Your money is funding NPR.

With any luck, it won't be much longer.

Donald Trump is the first President in my lifetime who seems determined to do something to cut back the size of government. Yes, Reagan wanted to, and tried, but ultimately was mostly frustrated. I suspect Trump likewise ultimately will see limited success at best, but you’ve got to give him credit for the effort (notwithstanding that the MSM would sooner saw off its right arm than give him credit for anything).

It’s true that Trump is bashing ahead, sometimes without due regard for legal requirements, and that this is a bad thing, both because Presidents must adhere to the law even when inconvenient, and because his recklessness will prove to be counterproductive: The press will use it to smear the entire government-reduction enterprise, and the courts will push back, as they’re already doing. It’s true that some of the bush-back is plausibly accused of being partisan antipathy in a thin (if robed) disguise, but it’s also true that Trump brings it on himself by just plowing ahead as if legally required procedures were on a different planet.

Every day, we see a story, or lots of stories, about how the cutbacks are harming children’s cancer research and other such things, stories that are designed to make your hair stand on end. Some of the cavalcade of articles might be true; there are too many for me to check. But with the press, which hated Trump before the election and hates him even more now, the idea is to make you think it’s only children’s cancer research and other sainted projects that are being hurt.

Not exactly.

Which brings me to today’s story from Commentary about the House hearing on funding for PBS and NPR (full disclosure: I have done criminal justice-related programs on both and felt like, despite the unmistakable liberal lean, I was largely treated fairly and given the chance to make my case).

Abe Greenwald, the Commentary author, begins with sarcasm he found himself unable to resist.

I’m perfectly fine with cutting off the annual $30 million in federal funds that go to NPR. But, if Donald Trump is the master dealmaker he claims to be, maybe something can be worked out. If we can get a guarantee that NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher will subject herself to an annual public grilling, even double the current amount would be money well spent. Maher testified before Congress yesterday, and it made for more riveting entertainment than anything you’ll hear on NPR or elsewhere.

Maher, who tried to defend NPR’s objectivity, is to rich, white liberalism what the Gerber Baby is to baby food. In various high-level positions, she has built a career as the global brand ambassador for a worldview now in rapid retreat. As she herself once tweeted, “I grew up feeling superior. How white of me.”

You can see where this is going. In short order so could Ms. Maher, but it was already too late, and the Democrats on the Committee could provide only so much distraction, try as they might.

It turns out that it’s really hard to paint NPR’s roaring, years-long parade for black supremacy as if were on the same moral level as children’s cancer research.

She was asked about that tweet, along with many others, at yesterday’s hearing. And it was fascinating to witness her claim not to remember certain statements or note that her thinking has “evolved” out of wokeness altogether.

The less dishonest of the MSM might tut-tut that as an evasion. It’s that, sure, but more to the point, the media isn’t about to call it by its more relevant name, to wit, an outright lie. She hasn’t evolved one little bit and we all know it. Witnesses like Ms. Maher only do this spinning because they know they can get away with it (and, in the moment, need to).

When asked by Rep. Brandon Gill why she tweeted that “America is addicted to white supremacy,” Maher responded: “I don’t recall the exact context, sir. I wouldn’t be able to say.” Asked if she believes that “America begins in black plunder and white democracy,” she said, “I don’t believe that, sir.” Gill then pointed out that she tweeted that quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book The Case for Reparations. When she claimed never to have read it, Gill reminded her that she had also tweeted about having taken a day off work to finish the book. Maher’s response: “Apologies. I don’t recall that I did.”

Gill should have followed up with, “Well, it’s not a book one would forget. Did you read it or not?”

It was as if she was being confronted with the humiliating details of her wayward youth, only her wayward youth was five years ago when she was 36 years old and the CEO of Wikipedia.

We see oodles of stories about how narrow Republican control of the House puts Republicans on a continuing razor’s edge, sweating bullets to see if Speaker Johnson can rein in the renegades to keep his precarious majority. What we see many fewer stories about is how delicious it is to have Republican majorities on every single committee, and Republican chairmen to decide who gets called to testify.

Asked if she believed that white people should pay reparations, Maher said, “I have never said that, sir.” Gill, again, tried to jog her memory by reading out one of her tweets: “Yes, the North, yes all of us, yes America. Yes, our original collective sin and unpaid debt. Yes, reparations. Yes, on this day.” Maher explained that she wasn’t referring to fiscal reparations but was merely observing that “we all owe much to the people who came before us.”

If your 13 year-old lied to your face that flagrantly, for how long would he get grounded?

And, finally, she bobbed and weaved around questions over this 2020 gem: "I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.”

Again, this woman is being paid with your money — American taxpayers’ money. My guess is she’s being paid more than I ever made as a federal prosecutor, even though every now and again I would handle a decently big case.

For the record, the one piece of her testimony I do believe is that she never read The Case for Reparations. Because for woke C-suite executives, the whole point of the revolution was to broadcast support for radicalism, not to, as they say, “do the work.” What was made clear yesterday is that what’s so “white of” Maher isn’t that she “grew up feeling superior”; it’s that, as an adult, she fostered a sense of superiority by embracing a fashionable brand of anti-racism that she would discard the moment it became a liability.

I don’t know that I agree with that aspect of Greenwald’s analysis. While it’s true that Ms. Maher had every affect of a person without any particularly deep beliefs — ones it would take serious thinking to embrace — she came across to me less as a carefree spin artist and more like a genuine if agile America hater. When you keep the company she does for as long as she has, one can absorb (if not actually adopt) beliefs simply by osmosis, then see them ossify simply because there are no competing ideas inside the Left’s bubble.

That’s the bad news about America’s chattering class, who Ms. Maher so ably represents. The good news is that, in part on account of this wonderfully revealing hearing, I have the sense that, for once, NPR’s public funding might be in trouble.