Who Is Katherine Maher?

By now you are fully informed about the saga playing itself out at the National Public Radio. A senior editor, named Uri Berliner denounced the station on The Free Press for having become a propaganda organ.

He exposed an inconvenient truth. The station has dedicated itself to promoting leftist and extremist propaganda and has become an activist organ, dedicated to damaging one Donald Trump.

You might say that you did not need Uri Berliner to tell you that, but still, he fired a shot across the bow of NPR. 

The powers that be, that would be President Katherine Maher was seriously aggrieved. So she suspended Berliner for five days, and threatened him with expulsion. He responded by resigning. 

The net result has been increased scrutiny for the mind of Katherine Maher. One uses the term “mind” cautiously, because Maher is an obvious imbecile, worthy of a political party that extols Kamala Harris and Karine Jean-Pierre.

At a time when a twit named Katie Couric is denouncing Trump supporters for being anti-intellectual, I dare you to mention one person who has ever thought of Katie Couric as an intellectual, as a serious thinker.

In the meantime, Maher’s newfound public prominence has shined a spotlight on her archive of nearly 30,000 tweets. For her pains she has now been critiqued by one Christopher Rufo. That is to say, she has been Rufoed.

Maher’s usings are as bad as you would expect. In a world that considers the dimwitted pseudo-thinker a great thinker, once you examine her acolytes in the feminist intelligentsia, you are appalled at the level of stupid that some people attain, all the while, thinking of themselves as serious thinkers.

Rufo calls Maher an archetype, and, frankly, one wishes that it were not true. And yet, alas, it seems to be more than true.

An archetype of what, you will ask? Rufo responds: 

… an affluent white female liberal—many of whom now sit atop our elite institutions.

If you were wondering what the world would look life if strong empowered feminists were in charge, the example of NPR will offer a cautionary note.

And yet, it’s worse than that. Maher is also the product of our most esteemed institutions of learning. She is what you become when you major in Women’s Studies or Ethnic Studies. You become a living, breathing caricature.

Rufo is correct to say that she descends into self-parody, only she does not believe that she is making a complete fool of herself. She thinks she belongs to the elite intelligentsia. Apparently, Maher sprinkles leftist buzzwords throughout her tweets.

Rufo collected some of them. One gets the impression that Maher spends her off hours picking through Judith Butler’s trash:

… “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.”

On every topic, Maher adopts the fashionable language of left-wing academic theory and uses it as social currency, even when her efforts veer into self-parody. She never explains, never provides new interpretation—she just repeats the phrases, in search of affirmation and, when the time is right, a promotion.

This suggests that she does not know how to think, and that she certainly does not know how to consider both sides of an argument.

Consider this nugget, gleaned from a TED Talk that Maher gave:

Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction getting in the way of finding common ground & getting things done.

How else can you find common ground if not in your reverence for an objective truth? The point of searching for the truth is to find facts and realities that everyone can agree upon, because they do not, by definition, promote the interest of one group over another.

Maher has evidently not thought about what she is saying. This is characteristic of someone who is not very smart but who is good at pretending that she is.

Rufo explains:

Maher understands the game: America’s elite institutions reward loyalty to the narrative. Those who repeat the words move up; those who don’t move out.

More importantly, the intellectually deficient Maher does not want to debate issues. As Justice Holmes once said, in the free trade of ideas, people eventually arrive at the truth. And yet, if you have nothing but your jejune beliefs and your ideological fanaticism, you are more likely to refuse to debate or discuss. You will be happier censoring:

As CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher made censorship a critical part of her policy, under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” 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.

Given her disdain for the truth and her inability to debate and discuss, Maher has found her place in a world where people do not compete, but where they beg for charity. She does not want to subject herself to the verdict of the free market but prefers to impose herself, bloated ego and all, on the rest of the world. 

Maher is no aberration. She is part of a rising cohort of affluent, left-wing, female managers who dominate the departments of university administration, human resources, and DEI. They … value safety over liberty, censorship over debate, and relativism over truth.

The new CEO of NPR, then, is a left-wing ideologue who supports wide-scale censorship and considers the First Amendment an impediment to her campaign to sanitize the world of wrong opinions.

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