The mainstream media, that festering swamp of self-righteous gatekeepers, has once again exposed its true colors. This time, it’s the so-called conservative stalwarts—outlets like The Wall Street Journal and National Review—leading the charge in a chorus of sanctimonious outrage. Their crime? Clutching their pearls over President Trump’s audacious move to dismantle relics of US-funded media outlets like Radio Free Asia, Voice of America (VOA), and their sort.
On Saturday, Trump ordered the termination of grants for Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, VOA, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, the Open Technology Fund, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. And the reaction from these self-appointed arbiters of truth? A collective wail that this is a “retreat in the global war of ideas.” What unmitigated garbage.
• SEGMENT 2 (BELOW): How Wokeism Hijacked Entertainment
Let’s strip away the veneer. These agencies, birthed in the Cold War to counter communism and beam truth into nations choked by government lies, have devolved into something grotesque. Once heralded as champions of liberty, they’ve morphed into megaphones for a Leftist gospel of globalism—a creed that spits in the face of freedom and individualism, the very cornerstones of Americanism.
Yet here come the conservative media darlings, wringing their hands as if Trump’s ax is chopping down the last bastion of righteousness. National Review whines that shutting down VOA and its cousins is a “misguided reaction” to organizational failings, insisting that none of their shortcomings are “enough on their own to justify” such a purge. Really? The White House has a laundry list of outrages that says otherwise: VOA instructing its journalists to call Hamas operatives “militants” instead of terrorists; staff spewing hyper-partisan drivel on social media; and a steady stream of left-wing bile on race and transgenderism. Add to that lapses in vetting foreign employees, resource mismanagement, and the peddling of anti-American narratives, and you’ve got a rotting corpse masquerading as a public good.
The Wall Street Journal isn’t much better, cherry-picking rare instances where these propaganda mills (and let’s call them what they are) stumble into doing something worthwhile. But those moments are fleeting, drowned out by the overwhelming stench of ideological decay.
These outlets—Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the rest—are nonprofit in name only, suckling at the teat of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), fully funded by taxpayers to the tune of hundreds of millions. And what do we get for it? A globalist agenda that undermines the very nation footing the bill.
The hypocrisy of the conservative media elite is astonishing. They’ve spent years posturing as defenders of truth, liberty, and fiscal responsibility, yet when Trump dares to torch these sacred cows, they recoil in horror. Why? Because their authoritative autonomy—their self-anointed role as the vanguard of conservatism—is under siege. And they’re terrified.
This isn’t about principle; again—and this is a re-occurring theme with those protesting Trump’s reformative moves—it’s about power. The protestations from The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and their second selves at FOX News are the death rattles of an elitist clique that’s long held sway over the narrative, now panicking as their influence crumbles.
Look at the numbers. News consumption has shifted dramatically, and the old guard is being left in the dust. In 2025, the internet dominates globally, accounting for 40-50% of news intake—think websites, social media, streaming, and apps. Cable limps along at 20-25%, traditional broadcast TV at 15-20%, and satellite and radio trailing at 5-10% each.
Pew Research in 2024 found a third of US adults regularly get news from platforms like Facebook, X, YouTube, and Rumble, a trend echoing worldwide as internet access explodes. Streaming’s rise—hitting 40.3% of US TV usage in June 2024, per Statista—only accelerates this shift.
Meanwhile, trust in traditional outlets is hemorrhaging. The Edelman Trust Barometer pegged global trust in mainstream media at a measly 43% in 2023, down from prior years, battered by accusations of bias, sensationalism, and corporate puppetry. The people are waking up.
And who’s driving this exodus? The young—Gen Z and Millennials—who scoff at legacy brands. The 2023 Reuters Institute Digital News Report found 55% of under-35s globally turn to social media first, often flocking to independent voices over the polished lies of the establishment. If the goal is to reach future generations, then VOA, Radio Free Asia, and their dinosaur brethren are already fossils. Yet the conservative media clings to them like life rafts, desperate to preserve a system that’s as obsolete as it is corrupt.
This is where Trump’s genius shines. He’s no traditional “conservative”—a term so diluted by Republicans in Name Only like Mitch McConnell that it’s lost all meaning. Trump is an anti-federalist, a wrecking ball to the bloated, overreaching national government that’s drowned us in taxes, regulations, and globalist surrender. He sees these media agencies not as noble emissaries but as cogs in that oppressive machine—stakeholders in a status quo that’s suffocating the American spirit. And the citizenry agrees. We don’t see a “free press” in these government-subsidized relics; we see a cabal propping up an elitist structure we’re desperate to tear down.
The conservative media’s tantrum is predictable. They’re cut from the same cloth as the forty-year congressional power-clingers—jumping on and off the Trump train as it suits their quest for relevance. The Wall Street Journal and National Review lash out because their fraud has been laid bare: they’re not guardians of conservatism, but members of the same bloated national elite Trump’s supporters are rejecting. The people are fleeing to independent outlets—online platforms, podcasts, social media—where truth and fact aren’t filtered through a legacy lust for influence.
So, should Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, VOA, and the rest be euthanized? It’s a fair debate. If they’re to survive, it’d have to be in a radically new form—leveraging modern technology and enforcing ruthless vetting to ensure truth, not propaganda, reigns. But in their current state, no amount of cherry-picked “good” can save them. They’re bloated, corrupt, biased, and beholden to a federal beast that’s lost its way. Trump’s move isn’t a retreat; it’s a reckoning. And the conservative media’s howls only prove they’re on the wrong side of it.
The global war of ideas isn’t fought with dusty relics of a bygone era. It’s waged on the digital frontier, where the people—not the elites—hold the reins. The mainstream conservative press can clutch its pearls all it wants, but the tide has turned. Their time is up. Let them die with the propaganda mills they defend. We’ll find the truth elsewhere—unfiltered, unbowed, and free.
Then, when we return, our segment on America’s Third Watch, broadcast nationally from our flagship station WGUL AM930 & FM93.7 in Tampa, Florida.
How Wokeism Hijacked Entertainment
I am going to divert from my usual researched analysis on politics and geopolitics here to wax philosophical—or perhaps observational—about the entertainment industry and how it is completely failing society, both around the world and especially here in the United States. But for very few offerings today, the entertainment industry is complete garbage, and it only has itself to blame for its demise.
For as long as humans have toiled under the weight of daily existence, entertainment has been a sanctuary—a shimmering oasis where the mind can flee from the grind of bills, deadlines, and the relentless beatdown of reality. Whether it’s the flickering glow of a movie screen, the lyric lines that transport to another place or time, or the dog-eared pages of a novel, people have long turned to these escapes to recharge, to dream, to feel something beyond the mundane.
Entertainment was once a pressure valve, a way to sidestep life’s burdens without judgment or sermonizing. But today, that sacred refuge is under siege, infiltrated by the creeping tendrils of wokeism and cultural Marxism—ideologies that have turned art into a megaphone for sanctimonious preaching, robbing us of true escapism.
The allure of entertainment as an escape is primal. Life is hard—always has been. The average person wrestles with financial strain, fractured relationships, and the quiet despair of unfulfilled dreams.
A 2023 study from the American Psychological Association found that 77% of adults reported significant stress from work and money woes, a number that’s only climbed in recent years. Entertainment offered a reprieve: a chance to slip into a world where heroes triumph, love conquers, or at least where the stakes feel thrillingly distant from our own. Think of the golden age of Hollywood—films like Casablanca (a personal favorite) or The Wizard of Oz, they didn’t lecture you on systemic inequities; they swept you into stories of courage and wonder. Songs like Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay transported you to serenity without a sidebar on racial inequity. And books like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings built sprawling universes free of diversity quotas. These were escapes, pure and simple.
But that purity is gone.
Today’s entertainment industry has been hijacked by a cadre of self-righteous ideologues who see every script, every pixel, every lyric as a battlefield for social engineering. Wokeism—a noxious blend of identity obsession, grievance culture, and moral superiority—has wormed its way into every corner of pop culture, dragging cultural Marxism along for the ride. This isn’t about art anymore; it’s about control.
Studios, publishers, and developers bow to a shrill minority of activists—increasingly embedded into the industry—who incrementally insert their ideology into the process until they reach a point of demanding that every story reflect their narrow worldview, where characters aren’t judged by their actions but by their skin color, gender, or proximity to some imagined oppressed class. The result? A glut of content that’s less about entertaining and more about indoctrination.
Take Hollywood, which, for the most part, has turned into a cauldron of coastal elitism that panders to narcissistic virtue-signaling while ignoring the values of its audiences. Once a dream factory, it’s now a propaganda mill.
So-called “blockbusters” like Disney’s recent Star Wars sequels or Marvel’s endless churn of capes-and-tights flicks don’t just tell stories—they lecture. Rey is a flawless “strong female character” because the script says so, not because she earns it. Captain Marvel smirks through adversity, untouchable and unrelatable, a cardboard cutout of feminist talking points. And subtlety’s dead; every line drips with agenda.
Television’s no better—shows like The Rings of Power twist Tolkien’s legacy into a diversity checkbox, alienating fans who just wanted Middle-earth, not a sociology seminar.
A perfect example comes to us in the television series Everwood, the story of Dr. Andy Brown, a widowed and renowned Manhattan neurosurgeon, who impulsively moves his teenage son and young daughter to the small, picturesque town of Everwood, Colorado, following his wife's sudden death.
The series starts out exploring the family's adjustment to their new life, navigating grief, their complex relationships, and the challenges of small-town living. But, by season four, it devolves into a storyline including a main character who embraces radical feminism and left-wing causes and episodes about hot-button issues like abortion, with the occasional promotion of Leftist politicians and digs at politicians from the Right. It moved away from a journey with a family people could relate to and arrived at an unrelatable caricature of a pseudo-utopian small town, lecturing on diversity and tolerance. While it returned to a non-woke theme by the end of the series, the damage was done.
Another example comes to us in Disney’s unnecessary remark of Snow White, with which both critics and viewers alike took issue. The adaptation was roundly criticized for its woke narrative updates emphasizing female empowerment and cultural inclusivity. The box office immediately registered its unquestionable disapproval, as has been the case with all Disney films as of late.
This isn’t escapism—it’s ideology-induced exhaustion that robs people of escapism. People don’t want to flee the stress of their lives only to be scolded about privilege or climate change. A 2022 YouGov poll found that 62% of Americans feel entertainment is “too political,” with many citing it as the main reason they’ve tuned out. The numbers speak clearly in support of that poll. Box office receipts for woke-heavy films like The Marvels (2023) tanked, pulling in a measly $206 million worldwide against a $270 million budget; $63 million underwater. Meanwhile, unapologetically escapist fare like Top Gun: Maverick soared past $1.4 billion. Audiences are voting with their wallets, begging for stories that don’t nag, preach, and lecture.
Television franchises like Yellowstone, with all its offshoots, dominate in the ratings with great plots and intriguing storylines.
The root of this rot, of course, is cultural Marxism, a framework that bastardizes art as a tool to dismantle “oppressive” structures—capitalism, patriarchy, Americanism, you name it. Wokeism is its arrogant, ignorant, self-absorbed, loudmouthed offspring, obsessed with deconstructing everything fun or heroic into a guilt trip. Villains can’t just be evil; they’re products of systemic injustice. Heroes can’t just win; they must first navel-gaze about their privilege. The industry’s enforcers—critics, executives, social media pseudo-potentates—cheer this on, dismissing dissent as bigotry. If you complain that Ghostbusters: Afterlife feels like a corporate feminist sermon, you’re a misogynist. If you miss the days when television shows had characters like Archie Bunker or Red Forman, you’re a dinosaur. The message is clear: conform or be canceled; what the audiences want be damned.
This relentless social engineering has stripped entertainment of its soul. Escapism thrives on freedom—freedom to imagine, to feel, to lose yourself without a lecture. Wokeism chains today’s escapism to reality’s worst impulses: division, resentment, sanctimony. People aren’t turning away because they hate progress; they’re turning away because they’re tired of elites lecturing them about how bad they are. They want dragons, not dogma; lyrics that touch the heart, not lessons.
The industry could save itself by remembering why we loved it in the first place—because it let us dream. Until then, every new release risks being another sermon we didn’t sign up for, and the oasis of escapism grows infinitely drier by the day.
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