Fox News host Juan Williams (a Democrat) was recently fired from his day job at NPR (National Public Radio) for saying politically incorrect things about Muslims on airplanes. He says that it’s wrong to be fired for simply airing his feelings. I don’t agree, because in a private news organization (which NPR is not) the owners are entitled to hire and fire whomever they wish. But he’s right to point out liberal hypocrisy. Liberals are all about subjectivism and the primacy of feelings over reason and reality. However, what liberal elites really mean by the supremacy of feelings is: their OWN feelings, not those of opposing views. The feelings in question are Williams’ emotions of concern when he sees someone self-evidently Muslim flying on an airplane flight with him. In fact, these emotions are reality-based. No, the fact that you merely suspect someone of being a Muslim terrorist does NOT automatically make them one, of course. But it is reality-based to assume, as these emotions do, that the religion of Islam is explicitly at war with the United States and all things Western. It’s reasonable to be concerned that on any given airplane flight there will be a terrorist, acting on the premises of Islam, planning to blow the whole flight up. Terrorist-inspired events (virtually always Muslim) have happened before and will surely happen again, both on and off airplanes. THIS is the kind of emotion that the liberal elites who work at taxpayer-supported NPR cannot and will not tolerate: The truth.
Should NPR be defunded over this? NPR should most definitely be defunded, but not because of this. NPR should never have been funded in the first place, and it should have been defunded long ago. The problem is, to get rid of NPR you have to assert the wider principle that government should not be involved in anything other than protecting individuals from force and prosecuting fraud. None of today’s elected leaders are willing to assert this principle. Democrats stand for the opposite principle, and Republicans simply hate principles of any kind. Even the conservatives who dislike tax-funded television and radio are afraid that if they have to defund things they don’t like, they’ll have to defund things they do like. Watch what happens — or fails to happen — to NPR in the weeks and months ahead. It will give you a clue as to what happens to the rest of the huge, subsidized welfare-regulatory state as we know it.