Matthew Boyle
The Daily Caller
3/8/2011
A man who appears to be a National Public Radio senior executive, Ron Schiller, has been captured on camera savaging conservatives and the Tea Party movement.
“The current Republican Party, particularly the Tea Party, is fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian – I wouldn’t even call it Christian. It’s this weird evangelical kind of move,” declared Schiller, the head of NPR’s nonprofit foundation, who last week announced his departure for the Aspen Institute.
In a new video released Tuesday morning by conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe, Schiller and Betsy Liley, NPR’s director of institutional giving, are seen meeting with two men who, unbeknownst to the NPR executives, are posing as members of a Muslim Brotherhood front group. The men, who identified themselves as Ibrahim Kasaam and Amir Malik from the fictitious Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) Trust, met with Schiller and Liley at Café Milano, a well-known Georgetown restaurant, and explained their desire to give up to $5 million to NPR because, “the Zionist coverage is quite substantial elsewhere.”
On the tapes, Schiller wastes little time before attacking conservatives. The Republican Party, Schiller says, has been “hijacked by this group.” The man posing as Malik finishes the sentence by adding, “the radical, racist, Islamaphobic, Tea Party people.” Schiller agrees and intensifies the criticism, saying that the Tea Party people aren’t “just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.”
The article continues at The Daily Caller.
At HotAir.com Ed Morrissey makes this point, among others:
…Some of you may be angry with Ron Schiller, president of the NPR Foundation and Senior VP of Development, but put that aside for a moment. I believe we should help Schiller to reach his policy goals — of stripping NPR and public broadcasting of its federal subsidies. He might have to hold more of these kinds of meetings to cover the hole that will blow in NPR’s budget, but at least the gun-toting taxpayers won’t be forced to pay for Schiller’s activities a moment longer.
Update: At The Blaze, NPR on Expose Vid: We Didn’t Take the Money…and Exec Resigned a Week Ago
…NPR is covering its own controversy, and has a blog post that is being updated here. Author Mark Memmot offers additional details on Schiller’s new position: he will become director of the Aspen Institute Arts Program.
Oh, well, that’s all right, then. The nation’s loss is Colorado’s gain!
Update 2: From Althouse
…The pranksters were trying to trap Schiller into sounding anti-Jewish or anti-Israel, and I would defend Schiller for what he said in response to that prodding. What does look really bad, though, is his virulent hostility toward social conservatives and his twisted image of the people in the Tea Party movement. What’s completely predictable — we’re familiar with NPR — is the preening self-love of the liberal who’s so sure he and his people are the smart ones. Not smart enough not to get pranked, though.
Remember when Scott Walker got pranked the other day by a phone call purporting to be from David Koch? His opponents couldn’t get enough of calling him stupid for that, and even though he said nothing inconsistent with his public talking points and seemed the same as he seems in public, they fine-tooth-combed his remarks to find little things they could blow up and portray as evil. Forget empathy and fairness — use whatever you find as brutally as you can.
Now here’s this choice new material from Schiller, giving conservatives to punch back twice as hard (to use the old Obama WH motto)…
Update 3: In today’s Washington Examiner, GOP leader amazed at ‘condescension and arrogance’ in NPR video, calls on Dems to support defunding:
“…I certainly have no desire to see them go away or to suffer. I just think and believe and totally expect that they can survive in the private market, like everyone else in the media has to.”
