CHRISTOPHER RUFO: Quotations from Chairman Maher.
Maher understands the game: Americaâs elite institutions reward loyalty to the narrative. Those who repeat the words move up; those who donât move out.
Next, you notice the partisanship. Maher was âexcitedâ about Elizabeth Warren in 2012. She âjust [couldnât] wait to voteâ for Hillary in 2016. She once had a dream about âsampling and comparing nuts and baklava on roadside standsâ with Kamala Harris. She worked to âget out the voteâ in Arizona for Joe Biden but slightly resented being called a âBiden supporterâ; for her, it was simply a matter of being a âsupporter of human rights, dignity, and justice.â
Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a âderanged racist sociopath.â
If you read Maherâs tweets closely, you also get glimpses of the human being. She spent much of her time in airports, taxis, meetings, and conferences. She expressed anger over the fact that most first-class flyers were white men, then noted that she went straight âto the back of the bus.â In her thirties, unmarried and without children, she felt the need to explain that âthe planet is literally burningâ and that she could not, in good conscience, âbring a child into a warming world.â
Behind the frenetic activity and the moral posturing, you wonder. Maher once posted her daily routine, which involved yoga, iced coffee, back-to-back meetings, and Zoom-based psychotherapy. She resented being served maternity advertisements on Instagram, she said. She was not âcurrently in the market for a babyâ and would not be âtending her ovariesâ according to the dictates of American capitalism.
Americans, even CEOs, are entitled to their opinions and to their own life decisions, of course. But the personal and psychological elements that suffuse Maherâs public persona seem to lead to political conclusions that are, certainly, worthy of public criticism.
The most troubling of these conclusions is her support for radically narrowing the range of acceptable opinions. In 2020, she argued that the New York Times should not have published Senator Tom Cottonâs op-ed, âSend in the Troops,â during the George Floyd riots. In 2021, she celebrated the banishment of then-president Donald Trump from social media, writing: âMust be satisfying to deplatform fascists. Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.â
As CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher made censorship a critical part of her policy, under the guise of fighting âdisinformation.â In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she âtook a very active approach to disinformation,â coordinated censorship âthrough conversations with government,â and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.
In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the âthe number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.â These speech protections, Maher continued, make it âa little bit trickyâ to suppress âbad informationâ and âthe influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.â
Related: Where are Uri Berlinerâs defenders in the press?
What should be most troubling, however, is that Maher flaunted a Biden campaign hat in a post from 2020, as she canvassed a Get Out the Vote operation in Arizona. NPR now has a dilemma: they can keep Maher as CEO (which I believe they will), but they can no longer dispute the accusations of what Berliner claimed the network has become in recent years. I would argue this is what NPR wants, and has wanted for a while. NPR, their hosts and their CEO can now exhale and stop pretending to be anything other than another progressive media outlet. The problem for NPR in that realm now becomes an issue of public funding (cue a Marsha Blackburn bill to defund NPR). This debate has be re-energized by Berlinerâs resignation and NPRâs stiffening spine in defending their new activist CEO.
What cannot be ignored is the lack of outcry from Berlinerâs fellow journalists and his union. Berliner was made to be a leper in the media cool-kidsâ clique simply for telling the truth of what NPR is. Berlinerâs public flogging is a warning to anyone else who dares speak out about what media organizations, and the journalists working for them, have become. They all know what they are, and they all now know what happens to them if they speak out about it like Uri Berliner did.
More: Dozens of NPR Staffers Sign Letter to CEO and Unwittingly Prove Uri Berliner’s Point.