I don't see how you can have any sympathy for Maher (NPR lady, not Bill), she said a bunch of crazy stuff and then pretended like it never happened. It was like a low rent series of Bill Clinton denials, totally unconvincing, and she should get raked over the coals for it.
And that clip was hilarious for the endless ‘I didn’t say that / yes you did heres your tweet’. Every single time.
Honestly she should resign on that performance alone. Either she’s lying or you can’t have faith in her as a coherent responsible adult. This ‘everybody knows’ approach from Jessie just lets people get away with endorsing bullshit. Including ‘trans women are women’. There’re not. Let’s hold people to account.
Exactly. People have been rooted out of jobs for less with bad tweets yet hers were known from the start and it’s ’no biggie’. So okay they accepted that and appointed her but now she’s just outright lying about not having read things? You can’t have faith in people who conduct themselves this way.
What bothers me about Maher's behavior is that at the time she was endorsing these nutty ideas, pointing out that they were nutty could get you fired. She was working at Wikipedia at the time she endorsed these nutty ideas and part of the reason people were getting cancelled or losing their jobs for expressing skepticism about these ideas was that people in powerful positions like her were endorsing them. there is an expectation that if you have a position of power, you are expected to be thoughtful and not just jump on noxious trends.
I don't understand Jesse's argument that everyone was saying that stuff in 2020 so it's dumb to question her. Of course I have some sympathy for it as someone who got caught up in these social circles and also said dumb things, although not with such a huge platform thank god, but I do think it greatly decreased her (and my) credibility to know that we at the very least can be easily manipulated into saying things we don't really think. Or even into temporarily believing those things. Everyone should know that if you publicly say something dumb as hell you may have to eat crow in the future.
I managed to make it through 2020 with going all in on being a complete moron for social points so maybe I'm a bit harder on those that lost their minds than most... Not "everyone" was doing it, in fact half the country was not doing it. Maybe all of Jesse's friends were doing it, but that's an "I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon how could he have won" problem.
I doubt Jesse will extend the same charity to right-leaning voters saying objectively dumb shit to get along in MAGA land. In fact I know for a fact he doesn’t, given the social media spats he gets in with people with far less of a platform, and far less of a responsibility to be objective, than a leader at NPR.
I’m left wondering, did she ever really believe that stuff at all? Or was it performative progressivism all the way down? Did 90% of the people like her, the kind who were fully onboard with Robin D’Angelo etc, ever actually believe what they were saying?
I can't speak for her, but the many moderates and progressives I knew in 2020 were absolutely fully hopped up onto the bandwagon. And now they're on another progressive bandwagon without ever really having acknowledged the change.
I think of it this way, many of the people who believed in the satanic panic of the 80s still walk among us. I am sure some still believe in Satan but I doubt most of them still believe D&D is a gateway to satanism. I bet she still believes racism exists but her exact beliefs have probably moderated.
Frankly, I think for a lot of people there is no difference between what they "actually believe" and performative belief. That is, the performance is as sincere as they are capable of being.
The idiocy of her comments aside, I can’t believe she publicly admitted she never read the books she had claimed to! That’s on an even worse level than simply parroting the BLM propaganda of the time.
I wonder if she lied about reading them in the first place, or she did read them and is lying now? I'm not sure which is more embarrassing.
It's also such an odd way to try to defend yourself. I think it would be much less embarrassing to say that you've read a book, but that your views have evolved somewhat since then, or even say that you phrased your position poorly at the time and never fully agreed with it, than to deny ever having read a book that you previously bragged about reading..
This way she just seems like a liar and a moron no matter what the truth is.
Yeah this is giving people like her way too much of a pass, especially when they're getting taxpayer money for this stuff. If you're getting my money, taken from me involuntarily, then I get to criticize you for how you spend it!
This doesn't even touch upon the worst things she's said, such as a TED Talk where she claimed that "our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done". That should be an immediately disqualifying statement for anybody to participate in public broadcasting.
The fact that she fell for it again and again certainly brings her general competence into question. Granted, being in that seat is stressful, I'm sure, but surely by the fourth question she should have been able to piece together, "the fact that he's asking this probably means he has a tweet of mine ready."
I am sorry but Savage strikes again, is he really saying any instance of "being in the belly of the beast” in folklore or mythology is an instance of vore? I think there's a lot of bible scholars and classicists who might not just agree with you there, Danny boy. The idea that these myths which would have needed whole cultures to germinate and spread are there because of some fetish which represents a fraction of the human population is fucking mental. Get a grip. I’m sort of imagining Tom Holland vomiting at the thought, which would be kind of nicely ironic, if you think about it.
I *think* one could charitably understand Savage to be saying that stories of people being swallowed have long provided fodder for sexual fetishes. The problem with that is that you'd need literary or iconographic evidence for the fetish. Ancient people left us plenty of evidence for their sexual interests on their pottery and statuary and such, so the evidence should be there if they did indeed consider being swallowed whole titillating. I personally am not a scholar of ancient biblical or classical cultures, but I'm unaware of any ancient evidence for such fetishes.
I would guess that "vore" is of much more recent vintage, say within the last couple hundred years, and has seen a rise since the advent of the internet. What do I know? I'm just an old-fashioned historicist who thinks you can't assume without evidence that other cultures are into your very culturally specific fetishes.
I reckon that if you lived in a time where getting eaten whole by a bear or some other giant mammal was actually genuinely on the cards it would seem a whole lot less sexy than a lot of basement-dwelling, vitamin D-starved perverts seem to currently think it is
Ms No, as someone from Scotland, I demand you retract your comments about the vitamin d-starved. As a nation, we only see the sun once a year-on the solstice-at which point we fall to our knees and worship it, then sacrifice a virgin victim to the wicker man, by placing them in the belly of the wicker man!
Plus, it’s a truly terrifying way to die and it provides great ways of showing how hard the heroes task is. Andromeda being rescued by Perseus is necessary because the sea monster(or as becomes name in popular culture, though not Greek, “The Kraken”) is a giant whose going eat her.
The Greeks had lots of chimerical creatures, I doubt it. Dan Savage basically implies “turn/ons” are formed in childhood yet he acts almost
like they are epigenetic or even plain genetic. Seems kind of contradictory. I am sure that some ancient people’s had sexual obsessions, but modern obsessions are exactly that-modern.
not quite sure about that. Pasiphae had sex with a bull and she forced Dedalus to build her a hollow wooden cow for her to climb into so the bull could mount her. Ajax raped Cassandra in the temple of Pallas as plot motivation to curse the Greek fleet. Rape is all over the place in Greece and in Rome. In fact, the Roman Republic is based on the king Tarquinius raping the noble woman Lucretia and then being deposed for his crime and rape was *still* a crime in ancient cultures. I have no-doubt there was sexual obsession and fetish like behaviour-we know women had a thing for gladiators(they used to collect their sweat in
oil as an aphrodisiac)-but furries? Who knows. My take is sexual obsession is a universal trait that will exist in any time period and will latch-on to some external factor which exist contemporaneously. But I think it dangerous to back-project the ways we act on to the past-it’s another country and people do things differently there. Otherwise, you end-up with a minority of quite woke scholars claiming Elagabalus was “trans”. We can’t have it both ways.
Parsing the details of "vore" is just the stupidest use of time. So Jonah was swallowed whole by a whale and then jizzed all over the whale's stomach? Or was it the whale doing the jizzing?
Perfect. Savage lives as sex columnist and forgets that has probably immunised him to the weird shit. I get that fetishes are and on a spectrum, and most people are willing to tolerate the at least explicable stuff (breast fetishes in men or size queen women), in a live-and-let-live way but nobody wants trying ennoble this weirdest of the weird shit-that’s between them and their psychiatrist.
The core features of vore appear to be sadism and misogyny. How that got manifested through fantasizing about being a giant swallowing people whole is mostly speculation I figure. It is what it is.
No I have (sadly) come across vore before, if you will. Misogyny is not a given it’s more like Sado
Masochism- sometimes you’re the eater or eaten. There are women who are sexual sadists and (as fifty shades seems to imply) sexual masochists. The whole “misogyny” discourse had gotten a bit over-stretched since #metoo, but in this particular instance the whole trans AND vore thing is probably a good indicator.
I suppose intrinsically it's more sado-masochistic than misogynistic, but the fantasies in the episode were clearly misogynistic. I'm not in a position right now to dig deep on the frequency of that aspect though.
As I said, it is between him and his psychiatrist. I am sure in this instance given the putative trans-status, this person has some very misogynistic views. My point was that there are lesbians, who have never been near a man sexually, and are also into s & m and there are rad fems who undoubtedly could conjure arguments into existence about internalised misogyny, misogyny is an overused term in general. It’s not particularly helpful.
I'm saying the fantasies themselves were misogynistic, as in delighting in the idea of physically harming women to make the author take on enhanced feminine characteristics. To reference Silence of the Lambs, it's a kind of "Buffalo Bill" mindset. There are folks of all stripes into S&M, or into misogyny, or both, that stuff than J&K were reading off, it was plainly both, irrespective of the IDs of the authors (though like Katie, I confess to assuming they're all male even when it's not known outright).
I get you, but you wrote “ e core features of vore appear to be sadism and misogyny.” You weren’t talking specifically about this case, you were using this case to draw general assumptions, which I don’t think you have evidence for any more than lesbians into sadomaschism are exhibiting internalised misogyny, because it evolves a women being literally beaten and literally tortured.
Big Jesse fan, but his take on the NPR manager’s hearing was off to me. I thought it was great and productive to hold someone to account for extreme things she said publicly while managing NPR. She should face tough questions.
And the idea that there’s no way to do better in her answers? Obviously it’s possible to do worse, so of course it’s also possible to do better.
I agree. I think Jesse held her to the standard we would hold a private citizen to, but if you are the head of an organization that takes public money and claims to serve the public, you should be called to the mat for Tweeting like a partisan.
I can no longer listen to anything on NPR. I agree with Katie that it does serve a real need when there's a local crisis; they need to stop supporting terrorists on the other side of the world.
I don't understand what supporting NPR has to do with the local stations? Just have local public stations that get support, don't fund the national organization, and yank the local stations funding if they get too off their public service message/function or get to partisan.
If the government is paying them the government can dictate the content not get too extreme.
the problem is the local stations primarily purchase NPR content. There's local content from larger stations, but how is a small rural station supposed to produce or buy content to air?
Unneccessary, when local government can operate their own emergency announcement channels, which they do in certain areas. National parks make use to AM radio for announcements already.
I agree...she should be fired imho. She did a horrendous job of running **journalism** organization...she encouraged bias instead of minimizing it as much as possible...you know, journalism.
Appoint actual journalists who are equally critical of both sides at the top levels...then all the way down...that's what NPR needs...journalism.
Katie is right that it's about member stations not just the national org, but the person who was running the national org NPR needs to be fired for bad work performance, end of story.
Yeah, the whole thing of her claiming to have never said/read something then being told she tweeted it was perfect BAR pod fodder! I thought they were playing it to laugh at it and dunk on the stupidity of the fragile white women never actually doing the work, just like how the pod started in 2020. Really strange response from Jesse.
Seems like he fell into the trap of “I don’t like the goals of the people questioning her, ergo it’s ‘bad faith’ and it’s not possible to question her”
I was surprised how they framed whether she could "do better" in terms of whether that hearing might produce a positive financial outcome for NPR/CPB. No, she should do better because it's morally obligatory, especially considering that she's receiving public funding!
I loved NPR so much for so many years. Even the silly name I gave to my idea of the perfect man for me was "NPR Camping Man." It's been really, really sad to see them devolve and then fall off a cliff over the last ten years or so.
My absolute favorite example of bonkers-level NPR wokeness is this episode of All Things Reconsidered, where Peter Boghossian and Matt Thornton discuss an episode of All Things Considered where the terrible "TERFs" allegedly appropriated dinosaur emojis from the trans community, seemingly just to be mean and spiteful appropriators. The episode features interviews with a transgender person, a paleontologist, and the creator of the dinosaur emojis (who says the dinosaurs are and have always been transgender – transgender dinos!), but notably omits the entire backstory which provides the context that these "TERFs" were actually reclaiming the "dinosaur" label after being denigrated as "dinosaurs" for their ancient and outdated views on biological sex. 🤦🏻♀️
Bit of a pervert for nuance moment here, but... I THINK I disagree with Katie's assessment of NPR.
I'm not sure if she said that in general the news shows are good or she was just saying that there is at times good reporting on the news shows.
If it's the latter, OK, I suppose.
But I also found the news shows unlistenable, for a long time.
I was a constant listener to NPR for like 25 years. The first thing I would do in the morning was turn it on. Morning Edition was always the main thing I listened to, but other stuff at times too.
I THINK I finally had enough about 2018. I'm not exactly sure. I can't quite place it, but I think it was around then. I think it was before 2020, but I'm not positive.
I know I was getting sick of the bias for a long long time.
I specifically remember when the NPR ONE app came out ... which would have been like 2016 maybe? And I tried using it but EVERY SINGLE STORY that came up had an identity spin, mostly about racism. I was trying to find anything else on there and it was like the nothing but racism app.
So I really think the problem runs thru the whole institution, from end to end. For example, it has been well documented that NPR reporters have to keep a log of the identities of the sources in their stories and they are supervised on that point. It's just nuts.
I don't think there's a single corner of the organization that has been infected with a bent that is much, much too far.
So, yeah, I kinda think the whole institution should lose public funding. I'm all for public media, but NPR is too far gone. Institutions become corrupted at a point and NPR is there. Cut it loose.
Yup. Also, NPR isn't all about racism anymore, because as of 2023-2024 it was all about red states denying "trans kids" access to treatment, and as of January 2025 it's all about DOGE cutting federal programs and jobs.
I take Katie's point about WCQS having been a lifeline to people during Hurricane Helene, but frankly (1) that's unlikely to persuade people that we need to continuously fund other NPR tripe just so the occasional local station can do a good job in an emergency, and (2) every other privately funded radio station in WNC did the same during Helene, so lots of listeners got the same info about water supplies and roads from their favorite local music stations.
Sure, although TBH I wouldn't have a problem with cutting all government funding of media, as long as we didn't pretend taxpayers were getting significant savings out of the cuts.
Yeah I was a totally NPR head from age ~16-29, say from 97-2010. But in the early 2010s the constant political bias and inability to report almost anything politically valent with a semblance of fairness really started driving me away, and by 2016 the inability to cover the election in a fair manner (and I was not a Trump supporter) combined with the inability to talk about anything other than feminism and racism really drove me away.
It went from a favorite to something I occasionally tolerated, and then in 2020 it just became clown world and I stopped altogether, constant lies even from the news staff. I used to joke to my wife in the 19-21 period that it would be at most 2 or 3 sentences until racism or sexism would come up, and she would be like "stop it don't be silly", and then I would turn it on and like 90% of the time I was right.
Sure rioters are burning down the pharmacy in your neighborhood, but lets not report on that peaceful protest right now, instead lets examine the poetry of this marginalized black lesbian disabled lady from Texas no one has ever heard of.
Jesse's opinions were unusually stupid today and I want to defund NPR more than ever.
- Yes, there was no way for Katherine Maher to come off well, because the issue is whether NPR is biased, and her tweets were so bad. I'm not saying she had to patently lie about them, as she chose to, but the fact is she is very liberal.
- That's no different than calling oil executives or wherever in front of Congress. Yes, there's going to be a lot of grandstanding, but at the end of the day, Congress has to pass an oil bill or fund NPR, so both sides are talking about an issue of public importance.
- In this case, it's obvious that we're funding an organization that has no serious commitment to trying to target a median political position or strive for objectivity. NPR constantly assures me that they get almost no money from taxpayers. Fine, let's take them at their word and people who enjoy their work can pay for it.
Calling up NPR is even more defensible than calling oil company execs in front of Congress, because at least the oil companies are private entities that don't rely on public funding for their survival (notwithstanding their dissembling about CPB vs. direct NPR funding)
I feel like we still haven’t gotten a good reconciliation of the positions (1) federal funding is a tiny, microscopic amount of NPR/PBS’s funding so you shouldn’t care vs. (2) if you cut this all of the good things will die, especially Big Bird
This is a common enough tactic it could use a name - maybe it already has one? I noticed it a lot during affirmative action debates at UofMichigan: affirmative action was just a tiny little nudge, a tie breaker between otherwise indistinguishably qualified applicants, but ending affirmative action was going to absolutely crash black matriculation.
Re NPR Lady: Can we just take a moment to be scared by how *thin* this ideology turns out to be when people are forced to give direct answers to straight questions rather than attack the language or divert? It's platitudes and pieties all the way down, and yet this is the basis upon which careers were wrecked, friendships ended, public intellectuals outlawed.
The most aggravating thing to me is knowing that millions of people hopped on this bandwagon without any serious critical thinking, happily ruined lives for the dopamine hit of a few likes, and now they can all move on acting as if they never took part in it or seriously believed it. In fact most of these people don't give it any thought at all.
I wish ever person, not just the presidents of NPR and a handful of universities, could be held accountable for even a moment like this lady was.
I disagree that only people in positions of power like her deserve to be held accountable. Everyone who participated in the madness is culpable.
I've experienced pile-ons from people that I know in real life, and people in my extended social network, not just internet randos. Everyone who participated in this insanity has hurt someone, to one degree or another.
So have the people who remained silent rather than speak out against it, though they are less culpable in my opinion.
I think a searchable "cancellation receipts" website could prove satisfying.
I have managed to stay under the radar to avoid what you have suffered, but have however quietly self cancelled from a whole raft of communities where I can no longer be authentic. This has left me very angry.
Overall, what's dismaying but also interesting is the way that coordination failed. In a sane world, unions and other associations would have backed the victims, and mangers, venue owners, teachers and authority figures etc would have presented a united front.
For example, in the NHS Fife Nurse scandal (Upton vs Peggie), the nurse's union washed its hands of the nurses.
It turns out that a lot of organisations aren't actually controlled by the people they claim to represent.
Jesse definitely a lot more blasé about In Defense of Looting than he would be about an NPR run by Rufo using govt dollars to have softball interviews of Curtis Yarvin.
I don’t spend a lot of time caring about money NPR gets but it’s just true that left extremism is treated as quirky and right extremism is either dangerous or laughable.
Left extremists get quirky because they're trying so very hard to make the world a better place the way a city might remove all the trees in a park and then replant new trees in their place which made things better, right??
Left extremists are the types who spend a million dollars adding a bike lane to the only road in Antarctica and feeling good about themselves.
NPR can eat my ass. If the people have to fund it there should be some kind of system to ensure reporting and content is as unbiased as possible. Because even one fucking penny of my taxes is too much for that trash. Just because 1/10 instances isn’t identitarian garbage doesn’t mean it’s not still a shit sandwich.
Putting two pieces of bread on a pile of shit and calling it a sandwich still means you’re eating shit.
You would have to fire 100% of the NPR staff, erase all of their policies and mission statements and any trace of the institutional culture, and start from scratch.
That's not reform, that's burning it down and starting over.
And I'm open to trying to creating a new alternate to NPR, though I don't really think the federal government would be well equipped or competent enough to undertake such an endeavor.. And it would be very expensive and take years probably.
But there's no point in having the government attempt to reform NPR, that would just be a waste of money. Just cut it loose entirely.
Definitely not 100% need to go, I said top leadership, "the people responsible".
It's a standard institutional change situation, be deliberate, communicate early and often about the change, give employees who don't like the new direction an off ramp to a good mutual parting.
Are you saying there aren't enough actual journalists to potentially fill these positions??
There probably aren't enough actual journalists, but that's not my point at all. My point was that everyone at NPR is an activist with no principles or journalistic ethics. Otherwise they wouldn't work there.
It is impossible to work for NPR and have integrity, those are mutually exclusive.
That's like saying that someone could work for the NRA and hate guns. Actual journalism is not what the organization is about. It is all garbage and irredeemable.
Trying to reform NPR would be like trying to reform the ACLU at this point. It's beyond saving, and even if you could, it would be a whole lot easier to just replace it with something new.
NPR isn’t state media, so why would the government get involved in a full overhaul? Or create an alternative? It’s a nonprofit organization that receives *some* government funding. Most of its revenue comes from advertising, donations from listeners and dues from member stations (in no particular order).
The anger over it is so puzzling when there see genuine wastes of tax payer money in government today.
The anger is over an organization that has been tremendously harmful and divisive to the country.
The fact that they pretend to be journalists and receive taxpayer money just adds insult to injury.
They should receive zero federal funding.
That's not going to fix them, but it's the bare minimum of what should be done. I'd rather see their offices burn to the ground and every NPR employee lose their job and never work again, but I'll settle for permanently cutting off all government funding.
I stopped listening to NPR completely after 10/7. The "P" in NPR may as well stand for "Palestine".
Here's an example...the series "This American Life". In the past they've run a few "Palestinian" stories, but they were about young Palestinian Americans getting adjusted to life here. (Not once has there been a story about how Israeli ex-pats fare in public schools in the US--for that I'm glad I have The Free Press)
But after 10/7 _This Ameican Life_ doesn't even care if the story is "American" or not. I listen to the show because I want to hear American stories. It's in the title. They started running things like "Yosef and the Fourth Move" https://www.thisamericanlife.org/834/yousef-and-the-fourth-move
They don't have to make every show about Palestine.
A search on NPR reveals little concern over the hundreds of thousands of Israeli families who have been displaced by Hamas' war, or the Americans taken hostage by Hamas.
This American Life has run shows I strongly disagreed with, like their Ferguson coverage. (I own commecial property one town over in St. Charles, MO, so I have a personal interest in that story.) But it didn't make me want to stop listening to the podcast. Acting as a propaganda arm for a terrorist orgranization is something I can't overlook.
I feel like TAL has been not exactly balanced, but not totally…off balanced. they’re focused on human interest stuff… the free press on the other hand has become so off putting in their dogmatic embrace of everything conservative that I can’t stomach it any more. they kept putting Wu and Unger Sargon on and I can’t listen to that much brain dead.
I hadn't heard about hundreds of thousands of Israeli families being displaced. I suppose that would be expected for various reasons. Do you have a news article describing the situation? There's so much other stuff that comes up when I search for the key terms ("Israeli families displaced war") I'm struggling to find one.
Nope, not kidding. I don't trawl through hasbara a lot. Reading the article and some of the linked articles, it seems that a lot of people were evacuated from border areas by the military for their safety, which is very sad. I'm glad their military is concerned for their safety, and largely able to ensure it, but it's still very sad that what looks like 2.6% of the Israeli population has been displaced by the war. No one should be driven from their homes.
Yall are going waaaay too soft on npr lady. She was up there eating a conveyor belts worth of shit sandwiches that she herself made on Twitter. What a joke. She should be fired for that. Those are tweets I’d cringe at if they were posted by a 14 year old, let alone the head of NPR.
I thought so too, but there was something else in there; I could occasionally hear flattened northern vowels - either Yorkshire or Lancashire, but posh.
I don't see how you can have any sympathy for Maher (NPR lady, not Bill), she said a bunch of crazy stuff and then pretended like it never happened. It was like a low rent series of Bill Clinton denials, totally unconvincing, and she should get raked over the coals for it.
And that clip was hilarious for the endless ‘I didn’t say that / yes you did heres your tweet’. Every single time.
Honestly she should resign on that performance alone. Either she’s lying or you can’t have faith in her as a coherent responsible adult. This ‘everybody knows’ approach from Jessie just lets people get away with endorsing bullshit. Including ‘trans women are women’. There’re not. Let’s hold people to account.
Wouldn't a normal, non sociopath person be extremely embarrassed by being proven to be a liar like that
Exactly. People have been rooted out of jobs for less with bad tweets yet hers were known from the start and it’s ’no biggie’. So okay they accepted that and appointed her but now she’s just outright lying about not having read things? You can’t have faith in people who conduct themselves this way.
It's like putting a college student under oath. "I never read that book I said I read."
Much more sad than hilarious because this is what you can expect when arguing with people like her. They just make up their own reality.
What bothers me about Maher's behavior is that at the time she was endorsing these nutty ideas, pointing out that they were nutty could get you fired. She was working at Wikipedia at the time she endorsed these nutty ideas and part of the reason people were getting cancelled or losing their jobs for expressing skepticism about these ideas was that people in powerful positions like her were endorsing them. there is an expectation that if you have a position of power, you are expected to be thoughtful and not just jump on noxious trends.
I don't understand Jesse's argument that everyone was saying that stuff in 2020 so it's dumb to question her. Of course I have some sympathy for it as someone who got caught up in these social circles and also said dumb things, although not with such a huge platform thank god, but I do think it greatly decreased her (and my) credibility to know that we at the very least can be easily manipulated into saying things we don't really think. Or even into temporarily believing those things. Everyone should know that if you publicly say something dumb as hell you may have to eat crow in the future.
I managed to make it through 2020 with going all in on being a complete moron for social points so maybe I'm a bit harder on those that lost their minds than most... Not "everyone" was doing it, in fact half the country was not doing it. Maybe all of Jesse's friends were doing it, but that's an "I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon how could he have won" problem.
Indeed, even my very left of center hippie wife was like "yeah this shit has gotten crazy" and mostly got off the woke train in 2020.
I doubt Jesse will extend the same charity to right-leaning voters saying objectively dumb shit to get along in MAGA land. In fact I know for a fact he doesn’t, given the social media spats he gets in with people with far less of a platform, and far less of a responsibility to be objective, than a leader at NPR.
I’m left wondering, did she ever really believe that stuff at all? Or was it performative progressivism all the way down? Did 90% of the people like her, the kind who were fully onboard with Robin D’Angelo etc, ever actually believe what they were saying?
I can't speak for her, but the many moderates and progressives I knew in 2020 were absolutely fully hopped up onto the bandwagon. And now they're on another progressive bandwagon without ever really having acknowledged the change.
I think of it this way, many of the people who believed in the satanic panic of the 80s still walk among us. I am sure some still believe in Satan but I doubt most of them still believe D&D is a gateway to satanism. I bet she still believes racism exists but her exact beliefs have probably moderated.
Yes, this is something I often wonder. I am not sure if it's worse to actually believe social justice dreck or to just pretend.
Does Robin D'Angelo actually believe this crap?
Frankly, I think for a lot of people there is no difference between what they "actually believe" and performative belief. That is, the performance is as sincere as they are capable of being.
I think she still does, but there was a time when you kept your politics more private and 2020 changed that and exposed these toxic progressives.
The idiocy of her comments aside, I can’t believe she publicly admitted she never read the books she had claimed to! That’s on an even worse level than simply parroting the BLM propaganda of the time.
I wonder if she lied about reading them in the first place, or she did read them and is lying now? I'm not sure which is more embarrassing.
It's also such an odd way to try to defend yourself. I think it would be much less embarrassing to say that you've read a book, but that your views have evolved somewhat since then, or even say that you phrased your position poorly at the time and never fully agreed with it, than to deny ever having read a book that you previously bragged about reading..
This way she just seems like a liar and a moron no matter what the truth is.
Exactly. No harm in reading something, it’s what you took away from it.
Yeah this is giving people like her way too much of a pass, especially when they're getting taxpayer money for this stuff. If you're getting my money, taken from me involuntarily, then I get to criticize you for how you spend it!
This doesn't even touch upon the worst things she's said, such as a TED Talk where she claimed that "our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done". That should be an immediately disqualifying statement for anybody to participate in public broadcasting.
Yes, but something something Republicans are jerks so it's all ok
Yeah, she is feckless as hell.
The "banality of cringe"
The fact that she fell for it again and again certainly brings her general competence into question. Granted, being in that seat is stressful, I'm sure, but surely by the fourth question she should have been able to piece together, "the fact that he's asking this probably means he has a tweet of mine ready."
I am sorry but Savage strikes again, is he really saying any instance of "being in the belly of the beast” in folklore or mythology is an instance of vore? I think there's a lot of bible scholars and classicists who might not just agree with you there, Danny boy. The idea that these myths which would have needed whole cultures to germinate and spread are there because of some fetish which represents a fraction of the human population is fucking mental. Get a grip. I’m sort of imagining Tom Holland vomiting at the thought, which would be kind of nicely ironic, if you think about it.
I *think* one could charitably understand Savage to be saying that stories of people being swallowed have long provided fodder for sexual fetishes. The problem with that is that you'd need literary or iconographic evidence for the fetish. Ancient people left us plenty of evidence for their sexual interests on their pottery and statuary and such, so the evidence should be there if they did indeed consider being swallowed whole titillating. I personally am not a scholar of ancient biblical or classical cultures, but I'm unaware of any ancient evidence for such fetishes.
I would guess that "vore" is of much more recent vintage, say within the last couple hundred years, and has seen a rise since the advent of the internet. What do I know? I'm just an old-fashioned historicist who thinks you can't assume without evidence that other cultures are into your very culturally specific fetishes.
I reckon that if you lived in a time where getting eaten whole by a bear or some other giant mammal was actually genuinely on the cards it would seem a whole lot less sexy than a lot of basement-dwelling, vitamin D-starved perverts seem to currently think it is
Ms No, as someone from Scotland, I demand you retract your comments about the vitamin d-starved. As a nation, we only see the sun once a year-on the solstice-at which point we fall to our knees and worship it, then sacrifice a virgin victim to the wicker man, by placing them in the belly of the wicker man!
Plus, it’s a truly terrifying way to die and it provides great ways of showing how hard the heroes task is. Andromeda being rescued by Perseus is necessary because the sea monster(or as becomes name in popular culture, though not Greek, “The Kraken”) is a giant whose going eat her.
Satyrs were frequently shown with massive erections, I assume that they must have inspired some proto-furries.
The Greeks had lots of chimerical creatures, I doubt it. Dan Savage basically implies “turn/ons” are formed in childhood yet he acts almost
like they are epigenetic or even plain genetic. Seems kind of contradictory. I am sure that some ancient people’s had sexual obsessions, but modern obsessions are exactly that-modern.
Centaurs also were infamous rapists! Yeah, I have no problem buying that the Greco-Romans were into human-animal-hybrid kinks.
Perhaps, but I’m
not quite sure about that. Pasiphae had sex with a bull and she forced Dedalus to build her a hollow wooden cow for her to climb into so the bull could mount her. Ajax raped Cassandra in the temple of Pallas as plot motivation to curse the Greek fleet. Rape is all over the place in Greece and in Rome. In fact, the Roman Republic is based on the king Tarquinius raping the noble woman Lucretia and then being deposed for his crime and rape was *still* a crime in ancient cultures. I have no-doubt there was sexual obsession and fetish like behaviour-we know women had a thing for gladiators(they used to collect their sweat in
oil as an aphrodisiac)-but furries? Who knows. My take is sexual obsession is a universal trait that will exist in any time period and will latch-on to some external factor which exist contemporaneously. But I think it dangerous to back-project the ways we act on to the past-it’s another country and people do things differently there. Otherwise, you end-up with a minority of quite woke scholars claiming Elagabalus was “trans”. We can’t have it both ways.
Thank you, Jane, I was so piqued I could come up within outline of the problem with what he was saying.
Yeah, "there's even vore in the Bible" is... quite a stretch
Parsing the details of "vore" is just the stupidest use of time. So Jonah was swallowed whole by a whale and then jizzed all over the whale's stomach? Or was it the whale doing the jizzing?
Nobody cares, Dan. They are all fucking weirdos.
Perfect. Savage lives as sex columnist and forgets that has probably immunised him to the weird shit. I get that fetishes are and on a spectrum, and most people are willing to tolerate the at least explicable stuff (breast fetishes in men or size queen women), in a live-and-let-live way but nobody wants trying ennoble this weirdest of the weird shit-that’s between them and their psychiatrist.
100%
The core features of vore appear to be sadism and misogyny. How that got manifested through fantasizing about being a giant swallowing people whole is mostly speculation I figure. It is what it is.
No I have (sadly) come across vore before, if you will. Misogyny is not a given it’s more like Sado
Masochism- sometimes you’re the eater or eaten. There are women who are sexual sadists and (as fifty shades seems to imply) sexual masochists. The whole “misogyny” discourse had gotten a bit over-stretched since #metoo, but in this particular instance the whole trans AND vore thing is probably a good indicator.
I suppose intrinsically it's more sado-masochistic than misogynistic, but the fantasies in the episode were clearly misogynistic. I'm not in a position right now to dig deep on the frequency of that aspect though.
As I said, it is between him and his psychiatrist. I am sure in this instance given the putative trans-status, this person has some very misogynistic views. My point was that there are lesbians, who have never been near a man sexually, and are also into s & m and there are rad fems who undoubtedly could conjure arguments into existence about internalised misogyny, misogyny is an overused term in general. It’s not particularly helpful.
I'm saying the fantasies themselves were misogynistic, as in delighting in the idea of physically harming women to make the author take on enhanced feminine characteristics. To reference Silence of the Lambs, it's a kind of "Buffalo Bill" mindset. There are folks of all stripes into S&M, or into misogyny, or both, that stuff than J&K were reading off, it was plainly both, irrespective of the IDs of the authors (though like Katie, I confess to assuming they're all male even when it's not known outright).
I get you, but you wrote “ e core features of vore appear to be sadism and misogyny.” You weren’t talking specifically about this case, you were using this case to draw general assumptions, which I don’t think you have evidence for any more than lesbians into sadomaschism are exhibiting internalised misogyny, because it evolves a women being literally beaten and literally tortured.
Big Jesse fan, but his take on the NPR manager’s hearing was off to me. I thought it was great and productive to hold someone to account for extreme things she said publicly while managing NPR. She should face tough questions.
And the idea that there’s no way to do better in her answers? Obviously it’s possible to do worse, so of course it’s also possible to do better.
I agree. I think Jesse held her to the standard we would hold a private citizen to, but if you are the head of an organization that takes public money and claims to serve the public, you should be called to the mat for Tweeting like a partisan.
Yeah, exactly.
NPR describing the treatment of the Bibas families bodies as “solemn “ is all one needs to hear.
I can no longer listen to anything on NPR. I agree with Katie that it does serve a real need when there's a local crisis; they need to stop supporting terrorists on the other side of the world.
I don't understand what supporting NPR has to do with the local stations? Just have local public stations that get support, don't fund the national organization, and yank the local stations funding if they get too off their public service message/function or get to partisan.
If the government is paying them the government can dictate the content not get too extreme.
the problem is the local stations primarily purchase NPR content. There's local content from larger stations, but how is a small rural station supposed to produce or buy content to air?
The same way a college or independent station does?
Unneccessary, when local government can operate their own emergency announcement channels, which they do in certain areas. National parks make use to AM radio for announcements already.
Which part was that? Need a reminder.
I agree...she should be fired imho. She did a horrendous job of running **journalism** organization...she encouraged bias instead of minimizing it as much as possible...you know, journalism.
Appoint actual journalists who are equally critical of both sides at the top levels...then all the way down...that's what NPR needs...journalism.
Katie is right that it's about member stations not just the national org, but the person who was running the national org NPR needs to be fired for bad work performance, end of story.
I think he let his team affiliation color his perception here.
This is the answer, I constantly get the vibe that Jesse just wants to get an invite to the right parties
Yeah, the whole thing of her claiming to have never said/read something then being told she tweeted it was perfect BAR pod fodder! I thought they were playing it to laugh at it and dunk on the stupidity of the fragile white women never actually doing the work, just like how the pod started in 2020. Really strange response from Jesse.
Seems like he fell into the trap of “I don’t like the goals of the people questioning her, ergo it’s ‘bad faith’ and it’s not possible to question her”
I was surprised how they framed whether she could "do better" in terms of whether that hearing might produce a positive financial outcome for NPR/CPB. No, she should do better because it's morally obligatory, especially considering that she's receiving public funding!
This was a very entertaining episode, more like this please!
PS it would be so great if you would never ever mention vore ever again
Agreed 💯 on vore. I look forward to the upcoming primo episode! Sounds like a fascinating subject.
Yes! This faking one’s death thing is fascinating.
I suppose for the very online people who fake their life, faking their death is just a logical next step
I see it as VERY related to the idea of a dead name that we are never ever supposed to say again. It’s a fake death out loud in public.
Between adult baby diaper lovers and vore I’m not sure which is worse
For me, vore for sure. I was so grossed out by the episode where Jesse read some of that shite out loud, i couldn't finish it.
Yeah I genuinely found it upsetting and still do. It seems so sadistic and spiteful
No matter who wins in the which is worst race, humanity loses.
I loved NPR so much for so many years. Even the silly name I gave to my idea of the perfect man for me was "NPR Camping Man." It's been really, really sad to see them devolve and then fall off a cliff over the last ten years or so.
My absolute favorite example of bonkers-level NPR wokeness is this episode of All Things Reconsidered, where Peter Boghossian and Matt Thornton discuss an episode of All Things Considered where the terrible "TERFs" allegedly appropriated dinosaur emojis from the trans community, seemingly just to be mean and spiteful appropriators. The episode features interviews with a transgender person, a paleontologist, and the creator of the dinosaur emojis (who says the dinosaurs are and have always been transgender – transgender dinos!), but notably omits the entire backstory which provides the context that these "TERFs" were actually reclaiming the "dinosaur" label after being denigrated as "dinosaurs" for their ancient and outdated views on biological sex. 🤦🏻♀️
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Latb4tOUG-0
I never heard that dinosaur backstory before. Magnificent!
Thanks for that: I like Boghossian and will check it out.
Bit of a pervert for nuance moment here, but... I THINK I disagree with Katie's assessment of NPR.
I'm not sure if she said that in general the news shows are good or she was just saying that there is at times good reporting on the news shows.
If it's the latter, OK, I suppose.
But I also found the news shows unlistenable, for a long time.
I was a constant listener to NPR for like 25 years. The first thing I would do in the morning was turn it on. Morning Edition was always the main thing I listened to, but other stuff at times too.
I THINK I finally had enough about 2018. I'm not exactly sure. I can't quite place it, but I think it was around then. I think it was before 2020, but I'm not positive.
I know I was getting sick of the bias for a long long time.
I specifically remember when the NPR ONE app came out ... which would have been like 2016 maybe? And I tried using it but EVERY SINGLE STORY that came up had an identity spin, mostly about racism. I was trying to find anything else on there and it was like the nothing but racism app.
So I really think the problem runs thru the whole institution, from end to end. For example, it has been well documented that NPR reporters have to keep a log of the identities of the sources in their stories and they are supervised on that point. It's just nuts.
I don't think there's a single corner of the organization that has been infected with a bent that is much, much too far.
So, yeah, I kinda think the whole institution should lose public funding. I'm all for public media, but NPR is too far gone. Institutions become corrupted at a point and NPR is there. Cut it loose.
Yup. Also, NPR isn't all about racism anymore, because as of 2023-2024 it was all about red states denying "trans kids" access to treatment, and as of January 2025 it's all about DOGE cutting federal programs and jobs.
I take Katie's point about WCQS having been a lifeline to people during Hurricane Helene, but frankly (1) that's unlikely to persuade people that we need to continuously fund other NPR tripe just so the occasional local station can do a good job in an emergency, and (2) every other privately funded radio station in WNC did the same during Helene, so lots of listeners got the same info about water supplies and roads from their favorite local music stations.
Maybe a happy medium would be: keep the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but cut NPR loose?
Sure, although TBH I wouldn't have a problem with cutting all government funding of media, as long as we didn't pretend taxpayers were getting significant savings out of the cuts.
Yeah I was a totally NPR head from age ~16-29, say from 97-2010. But in the early 2010s the constant political bias and inability to report almost anything politically valent with a semblance of fairness really started driving me away, and by 2016 the inability to cover the election in a fair manner (and I was not a Trump supporter) combined with the inability to talk about anything other than feminism and racism really drove me away.
It went from a favorite to something I occasionally tolerated, and then in 2020 it just became clown world and I stopped altogether, constant lies even from the news staff. I used to joke to my wife in the 19-21 period that it would be at most 2 or 3 sentences until racism or sexism would come up, and she would be like "stop it don't be silly", and then I would turn it on and like 90% of the time I was right.
Sure rioters are burning down the pharmacy in your neighborhood, but lets not report on that peaceful protest right now, instead lets examine the poetry of this marginalized black lesbian disabled lady from Texas no one has ever heard of.
Katie should do more with the phrase "tragically did not die" for fake suicide. I'm not sure it's been used before.
Dying in a blocked and reported episode is sort of like dying in a marvel movie. Often not permanent.
There was an episode with similar subject matter where Katie did a public safety announcement for anyone who was considering committing fake suicide
Which, as the record will show, made me laugh out loud, on the street, like a crazy person.
Jesse's opinions were unusually stupid today and I want to defund NPR more than ever.
- Yes, there was no way for Katherine Maher to come off well, because the issue is whether NPR is biased, and her tweets were so bad. I'm not saying she had to patently lie about them, as she chose to, but the fact is she is very liberal.
- That's no different than calling oil executives or wherever in front of Congress. Yes, there's going to be a lot of grandstanding, but at the end of the day, Congress has to pass an oil bill or fund NPR, so both sides are talking about an issue of public importance.
- In this case, it's obvious that we're funding an organization that has no serious commitment to trying to target a median political position or strive for objectivity. NPR constantly assures me that they get almost no money from taxpayers. Fine, let's take them at their word and people who enjoy their work can pay for it.
Calling up NPR is even more defensible than calling oil company execs in front of Congress, because at least the oil companies are private entities that don't rely on public funding for their survival (notwithstanding their dissembling about CPB vs. direct NPR funding)
I feel like we still haven’t gotten a good reconciliation of the positions (1) federal funding is a tiny, microscopic amount of NPR/PBS’s funding so you shouldn’t care vs. (2) if you cut this all of the good things will die, especially Big Bird
This is a common enough tactic it could use a name - maybe it already has one? I noticed it a lot during affirmative action debates at UofMichigan: affirmative action was just a tiny little nudge, a tie breaker between otherwise indistinguishably qualified applicants, but ending affirmative action was going to absolutely crash black matriculation.
“App to delete my twitter history” sounds like a perfect sponsorship opportunity for Blocked and Reported.
I used that app once a year to start fresh back when it was free and instant. With Elon's API changes, it isn't free and isn't fast anymore.
Re NPR Lady: Can we just take a moment to be scared by how *thin* this ideology turns out to be when people are forced to give direct answers to straight questions rather than attack the language or divert? It's platitudes and pieties all the way down, and yet this is the basis upon which careers were wrecked, friendships ended, public intellectuals outlawed.
The most aggravating thing to me is knowing that millions of people hopped on this bandwagon without any serious critical thinking, happily ruined lives for the dopamine hit of a few likes, and now they can all move on acting as if they never took part in it or seriously believed it. In fact most of these people don't give it any thought at all.
I wish ever person, not just the presidents of NPR and a handful of universities, could be held accountable for even a moment like this lady was.
I disagree that only people in positions of power like her deserve to be held accountable. Everyone who participated in the madness is culpable.
I've experienced pile-ons from people that I know in real life, and people in my extended social network, not just internet randos. Everyone who participated in this insanity has hurt someone, to one degree or another.
So have the people who remained silent rather than speak out against it, though they are less culpable in my opinion.
I think a searchable "cancellation receipts" website could prove satisfying.
I have managed to stay under the radar to avoid what you have suffered, but have however quietly self cancelled from a whole raft of communities where I can no longer be authentic. This has left me very angry.
Overall, what's dismaying but also interesting is the way that coordination failed. In a sane world, unions and other associations would have backed the victims, and mangers, venue owners, teachers and authority figures etc would have presented a united front.
For example, in the NHS Fife Nurse scandal (Upton vs Peggie), the nurse's union washed its hands of the nurses.
It turns out that a lot of organisations aren't actually controlled by the people they claim to represent.
Socially acceptable bullying as usual
Jesse definitely a lot more blasé about In Defense of Looting than he would be about an NPR run by Rufo using govt dollars to have softball interviews of Curtis Yarvin.
I don’t spend a lot of time caring about money NPR gets but it’s just true that left extremism is treated as quirky and right extremism is either dangerous or laughable.
Left extremists get quirky because they're trying so very hard to make the world a better place the way a city might remove all the trees in a park and then replant new trees in their place which made things better, right??
Left extremists are the types who spend a million dollars adding a bike lane to the only road in Antarctica and feeling good about themselves.
NPR can eat my ass. If the people have to fund it there should be some kind of system to ensure reporting and content is as unbiased as possible. Because even one fucking penny of my taxes is too much for that trash. Just because 1/10 instances isn’t identitarian garbage doesn’t mean it’s not still a shit sandwich.
Putting two pieces of bread on a pile of shit and calling it a sandwich still means you’re eating shit.
You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.
NPR is shit.
Something like that.
I don't think anyone disagrees, it's more about what to do.
It must be fixed, not allowed to descend into shit-lib hell forever.
Fire the people responsible and hire actual journalists. That's the solution.
You would have to fire 100% of the NPR staff, erase all of their policies and mission statements and any trace of the institutional culture, and start from scratch.
That's not reform, that's burning it down and starting over.
And I'm open to trying to creating a new alternate to NPR, though I don't really think the federal government would be well equipped or competent enough to undertake such an endeavor.. And it would be very expensive and take years probably.
But there's no point in having the government attempt to reform NPR, that would just be a waste of money. Just cut it loose entirely.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Definitely not 100% need to go, I said top leadership, "the people responsible".
It's a standard institutional change situation, be deliberate, communicate early and often about the change, give employees who don't like the new direction an off ramp to a good mutual parting.
Are you saying there aren't enough actual journalists to potentially fill these positions??
There probably aren't enough actual journalists, but that's not my point at all. My point was that everyone at NPR is an activist with no principles or journalistic ethics. Otherwise they wouldn't work there.
It is impossible to work for NPR and have integrity, those are mutually exclusive.
That's like saying that someone could work for the NRA and hate guns. Actual journalism is not what the organization is about. It is all garbage and irredeemable.
Trying to reform NPR would be like trying to reform the ACLU at this point. It's beyond saving, and even if you could, it would be a whole lot easier to just replace it with something new.
NPR isn’t state media, so why would the government get involved in a full overhaul? Or create an alternative? It’s a nonprofit organization that receives *some* government funding. Most of its revenue comes from advertising, donations from listeners and dues from member stations (in no particular order).
The anger over it is so puzzling when there see genuine wastes of tax payer money in government today.
The anger is over an organization that has been tremendously harmful and divisive to the country.
The fact that they pretend to be journalists and receive taxpayer money just adds insult to injury.
They should receive zero federal funding.
That's not going to fix them, but it's the bare minimum of what should be done. I'd rather see their offices burn to the ground and every NPR employee lose their job and never work again, but I'll settle for permanently cutting off all government funding.
Ok man, very balanced and normal response 👍
Yes I think so.
I stopped listening to NPR completely after 10/7. The "P" in NPR may as well stand for "Palestine".
Here's an example...the series "This American Life". In the past they've run a few "Palestinian" stories, but they were about young Palestinian Americans getting adjusted to life here. (Not once has there been a story about how Israeli ex-pats fare in public schools in the US--for that I'm glad I have The Free Press)
But after 10/7 _This Ameican Life_ doesn't even care if the story is "American" or not. I listen to the show because I want to hear American stories. It's in the title. They started running things like "Yosef and the Fourth Move" https://www.thisamericanlife.org/834/yousef-and-the-fourth-move
They don't have to make every show about Palestine.
A search on NPR reveals little concern over the hundreds of thousands of Israeli families who have been displaced by Hamas' war, or the Americans taken hostage by Hamas.
This American Life has run shows I strongly disagreed with, like their Ferguson coverage. (I own commecial property one town over in St. Charles, MO, so I have a personal interest in that story.) But it didn't make me want to stop listening to the podcast. Acting as a propaganda arm for a terrorist orgranization is something I can't overlook.
I feel like TAL has been not exactly balanced, but not totally…off balanced. they’re focused on human interest stuff… the free press on the other hand has become so off putting in their dogmatic embrace of everything conservative that I can’t stomach it any more. they kept putting Wu and Unger Sargon on and I can’t listen to that much brain dead.
TAL used to be about American obscurity. Now it's just preaching to us.
I hadn't heard about hundreds of thousands of Israeli families being displaced. I suppose that would be expected for various reasons. Do you have a news article describing the situation? There's so much other stuff that comes up when I search for the key terms ("Israeli families displaced war") I'm struggling to find one.
>I hadn't heard about hundreds of thousands of Israeli families being displaced.
You're kidding, right?
https://unwatch.org/report-un-silent-on-israeli-idps/
Nope, not kidding. I don't trawl through hasbara a lot. Reading the article and some of the linked articles, it seems that a lot of people were evacuated from border areas by the military for their safety, which is very sad. I'm glad their military is concerned for their safety, and largely able to ensure it, but it's still very sad that what looks like 2.6% of the Israeli population has been displaced by the war. No one should be driven from their homes.
“Vore Isn’t Chewing” is the obvious top pick for B&R Merch Not to Buy.
I would totally buy that , tho, and wear it!
Good conversation starter..
Yall are going waaaay too soft on npr lady. She was up there eating a conveyor belts worth of shit sandwiches that she herself made on Twitter. What a joke. She should be fired for that. Those are tweets I’d cringe at if they were posted by a 14 year old, let alone the head of NPR.
Why does Amaryllis Blue sound suspiciously like Jesse doing a Helen Lewis impersonation?
The voice clips made me think Amiaryllis Bloo is actually a man, despite the she/her pronouns used throughout the episode.
I didn't even realize this was a question. I'd bet good money that the vast majority of Sexy Asian Lady VTubers are men.
I thought so too, but there was something else in there; I could occasionally hear flattened northern vowels - either Yorkshire or Lancashire, but posh.
I thought posh too, but being American, not sure.
Yeah, definitely northern. Maybe northern and east Asian? (I listen at x1.7, so don't necessarily trust me!)
They're all men with voice distortion