https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/05/thomas-dilorenzo/the-american-pravda-sues-the-trump-administration/

By Thomas DiLorenzo
Mises.org
May 29, 2025

In a recent executive order President Trump called for an end to taxpayer funding of NPR and “public” television (PBS), created by Congress in 1967 to laughingly create an “independent” news source. Yes, they have always been independent of the free market and of the hapless American taxpayers, but certainly not independent of the deep state Washington establishment. NPR has always been a government-subsidized propaganda organ. If Americans want even more government propaganda thrown at them than what they already get from the “mainstream media,” Hollywood, the universities, Google, Facebook, and dozens of television networks, NPR and “public” television should have no problem at all at attracting investors and viewers for a very profitable private business. Patrick J. Buchanan Best Price: $9.48 Buy New $14.00 (as of 08:25 UTC - Details)

NPR’s lawsuit claims that President Trump’s executive order deprives the employees at NPR of freedom of speech, with the implicit assumption that only government subsidies allow them to have freedom of speech and that that freedom will be abolished if the subsidies are ended. As the president of the private, nonprofit Mises Institute I can attest that it is indeed possible to speak freely and even criticize the government without a single red cent of taxpayers’ money.

NPR claims that depriving it of taxpayer-financed subsidies is unconstitutional when in fact it is the existence of NPR and PBS that is unconstitutional. There is no mention of government-subsidized statist propaganda – or of any other kind of taxpayer-subsidized propaganda – in the delegated powers of the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 8. The existence of “public” radio and television is consistent, however, with the sixth plank of the ten planks of The Communist Manifesto: “Centralization of the means of communication . . . in the hands of the state.” NPR, along with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), do nothing if not centralizing more communication in the hands of the state. During the FDR administration the FCC essentially abolished criticism of FDR over the radio by denying or eliminating broadcasting licenses of his critics. Other radio stations got the message and kept silent.

Government-funded statist propaganda is also immoral, tyrannical, and un-American for as Thomas Jefferson once said, “It is sinful and tyrannical to compel a man to contribute to ideas with which he disagrees.” At least half of adult Americans disagree with NPR/PBS leftist propaganda.

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https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/05/thomas-dilorenzo/the-american-pravda-sues-the-trump-administration/