NPR and PBS Ideologues Face Congress, Defend Forcing Taxpayers to Pay for Partisan Propaganda

NRP's Katherine Maher is a woke disaster.

NPR's CEO has owned up to not giving the Hunter Biden laptop story the coverage it deserved.

Katherine Maher, a progressive who previously headed Wikipedia before starting at NPR last year, made the admission after being grilled relentlessly by Marjorie Taylor Greene on Capitol Hill about the broadcaster's alleged bias.

'I do want to say that NPR acknowledges we were mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively or sooner,' Maher said Wednesday, at a hearing centered around whether NPR should receive federal funding.

At another moment, Greene confronted Maher - a 41-year-old former tech exec - on some of her more opinionated comments.

This included statements to social media penned in the past, like one that slammed Donald Trump as a 'racist' and 'sociopath' in 2020.

When asked by GOP Rep. Tim Burchett about such tweets, Maher said: 'I regret [them] today.'

The CEO also said she and her team 'has work to do', when it comes to offering access to reliable reporting.

Joining Maher was PBS boss Paula Kerger - but due to the makeup of her staff and past comments, Maher appeared to bear the brunt of the beatdown.

This led to some bombshell admissions - including the one surrounding the recently pardoned son of the former president.

'Our current editorial leadership thinks that was a mistake, as do I,' Maher said of NPR's failure to immediately cover the the scandal surrounding contents found on his laptop, which surfaced in late 2020.

...

Contents seized from the laptop shed light on Hunter's business dealings in Ukraine and China - all while his father was vice president.

On March 31, 2021, NPR published an article stating U.S. intelligence had discredited the story, before issuing a correction the very next day - one saying officials actually never made such a statement.

The Daily Mail notes that the computer shop owner who turned over Hunter Biden's laptop almost immediately faced penny-ante retribution from Biden's IRS:

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In September 2021, Mac Isaac also received what he perceived as threats from the IRS, demanding a supposedly overdue $57 from a 2016 tax return.

He told the Post how he sent the agency the $57 almost immediately.

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With this and more on her mind Wednesday, a visibly disgusted Greene - showing little patience - tore in Maher from the outset.

'Let's walk through some of your statements so the public can understand your personal views,' she began.

'Your fellow Americans selected Donald Trump as president again this past November - you called him "a deranged, racist and sociopath."

'You posted on X that America is "addicted" to white supremacy,' she added, before ad-libbing: 'That's appalling.

'You've publicly chastised using the phrase "boy and girl", which you said "erases the language for nonbinary people",' the 50-year-old Georgia firebrand continued, before again offering her own commentary.

'There's only two genders, by the way.'

She went on to point out how NPR's federal funding comes from 'all' American tax-dollars - not just NPR viewers, listeners, and readers.

Roughly half, she pointed out, were the 77 million who voted for Trump - 'someone you called a "deranged, racist sociopath,"' she reminded Maher, before loudly sucking her teeth.

'Many find your professorship and anti-free speech views more concerning than your politics,' Greene insisted, telling Maher: 'The only speech you like seems to be speech you agree with.'

Greene went on to recall more apparent slip-ups from Maher, whose role at NPR is her first in journalism.

'In 2021, you called the First amendment the "number one challenge" in American journalism because it makes it hard to crack down on bad information,' Greene said - before Maher attempted to clarify those comments were taken out of context.

'You said on a TED talk that "our reverence for the truth might be a distraction",' Greene, in rare form, continued.

'You've also expressed support for deplatforming individuals you view as "facist".'

Greene then sarcastically asked the CEO who she believes should be in charge of making such calls.

'Is it NPR? Is it the government? Is it you Ms. Maher?'

...

At this point, Greene reminded Maher how she was under oath, as well as the punishments one could face, including prison time, if found flouting the federal law.

She went on to ask the same for Kerger, who said no and that PBS 'look[s] forward to delivering the material required in this part of the investigation.'

To this, Greene offered a characteristic, out-of-the-ordinary clapback, before again sucking her teeth.

'We look forward to that too. I'm assuming both of you are concerned about this,' she said. 'And that's why you brought so many attorneys with you today.'

Chris Rufo collected up this Regime Communist's most pungent emanations back in 2024.

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. She was chief executive officer and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. And, as of last month, she is CEO of National Public Radio.

Mere weeks into this new role, Maher has stepped into controversy. Long-time NPR senior editor Uri Berliner published a scathing indictment of the self-professed "public" media service's ideological capture. Rather than address the substance of these criticisms--which will ring true to anyone who has listened to NPR over the past decade--Maher punished Berliner with a five-day unpaid suspension. (Berliner announced his resignation from NPR earlier today.)

But Maher has another problem: her archive of 29,400 tweets.

I have spent the past few days exploring Maher's prolific history on social media, which she seems to have used as a private diary, narrating her every thought, emotion, meeting, and political opinion in real-time. This archive is a collection of her statements, but at a deeper level, it provides a window into the soul of a uniquely American archetype: the affluent, white, female liberal--many of whom now sit atop our elite institutions.

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."

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.

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.

Next, you notice the partisanship. Maher was "excited" about Elizabeth Warren in 2012. She "just [couldn't] wait to vote" for Hillary in 2016. She once had a dream about "sampling and comparing nuts and baklava on roadside stands" with Kamala Harris. She worked to "get out the vote" in Arizona for Joe Biden but slightly resented being called a "Biden supporter"; for her, it was simply a matter of being a "supporter of human rights, dignity, and justice."

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a "deranged racist sociopath."

If you read Maher's 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 "to the back of the bus." In her thirties, unmarried and without children, she felt the need to explain that "the planet is literally burning" and that she could not, in good conscience, "bring a child into a warming world."

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 "currently in the market for a baby" and would not be "tending her ovaries" according to the dictates of American capitalism.

Of course, she has also campaigned vigorously for censorship, or as she calls it, "fighting disinformation" and "harmful information." She has called the First Amendment "the main impediment" to fighting harmful information.

She also declared that "Truth is a distraction" from what's really important, which is finding "consensus" (the leftwing consensus) on leftwing political dogma.

So of course Biden installed her has head of NPR, literal state media which is supposed to serve all of the taxpayers forced to fund it, not just yoga-practicing shrink-seeking lunatic AWFLs like herself.

Christopher F. Rufo @realchrisrufo

EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher helped advance Color Revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, arguing that regime-change operatives could "govern a country" by capturing radio stations.

Now she has taken over NPR, bringing the Color Revolution home.

The Color Revolution is restless. Beginning in the former Soviet republics in the early 2000s, it moved along the coast of North Africa with the so-called Arab Spring in the 2010s, and, into the current decade, has spread further.

The ostensible purpose of Color Revolutions--named after the Rose Revolution, Orange Revolution, and Tulip Revolution in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, respectively--is to replace authoritarian regimes with Western liberal democracies. American and European intelligence services are often heavily involved in these revolutions, with ambitions not only to spread modern ideologies but also to undermine geopolitical opponents.

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. Americans hold varying opinions on such efforts, but what many don't realize is that they occur not only overseas but also here in the United States. 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, advanced by progressive NGOs, media entities, and political actors.

A minor figure in these movements, a woman named Katherine Maher, has recently come to greater prominence. Maher was involved in the wave of Color Revolutions that took place in North Africa in the 2010s, and she supported the post-George Floyd upheavals in the United States in the 2020s. She was also the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and was just recently named the new CEO of National Public Radio.

At NPR, Maher has already been embroiled in controversy. Longtime editor Uri Berliner, who has now resigned, accused her of left-wing bias and suppressing dissent. Following these accusations, I did extensive reporting demonstrating that Maher has a troubling history of arguing against the notion of objective truth and supporting censorship in the name of democracy.

Now I have gathered additional facts that raise new questions about Maher's role as a regime-change agent, both foreign and domestic. She has brought the Color Revolution home to America.

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During much of 2011, Maher worked for the National Democratic Institute, a government-funded NGO with deep connections to U.S. intelligence and the Democratic Party's foreign policy machine. The organization was "set up to do independently what CIA had done covertly worldwide," says national security analyst J. Michael Waller. While initially some distance supposedly existed between NDI and the intelligence services, that relationship has devolved back to "the gray zone," per Waller, and it appears that they often work in concert. "NDI is an instrument of Samantha Power and the global revolution elements of the Obama team," Waller explains. "It has gone along with, and been significant parts of, color revolutions around the world. It is very much a regime-change actor."

American adversaries such as China agree with this sentiment and have accused NDI of being a "second CIA." Some nations, fearing American interference, have banned NDI from operating in their territories. In 2012, for example, Egypt accused NDI and other organizations of serving as unregistered foreign agents and working "in coordination" with U.S. intelligence to subvert the Egyptian state.

During her time at NDI, Katherine Maher was "part of a revolutionary vanguard movement," says Waller.

Read the whole thing.

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ @realchrisrufo The CEO of NPR:

* Believes the First Amendment is a "problem"
* Supports censorship of "bad information"
* Said the "truth" is a "distraction"
* Lied to Congress multiple times
* Said a "free and open" internet is a "white male Westernized construct"

Defund NPR.

Note that she didn't just deny having read "The Case for Reparations."

She also previously tweeted support for "In Defense of Looting" -- and now also claims she has "no recollection" of having ever read that, nor of tweeted out her recommendation for it.

She even said she took a whole day off to savor its wisdom!

If you want to both be informed and be amused -- well, and be outraged, as well -- please do yourself a favor and read all of Chris Rufo's twitter feed today. He's reposting Maher's most egregious ultra-woke AWFL tweets, and adding his own tongue-in-cheek commentary about her various Deep Thoughts.

More of her testimony:

posted by Ace at 05:30 PM

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