Just before NPR editor Uri Berliner resigned from the leftist network this week after CEO Katherine Maher’s response to his now-famous essay, the City Journal’s Christopher Rufo disclosed just what kind of hide-bound leftist is running the show.
Maher “exemplifies the ideological capture of America’s institutions,” he wrote. In particular, she represents the rise of leftist white women to positions of power where they control a narrative and seek to destroy anyone who doesn’t agree with it.
Thus did Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger tell Rufo that Maher represents the death of a free and open internet. That’s doubly true, as Rufo strongly suggested, if Maher is a CIA or other U.S. intelligence asset.
Maher’s Deranged Leftism
Maher’s X feed and public speeches are “a window into the soul of a uniquely American archetype: the affluent, white, female liberal—many of whom now sit atop our elite institutions,” Rufo wrote:
What you notice first about Maher’s public speech are the buzzwords and phrases: “structural privilege,” “epistemic emergency,” “transit justice,” “non-binary people,” “late-stage capitalism,” “cis white mobility privilege,” “the politics of representation,” “folx.” She supported Black Lives Matter from its earliest days. She compares driving cars with smoking cigarettes. She is very concerned about “toxic masculinity.”
She is, in other words, a committed leftist who buys the woke narrative in its entirety — and, of course, a zealous if not fanatical Democratic partisan.
She was “excited” about Elizabeth Warren in 2012, Rufo wrote, and of course she “just [couldn’t] wait to vote” for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a “deranged racist sociopath.”
Maher also dislikes the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because it forbids the government from censoring opinions that Maher doesn’t like.
“In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she ‘took a very active approach to disinformation,’ coordinated censorship ‘through conversations with government,’ and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election,” Rufo wrote:
In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, … “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” These speech protections, Maher continued, make it “a little bit tricky” to suppress “bad information” and “the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”
And frighteningly, he continued, she is no “aberration,” but instead one of the typical petticoat tyrants “who dominate the departments of university administration, human resources, and [diversity, equity, and inclusion].”
Sanger Interview
Having seen what Rufo uncovered about Maher, Sanger is alarmed.
“You’ve kind of shocked me,” he told Rufo of his X posts. Sanger said he was unaware of Maher’s radicalism, and for the “ex-CEO of Wikipedia to say that it was somehow a mistake for Wikipedia to be ‘free and open,’ that it led to bad consequences — my jaw is on the floor.”
Maher confessed to working with the government to suppress “misinformation” on Wikipedia, Rufo observed, a fact that left Sanger perplexed.
Also astounding are Maher’s possible ties to U.S. intelligence through myriad nongovernmental organizations, Sanger said. As Rufo wrote in his take on Maher:
Katherine Maher has a golden résumé, with stints and affiliations at UNICEF, the Atlantic Council, the World Economic Forum, the State Department, Stanford University, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Research in 2007 showed that “agencies and corporations” edit Wikipedia to polish their image. One such editor: the CIA:
I will say this: it’s outrageous, frankly, that a purportedly “free and open” resource, built by the public, built to deliver a neutral representation of the views on every subject, has not just been taken over by the Left, but has been co-opted by and is working with the government—that’s not a thing I would’ve imagined happening 20 years ago.
And now, a leftist operative who might be a U.S. intelligence asset controls taxpayer-subsidized NPR.
Berliner Quits
No wonder Berliner jumped ship.
CEO Maher’s answer to Berliner’s essay at The Free Press, which exposed the network’s extremist leftism, inspired him to email her his resignation:
I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.
NPR’s leftism had caused the public to “lose trust” in the network, Berliner wrote, and destroyed its credibility.
When NPR suspended Berliner for exposing the network’s ideological rot, Maher’s kooky leftism went viral.
“If NPR wanted to prove that they were still committed to free speech, to being ideologically neutral, and simply nonpartisan, they would let her go right away,” Sanger told Rufo. However, he continued:
I don’t expect them to do that. They don’t listen to people like us. They don’t care what we think.
