Remember all the praise that the media heaped on John McCain and other Republicans who veered away from some of the conservative policies of their party? They were hailed as “mavericks.” Notice how no such label is ever applied by the media for Democrats who stray from the liberal line.

In fact, in the case of Senator John Fetterman, New York magazine spread the suggestion that such divergences were due to health, specifically mental health issues. 

On Friday, we saw this treatment applied to John Fetterman by former Washington Post reporter Ben Terris in “All By Himself.” The subtitle gets more specific as to why the angst over Fetterman going maverick on some important issues, “John Fetterman insists he is in good health. But staffers past and present say they no longer recognize the man they once knew.”

When John Fetterman was released from Walter Reed hospital in March 2023, Adam Jentleson, then his chief of staff, was proud of his boss for seeking help for what the senator’s office and his doctor had said was a case of clinical depression. His six weeks of inpatient care had been the latest medical setback for the Pennsylvania Democrat, who had had a stroke mere months before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, nearly derailing his campaign against Republican Mehmet Oz.

But a year after his release from the hospital, Fetterman’s behavior had so alarmed Jentleson that he resigned his position. In May 2024, he wrote an urgent letter to David Williamson, the medical director of the traumatic-brain-injury and neuropsychiatry unit at Walter Reed, who had overseen Fetterman’s care at the hospital. “I think John is on a bad trajectory and I’m really worried about him,” the email began. If things didn’t change, Jentleson continued, he was concerned Fetterman “won’t be with us for much longer.”

Some behavioral changes are listed but what really bothers Jentleson (and New York magazine) were the political changes.

Fetterman was, according to Jentleson, avoiding the regular checkups advised by his doctors. He was preoccupied with the social-media platform X, which he’d previously admitted had been a major “accelerant” of his depression.

…A few weeks later, Hamas staged a large-scale terrorist attack against Israel, killing more than a thousand people and kidnapping 250 others.

In the days after the October 7 attack, Israel declared war and retaliated with brute force, killing Hamas forces as well as thousands of civilians. In the U.S., progressives began calling for a cease-fire to at least pause the carnage. Fetterman felt differently. “Now is not the time to talk about a cease-fire,” he posted on October 18. “We must support Israel in efforts to eliminate the Hamas terrorists who slaughtered innocent men, women, and children.”

…it wasn’t until October 7 that it became clear Fetterman was the most outspoken Israel hawk in his party, offering constant and unconditional support for the military action in Gaza. Early on in the conflict, 16 of his former campaign staffers wrote a letter — anonymously — saying they found his full-throated support for Israel to be a “gutting betrayal.” Jentleson had taken to defending Fetterman on X from such criticisms, posting, “The thing about being a staffer is that no one elected you to represent them.”

But it wasn’t just staffers who were upset. There was also Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, who had become something of a political celebrity in her own right: She is a kindhearted philanthropist (the proprietor of a “free store” in Braddock that gave away goods and clothing), a formerly undocumented immigrant from Brazil, and a vocal progressive. In early November, just weeks after the attack, Gisele arrived at her husband’s Senate office and, according to a staffer present, they got into a heated argument.

Besides Fetterman’s strong support for Israel, he did something unforgivable in the eyes of liberals. He (GASP!) went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with then President-elect Donald Trump:

After Donald Trump won the election, Fetterman did something no other Democratic senator dared to do: He went to Mar-a-Lago. “I didn’t bend any knee; they reached out and invited me,” Fetterman told me. “And if you’re a senator from a critical state and the president would like to have a conversation, that’s part of our responsibility.” Gisele, however, wasn’t so keen on traveling with him.

…Ultimately, Gisele did go, and by all accounts the meeting went smoothly. According to Fetterman, the conversation lasted about 75 minutes and the president was charming, “fully engaged,” and different from the persona you may see on television. “His faculties haven’t slipped at all,” Fetterman told me. “It’s not that I admire it — I acknowledge it, and if you don’t, you do it at your own peril politically.”

Terris said in his talk with Fetterman, he saw no medical cause for alarm:

But in my conversation with Fetterman, I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired. Our interview lasted just over an hour, during the first half of which he seemed excited to discuss just about anything I threw at him. He had problems with the way Democrats had estranged themselves from the public, he said, but still had no intention of leaving the party to become a Republican or even an independent: “Same chance I’m going to end up with a beautiful head of hair.”

So if Terris did not find Fetterman cognitively impaired, why suggest that his maverick political positions are the result of that?

Murdering a father in cold blood not only gets you rewarded with nearly $1 million fundraised by a fan base of shrieking 20-year-old women, but you’ll also get your own musical!

San Francisco’s leftist theatre types are performing a “comedy” that lionizes Luigi Mangione as a “folk hero” for shooting UnitedHealthcare’s CEO fatally in the back.

Tickets are already sold out for the opening night of “Luigi the Musical,” which turns an act of evil into a lighthearted “story of love, murder and hash browns,” according to its website.

(The hash browns are a cheeky reference to Mangione making a pit stop at McDonalds before being arrested in Pennsylvania.)

The plot follows the prep school punk as he “navigates friendship, justice and the absurdity of viral fame,” with “real-life cellmates Sam Bankman-Fried and Diddy (played by a woman) by his side.”

“What I love about Diddy is that he really has taught us that if you step on a crack… you will break that bare back,” proclaimed the actress in an Instagram video. 

Because alleged sex trafficking is now apparently just as trendy as a trust fund comrade smugly killing off a self-made CEO in the name of “justice.” 

“This show is not a celebration of violence of any kind,” its website insists, despite dedicating an entire song to glorifying Mangioni’s “pearly white” teeth.

Cold-blooded murder is rather “complex,” according to the musical’s creators, who make their criminal characters into victims of “the systems we’re supposed to trust.” 

Perhaps the musical should be called “The Court Jesters of Justice.”

David Segal, a feature writer for the New York Times, interviewed German-born novelist Daniel Kehlmann, who “sees chilling parallels between what happened [under Hitler] and what has unfolded since Trump’s second inauguration.”

The “Republican president = Hitler” smear has been a tired and offensive liberal trope since the Reagan Administration, unworthy of appearing in a once-prestigious newspaper. The Times headline writer wasn’t subtle:

In a Nazi-Era Filmmaker’s Compromises, a Novelist Finds Reasons to Fear 

Daniel Kehlmann wrote ‘The Director’ only to realize how loudly the moral quandaries faced by G.W. Pabst would resonate today.

The spark of inspiration for “The Director,” Daniel Kehlmann’s new historical novel about a filmmaker toiling for the Nazi regime, came during the first Trump administration. Kehlmann noticed Americans taking special care about what they said and to whom they said it. The self-censorship faintly echoed stories he’d heard from his father, who was a Jewish teenager in Vienna when the Third Reich came to power.

The word “Austria,” for example, was banned by the regime. Suddenly, everyone lived in Ostmark.

Was Segal paying attention when people were getting fired from jobs for posting mildly critical comments on the Black Lives Matter riots, or for questioning state government authoritarian edicts that shuttered businesses and schools? That was an actual time when people had to take special care not to offend the vengeful activist left.

Kehlmann, a boyish 50-year-old born in Munich, has long been fascinated by the ways that citizens accommodated Hitler’s dictatorship. He centers his novel on the largely forgotten G.W. Pabst, an Austrian film director who gained fame in the era of silent movies and flamed out in Hollywood in the 1930s.

Pabst got stuck in Austria when the Nazis shut the border and eventually worked for the German film industry under minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels.

Once again, a Times writer carefully curated events to make a Trump-Nazi parallel sound plausible, at least to gullible liberal ears.

To understand how the left-leaning Pabst ended up as one of the Nazis’ marquee directors, Kehlmann read deeply about Germany’s slide into autocracy. Now he sees chilling parallels between what happened then and what has unfolded since Trump’s second inauguration. Eroding the rule of law, persecuting “enemies,” elevating incompetents and extremists to top jobs — it all comes from the same playbook

….

In “The Director,” he unpacks what is “total” about totalitarianism. Nazism warps every interaction and every opinion, and social status is no longer determined by talent. Gifted people on the wrong side of the ideological divide are persecuted. Hacks are elevated and praised.

Sounds like rule under liberal leadership. Segal must have missed the last few years of online censorship, both self-censorship and the real kind, when the good people showed their fealty by condemning “white privilege” and passing around woke reading lists online (often headed by the now-discredited, “everything is racist” pseudo-scholar Ibram X. Kendi) for the unenlightened masses to read.

We met the day after Germany’s parliamentary elections, in which the hard-right Alternative for Germany party had over-performed, winning 20 percent of the vote.

Kehlmann greeted the news with equanimity. The AfD would not join the ruling coalition, he predicted — correctly, it turned out — because there remains in his home country a powerful social stigma against extremist politicians, something he finds alarmingly absent in the U.S.

For someone afraid that people were taking special care of what they said, the novelist seemed disturbed by the fact that someone at a fancy dinner he attended actually “proudly identified himself as a major Trump donor.”

At a dinner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art not long ago, he sat next to a man who proudly identified himself as a major Trump donor. By Kehlmann’s lights, the Republican Party is now demonstrably more dangerous than the AfD. Deep-pocketed members of the party are mixing in the highest echelons, he said, even though they support an administration posing an existential threat to democracy. “Everybody says that society here is too polarized and too fractured,” he said. “But maybe on the level of the really wealthy, it’s really not fractured and polarized enough.”

At the end, Kehlmann cited his own paranoia to prove himself right that American had become a dangerously intolerant place under Trump.

“Immediately I’m thinking, can it be bad for me to say something like this to The New York Times? Which, I think, proves my point.”

Jimmy Carter might be gone. But thanks to the efforts of MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, “malaise”—the word most associated with Carter’s failed presidency—lives on. But now, of course, slapped on President Trump.

Wallace did her best to recycle the m-word on Thursday’s edition of MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, which she hosts.

Wallace brought on Michele Norris, a former co-host of NPR’s All Things Considered (until her husband joined Obama’s campaign),  to doomsday prophesy that President Trump’s economic moves would lead to “manufacturing slowdowns,” and then “we start to get something called malaise in the economy.”

Not only that, even if tariffs are reversed, Norris predicted “the malaise that has settled in around the chaos and the uncertainty in the economy is going to linger like a hangover, like a bad hangover for a very long time.”

Wallace predictably agreed: 

“We’re seeing that malaise show up. It’s actually hotter than that. And we’re seeing anger in the town halls that Republicans are having.”

In a fit of anticipatory schadenfreude, Wallace exulted:

“This hasn’t really hit yet. And it’s going to come in in waves that’ll, that’ll hit people, you know, as they’re rolling a cart through a retailer. I mean, I, I cannot stress enough, having worked in politics, how perilous this moment is.”

Oh Happy Day, Nicolle!

But it’s odd that she would already be lecturing Team Trump about putting a happy face on the economy, that they can’t “tell the truth or be empathetic, don’t match people’s lived realities.” Late in the fall campaign of 2022, Wallace brought on Joy Reid and they suggested inflation was just not a real issue for Republicans to campaign on.  
Note: There seems to be an NPR to MSNBC/CNN pipeline. Michele Norris, a former All Things Considered co-host, is now an MSNBC contributor. And over at CNN, Audie Cornish, another former All Things Considered co-host, is now host of CNN This Morning. 

MSNBC
Deadline White House
5/2/35
4:10 pm EDT

MICHELE NORRIS: When we get into the second and the third quarter, and David certainly knows probably much more about this than I do, but we’re going to probably be looking at manufacturing slowdowns. And so that means layoffs. That means people, if they’re not laid off, they’re not pulling that extra shift. They’re just scaling down their manufacturing. So people are going to start to feel this in all kinds of ways. 

And on top of all that, then we start to get something called malaise in the economy. And people just don’t have the kind of confidence that you would expect with the economy that Donald Trump inherited. And it’s worth repeating that. He inherited a very strong economy. And even though people were concerned about the price of eggs and the price of rent and the price of cars and the price of gas and everything else, the fundamentals of the economy were essentially pretty strong. And people don’t feel that way right now. 

And so, even if he were to reverse the tariffs, even if we could get boats on the water and get equipment over here and get goods over here much quickly, much more quickly, the malaise that has settled in around the chaos and the uncertainty in the economy is going to linger like a hangover, like a bad hangover for a very long time. 

NICOLLE WALLACE: You know, you’re seeing it. I mean, we’re seeing that malaise show up. It’s actually hotter than that. And we’re seeing anger in the town halls that Republicans are having. People are angry at everything from no due process for Kilmar Obrego Garcia. They’re angry about DOGE. 

And, it’s sort of David’s point. I mean, this hasn’t really hit yet. And it’s going to come in in waves that’ll, that’ll hit people, you know, as they’re rolling a cart through a retailer. I mean, I, I cannot stress enough, having worked in politics, how perilous this moment is. When your message is, if they’re not true and empathetic, which the Trump administration, I don’t think if they were sitting here, would ever claim to do well, tell the truth or be empathetic, don’t match people’s lived realities. 

And I really feel like we’re at this tectonic break in everything that’s come before it, where there will be no lie, there will be no right-wing disinformation, to spin the reality of things that people need becoming more expensive. Or if you’re an Etsy small business, everything that you need to run your business or to embroider. 

I mean, the whole sort of supply chain and ripple effects of this are either misunderstood or being ignored by the entire Republican Party. 

Journalists aren’t supposed to make things up.

Unless, of course, you’re the New York Times Editorial Board.

The other day the “Paper of Record” ran an editorial titled: 

There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab

This jewel of distortion says, among other things, this, bold print for emphasis supplied: 

The first 100 days of President Trump’s second term have done more damage to American democracy than anything else since the demise of Reconstruction. Mr. Trump is attempting to create a presidency unconstrained by Congress or the courts, in which he and his appointees can override written law when they want to. It is precisely the autocratic approach that this nation’s founders sought to prevent when writing the Constitution.

Obviously, the Times has no historical memory of a president named Franklin D. Roosevelt. Perhaps because liberal Democrat FDR is to this day the left-wing ideal of how to run the presidency – and that ideal is, yes indeed, remarkably Trumpian. 

In fact, you could call the FDR presidency what it has effectively become for all FDR successors since: precedent.

Over there at Chapman University is a lengthy look at FDR’s presidency by the distinguished USC Berkeley Professor of Law John Yoo. Among other things, Professor Yoo writes the following, bold print for emphasis supplied:

….FDR made management of the economy by a bureaucracy of experts a permanent feature of American life. While the Republican presidents who had dominated elections since the Civil War had left economic decisions to the market, FDR pushed the federal government to provide for economic as well as national security.  The New Deal did not just produce a federal government of broad power—it gave birth to a president whose influence over domestic affairs would expand to match his role in foreign affairs. 

When the Supreme Court stood in the way of the new administrative state, FDR launched a campaign to increase the membership of the Court to change the meaning of the Constitution. When political parties challenged the New Deal, FDR concentrated power in the executive branch, which undermined their ability to channel benefits to their members. The New Deal produced a presidency that was more institutionally independent of Congress and more politically free of the parties than ever before.

In short? In short, FDR took it upon himself to have  “concentrated power in the executive branch” and “produced a presidency that was more institutionally independent of Congress and more politically free of the parties than ever before.”

In other words? What FDR accomplished was to set a new precedent. Precedent for successor presidents to go about conducting a presidency that has “concentrated power in the executive branch” – something Donald Trump has, in decided FDR style- and that of other predecessors – indeed done.

The opposition to Trump on this score would be laughable except for the Times staunch support of the Biden-era use of lawfare – weaponizing the government to target President Biden’s political opponent of the day — Donald Trump. But when Trump asked the leader of Ukraine to look into the fishy influence-peddling there of Joe Biden’s son, the Democrats impeached him.

What the Times editorial reminds is that, along with its left-wing allies, the paper had no problem with making what effectively could be called its own “War on Democracy” when power in the Justice Department, not to mention the White House, was in the hands of Presidents Biden and Obama and their left-wing lawyers staffing the DOJ.

But there is no such thing as a Trump “War on Democracy.”

That is the authoritarian stuff of left-wing Presidents decidedly cheered on by the Times and others in the left-wing media. It is Biden and Obama who, to borrow from the Times, had inflicted more “damage to American democracy than anything else since the demise of Reconstruction.” And, again, the Times cheered them on.

Running editorials now trying to pretend the opposite is true simply – laughably – doesn’t come close to passing muster.

As the old comedic TV character Gomer Pyle use to say with unintentional irony: “Sur….prise,  Sur….prise, Sur..prise.”

The Friday primetime lineups of CNN and MSNBC did not handle the news that President Trump signed an executive order forbidding taxpayer money for PBS and NPR well, as they portrayed the news as an assault on everything from democracy, science, the military, farmers, and even the country itself.

On his CNN show, Anderson Cooper asked PBS documentarian Ken Burns, who will be out with a new documentary on the Revolution in November, “There’s plenty of documentaries on Netflix, for instance. What’s the value of public broadcasting?”

Burns tried to wax poetic but ultimately just ended up sounding like a crazy person, “Well, I think it’s important that we do things together as a country. The enrichment that PBS has brought to my life, to our collective lives is just undisputable. I think PBS is part of the pursuit of happiness machine. They’re part of what makes the country what it is. Like the National Parks. We called—we subtitled our series on the national parks, ‘America’s best idea.’ This is the Declaration of Independence applied to broadcasting.”

As for that upcoming documentary, Burns continued, “The footage you’re showing now on The American Revolution, we spent more than nine years working on it. By the time we broadcast, it will be one month short of ten years. You don’t get that kind of space anywhere else, but public broadcasting. And it’s just one of our crown jewels, like higher education that you mentioned at the beginning, like our national parks. This is who we are. It puts the us in the U.S.”

 

 

Cooper then turned to PBS CEO Paula Kerger, “What would a loss of federal funding mean for your organization and NPR, what would the impact of these cuts be for shows like Sesame Street or Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood?”

Predictably, Kerger freaked out. Speaking next to footage of Sesame Street, she warned:

We have 330 stations across the United States. Many of them are in very small communities. The whole idea when Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act is he wanted to make sure that there would be public broadcasting in communities accessible to people, no matter what the size of those communities where, wherever you live, what your economic means, you should have access to really great content… For some of our stations, particularly in small communities…It is hard to imagine how those stations will exist without the support of the federal government.

The next hour on The Source, host Kaitlan Collins recalled to Bill Nye the Science Guy, “You, personally, must have interacted and encountered so many people over the years who have talked about how beneficial that was to them, or to their kids, or to their families.”

 

 

Nye tried to paint the move as harmful to missile defense, “everything happens for a reason, Kaitlan. And that reason, it’s usually physics. So, if you want to have — if you want to have this advanced military capability, this, for example, this Golden Dome, you’re going to need people in the pipeline to come be engineers, and physicists, scientists, to build these — this extraordinary system. And those people are going to get their love of science from public broadcasting.”

Later, during her show, Laura Coates welcomed Fred Rogers’s nephew, Daniel Crozier, and wondered, “Why is it so important to continue funding at PBS, obviously, the — the house of Mr. Rogers?”

Crozier made the false claim that, “Things of such value are — are presented by PBS that can’t be at other networks because they aren’t of commercial value. You know, it’s a very special kind of thing, educational programming, the arts and history, all these things that PBS can offer that others can’t.”

 

 

Fact-check: 31 years ago, while Burns was making baseball documentaries for PBS, the History Channel was making its own in-depth documentaries about the Revolution. 

Over at MSNBC and Deadline: White House¸ former NPR host Michele Norris claimed Trump’s move was part of a strategy to make Americans dumber:

They don’t understand that if you live in a place like Iowa or Nebraska and you spend your day behind a combine, or you listen to the radio while you’re looking out at a cornfield, that oftentimes what they’re listening to is an NPR station, because that’s the place that will give them news about soybean futures. That’s the place that will give them news about an invasive species that is affecting their crops. It’s the place that will give them news about things that happened in the hills and the hollers and the mountains of America that, frankly, we don’t cover in a place like MSNBC. And the Trump administration wants to control the narrative. The Trump administration wants to control the flow of information, and the Trump administration does not care that the public will be less educated and less informed.

 

 

A few hours later on All In, host Chris Hayes claimed to notice a pattern. After recalling previous Republican attacks on public broadcasting from everyone from Newt Gingrich to George W. Bush to Mitt Romney, he turned to Congressional Republicans, “Republican members of Congress who should want to protect their constitutional power of the purse, that’s the biggest thing they have, have instead been so eager to let Donald Trump and Elon Musk slash and burn entire agencies and programs, because it saves them from having to do the unpopular stuff directly. No votes. Put another way, it protects them from their own voters. Put another way, it protects them from democracy.”

Hayes is not entirely wrong. Trump’s order will be challenged in the courts. Even if the order is upheld, a future Democratic president can simply reverse the move with their own executive order, so you can send a message to Congress on the need to codify the defunding of PBS and NPR by signing our petition at defundpbsnpr.org.

Here are transcripts for the May 2 shows:

CNN Anderson Cooper 360

5/2/2025

8:22 PM ET

ANDERSON COOPER: Ken, what do you say to people who don’t believe taxpayer dollars should be spent to fund media or the arts at all? There’s plenty of documentaries on Netflix, for instance. What’s the value of public broadcasting?

KEN BURNS: Well, I think it’s important that we do things together as a country. The enrichment that PBS has brought to my life, to our collective lives is just undisputable.

I think PBS is part of the pursuit of happiness machine. They’re part of what makes the country what it is. Like the National Parks. We called — we subtitled our series on the national parks, “America’s best idea.” This is the Declaration of Independence applied to broadcasting.

I couldn’t have made, Anderson, any of the films I’ve made, nearly 40 films over the course of the last 45 years, any other place, but PBS. And it’s not because I couldn’t go raise the money to do it elsewhere. I could, with the kind of reputation that I’ve developed. It’s just that they wouldn’t give me the time to be able to explore these subjects.

The footage you’re showing now on The American Revolution, we spent more than nine years working on it. By the time we broadcast, it will be one month short of ten years.

You don’t get that kind of space anywhere else, but public broadcasting. And it’s just one of our crown jewels, like higher education that you mentioned at the beginning, like our national parks. This is who we are. It puts the us in the U.S.

COOPER: Paula, help put this in perspective. What would a loss of federal funding mean for your organization and NPR, what would the impact of these cuts be for shows like Sesame Street or Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood?

PAULA KERGER: Well, it would impact the shows, but what it particularly will impact is many of our stations that serve this country. We have 330 stations across the United States. Many of them are in very small communities.

The whole idea when Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act is he wanted to make sure that there would be public broadcasting in communities accessible to people, no matter what the size of those communities where, wherever you live, what your economic means, you should have access to really great content.

And so, for a number of our stations, Ken and I have crisscrossed the country often on behalf of PBS. We visit so many of our stations, and we see on the ground the great work we do. We talk to the people in the communities who benefit from those stations. Those stations will not stay on the air. We get about 15 percent of our funding from the public— government — from the public funding from the government. That’s 15 percent, one five percent, that’s an aggregate number.

For some of our stations, particularly in small communities. Ken and I have both been to Granite Falls, Minnesota. I think the federal appropriation for that station is closer to 40 percent. It is hard to imagine how those stations will exist without the support of the federal government.

***

CNN The Source with Kaitlan Collins

5/2/2025

9:39 PM ET

KAITLAN COLLINS: You, personally, must have interacted and encountered so many people over the years—

BILL NYE: Oh.

COLLINS: —who have talked about how beneficial that was to them, or to their kids, or to their families.

NYE: Well, it says, it’s not millions or tens of millions. It’s hundreds of millions of people watch the Science Guy show. Thank you all. Put my heart and soul into that thing.

And this is elementary science that is, for many people that I have spoken with, is sort of the main, the main science they got in middle and often high school. And so the reason we made that show, and the reason the show was made at that education level, is it was based on very, very compelling research, back in the 20th century, about what people needed to get this fundamental understanding of science.

And what — you know, everything happens for a reason, Kaitlan. And that reason, it’s usually physics. So, if you want to have — if you want to have this advanced military capability, this, for example, this Golden Dome, you’re going to need people in the pipeline to come be engineers, and physicists, scientists, to build these — this extraordinary system. And those people are going to get their love of science from public broadcasting. So this is—

COLLINS: Yeah.

NYE: —this is very well documented and so on. This is not in the national interest.

COLLINS: Well and just—

NYE: And it will be unpopular.

***

CNN Laura Coates Live

5/2/2025

11:43 PM ET

LAURA COATES: Joining me now is Mr. Rogers’s nephew, Daniel Crozier. He’s also a professor of music theory and composition at Rollins College. Daniel, so nice to see you. And you heard from your uncle just now, a very young uncle, making his case for PBS in that Senate hearing over 50 years ago. Do those words still resonate with you?

DANIEL CROZIER: Absolutely. He would say the same thing now as he said then. I’m absolutely sure of it if he were with us. I wish he were.

COATES: I think we all wish he were still here and imparting his wisdom to even this new generation as well. Why is it so important to continue funding at PBS, obviously, the — the house of Mr. Rogers?

CROZIER: Yes. He — well, his legacy is still alive and well at the Fred Rogers Company where they still produce Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and a lot of other programs. But it’s — you know, the — the same values that are enforced now. Things of such value are — are presented by PBS that can’t be at other networks because they aren’t of commercial value. You know, it’s a very special kind of thing, educational programming, the arts and history, all these things that PBS can offer that others can’t.

COATES: A really important distinction in the idea of how do you put a price tag or a value to be intangible and the invaluable that we see on programming that is found places like there.

***

MSNBC Deadline: White House

5/2/2025

4:49 PM ET

MICHELE NORRIS: One of the things, Nicolle, that I know from all the years that I worked at NPR is there’s this misunderstanding about the NPR audience. I think the Trump administration would like to believe that most people who listen to NPR sip chardonnay and drive Volvos and, you know, are fairly progressive. They don’t understand that if you live in a place like Iowa or Nebraska and you spend your day behind a combine, or you listen to the radio while you’re looking out at a cornfield, that oftentimes what they’re listening to is an NPR station, because that’s the place that will give them news about soybean futures. That’s the place that will give them news about an invasive species that is affecting their crops. It’s the place that will give them news about things that happened in the hills and the hollers and the mountains of America that, frankly, we don’t cover in a place like MSNBC. And the Trump administration wants to control the narrative. The Trump administration wants to control the flow of information, and the Trump administration does not care that the public will be less educated and less informed.

***

MSNBC All In With Chris Hayes

5/2/2025

8:06 PM ET

CHRIS HAYES: So you might be thinking, well, why doesn’t Congress, which, remember, has Republican majorities in both houses, pass a bill to defund PBS? And here I’m pretty sure the answer is because they don’t have the votes to do it. That is why Republicans have failed to defund PBS for half a century. It would be politically toxic to actually slash it legislatively. 

In fact, Trump’s proposed budget, which is out today, which Republicans are already balking at, does include the elimination of the funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as so many Republican budgets have before it. And yet Trump turned around and signed this executive order last night anyway. And what does that say about the White House’s confidence that it can pass the defunding through a Congress that it controls?

And here we come to what might be the central story so far of this administration. One way, it’s a problem Republicans have had for a long time. You might call it the Sesame Street problem. Okay. There are so many things Republicans want to destroy, defund, slash and cut in the government that they can’t because those things are popular. That is the context for what we have seen in the first 100 days. It is the reason that, somewhat counterintuitively or paradoxically, Republican members of Congress who should want to protect their constitutional power of the purse, that’s the biggest thing they have, have instead been so eager to let Donald Trump and Elon Musk slash and burn entire agencies and programs, because it saves them from having to do the unpopular stuff directly. No votes. Put another way, it protects them from their own voters. Put another way, it protects them from democracy.

On Thursday’s Anderson Cooper 360, CNN showed a pre-recorded report highlighting liberal contributor Van Jones speaking with three black voters who switched from voting Democrat to voting for Donald Trump.

But, toward the end of the segment, as host Cooper spoke live with Jones about the piece, the two hinted that these voters supported Trump because of “misinformation” they were getting from social media and other alternative sources.

During the report, Seth Dawkins was seen citing illegal immigration as a major reason he voted for Trump, leading him to throw some shade at the news media for not highlighting the money it costed the government to take care of them so that he had to go elsewhere to hear that perspective:

SETH DAWKINS, TRUMP VOTER: I just don’t like the idea of someone coming here illegally and getting benefits that can serve my community. So that’s the reason I support him on that border policy.

VAN JONES, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: When you think about the border, you think about people coming here who are getting more help that people who live here who were born here.

DAWKINS: Yeah. And I got that perspective not from news channels — I got it from social media. TikTok is like a holy grail. We even see it with the things that we learn about the United States government outside of the United States. People are showing Americans, “Hey, look at what’s going on. Do y’all know that your government is doing this? Have you seen this? Have you looked at it from this perspective?”

As Cooper spoke with Jones, he began by observing: “It’s interesting that most of the information that they are getting — or misinformation that they may be getting — is coming from online.”

Jones responded:

Really 100 percent. The thing that surprises me the most was how much social media is dictating, especially the younger guy. You know, he said, “Look, I’m learning all this stuff about America that I didn’t know.” Well, I’m like, “Where are you hearing it from?” “TikTok.” China? Guys, you’re a Republican, and you’re taking the Chinese narrative about your own country to heart? But that was a big part of their whole information ecosystem.  Social media.

These CNN experts made no attempt to explain how it’s “misinformation” that a lot of illegal immigrants received taxpayer-funded benefits. That reality is not in doubt. CNN used to brag they were “Facts First,” but they weren’t fact-focused on this. 

As Cooper followed up by asking about whether they watch the news, Jones seemed to lament that, even though they are good people, they get their news from alternative sources that would normally not be in his social bubble:

COOPER: Does it seem to you that they — do they follow news closely, I mean?

JONES: No, that was the other thing, too. It’s like, you know, one of the women said, “Look, I do not watch any of the media.” She says, you know, “I have some influencers that I follow” — Candace Owens being a big deal, and Newsmax. And that is their information system. And, listen, these are hard-working people, they’re good people, they care about the country, but they are in a completely different information environment than people I talk to every day.

“Good people” following “fake news,” apparently. 

Transcript follows:

CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360

May 1, 2025

8:55 p.m. Eastern

VAN JONES, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: You weren’t always a Republican.

SETH DAWKINS, TRUMP VOTER: No, actually, I come from a family that was, like, super-Democratic. My first time voting, I voted Democrat. I voted for Joe Biden.

JONES: What about Trump appealed to you?

DAWKINS: Am I allowed to cuss?

JONES (laughing): Yeah, you can do that!

DAWKINS: I mean, part of it is, he’s an a**hole. I like authenticity.

JONES: You voted for Obama, and then you voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but, 2020, you voted for Donald Trump. What made you change?

DETRA GERMAN, TRUMP VOTER: I began listening to someone — her name is Candace Owens. And I read her book, and it just opened my eyes to maybe he’s not this person that I have been led to believe that he was.

JONES: So you voted against Trump in 2016?

KYASIA KRAFT, TRUMP VOTER: Yes.

JONES: But then in 2020 you voted for him?

KRAFT: Absolutely.

JONES: Why?

KRAFT: I saw how things were going during his first term, and I was pleasantly surprised, and I was pleased with what was happening. I saw the economy getting better. I saw country relations in certain countries getting better.

JONES: What are some things he’s doing that you do like?

DAWKINS: For me, I like the border. I just don’t like the idea of someone coming here illegally and getting benefits that can serve my community. So that’s the reason I support him on that border policy.

JONES: When you think about the border, you think about people coming here who are getting more help that people who live here who were born here.

DAWKINS: Yeah. And I got that perspective not from news channels — I got it from social media. TikTok is like a holy grail. We even see it with the things that we learn about the United States government outside of the United States. People are showing Americans, “Hey, look at what’s going on. Do y’all know that your government is doing this? Have you seen this? Have you looked at it from this perspective?”

JONES: People think about a Trump voter — they usually think about, like, a white dude with like a red hat on and a pickup truck, and y’all are not that at all.

(…)

JONES: If you had to do it over again, would you vote for Donald Trump? Yes or no?

KRAFT: One thousand percent, absolutely yes!

ANDERSON COOPER, HOST: And Van Jones joins me now. It’s interesting that most of the information that they are getting — or misinformation that they may be getting — is coming from online.

JONES: Really 100 percent. The thing that surprises me the most was how much social media is dictating, especially the younger guy. You know, he said, “Look, I’m learning all this stuff about America that I didn’t know.” Well, I’m like, “Where are you hearing it from?” “TikTok.” China? Guys, you’re a Republican, and you’re taking the Chinese narrative about your own country to heart? But that was a big part of their whole information ecosystem.

COOPER: Yeah.

JONES: Social media.

COOPER: Does it seem to you that they — do they follow news closely, I mean?

JONES: No, that was the other thing, too. It’s like, you know, one of the women said, “Look, I do not watch any of the media.” She says, you know, “I have some influencers that I follow” — Candace Owens being a big deal, and Newsmax. And that is their information system. And, listen, these are hard-working people, they’re good people, they care about the country, but they are in a completely different information environment than people I talk to every day.

COOPER: Van Jones, thanks very much.

“Oh, heavens no!”

John Lithgow’s reaction to journalists pressuring him to reconsider his part in the new “Harry Potter” series says it all.

This isn’t 2020 anymore.

The actor will play Albus Dumbledore in the upcoming Max series, one of the most talked-about projects in Hollywood. The role originally played by Richard Harris and, later, Michael Gambon represents a key figure in the Potterverse.

Most actors of a certain age would jump at the chance. Lithgow, 79, did just that.

 

 

Now, select media outlets are trying to either cancel him or force him to resign. Why?

The series is part of author J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” universe, and the scribe is playing a sizable role behind the scenes. Rowling’s critiques of select elements of the trans community made her Public Enemy no. 1 to the far-Left and many journalists.

But we repeat ourselves.

Had this casting news dropped in 2020, the height of woke mania, Lithgow may have been forced to decline the role.

Not today.

“Of course, it was a big decision because it’s probably the last major role I’ll play … It’s an eight-year commitment so I was just thinking about mortality and that this is a very good winding-down role.”

“I thought, ‘Why is this a factor at all?’ I wonder how J.K. Rowling has absorbed it. I suppose at a certain point I’ll meet her, and I’m curious to talk to her.”

And, when pressed about reconsidering his decision, he answered, “Oh, heavens no.”

Curses, cried the far-Left Deadline.com. The site framed the story as an attack on Lithgow right from the jump. Consider this epic-length lede meant to inflict damage on the star.

Despite the ire toward and denouncement of J.K. Rowling from such colleagues like Nicola Coughlan, Pedro Pascal and David Tennant, and amid the rise of anti-trans rhetoric from the presidential administration, John Lithgow is befuddled at how the author’s sentiments factor into his decision to step into the role of Albus Dumbledore in HBO‘s forthcoming Harry Potter serialized adaptation.

And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for woke’s sudden, glorious decline.

Lithgow appears unaware of Cancel Culture, witness recent comments tied to free speech in the arts. He’s getting a crash course now, but to his credit he isn’t folding like others in the recent past.

Lithgow has Rowling’s back, and she has the public on her side. You wouldn’t know that if you read the media coverage pressuring Lithgow to reconsider the role. That might have worked a short time ago.

It’s unlikely to change Lithgow’s mind now.

Ahead of next week’s papal conclave, Friday’s edition of CBS Evening News was caught in a tough situation. On one hand, being the diversity-conscious liberal show that it is, Africa correspondent Debora Patta lamented Africans are not reflected in the Vatican’s halls of power despite Catholicism growing in the area. On the other, Patta warned that an African pope would not be the pro-LGBTQ reformer liberals would want him to be.

Talking over footage of African worshipers, Patta set the scene, “This is the face of the Catholic Church’s future. The African continent is its fastest growing region. Home to at least one-fifth of its followers. That’s more than 272 million people.”

 

 

However, she also added, “But while Africa may be a spiritual powerhouse, that strength is not reflected in the Vatican corridors.”

Patta then showed two clips. One featured a woman declaring, “As a black child myself, I would be very beautiful to be a black African pope,” and the other featured a man asserting that, “I think it was very clear that a change needs to be on the site of the marginalized, the poor, the suffering.”

Recalling Pope Francis’s troubles with the African Church, Patta resumed, “During his 12-year reign, Pope Francis visited ten African nations and always went to where the pain was most felt. South African priest Father Russell Pollitt says there are obstacles to electing an African pope, as the church tries to remain relevant. Thirty-one of Africa’s 54 nations have criminalized homosexuality, and its clergy have mostly remained silent.”

Pollitt spoke broadly about who would replace Francis and the challenges he will face in Africa, “Whoever it is going to also, in a way, walk that tightrope of being able to speak into the African context because I think Francis lost the African Church after he put the document out on the blessing of gay people.”

Liberals, journalists very much included, just assume that colonialism and imperialism are right-wing phenomena, but many people in Africa view what we may call liberal culture war issues as a form of cultural imperialism. If the African Church was resisting Francis’s moves, than maybe the media’s portrayal of conservative American critics being fixated on culture war issues is unfair.

Here is a transcript for the May 2 show:

CBS Evening News

5/2/2025

6:38 PM ET

DEBORA PATTA: This is the face of the Catholic Church’s future. The African continent is its fastest growing region. Home to at least one-fifth of its followers. That’s more than 272 million people.

CONGREGATION: Hear our prayers.

PATTA: But while Africa may be a spiritual powerhouse, that strength is not reflected in the Vatican corridors.

WOMAN: As a black child myself, I would be very beautiful to be a black African pope.

MAN: I think it was very clear that the church needs to be on the site of the marginalized, the poor, the suffering.

PATTA: During his 12-year reign, Pope Francis visited ten African nations and always went to where the pain was most felt. South African priest Father Russell Pollitt says there are obstacles to electing an African pope, as the church tries to remain relevant. Thirty-one of Africa’s 54 nations have criminalized homosexuality, and its clergy have mostly remained silent.

RUSSELL POLLITT: Whoever it is going to also, in a way, walk that tightrope of being able to speak into the African context because I think Francis lost the African Church after he put the document out on the blessing of gay people.

Self-reflection was absent as the cast of characters that made up Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour attacked President Donald Trump’s executive order that cut off their taxpayer money. From putting their heads in the sand on their liberal bias, to trying to make themselves free speech martyrs, Friday’s show by itself showed by Trump’s move was the correct one.

Host Amna Nawaz asked William Brangham, “just pull back for a little bit here. How does this fit into the larger campaign by the Trump administration that they’re waging against the press?”

 

 

Brangham saw a larger pattern, “I mean, this is definitely part of a much larger strategy, that the president is pushing back on all of the organizations and institutions that he believes are against him and his agenda. I mean, as we well know, most presidents have a fraught relationship with the press. But few take it to the extreme that this president has, either rhetorically or legally.”

After rattling off some of Trump’s other battles with the press, Brangham added, “There’s an organization that’s called Reporters Without Borders. And, every year, they put out an annual measure of world press freedom. We should put up this chart. They just issued their most recent report, and it says that press freedoms in the United States have fallen to historical lows.”

Brangham was the first, but certainly not the last person to try to tie PBS’s fate to other outlets. Later, Nawaz asked New York Times columnist David Brooks a similar question, “He’s alleging bias in the reporting. And it is, as we have seen, the latest move by the president to use executive power and the levers of government to target institutions, media, cultural, academic, that he disagrees with. At its core, what do you believe this is about?”

Brooks claimed, “At its core, the Trump administration is based on one them, which is, they think progressive elites have destroyed the country, we need to take progressive elites down.”

 

 

After recalling how he got the job 23 years ago, Brooks became more animated:

And I would say, if you think the PBS is biased, compared to who? Name one news organization in America — and I shouldn’t be defending us. I get paid by PBS. But I’m going to do it — who’s more straight down the line than we are. Is it MSNBC? Is it Fox? Is it CNN? Lisa Desjardins, like, one of the great journalists of our time? And so I will defend PBS, A, because I know how good we do in relative terms, but, B, because we travel around the country. We see the local affiliates where they’re not doing some ideological thing. They are the voice of their community.

Of course, Fox News does not receive federal money and also has local affiliates, but to answer Brooks’s question, Brooks himself is an example of PBS’s bias. Brooks is the man whom PBS rolls out every week to give the conservative perspective on the news, and while he may claim that the problem with the GOP is that it has been captured by Trumpism, this is the guy who marveled at Barack Obama’s pants and voted for him over John McCain.

Nawaz then asked the same question of a third person, this time Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart, “Jonathan, what do you make of the president’s moves at this time, not just about PBS? This is not just about us. It’s part of a larger campaign here.”

Capehart began with an incorrect reading of the First Amendment, “But I think what the president is doing, it is a fundamental attack on our Constitution, on the foundation of this country. People need to understand and remember, there is only one profession that is protected in the Constitution, and it is the free press. It is the press.”

 

 

The Constitution also protects religious leaders and political activists, but Capehart continued as he suggested defunding was the same as elimination, “And why? Because the founders understood that the survival of a democracy depends on an informed citizenry. And the citizenry can only be informed by a press that can report and do — report on the affairs of the republic free and unfettered.”

Capehart concluded by warning his MSNBC colleagues might be next, “And whether they are — come from the left or from the right, the government should not interfere with that reporting. And so, when you have a president of the United States who is making it his mission to attack the free press, we should all be concerned, whether we are at PBS or whether we are at MSNBC, because he’s focused on us too.”

Nawaz then wrapped up, “Well, I know we will all continue to do our work without fear or favor.”

In reality, they will continue with favor, as Friday’s show demonstrated so well.

Sign the petition to help us defund another MSNBC in PBS and NPR at defundpbsnpr.org.

Here is a transcript for the May 2 show:

PBS News Hour

5/2/2025

7:19 PM ET

AMNA NAWAZ: So, William, just pull back for a little bit here. How does this fit into the larger campaign by the Trump administration that they’re waging against the press?

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I mean, this is definitely part of a much larger strategy, that the president is pushing back on all of the organizations and institutions that he believes are against him and his agenda.

I mean, as we well know, most presidents have a fraught relationship with the press. But few take it to the extreme that this president has, either rhetorically or legally. I mean, he’s repeatedly called the press the enemy of the people. He has sued ABC and CBS and 60 Minutes. He pushed the Associated Press out of the pool.

He’s called pollsters very recently from major media institutions criminals who should be investigated for election fraud because they published polls showing that his current policies are unpopular.

There’s an organization that’s called Reporters Without Borders. And, every year, they put out an annual measure of world press freedom. We should put up this chart. They just issued their most recent report, and it says that press freedoms in the United States have fallen to historical lows.

…

7:51 PM ET

NAWAZ: Well, David, I want to come to you on this other topic, because I know you’re obviously both here because you are believers in the power of public media.

We did see President Trump issue this executive order directing that federal funding should be cut for NPR and PBS. He’s alleging bias in the reporting. And it is, as we have seen, the latest move by the president to use executive power and the levers of government to target institutions, media, cultural, academic, that he disagrees with.

At its core, what do you believe this is about?

DAVID BROOKS: At its core, the Trump administration is based on one them, which is, they think progressive elites have destroyed the country, we need to take progressive elites down.

And that’s whether they’re in museums, in sciences, the universities, whatever. And so, in some sense, they have some case to be made that the elites have become a little more progressive. But as they go after CPB, I’m reminded of the call I got 23 years ago from Jim Lehrer offering me this job.

And I’m sitting there, of course, in a little league dugout. And Jim said, “You’re going to be on the show on Fridays. We want you out and do a lot of reporting. You got to bring something to the game. This is about journalism.”

And I would say, if you think the PBS is biased, compared to who? Name one news organization in America — and I shouldn’t be defending us. I get paid by PBS.

But I’m going to do it — who’s more straight down the line than we are.

Is it MSNBC? Is it Fox? Is it CNN? Lisa Desjardins, like, one of the great journalists of our time? And so I will defend PBS, A, because I know how good we do in relative terms, but, B, because we travel around the country. We see the local affiliates where they’re not doing some ideological thing. They are the voice of their community.

And so that’s one of the reasons I’m violating my normal principle of never defending somebody I work for and trying to say, this is how I was hired, to be a journalist.

NAWAZ: Jonathan, what do you make of the president’s moves at this time, not just about PBS? This is not just about us. It’s part of a larger campaign here.

JONATHAN CAPEHART: Right. And I was going to say, well, what can I say after that passionate defense of PBS and CPB? But I think what the president is doing, it is a fundamental attack on our Constitution, on the foundation of this country. People need to understand and remember, there is only one profession that is protected in the Constitution, and it is the free press. It is the press.

And why? Because the founders understood that the survival of a democracy depends on an informed citizenry. And the citizenry can only be informed by a press that can report and do — report on the affairs of the republic free and unfettered.

And whether they are — come from the left or from the right, the government should not interfere with that reporting. And so, when you have a president of the United States who is making it his mission to attack the free press, we should all be concerned, whether we are at PBS or whether we are at MSNBC, because he’s focused on us too.

NAWAZ: Well, I know we will all continue to do our work without fear or favor.