada converted to U.S. dollars, it’s $487,000.”

National debt:

Maher noted that because of mortgage debt, “Canada has the highest debt to GDP ratio of any G7 nation.”

Health care:

“(It) ranks dead last [in health care] among high income countries, and access to primary health care, and the ability to see a doctor in a day or two. And it’s not for lack of spending. Of the 30 countries with universal coverage, Canada spends over 13% of its economy on it, which is a lot of money for free health care. Look, I’m not saying Canada still isn’t a great country, it is, but those aren’t paradise numbers. If Canada was an apartment, the lead feature might be: ‘America adjacent.’”

Immigration:

Jumping to immigration, he cited Sweden opening its borders to “over a million and a half immigrants since 2010” which led to “20%” of its citizens being foreign born, its education system “tanking,” and Europe’s leader in “gangland killings.”

“One result is that the far-right parties are in the government now there for the first time. To which liberals say blaming immigrants for the rising crime rate is racist. Yeah, but is it true? Of course it’s true. It’s not a coincidence the quality of life went down after the Somali gangs started a drug turf war using hand grenades. Calling it racist doesn’t solve the problem.

The Toronto Sun article then helps Maher out with some recent numbers:

Last month, the Canadian Press reported that people in Ontario and British Columbia increasingly missed payments on mortgages and credit cards in the fourth quarter of 2023, citing stats from Equifax Canada.

In Ontario, the mortgage delinquency rate was up 135.2% compared with a year earlier, while B.C.’s rate rose by 62.2%.

What do you think? Do you think that conservatives argue better when they argue from the demonstrated achievements of different countries?

The Toronto Sun noted:

On X, Maher’s comments went viral, drawing nearly 42 million views and nearly 5,000 comments with many calling the TV personality’s assessment spot on.

I think it’s a great approach. Why should America try policies that have been known to fail elsewhere? But we can’t count on the ignorant “don’t judge” public school teachers to tell voters what’s happening in other countries. We shall have to tell them ourselves. So, make sure you share this article.