Birdnow's Aviary

January 09, 2026

Still Just Thugs

Timothy Birdnow

Here is an interesting if windy explanation of the "NPR Voice" and why it matters.

The author spills considerable digital ink addressing the Enlightenment and the way Liberals think, and he's not wrong, but it boils down to just one simple proposition.

They are just pompous buffoons trying to pretend they are divine-like voices of pure reason.

FTA:

The thread connecting all of these Enlightenment movements is the effort to discredit patrimonial authority — grounded upon religion, relational affinity, and fealty to tradition — as arbitrary and autocratic. The various Enlightenment movements aimed to displace the personal, autocratic modes of authority that had grounded the fading Late Medieval order and install in their place a regime of impersonal, rationally grounded authority structures that would legitimize the ascendant powers of capital and "scientific” state management.

Strange to say, this fact lies at the heart of the liberal’s affinity for NPR voice. The breezing monotone functions to obscure personal agency. The monotonous, anodyne drone that characterizes NPR voice serves to convey the illusion that the words the listener hears are "spoken” by a disembodied Spirit of Disinterested Rationality, unleavened by any preference, agenda, perspective, or personality. If "The Science” could speak, it would do so in NPR voice.

In other words they are like gods. Gods do not have to shout or make a fuss; they speak quietly because they can. And this also gives the impression of deep thought and careful consideration, something that is not true but is rooted in human psychology. The person who is loud and aggressive is usually thought to be the less intelligent.

That is why the Left has so much dichotomy; they need shock troops, foot soldiers to be loud and aggressive and even violent while others, such as the stooges at NPR, speak with this quiet intellectualism. They divide in two what most of us do as a unified thing so they can lay claim to both the high ground intellectually/morally and at the same time can attain the benefits of bullying and strong-arming. It's the carrot and the stick.

That's why the Left has power bases in both academia and in Big Labor - the carrot and the stick.

Conservatives do this too to a much lesser degree. We see that today with the division between the old Paleocons, the National Review folks who despise the MAGA people as uncouth hillbillies. The National Review types are the same as the NPR voice whisperers in many ways, and rarely raise their voices or display passion lest someone think them unmannerly. They don't like the people who get down and dirty. But the fact is the Left has always understood the need for both and have divided the labor while the Right seems to struggle with that. But then we are more nearly human in our thinking than are they and we require less division by and large. Oh, and you can divide this way when you have control of the dissemination of information; shut out a group and it has no choice but be loud.

At any rate the NPR voice is largely a stuffed-shirt attempt to take the high ground, pretend to be disinterested. Yes, it probably was born out of the Enlightenment, but then we've had this sort of thing since the Greeks, no doubt, and probably well before.

Anyone remember Tom Daschle? He was the very soft spoken Senate Majority leader back in the Bush days. He always spoke softly and sounded quite gentle, even though he was the most viciously partisan creep in the government at that time and he did awful things all while using the NPR voice. Harry Reid did that too, to a lesser extent.

It's pure hypocrisy but it's not intended to be anything but. It's intended to calm people's fears while you are plunging in the knife.

It's a form a lying, lying by tone of voice. They are not dispassionate but ruthless thugs who hide behind a mild voice to ease people's fears. But in the end they are still just thugs.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:11 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 683 words, total size 5 kb.

1 You've posted this article twice, Tim.

Posted by: Dana Mathewson at January 10, 2026 12:38 AM (lBLsY)

2 I see that. Not sure what happened.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at January 10, 2026 07:40 AM (umJ+Y)

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