After four decades of ruminating about it, talking about doing it and hinting to their core voters they would do it, the Republicans in Congress finally did do it. Last week they ended taxpayer funding and subsidies to National Public Radio (‘NPR’) and the TV equivalent PBS. And this despite the CEO of NPR, Katherine Maher, going on a recent charm offensive vociferously assuring Republicans legislators that her organisation was wholly and completely impartial. And unbiased. Always played it down the middle, didn’t you know. Committed solely to a disinterested presentation of the news.

For some impenetrable reason beyond the grasp of mere mortals the House and Senate Republicans weren’t buying what Ms Maher was desperately trying to sell. Maybe this had to do with the fact that one of her own top people doing a recent review, a Lefty like her, found that every single member of the editorial staff, some 87 or so individuals, were all Democrats. (Donations are public information in the US.) Not a single Republican to be seen. Or maybe it had to do with the fact that neither NPR nor PBS gave any time at all, zero, to the pre-2020 Hunter Biden laptop story. The NPR ‘Public Editor’ back just before the 2020 election claimed “we don’t want to waste our time on stories that are just pure distractions… not really stories”. Or, maybe what swung this knife-edge debate about the supposed impartiality of the US public broadcasters was the three-month study to the end of June this year that found that PBS’s weekend political roundtable, its flagship show devoted to national politics, had delivered 93% negative coverage of Republicans. The previous quarter it had been 90% negative.

Or hey – and I am just spitballing ideas here – there’s just a chance that Republican lawmakers weren’t overly impressed by an 18-month study of the main PBS national nightly news, News Hour, that showed a slight variance from what most of us would consider to be impartiality and unbiased balance. You see this study of a year and a half of News Hour output found that the PBS flagship news show had used the terms ‘extreme Right’ and ‘far Right’ 162 times. That contrasted with its use of the terms ‘extreme Left’ and ‘far Left’ only six times. A bit of quick mental arithmetic (so I’m excluding here anyone who went through Australian schools in the last couple decades) and you get a ratio of 27:1. And that was just the newsreaders. For PBS reporters those same labels were used at a 32:1 ratio. Readers can guess which way the bias went. I feel confident you’ll get it right.  Meanwhile 90% of the public broadcasters’ time went to those in favour of transgender positions including being in favour of irreversible surgeries and in favour of biological men in women’s sports, all while rejecting biological differences between men and women because it’s all just how you feel about yourself and not wanting anyone’s feelings to be hurt. And that’s without getting into their Pravda-like Covid and lockdown coverage that attacked Florida’s Ron DeSantis while praising to the high heavens California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Andrew Cuomo – despite the data on everything from excess deaths to the budgetary response massively favouring Big Ron.

At any rate, despite CEO Katherine Maher’s heartfelt pleas that her organisation was impartiality incarnate, the Republicans didn’t buy it. Why not is one of those impenetrable mysteries I suppose, the sort that surpasseth all human understanding.

Now all cheap sarcasm aside, who amongst us doesn’t love this outcome? Because I sure do. If you want to run a PR agency for the Left-side of politics then go ahead. But don’t make me pay for it out of my taxes. That stinks. And I think we all know that the exact same sort of lopsided, biased, Titanic-like listing to the Left is available every single day here in Australia on the ABC – from the climate change doomsterism to the exclusively pro-Voice attitudes to the anti-Trump hysteria and more.

And yet for all the deep-seated distaste and unease even most conservative politicians and commentators seem to have for Mr Trump (stupidly in my view), I think we all know that none of them would have achieved this result of ending taxpayer funding of the ‘conservative free’ zone that is public broadcasting. Not here. Not in Britain. Pierre Poilievre in Canada continues to make noises about cutting half the CBC’s budget, so we may see something there one day. But so far only Trump has had the balls to get this done. Here in Australia we have seen various Liberal Prime Ministers appoint real conservatives to the ABC board, to zero effect. They complain. Nothing happens. And the money keeps flowing (ScoMo even increasing it).

I could go through the same story as regards ending all DEI anti-merit wokery in the public service and the universities; fighting and winning against the transgender lobby; crushing the impoverishing Net Zero lunacy; taking on the woeful university sector; actually appointing interpretive conservatives to the top courts; going after the NGO sector that is another arm of Left-wing politics; fighting back against lawfare; cutting taxes and deregulating; pushing the pro-free speech case at home and around the world; tackling the antisemitism of the fusion of socialists and Islamicists; not starting ground wars you aren’t prepared to win at all costs; and calling out the incredible Lefty bias of the legacy media (and, too, of much of the big end of town). Voters like me love the fact Mr Trump will fight on all these fronts, many of which would be called ‘culture war’ issues, and is winning on many of them. Meantime we despair because established Anglosphere conservative political parties have no fight in them at all, approaching absolute zero. Against those consequences, whether The Don is boorish, egomaniacal, uncultured matters barely a whit to me. I want a fighter. Not someone who throws in the free speech towel at the first hint of tough going.

So what is really laughable is the recent Australian Liberal Party claims that Mr Dutton lost because his campaign focused too much on culture war issues and was too ‘blokey’. Are you kidding me? On which culture wars fronts did Team Dutton fight? Against the transgender lobby? Against the cancel culture, anti-speech e-Safety Commissioner? Head on against all the DEI programs that hurt young men, especially young white men, because they sacrifice merit-based concerns? Against Net Zero rent-seeking idiocies? The Ponzi Scheme universities? Anything at all?  No, no, no. I suppose Mr Dutton did insist on standing in front of just the Australian flag. That’s what seems to pass for ‘too focused on culture war issues’ with the idiots running the Liberal Party and its take on why they lost.

And as for the campaign being ‘too blokey’, I’ve attended university feminist sensitivity training sessions that were more blokey than the Libs’ recent campaign.

A majority of voters is there for the taking for any party that runs the Trump playbook. Have it led by someone less crass and self-obsessed and it’ll be a bigger majority. But as I’ve been saying for quite a while now, the most important quality in any conservative leader (or appointee to anything) is bravery and a willingness to fight.  Where we are right now means that everything else is peripheral and unimportant.

James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.