NPR’s Little Miss Extremist

By Lawrence B. Wheeler

NPR’s Miss Extremist

Handwritings on the Wall

May 12, 2022

NPR has a new hire, who will be the subject of this post. Here’s the biographical note from NPR’s website: “Odette Yousef is a National Security correspondent focusing on extremism.

“In her reporting, Yousef aims to explore how extremist ideas break into the mainstream, how individuals are radicalized, and efforts to counter that. Before joining NPR in August of 2021, Yousef spent twelve years reporting for member station WBEZ in Chicago, where she was most recently part of the Race, Class, and Identity team. While there, she was a reporter and host for Season 3 of WBEZ’s investigative podcast, Motive. The podcast, which won a 2021 national Edward R. Murrow award, explores the emergence and spread of the neo-Nazi skinhead movement in the U.S. and its connections to the far-right extremism of today. Yousef was also part of a team that won a 2016 National Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Continuing Coverage, and she received a 2018 Studs Terkel Community Media Award. Prior to joining WBEZ, Yousef reported at WABE in Atlanta. Born and raised in the Boston area, Yousef received a Bachelor of Arts in economics and East Asian studies from Harvard University. She is based in Chicago.”

Odette Yousef

Yousef checks many of the proverbial boxes. Racial minority? Check. Woman? Check. Blue city girl? Check. Gig at liberal NPR? Check and double-check. She must be a bundle of grievances. You already know where this is going.

This will sound paradoxical, but it seems that for the Western political mind, change is the immutable virtue. It’s taken for granted that change is a good thing. Pres. Barry Obama ran with the slogan “Change We Can Believe In”. I drove past a campaign poster today. It read, “Vote for Change”. It seems that the only sort of change that is bad these days is “climate change”, which must be combatted, or so they say.

Yours truly

NPR itself has certainly changed over the years. When I returned stateside 28 years ago, I used to enjoy listening to NPR radio. I appreciated the thorough reporting. Although it was a bit left of center, the nuanced views were offered without that annoying commercial interruption. Nowadays, I turn on NPR while driving, but find that the content is one leftist agenda item after another. You know the drill. They promote sexual proclivities, racial angst, women’s desires, and on and on. It gets to be so irritating that, often within seconds, I just turn it off. I have to turn it off to keep my blood pressure down. This is National Public Radio, i.e. the leftwing organ of the airwaves supported in part by your tax dollars. How strange is that? The federal government provides 8%, and state and local governments contribute another 4% of NPR’s budget. You would think that with that much public support the news reportage would be “fair and balanced”. Think again.

Dr. Nicholas Stamatakis at the Greek weblog Helleniscope has drawn our attention to a recent story done by NPR. The reporter was Mary Louise Kelly, a name that is familiar to longtime NPR listeners. The research for the piece, however, had been done and the article had been written by the new reporter that you see above and below: Odette Yousef. Ms. Yousef is the new “National Security Correspondent on Extremism” for NPR. She has done investigative work for Chicago’s WBEZ radio station for many years. The podcast for that station was the award-winning Motive, a series that looks into the “neo-Nazi skinhead movement in the U.S. and its connections to the far-right extremism.” One can see how the podcast might be a tad biased from the start.

One might also ask whether Miss Extremism has looked into far-left extremist groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter. I’ve gone through the last three years of Ms. Yousef’s Twitter feed. Not a mention. She has been living in Chicago, which in the summer of 2020, was plagued day after day with violence in the streets caused by those who took advantage of George Floyd’s killing to make a statement. Regardless, she posted nothing about the leftist extremists who perpetrated those crimes. It seems that they got a pass from the young lady since their cause wasn’t the evil bugaboo of white supremacy. Indeed, a perusal of Ms. Yousef’s Twitter shows that every cause that she supports is a textbook leftwing cause. She was particularly keen to report on the Charlottesville protest on August 12th of 2017 and the January 6, 2021 protest at the U.S. Capitol in Washington which was precipitated by so-called Trumpist “election deniers”. I get the impression that Ms. Yousef, who appears to be a Middle Eastern “person of color” has a typical liberal grudge against white people in general and white men in particular. In another universe, one might call that racism, but in our universe that sort of antiracist racism is cool.

The Nightlife in Chicago

Having teed that up, I’ll posit that you can see how that Ms. National Security Correspondent for National Public Radio is on the prowl for stories that unearth the white supremacists out there. Few and far between, you say? Well now, luckily for her, Vladimir Putin’s army has advanced on Ukraine and the whole civilized world seems to have designated Russia a pariah state. Russia is overwhelmingly white, of course, as is Ukraine. There must be some connection there to neo-Nazi skinheads. They’re run-of-the-mill white supremacists, aren’t they? Yeah, but it wouldn’t be politically correct to find the low-hanging fruit of the REAL neo-Nazis in the Right Sector and the Azov Battalion of Ukraine, so Ms. Yousef has been forced to forage elsewhere. At a time when NPR has decided along with the other mainstream corporate media stations to support Ukraine, it’s terribly inconvenient to report on Ukrainian neo-Nazis. There’s a chance that there are some of them in the Ukrainian Orthodox parishes in the U. S. But, it would be politically incorrect to go snooping for neo-Nazis in the parishes of immigrants of the victim nation, now wouldn’t it.

So, what does Yousef do? She finds a link between Russia and ROCOR in the United States to see if she can sniff out white supremacism in that little denomination. After all, it carries the name Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. “Of course, that’s where I’m bound to find white supremacy and skinhead racism!” she must have exclaimed to herself. “Let’s discredit both Russia and the Orthodox Church in one single shot.” As you will see in her article, she found anecdotal evidence of far-right white political extremism and anti-black racism to dish up to suspecting readers. Using individual incidents to make a general case is something that I would call yellow journalism. Wouldn’t you? Yousef’s unimaginative presupposition is that since Vladimir Putin is a Christian ruler – almost a king -who supports traditional values like Church and Country. Anyone who sympathizes with Russia’s side in the war has got to be a bigot. Well, it takes one to know one. Yousef’s piece is a cheap shot against a Church that is worried about both Russians and Ukrainians back home and is praying for both sides during this terrible military conflict. I’m a member of a ROCOR parish and we have an even mix of Ukrainian and Russian families, along with Americans of unrelated ethnicity who have no skin in the game. All of us worship together and fellowship together. We just love each other, regardless of family origin. Maybe Ms. Yousef would like to come and interview us for a more objective view of the situation.

But, no. There is an agenda for the “liberal” reporter to pursue, and anecdotal evidence must be found to support the agenda. So she finds a link between one excommunicated Orthodox Christian to a right-wing group. And she listens to the opinion of an Orthodox woman who married a black man decades ago but now feels uncomfortable in an Orthodox parish. Both cases are unfortunate, but unless Ms. Yousef can find a dominant trend in ROCOR that proves the obligatory hypothesis that believers are overwhelmingly white racists or pro-Putin apologists, there is no compelling story here. There is only conjecture – damning conjecture against a little denomination of Orthodox Christians who are active in their parishes only to worship God and work out their own salvation. Who knows? It’s likely that Ms. Yousef found many sources whose testimonies didn’t gibe with her story, so she left them out. After all, the agenda must come first. She’s willing to stretch the story to label innocent parishioners as white nationalists and tie them to Vladimir Putin. It’s called a “twofer”. with If Ms. Yousef were a lawyer, one might call her an ambulance chaser. Call this author disgusted. 

https://weborthodox.com/2022/05/12/nprs-miss-extremist/

 

Comments

  1. Gail Sheppard says

    Their view of extremism is anyone who is different from them. If you take a harder path, they feel it’s criticism against them. They conjure up relationships that don’t exist, thoughts you don’t have, and people you don’t know. Anything to give meat to their stories. Since we’re not public figures, I think the next time they write something about us, I’m going to insist they provide proof. They shouldn’t be allowed to slander people, especially people in their own Church. – How do they sleep at night? – Never mind. No one cares.

  2. Philippos says

    I’ve spent my entire life (until 6 months ago) in a Greek Orthodox parish. I found her citing of the mixed race couple’s comments laughable. Convert rich Orthodox parishes are the least likely ones to raise eyebrows at mix race marriages. Greek immigrant based parishes are by far are the type of Orthodox parishes where mixed race couples would feel MOST UNCOMFORTABLE. Forty years ago, eyebrows were raised when us Greeks merely married non-Greeks…this is why we all related to the movie Big Fat Greek Wedding.

    • George Michalopulos says

      Seriously.

      It makes you wonder what other “facts” she reported on is BS.

  3. Just a dad says

    https://www.npr.org/2022/05/10/1096741988/orthodox-christian-churches-are-drawing-in-far-right-american-converts

    Well, Ms. Yousef certainly did her research. She even managed to find a key spokesperson within the OCA, none other than “Inga Leonova, the founder and editor of The Wheel, a journal on Orthodoxy and culture.” I am surprised Ms. Yousef didn’t go one step further and get the thoughts of the most notable member of the Wheel Advisory Board. “The Very Reverend Robert M. Arida is Rector and Dean of Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral (OCA) in Boston, Massachusetts.”

    Sigh …..

  4. It’s a badge of honor. If you’re taking flak, you know you’re over the target.

  5. Illumined says

    I find it very unfortunate that so many liberal Orthodox keep guzzling propaganda like this to cause division in the church. These same people keep proclaiming there’s no sides in the culture war while simultaneously picking a side that is overtly against everything the church teaches. Some people want to be deceived I guess. Lord have mercy on them and illumine their hearts.

  6. Lack of good Christian education would seem to be the basic cause of this problem. Jesus said to make disciples. Jesus made disciples. We don’t.

    • You’re too negative. The majority of Orthodox priests are good men who take the spiritual education of their flocks seriously.

      • Basil,

        That is not my experience at all. What I have seen is that the vast majority of Orthodox priests in this country are company men who tout the party line and have largely been ruined by the acid of Western culture. And the party line is seldom traditional Orthodoxy.

        • I meant Orthodox priests in general. Orthodox priests in this country are probably less than 1% of the total, thankfully.

          Even then, my experience has been universally positive. The only negative experiences I have had with Orthodox clergy have been second- or third-hand through articles, etc. I have never seen or heard a priest preach anything suspicious or weird in person, and my personal interactions with clergy, from bishop to deacon, have always been good.

          • George Michalopulos says

            I agree with you Basil. Most priests are good, they’re just caught between secularists in the pews & academics in the hierarchy.

    • I came across this on another blog.

      This famous inscription located on a painting inside the Lübeck Cathedral (German: Dom zu Lübeck, or colloquially Lübecker Dom) in Lübeck, Germany, phrases an individual disciple of Christ’s personal obligations to Jesus the Messiah:

      This Ye Call Me:
      Ye call Me Eternal, then seek Me not.
      Ye call Me Fair, then love Me not.
      Ye call Me Gracious, then trust Me not.
      Ye call Me Just, then fear Me not.
      Ye call Me Life, then choose Me not.
      Ye call Me Light, then see Me not.
      Ye call Me Lord, then respect Me not.
      Ye call Me Master, then obey Me not.
      Ye call Me Merciful, then thank Me not.
      Ye call Me Mighty, then honour Me not.
      Ye call Me Noble, then serve Me not.
      Ye call Me Rich, then ask Me not.
      Ye call Me Saviour, then praise Me not.
      Ye call Me Shepherd, then follow Me not.
      Ye call Me Way, then walk with Me not.
      Ye call Me Wise, then heed Me not.
      Ye call Me Son of God, then worship Me not.
      When I condemn you, then blame me not.

  7. In the famous words of Dr. Steve Turley “everything woke turns to sh*t”

    Everything woke backfires.

    These people that continue to write hit pieces on Orthodoxy thinking that it is going to scare people away from converting, I think it’s doing the opposite, it’s essentially saying that “Orthodoxy goes against the liberal world Zeitgeist, if you don’t agree with that then Orthodoxy is the place for you!”

    Their paper arguments are crumbling. If you haven’t already, I’d recommend listening to the recent episode of Dissident Mamma where she interviews Patriarch Prime. They touch on this.

  8. cynthia curran says

    https://www.fox5dc.com/news/pastor-heroism-hit-laguna-woods-gunman-chair Asian pastor shot because of Taiwan. U wonder what the libs think. Anyways, he saved the rest of the congregation, not orthodox but a protestant.

  9. House Judiciary GOP
    https://twitter.com/i/status/1526983113141891073

    [Video – 16 sec]

    Q: “Do you believe that men can become pregnant and have abortions?”
    A: “Yes.” -Democrat witness