This is why Obama, Biden, and other politicians who support democracy had no problem funding a free and fair press while populist authoritarians have sought to dismantle it.

Because the people want it? You are treating democracy as a kind of populist authoritarianism where unwelcome viewpoints are suppressed. Generally We the People value (or at least used to value) free and fair discussion.

>NPR

Mostly irrelevant in this discussion. The large majority of NPR's funding has always come from member stations and "listeners like you".

>Imagine the opposite: Obama's America being forced to pay for journalists who approach the world from the viewpoint of Christian fundamentalism.

What is there to imagine? Obama's America did in fact pay journalists to do just that. Public media is generally supposed to present a diversity of viewpoints, and leaving out religion would be doing the public a disservice in that regard.

1. Current space exploration work is supported at least in part by the bizarre fiction that humanity can escape global warming by putting infrastructure in space or by traveling to Mars. This pipe dream competes with more realistic proposals. People concerned about global warming might be misled and support allocating capital to space exploration rather than to overhauling transportation and power grids here on Earth.

2. Fabricating and launching rockets is environmentally destructive. This is not causing global warming so much, but launch facilities cause a great deal of local pollution to air and water. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/12/spacex-repeatedly-polluted-w...

I suppose that what I am really saying here is "SpaceX sucks" in two different ways. Their competitors don't have either of these problems to the same degree.

https://arxiv.org/html/2504.09762v2