Last week, a looming $30 million budget shortfall prompted NPR to eliminate 10% of its staff across all its departments. It killed several podcasts and so far, 84 employees are gone; more will follow.
One of the podcasts sent into the archives was “Louder Than A Riot,” which explored how hip-hop’s “Black women and queer folk have dealt with the same oppression [hip-hop] was built to escape.” So after getting the bad news, “Louder Than A Riot’s” staff took to Twitter and accused NPR of bias in its layoff decisions:
What support for that did the angry staff have? Oh, none. But NPR is a nest of progressives who don’t believe in ethics, so playing the discrimination card was a reflex, and Facts Don’t Matter. As it turned out, NPR did engage in discrimination, but the “good’ kind: the layoffs had been “structured in a way” so they would not disproportionately affect people of color and other marginalized groups. In other words, skin color and sexual proclivities were used to decide who to fire, and being white and non-LGTBQ was held against employees.
That’s unethical.
Also illegal.
Also “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” exemplified.
President and CEO John Lansing was courageous (or foolish) enough to hold a mass meeting of NPR staff past and present so they could air their grievances about the lay-offs. Fired employees participated via Zoom even though they were no longer welcome at NPR offices. When some of the questioners’ venting became a bit too intense for Lansing, he suggested that attendees “turn down the rhetoric” and accused some participants of “lacking civility.”
A-HA! Now there was proof: Lansing, several Zoomers announced, was “racist.” One wrote in the “chat” function, “Civility is a weapon wielded by the powerful.”
I love it! This exemplifies the rules that the Left’s culture warriors want to install: ethical conduct and values are required in only one direction. In boxing, this would be the equivalent of one fighter having to box with his hands tied behind his back. In baseball, it would mean one team’s batters have just three strikes and the team has three outs in an inning, and the other team’s batters get to keep swinging until they get a hit. The amazing thing is that advocates of rules like “you have to be civil, we don’t” sincerely think this is fair. Fairness is their group not having to be fair. Rejecting this Bizarro World ethics structure is proof of racism.
Particularly fitting is that, as another angry sackee pointed out, NPR had endorsed this worldview in segment titled “When Civility Is Used As A Cudgel Against People Of Color.”
This is what is called “to be hoisted on one’s own petard.”
It couldn’t happen to a more deserving news media source.
Ethics Alarms 
It’s the basic tactic of any revolutionary: “If you can’t win or even compete in the game, militate to change the rules.” It’s what the Civil Rights Movement has morphed into. “We can’t compete or flourish in the majority white society, so, change the society so we get everything we would get if we could. And don’t expect us to be grateful either.”
They would have to have been really unpopular if NPR axed them.
or would they?
One of my favorite segments from “Parks and Recreation” is when Leslie Knope goes on the local NPR station for an interview which ends and transitions into…
NPR is indeed a nest of radical leftists pushing propaganda 24/7. That said, I sometimes listen to them for amusement just to see how they censor or twist facts to fit their dogma. One more recent absurdity I heard was someone on NPR was highly critical of straight White men who refuse to date trans women. The fact that a straight White man knows dating a trans woman is actually dating a gay man was never mentioned.
Well now, Ed, don’t you know trans people are superior to even gay people, never mind heterosexuals? Who’d date a straight, or lesbian woman when there are trans women available? Go to your room.
I’m super glad I wasn’t drinking anything when I read this…
If things don’t reverse course soon, I have a strong feeling that woke extremists will soon start getting a good look at what an end to civility really looks like. Even straight white guys have a breaking point.
They do. Which is why the narrative of White Christian Nationalism or Supremacy or whatever it is they are categorizing it this week is so important. When the breaking point comes, they will have already planted in people’s minds that white heterosexual men are dangerous, are the historical aggressors, are the enemies of democracies.
If you’ve ever puzzled over the purpose of “intersectionality”, it’s to build a hierarchy to identify “oppressors” and “oppressed”, or to borrow terms from a certain manifesto the “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_conflict
Since those at the top of the pyramid have greater institutional power, those at the bottom are granted leeway, and in the eyes of many, a _Marxist duty_ to weild tools of revolution, incivility, cancel culture, etc. Any harm from the top down is “punching down”, and an example of “oppression inherit in the system”, but punching up is celebrated and necessary.
Intersectionality is simply a way to lay claim to additional levity to use subversive tools. Rather than merit or experience, you gain power by pinning more and more facets of victimhood onto your identity. As long as NPR trims the upper parts of the pyramid, they’re fine, but POC, multiplied by gay, by female, by trans? It’s very difficult to find anyone lower than that!
Why little outrage over the destruction of women’s sports? Simple: All non-trans women are higher on the hierarchy than trans women. So it’s acceptable.
Of course this is extremely toxic. It makes a white minor student on a field trip observing a protest into an evildoer oppressing a native. It makes a black criminal out of his mind on drugs, resisting arrest an innocent saint. It converts an teenager with no criminal history guarding an immigrant-owned used car lot into a villian after he was sequentially attacked by four people in a mob chasing him down. It even shapes press coverage sympathetic to radicalized spree killers, and causes a president to take a formerly labeled “Trans day of Vengeance” and declare it a “Transgender Day of Visibility”.
Pretty well covers it. How did these people gain so many levers of power so quickly? And I don’t understand the number of fellow travelers they’ve enlisted outside their respective marginalized groups: so many enthusiastic, rabid, useful idiots.