I happened to hear House Speaker Mike Johnson yesterday. He was speaking along with a number of other Republican members of Congress about the Big Beautiful Bull and the requested canceling of previously approved appropriations for NPR, PBS and USAID. Johnson, like the other Republicans who spoke, started their remarks with sympathy for the victims of the attacks in Boulder and DC and a general condemnation of antisemitism.

I had a visceral reaction to almost everything Johnson said; I think him so wrong. If you have been scrolling through what I have been writing about this subject, you know I keep harping on the dangers of conflating antisemitism (dislike or hatred of Jews), anti-Israel positions (which can go so far as to press for the elimination of Israel as an independent country), anti-Zionism (dislike of people, Jewish or not, who support Zionism, whatever that means today), and pro-Palestine positions (which also vary widely). Johnson not only was overlooking these differences and making the mistake of conflating all of these things together – he was  purposely trying to conflate them as much as he could.

He said that both the perpetrators of the shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum and the attack in Boulder were not acting because they support the positions of a “free Palestine”, he said. This was just a pretense. They really don’t care about the Palestinians. They were committing these crimes because they simply hate Jews and want them eradicated from the planet. He ignored Mohamed Soliman’s statement that if Palestine were freed, there would be no more problems, for example.

Further, he said, we have a major antisemitism problem in this country, and it is all because of massive antisemitic actions taken by “the left”. In doing this, he made it look like antisemitism was a major leftist policy position – if you weren’t antisemitic, you were hardly worthy of being called a member of the left. Second, he did not even hint at any possibility of their being any antisemitism on the right. And third, he called both of these attackers as leftists, without – to my knowledge – knowing much about their overall political philosophies. He did not even bother to think that someone could be pro-Palestinian (whatever that might mean in this situation), and politically conservative or centrist.

So, in addition to conflating antisemitism and pro-Palestine stances, Johnson is now conflating pro-Palestinian positions with positions of the leftists in the country, and then of course he defines leftists as members and supporters of the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates. A triple conflation – how clever he must think he is.

And much of the American public (including the antisemitic far right) will fall right into his trap.

After this introduction, he got to the recision bill, which focuses on USAID ($9 billion plus) and NPR and PBS ($1 billion plus). I find the purported closing of USAID, the purported transfer of its ashes (I started to write “its embers”, but that would be less accurate) to the multi-hatted Marco Rubio, and the sudden firing of virtually all of its employees a legal disaster, a moral disaster, a human disaster and a security disaster. Johnson says it’s the first step to turning around the country. Johnson did not try at all to differentiate between any of USAID’s programs; to him, they were all abominations, it appears. None were worth saving. None was better than any other. The only one he mentioned in particular was support for a “trans opera in Peru”, of which he said clearly no one would approve.

This one act opera, “As One”, is an American opera, premiered in 2014, which Opera America says is the most performed modern opera today in the United States. As I understand it, it is the story of a young girl who, I think after her college years, transitions to male. The two leads both play the same role, before and after transition. The description I read made me want to see it.

The USAID supported presentation of the opera cost the American taxpayers approximately $22,000, and more was paid by local Colombian sources. And, yes, Mikey, it was Colombia, and not Peru. But, from your perspective, I assume that whether it is Colombia or Peru is not very important. After all, how different could they be? Don’t you think that on some days, residents of Peru wake up wondering of they are Colombian, or if they are Peruvian?

That leaves NPR and PBS. Want to know something? I actually don’t think that NPR or PBS should be publicly funded, although I would favor some sort of rational transition, rather than just locking them out in the cold. The cultural preferences and politics of both organizations are to the left of center; to me, that’s just fine, the way everything should be. But they are not politically balanced, and if they were, their liberal listeners and watchers would start to look elsewhere. Federal funds provide, I think, about a quarter of their funding (and the funding of local stations), and I bet this could be made up locally (or by technological changes in how they transmit and broadcast). And then, they could put on whatever shows they wanted to put on, and could be a real cultural outpost of liberal America. That would be my vote, assuming the details could be worked out.

After all, why should all media be balanced? Look at the disaster that CNN has on its hands by requiring their panels shows to have at least one right wing idiot on it. And, yes, I am talking to you, Scott Jennings. MSNBC, on the other hand, is proudly not balanced, and does an excellent job of providing factual coverage of the days event. If one party says the sky is blue and the other says the sky violet, do you want a news station to say: “The Democrats accurately say the sky is blue, while the Republicans insist, with out any proof, that it is violet.” Or do you want them to say: “What color is the sky? The Democrats say it is blue, and the Republicans say it is violet….That’s all the news for tonight. See you tomorrow.”