Is NPR’s woke CEO Katherine Maher WORSE than we thought?
NPR’s president and CEO, Katherine Maher, has made headlines after the publicly funded media company punished journalist Uri Berliner for exposing the network’s leftist bias.
Now, Maher’s also under fire for her past outrageous statements about free speech.
And while that’s all bad enough, Maher may be even more nefarious than conservatives are just now finding out.
“She would be a very important tool in the hands of the government, and she’s being paid by National Public Radio,” Glenn Beck says. “She is a tool of the government in many ways.”
Blaze News staff writer Joseph MacKinnon has some enlightening details.
“At first blush, she looks like just another shrill leftist. She has the obligatory photo wearing the Biden campaign hat, and she has an unhealthy obsession with race,” MacKinnon says. “But you keep digging, as Rufo has, and you realize really quickly that there’s something more going on here.”
“From 30,000 feet,” he continues, “she looks like not just a tech savvy media queen but someone who spent a lot of time around color revolutions.”
Not only is Maher also a World Economic Forum World Global Leader, but she’s worked with the World Bank, various NGOs in tech comms and foreign policy spaces, and the National Democratic Institute.
The National Democratic Institute is a spin-off of the National Endowment for Democracy, which according to MacKinnon is an “organization that tries to transition unwilling regimes to become liberal democracies.”
“Can I redefine that a little bit?” Glenn asks, adding, “It’s a CIA front.”
“Whether or not she has CIA on a card somewhere tucked into her desk, she might as well have been,” MacKinnon says.
NPR boss accused of being something far more impactful than just another radical World Economic Forum anointee
A Peabody Award-winning senior business editor who worked for NPR for 25 years penned a damning exposé earlier this month, confirming critics' suspicions that NPR is a Democratic propaganda machine.
For speaking truth to power, Uri Berliner was suspended. He later resigned, writing, "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."
The CEO who drove out this "EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag-carrying coastal elite"-styled liberal is Katherine Maher.
Maher, a censorious alumna of the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leader program, was announced as the president and CEO of the company in January. She previously served as CEO of Wikipedia's parent company, Wikimedia, and worked at the National Democratic Institute, which is primarily funded by George Soros' Open Society Foundations.
Blaze News previously explored some of the Orwellian revisionism that took place at Wikipedia under her leadership — where she made clear that "our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done" — and also recently highlighted some of her radical, race-obsessed comments online.
It appears, however, that beside her complicated relationship with the truth, her knack for spotting racism in unlikely places, and her apparent intolerance for dissenting views, Maher might also be a bit player in the regime-change business.
Christopher Rufo recently suggested in City Journal that Maher may have been involved in various color revolutions abroad — and may now be involved in one stateside.
Color revolutions — such as the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2004 — are political upheavals aimed at toppling supposedly illegitimate or abusive regimes and replacing them with supposedly liberal democratic regimes. In many cases, the revolutionaries appear to have been afforded help and direction by state actors and/or by non-governmental organizations, such as the outfits Maher has worked with.
Rufo noted, "The West's favored methods of supporting Color Revolutions include fomenting dissent, organizing activists through social media, promoting student movements, and unleashing domestic unrest on the streets."
Maher apparently toured the ground zeroes of various regime changes in recent years as they were unfolding.
Rufo claimed that beginning in 2011, the NPR CEO, who has a degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and has studied in Syria and Egypt, "traveled numerous times to Tunisia, working with regime-change activists and government officials. In 2012, she traveled to a strategic city on the Turkey-Syria border, which had become a base for Western-backed opposition to Bashar al-Assad. That same year, she traveled to Libya, where the U.S. had just overthrown strongman Muammar Gaddafi."
During her tour of toppled or toppling regimes in 2011 and for years afterward, Maher worked for the National Democratic Institute, which Rufo suggested was "a government-funded NGO with deep connections to U.S. intelligence and the Democratic Party’s foreign policy machine."
The Guardian indicated in 2004 that the NDI, founded in the early 1980s after Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy, was among the supposed NGOs dispatched by the U.S. to Ukraine and other nations to help "enginee[r] democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience."
National security analyst J. Michael Waller suggested, "NDI is an instrument of Samantha Power and the global revolution elements of the Obama team."
"It has gone along with, and been significant parts of, color revolutions around the world. It is very much a regime-change actor," added Waller.
Waller told City Journal that Maher was "part of a revolutionary vanguard movement."
Rufo appears convinced the woke CEO has since turned her sights from the Orient to the United States.
According to the New College of Florida board member, the "summer of rioting following the death of George Floyd, which ushered in the new DEI regime, was in many ways a domestic Color Revolution."
Rufo did not produce a smoking gun concerning Maher's possible direct role in the DEI revolution while at Wikipedia, "a key strategic way station ... [that] defines the terms, shapes the narrative, and launders mostly left-wing political ideologies into the discourse, under the guise of 'neutral knowledge.'"
However, he noted that Maher, a longtime BLM supporter, made clear the general policy at Wikipedia was to "eliminate racist, misogynist, transphobic, and other forms of discriminatory content" and elsewhere highlighted her aim of rebelling against the idea of "radical openness," which she associated with a "white male Westernized construct."
With Wikipedia still operating a "closed loop that operates surreptitiously, using its reputation for unbiased knowledge as a cover for its own disinformation," Rufo intimated that Maher has moved on to another key component in the "American Color Revolution" underway: NPR.
NPR "has formative power in many culture-shaping institutions and increasingly represents the voice of blue elites. It is state radio, in the Soviet sense: it produces propaganda to advance its own cultural power and move the nation toward a desired end-state," wrote Rufo.
Berliner previously highlighted how Maher's predecessor was already active in this regard.
"When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism," former NPR CEO John Lansing allegedly noted in a company-wide article, "we can be agents of change."
"America's infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it," Berliner wrote earlier this month.
Maher, an apparent agent of change, wrote in a December 2010 NDI blog post, "Control over the flow of information in a closed society can be tantamount to control over the state."
Rufo indicated that Maher's remarks in the blog post, which concerned an electoral crisis in the Ivory Coast that led to civil war, were "more descriptive than prescriptive." Nevertheless, "[t]he production of media works in Cote d’Ivoire as it does in America; the difference is only a matter of scale and complexity."
Responding to the City Journal piece, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote, "I don't know if she is actual CIA, or just ideologically aligned. What is clear though is that she will assiduously advance establishment narratives."
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NPR Will Never Face Its Intellectual Rot Until Taxpayer Funds Stop Flowing
Rep. Banks proposes bill to ban federal funds from going to NPR
Republican Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana is pushing a measure that would prohibit federal funds from flowing to NPR.
"After the date of the enactment of this Act, no Federal funds may, directly or indirectly, be made available to or used to support" National Public Radio, "including through the payment of dues to or the purchase of programming from such organization by a public broadcast station using Federal funds received by such station," the proposal, dubbed the "Defund NPR Act," states. The same would apply to "any successor organization" to NPR.
Katherine Maher, who includes "She/her" prounouns on her X profile, recently became NPR's president and CEO.
"NPR's new CEO is a radical, left-wing activist who doesn't believe in free speech or objective journalism. Hoosiers shouldn't be writing her paychecks," Banks said, according to a press release. "Katherine Maher isn't qualified to teach an introductory journalism class, much less capable of responsibly spending millions of American tax dollars. NPR was a liberal looney bin under the last CEO John Lansing, and it's about to get even nuttier. It's time to pull the plug on this national embarrassment. Congress must stop spending other people's hard-earned money on low grade propaganda."
Maher's archive of tweets includes comments such as an October 2016 post that reads, "I do wish Hillary wouldn't use the language of 'boy and girl' - it's erasing language for non-binary people."
"I am a super big public transit nerd. I hate private cars in cities. I love bikes. And yes, I love buses. Transit justice," she wrote in 2020, "and climate love," she continued, adding, "in one humble hunk of rolling metal."
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Shocking: NPR's Secret War on Free Speech