The Adam Mockler Show - Trump wants me SHUT DOWN for doing THIS…

Episode Date: May 4, 2025

Adam Mockler with MeidasTouch Network breaks down Donald Trump's executive order defunding NPR and PBS in a sweeping attack on free speech and independent media. Join my Substack as a free or paid subscriber: https://www.adammockler.com/subscribe Become a member to support me! https://www.youtube.com/Adammockler/join https://patreon.com/adammockler Adam Mockler Socials: Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AdamMockler/ Discord: https://discord.gg/y9yzMU3Gff Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adammockler/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/adammockler.bsky.social Twitter: https://x.com/adammocklerr/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/Adammockler Contact me at: [e-mail] Adam Mockler - amock LLC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, we have some major breaking news. Trump may have just signed one of his most important executive orders yet because this is a major escalation in his attack against the free press. Not only does this pertain to freedom of speech and freedom of press within America, but this pertains to the work that I do every single day. Because when Trump is trying to put his thumb on the scale and place pressure on independent media organizations, universities, law firms, this all comes together to paint a pretty damning picture of a president who does not want any checks or. balances. So I'm going to explain how this affects my work. I'm going to play some clips of me debating Trump supporters about this, but let's just start here. Because Trump is now beginning to strip public media outlets of federal funds, which is a scary, scary reality to enter. Even if you look at what Trump's done with colleges, he wants Harvard and other colleges to teach specific

things, to not teach specific things, to hire specific people and operate in a specific way. Could you imagine if we lived in a country where the president of the United States in a hop-down manner was able to dictate what the media covered, how the media covered the current administration, what the media was able to talk about on a day-to-day basis. This is not just an attack on the media. This is an attack on the ability of Americans to consume information on a day-to-day basis. So listen to this. Broadcasters, PBS, and NPR are going to lose tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money

under the U.S. President's order. Now, the framing of this article is weird because, yes, PBS and NPR are funded by taxpayer dollars, but that's the whole point. U.S. citizens pay taxes, and we have a social contract where PBS and NPR are able to feed us valid information. But U.S. President Trump does not want that. He moved to strip two major public media outlets of tens of millions of dollars. Check out me on Jubilee last week explaining why Trump is basically a fascist. So can you see where we're coming from?

Can you at least empathize? Imagine you were a soy boy liberal for one second. Can you empathize with my point of view? I know it hurts. Empathize when I see the president of the United States in an unprecedented way, putting his thumb on the scale, trying to attack universities, law firms, the media, for sure. You can't deny attacks the media. He doesn't he sued multiple, like ABC recently?

NPR. All of these different laws. He sued ABC. He sued NPR. And I didn't even mention the 60 Minutes lead producer. One of the lead producers at 60 Minutes recently resigned because he said the Trump admin is essentially placing pressure on them not to cover certain stories. When we lose the freedom of press, we lose what America is.

Lawsuits, does that not worry you that it's executive overreach? Can you see where we're coming from? For suing people? No, not just suing people, but using the executive branch to place pressure on universities and law firms and media. Do I see that as a problem? Not necessarily now. Why not? Because I think if he's fighting for things that need to be done, then... What if we replace the word Trump with Biden? Yeah, if this was a liberal administration, you'd be like, This is horrible. Oh my God. Like I said, sometimes it can be good

and sometimes it can be bad. Okay, so it's only good when it's people you agree with. Got it. Well, putting your thumb on the scale that influence the country is kind of what politicians and the president do. No, that's not the idea of it. That's not how that works.

Okay, so there exists something called checks and balances. Oftentimes, courts or law firms or all of these things exist as a check on the executive branch. What Trump is doing is intentionally eroding all of these checks by attacking the courts. Even Supreme Court Justice Alito had to come out recently and say, Trump, you've got to stop calling to impeach judges. It's not the place of the president to call to impeach judges without due process. So we can go across the board with like

courts, universities, everything. And Trump is always applying pressure in a way that he shouldn't be, not as the president, not going through Congress and passing some law. And I just want to know if you can empathize with my point of view there. I just think that he's doing the will of the American people and I love to see it. Wow, what a politician answer. What a politician answer. You're like Vivek Ramoswamy, bro. Oh, don't compare me to him. Yes. Why? Honestly, it's Okay, fine, JD Vance. I think we...

I like how he's like, don't compare me to Vivek Ramoswamy. I wonder what it is about Vaveh Ramoswami that he doesn't want to be compared to. But either way, everything I said there relates perfectly back to the executive order that Trump recently signed because he's stripping funds away

from NPR, from PBS, from organizations that act as they check on the government. And they're also a part of the government branch as well. So it's honestly just bigger than NPR losing funding. It's not even specifically about NPR. It is, but it's not specifically about NPR. It's about the president of the United States using the federal government to withhold funds and withhold funds with the end goal of curtailing freedom of speech. Now, you can bet your bottom dollar, the NPR, because they will still be

functioning. NPR isn't completely closing down tomorrow. They'll still have some funds that they can pull from, but they're going to be more careful with what they cover if I had to guess. They don't want the president completely nuking their business, so they're going to be more careful. I always use this example of the chilling effect. Imagine if I watched another YouTuber in the space, get sued into oblivion. He loses his channel. He loses his house. He doesn't even have the money to pay this off.

And it's all because he covered the Trump administration in a way that Trump didn't like. I would see that and go, oh my God, they just got their whole life taken away. I have to be a little bit more careful. Now, of course, I would never actually do that. We do whatever the hell we want here. We are independent media. But that is the chilling effect. When Columbia bent the knee to the Trump admin's demands, other universities preemptively bent the knee and began to curtail how they hire and what they teach without Trump even having to ask, and that is authoritarianism.

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking authoritarianism means CNN is going to get their door kicked down and then guns are going to be held in the faces of CNN journalists. No, authoritarianism can be a very subtle way of stopping people from just having freedom of speech, from speaking their mind whatsoever. Let's read this article really quickly. A PBS president and CEO, Paula Kerger, called it, quote, a blatantly unlawful executive order issued in the middle of the night. There's a reason why Trump issues a lot of these executive orders in the middle of the night. CPB is already suing the Trump admin over his executive order seeking to fire three of its five board members. On Friday, it dismissed the validity of the president's new order. Again, can I just go back one more time?

Even if Trump's lawsuits don't succeed. Even if Trump lost every single lawsuit, there is still a chilling effect where people begin to preemptively curtail how they speak so they don't get sued in the first place. Another interesting aspect is that Trump didn't just order a slashing of federal support. He also banned local stations from using these funds to license NPR or PBS content, effectively just choking off their distribution pipeline in Trump's justification. If we go to his truth social, he said, Republicans must defund and totally disassociate themselves from NPR and PBS, the radical left monsters that so badly hurt our country. He tweeted this out roughly a month ago on April 1st, and here we are. The president of the United States is stripping funding away from a program that he deems, quote unquote, radical left just because they check his administration.

They act as a check on his administration. As I said in this Jubilee debate, you can't erode every single check. and then get mad when people say that you're kind of a fascist. So just to finish this off, this says Trump's War on Woke finally hits NPR in PBS. President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order, gutting NPR and PBS, calling it, quote, woke. Quote, unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options.

For sure, that's true. But then they say, government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary, but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence. I totally disagree with that second part. Now, I agree with the first part that there is a new, diverse, abundant field of journalism. That's what we're doing here. But I disagree that government-funded news sources are necessary. They are necessary for a lot, a lot of reasons.

Think about it. Every other news organization in America runs off of a profit incentive, whether it's CNN or Fox News, they want to make as much profit as possible. So having media that is more educational, more in-depth, like PBS. I know that Republicans think PBS is some right-wing propaganda, but genuinely PBS is very, very educational. My producer sitting here grew up watching PBS throughout his entire life. His entire life, and he has great civic literacy skills.

He has an amazing understanding of the government. He's a huge liberal. Maybe if more people had access to PBS, there would be more liberals in this world. I'm going to leave it at that. All I'm going to end it off by saying is that there is one variable the Trump administration did not take into account when they were banning the media, attacking the media, and that was us. It sounds dramatic, but I swear to God, at a time when Trump is attacking the media and attacking every single check on him, having a platform like YouTube or whatever platform you're watching this on, Spotify, whatever the hell, pulling in hundreds of thousands of views, millions of views on a daily basis, holding Trump accountable. I personally think that is important, and I think it's the one variable Trump did not take you into account. So if you want to help us grow this movement, make sure you drop a like.

I get a lot of comments like this that say, hey, Adam, I've been watching you for a while now, but I didn't realize that I never even subscribed. I am now. So make sure you scroll down, subscribe. I appreciate every single one of you at a time when, yeah, Trump is 100% trying to remove any sort of checks on him. And right now, we are a check. We're going to keep pushing. Love you guys. Peace out.