After months of controversy, Vivian Schiller, the head of NPR, resigned after one of her colleagues got into a foaming anti-Tea Party tirade, thanks in part to conservative activist James O’Keefe, posing as a Muslim group carrying a $5 million donation to NPR and a hidden camera. Ron Schiller not only offered his opinion, he offered the rope to strangle funding for public broadcasting. (Not only that, one of the hoo-hahs chuckled that NPR is actually National Palestinian Radio. She's on adminstrative leave.)
The clincher in all of this? Upper class white people have maintained their facade of tolerance for many years, but their unadulterated spleen and contempt for others not like them - in other words, their real opinion about minorities, poverty, etc. - comes behind closed doors. They are every bit as bigoted, ignorant, racist, and intolerant as they proclaim their bete noirs to be. The upper white class lusts for power even more than the ones who "cling to their guns and religion," only their guns are mobs of professional agitators and their religion is socialism-lite.
NPR will only have itself to blame when federal funding is cut off from public broadcasting, and their only crime was being too candid.
Juan Williams, who was dismissed for exhibiting his opinion at NPR, is somewhere chuckling wryly to himself.
UPDATE: Juan Williams responds in the New York Post. Compared to his former NPR bosses, Williams at least has his shoes tied while they tripped over themselves.
Showing posts with label Juan Williams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Juan Williams. Show all posts
10/21/2010
Juan Williams pulls back the PC curtain and freaks out the narrow minds of NPR
Juan Williams deserves a TON of credit for telling the truth about National Public Radio.
Williams committed the simple sin of saying out loud what the rest of the elitist, fully white, upper middle and upper class editorial boards of NPR wouldn't dare say in public, but probably do well behind closed doors. (Even more telling is that Williams was the only black correspondent.)
Who will this brouhaha hurt the most? At the very least, moderate Muslims who have been yearning to break free from the stereotype of fundamentalist militancy have been pushed back into a corner - the ones who want to prove that the abaya, hijab or burqa, or the four fingers of beard the men must wear, is no way linked to the more malignant strains of Islamic worship - and assure them that while their religion is Islam, their nationality is American. Thanks to NPR's firing of Williams, that conversation gets drowned out by clueless upper-class twits.
But the real hurt that will come will be on NPR itself. When free speech is determined by an unelected upper echelon of white elitists, and that money comes from public taxpayers, a new Congress will be loathe to fund an entity whose primary focus is to make sure the right words come out of the right mouths, and any word not in the Approved Vocabulary of NPR will be grounds for immediate termination. Congress defunding NPR would force it to pledge even more from its listeners, and if you don't have the money, your license to broadcast gets ripped up and tossed out in the trash.
Williams should keep on talking about his now-ex-colleagues, how they love to insult those who aren't like them, and then tell the public to avoid donating a thin rusting penny to their organization because they are malignant narcissisists who only care about their own ideology and not giving a complete story. Oh, and donations from well-heeled, like-minded people.
Williams did everyone - including Muslims - a favor by pulling back the curtain on the narrow minds of NPR, who proved to the nation that the antidote to curtailing free speech is even more free speech - and that political correctness is worse than any nuclear weapon on the planet.
Williams committed the simple sin of saying out loud what the rest of the elitist, fully white, upper middle and upper class editorial boards of NPR wouldn't dare say in public, but probably do well behind closed doors. (Even more telling is that Williams was the only black correspondent.)
Who will this brouhaha hurt the most? At the very least, moderate Muslims who have been yearning to break free from the stereotype of fundamentalist militancy have been pushed back into a corner - the ones who want to prove that the abaya, hijab or burqa, or the four fingers of beard the men must wear, is no way linked to the more malignant strains of Islamic worship - and assure them that while their religion is Islam, their nationality is American. Thanks to NPR's firing of Williams, that conversation gets drowned out by clueless upper-class twits.
But the real hurt that will come will be on NPR itself. When free speech is determined by an unelected upper echelon of white elitists, and that money comes from public taxpayers, a new Congress will be loathe to fund an entity whose primary focus is to make sure the right words come out of the right mouths, and any word not in the Approved Vocabulary of NPR will be grounds for immediate termination. Congress defunding NPR would force it to pledge even more from its listeners, and if you don't have the money, your license to broadcast gets ripped up and tossed out in the trash.
Williams should keep on talking about his now-ex-colleagues, how they love to insult those who aren't like them, and then tell the public to avoid donating a thin rusting penny to their organization because they are malignant narcissisists who only care about their own ideology and not giving a complete story. Oh, and donations from well-heeled, like-minded people.
Williams did everyone - including Muslims - a favor by pulling back the curtain on the narrow minds of NPR, who proved to the nation that the antidote to curtailing free speech is even more free speech - and that political correctness is worse than any nuclear weapon on the planet.
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