#Katherine Maher

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Judd Legum at Popular Information:

In 2020, Bari Weiss quit her job as an editor and writer at the New York Times editorial page in a huff. In her public resignation letter, Weiss argued that she was forced out because the paper had become "illiberal" and her more conservative beliefs made her "the subject of constant bullying by colleagues." 

In January 2021, Weiss launched a newsletter, Common Sense, with her partner, Nellie Bowles. Weiss billed Common Sense as the antidote to "cancel culture," which she argued was the practice by progressives of seeking to punish and ostracize anyone who diverged from their ideological orthodoxy. "The fact that cancellation tales have become an everyday feature of American life should do nothing to diminish how shocking they are, and how damaging they are to a free society," Weiss wrote in October 2021. "Everyone… of conscience needs to start saying no to the mob." Whether or not Weiss' core critique is true, it is lucrative. In 2022, Common Sense rebranded itself as The Free Press to reflect its growing ambitions. It now reportedly employs about 30 people and generates millions in revenue annually. The rebranded publication continues to rail against "cancel culture." Bowles recently published an excerpt from her new book in The Free Press in which she describes the "pleasure" she used to get from helping "cancel people" — before she saw the light and embraced intellectual freedom.

Ironically, as Weiss cashes in on her critique of "cancel culture," The Free Press has become a central part of a sophisticated right-wing ecosystem that seeks to tear down anything and anyone who diverges too far from their ideology.  The latest effort began on April 9, 2024, when NPR editor Uri Berliner wrote in The Free Press that his employer had "lost America's trust." Using a formula that is typical for The Free Press, Berliner describes himself as fitting the liberal mold — admitting that he was "raised by a lesbian peace activist mother" and "eagerly voted against Trump twice." But Berliner says that NPR has gone too far. NPR, according to Berliner, has abandoned its "open-minded spirit" and is too focused on catering to the left. 

One of the core pieces of evidence Berliner cited was NPR's coverage of allegations that the "Trump campaign colluded with Russia." Berliner said NPR "hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff." He complained that Schiff was interviewed 25 times and, during those interviews, "alluded to purported evidence of collusion." But an NPR spokesperson told Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple that between January 2017 and December 2019, NPR conducted 900 interviews with congressional lawmakers, including stalwart conservatives like Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Paul Ryan (R-WI). In other words, Schiff did not dominate the coverage. Overall, Wemple describes Berliner's critique of NPR's Russia coverage as a "lazy… feelings-based critique of the sort that passes for media reporting these days."

Another central component of Berliner's critique is this statistic: "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None." There are a few problems with this. First, Berliner doesn't disclose that there are 662 employees at NPR producing content. It's unclear how or why he selected a subset of just 87 people. Second, in DC, voters have the option of registering as independents. That's how Berliner and other NPR employees who live in DC, like host Steve Inskeep, have registered. Finally, many NPR employees live in places like Virginia, which does not have voter registration by party. 

[...]

That is when the effort to punish NPR and Maher intensified. Chris Rufo, a right-wing operative, has been featured in The Free Press as a contributor and a podcast guest. Rufo began examining Maher's 29,400 tweets and highlighting examples that "exposed" her as liberal. (He later summarized his findings in a piece published by City Journal.) Rufo objects to tweets in which Maher discusses "structural privilege," "non-binary people," and "toxic masculinity." He also highlights that Maher's daily routine included "yoga, iced coffee, back-to-back meetings, and Zoom-based psychotherapy." In another tweet, Maher calls Trump — who rose to political prominence by falsely claiming that the nation's first Black president was illegitimate because he was born in Africa — a "deranged racist psychopath." For Rufo, Maher is but one example of a growing problem: a "rising cohort of affluent, left-wing, female managers."

For Rufo, expressing liberal views at any point in your life is a fireable offense. “If NPR wants to truly be National Public Radio, it can’t pander to the furthest-left elements in the United States,” Rufo told the New York Times. “To do so, NPR should part ways with Katherine Maher.” NPR, however, stuck by Maher. The organization noted that the tweets in question were written while Maher "was not working in journalism… and was exercising her First Amendment right to express herself like any other American citizen." NPR further noted that Maher, as CEO, was not involved in the editorial process. 

[...]

The incoherence of the argument underscores the reality of the political moment. There is a relentless right-wing operation seeking to inflict pain on their ideological adversaries. Some, like Rufo, are the political equivalent of street brawlers, willing to say or do anything to achieve their objective. Others, like Weiss and The Free Press, give the movement a more journalistic and professional sheen. But no one involved is a supporter of free expression or an opponent of cancel culture. Rather, they are the cultural force aggressively pursuing cancellation.

This Popular Information piece goes hard on the right-wing’s BS obsession with “cancel culture.” In reality, right-wing polemicists such as Bari Weiss and Christopher Rufo are the ones who got to where they are by practicing cancel culture on ideas that don’t align with their worldview.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Christopher F. Rufo

Published: Apr 17, 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. 

Americans, even CEOs, are entitled to their opinions and to their own life decisions, of course. But the personal and psychological elements that suffuse Maher’s 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 Cotton’s op-ed, “Send in the Troops,” during the George Floyd riots. In 2021, she celebrated the banishment of then-president Donald Trump from social media, writing: “Must be satisfying to deplatform fascists. Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.”

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.

In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “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.”

Maher’s general policy at Wikipedia, she tweeted, was to support efforts to “eliminate racist, misogynist, transphobic, and other forms of discriminatory content”—which, under current left-wing definitions, could include almost anything to the right of Joe Biden.

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.

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 are the matriarchs of the American Longhouse: they value safety over liberty, censorship over debate, and relativism over truth.

Each social gambit is designed for smothering the institution in ideology. Maher says that she knows “that hysteric white woman voice.” She has “done it.” And while she might not be proud of it—she is aware that she has “a big fat privilege pass”—she is willing to do what it takes to move the dictates of conventional left-wing opinion into a position of domination.

It didn’t begin at NPR, and it won’t end there.

--

==

The First Amendment being viewed as an impediment to what she wants to do, is not a good look for the CEO of a publicly (i.e. government, i.e. taxpayer) funded broadcaster.

[higherentity]

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 8/27/2024

every fucking time i step outside the apartment i get smacked in the face with a wet blanket of heat and humidity. this is my second summer in the swamp WHY am i so startled every single time

listening

both off my spotify recommended list: 2 Mello's dead leaves, a funky little instrumental that sounds like driving somewhere with fitful AC when it is so hot the leaves are dropping off the trees.

TV Girl's Taking What's Not Yours is not a song i wholeheartedly enjoy, but the sample of Nixon saying "I am not a crook!" has been stuck in my head all week. and stickiness in the head is the main criteria for a tuesdaysong. i don't know anything about this band but my brother said "you WOULD be the typical TV Girl listener". so that information is now available to everyone.

indie pop with indie frontman voice (get well soon). actually. no. this singer reminds me of shelby the worm from adventure time. plus distinct funk overtones. 70% of the song by volume is a hip-hop-ified sample of an anti-pirating PSA. i think i would probably like this when i am less depressed.

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reading

really great breakdown of what the fuck is happening with Telegram and why conservatives are so riled up about it.

The quick version of how Telegram became a part of the culture war goes something like this. In April, Uri Berliner, who was then a senior business editor at NPR, alleged a widespread culture of woke at NPR in Bari Weiss’s The Free Press. This led to weeks of discussion about NPR on Twitter and in the right-wing blogosphere. During this saga, several right-wing bloggers attacked NPR’s current CEO and President Katherine Maher, who was previously the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, an organization that has been repeatedly attacked by conservatives, Elon Musk, etc. for allegedly having a liberal bias. Maher is also a member of the Signal Foundation’s board of directors. 

this fascinated me as an engineering/infrastructure disaster in process. thanks longreads

Nearly wherever you look, border politics in the United States is animated by a persistent myth: that with enough money and willpower, you could eventually seal off the countries from one another, like apartments that share a 1,954-mile wall. One way to describe decades of militarization on the border is that it serves to make Mexico invisible to residents of the United States. The same might be said of cross-border industrial development: porous to money and airplane parts, hardened to everything else. Straddling one of the busiest land crossings in the world, the Tijuana River offers a stubborn rebuttal, a reminder that both sides of the border constitute a single place. Once the poop is in the water, no amount of barbed wire can get it out.

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watching

i have watched about a movie a day this week and nothing has like. hit.

The Sisters Brothers (2018, dir. Audiard) was simply not the vibe i was looking for. somewhere between coen brothers and peckinpah. not that i am expecting all movies to have an easily portable moral message delivered to me fortune-cookie style in a silent-film dialogue screen right before the credits play, but what was this About. what was the Story being conveyed to me. this was like an episode of the twilight zone where rod serling goes "damn well that was fucked up" except i went in expecting like. a drama. it's a beautiful movie with great acting except they forgot to put a feature-length-movie plot in it.

Omega Doom (1996, dir. Pyun) is such a strange thing. a cyber-Yojimbo with Rutger Hauer. takes place almost completely within one blasted, snowy little town plaza. Rutger Hauer got "shot in the program" during the great human/robot war and it turned him good.

i think it was marketed very poorly, bc it is NOT an epic science fiction thriller. it was made for about five dollars and is a very talky, meandering, weird little cyber-western. as is the case for all movies with female robots, a lot of weird anxieties about women. i think it would have been way more interesting with a completely genderflipped cast? like push that concept all the way! watching mr hauer mow down a lot of fembots was not the most pleasant experience for me as an alleged woman.

not as good as A Fistful of Dollars but compels me more.

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playing

hello this is very important. the fallout classic collection will be free on epic starting thursday. thank you for your time.

new major genshin patch this week so i will not shut up about that for a bit. as of time of drafting this i am down to TWENTY SEVEN map markers and fully half of them are card game opponents i haven't beaten.

i want to be a point and click adventure game girl so bad but i am afraid i do not have the point and click adventure game temperament. i am having fun with The Silent Age, a little postapoc thing with a time travel mechanic, but only through heavy reference to a walkthrough. this was free on epic last march and i kind of get why? it was published in 2012, wasn't part of a series and didn't have ongoing monetization, and reviewed well but doesn't have a ton of replayability. probably a great windfall for the studio of like $10k, im curious how many people actually downloaded it during its free week. the kind of self-contained game i personally am glad exists in the world but don't want to pay money for.

some good graph humor.

some good osha humor.

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making

i love to acquire a container. this tiny little pearlescent blue avon bath oil holder (i thought was a vase in texas thrift but that explains why it was horrifyingly sticky) now holds my double pointed needles and other knitting bits and bobs so they're not buried at the bottom of the vase with the regular needles

[beardedmrbean]

NPR has suspended Uri Berliner, the senior editor who published a bombshell essay a week ago that claimed that the publicly funded outlet has “lost America’s trust” by approaching news stories with a left-wing bias.

NPR media writer David Folkenflik revealed on Tuesday that Berliner beginning on Friday was suspended for five days without pay. Folkenflik, who reviewed a copy of the letter from NPR brass, said the company told the editor he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets — a requirement for NPR journalists.

NPR called the letter a “final warning,” saying Berliner would be fired if he violated NPR’s policy again.

Neither NPR nor Berliner immediately responded to requests for comment.

Berliner is a dues-paying member of NPR’s newsroom union, but Folkenflik reported that the editor is not appealing the punishment.

Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist who has worked at NPR for 25 years, called out journalistic blind spots around major news events, including the origins of COVID-19, the war in Gaza and the Hunter Biden laptop, in an essay published Tuesday on Bari Weiss’ online news site the Free Press.

The fallout from the essay sparked outrage from many of his colleagues. Late Monday afternoon, NPR chief news executive Edith Chapin announced to the newsroom that executive editor Eva Rodriguez would lead monthly meetings to review coverage.

The fiasco also ignited a firestorm of criticism from prominent conservatives — with former President Donald Trump demanding NPR’s federal funding be yanked — and has led to internal tumult, the New York Times reported Friday.

NPR’s new chief executive Katherine Maher defended NPR’s journalism, calling Berliner’s article “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning,” The 42-year-old exec added that the essay amounted to “a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are.”

Folkenflik said Berliner took umbrage at that, saying she had “denigrated him.” Berliner said he supported diversifying NPR’s workforce to look more like the US population at large. Maher did not address that in a subsequent private exchange he shared with Folkenflik for the story.

The fiasco soon put the spotlight on Maher, whose own left-leaning bias came to light in a trove of woke, anti-Trump tweets she penned.

In January, when Maher was announced as NPR’s new leader, The Post revealed her penchant for parroting the progressive line on social media — including bluntly biased Twitter posts like “Donald Trump is a racist,” which she wrote in 2018.

That hyper-partisan message was scrubbed from the platform now known as X, but preserved on the site Archive.Today.

It’s unclear when Maher deleted it, or if its removal was tied to her new gig.

Other woke posts remain on Maher’s X account. In 2020, as the George Floyd riots raged, she attempted to justify the looting epidemic in Los Angeles as payback for the sins of slavery.

“I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive,” Maher wrote on May 31, 2020.

“But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.”

The next day, she lectured her 27,000 followers on “white silence.”

“White silence is complicity,” she scolded. “If you are white, today is the day to start a conversation in your community.”

The NPR job is Maher’s first position in journalism or media.

She was previously the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, after holding communications roles for the likes of HSBC, UNICEF and the World Bank.

Maher earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies from New York University, according to her LinkedIn account, and grew up in Wilton, Conn. — a town that her mother, Ceci Maher, now represents as a Democratic state senator.

[vomitdodger]

Interesting. Signal as an encrypted way to send messages has long been hailed as the go to app. Now it’s called I to question. Anyone smart on this got a response?

[mediamonarchy]

https://mediamonarchy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/20240506_MorningMonarchy.mp3 Download MP3 The Seinfeld Chronicles, PCU and Trumpster’s billions + this day in history w/pointless, stupid and evil lockdowns and our song of the day by American Thought Criminals on your #MorningMonarchy for May 6, 2024. Notes/Links: Masticophis flagellum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masticophis_flagellum Image: You’re going to feel pretty stupid if it turns out you’re not a monarch. https://mediamonarchy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/if_youre_not_a_monarch.jpg ‘Sopranos’ star doubles down against pro-Biden celebs: ‘The far left own Hollywood’ https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/entertainment-celebrity/sopranos-star-doubles-down-against-pro-biden-celebs-the-far-left-own-hollywood/ar-AA1o879I Video: ‘Sopranos’ actress claims celebrities are against Biden but ‘petrified’ to speak out (Audio) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zILfl4wai9E Inside the failed White House coup to oust Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre https://nypost.com/2024/04/26/us-news/inside-the-failed-white-house-coup-against-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre/ Jerry Seinfeld Says TV Comedy Is Being Killed By the ‘Extreme Left and P.C. Crap and People Worrying So Much About Offending Other People’ https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/jerry-seinfeld-says-tv-comedy-is-being-killed-by-the-extreme-left-and-p-c-crap-and-people-worrying-so-much-about-offending-other-people/ar-AA1nSc5z Video: Jerry Seinfeld Says Extreme Left Is RUINING TV Comedy; Calls It ‘PC CRAP’ (Audio) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g8yYg8eh-g Image: Fuck America, Protect Israel https://mediamonarchy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/fuck_america_protect_israel.png New York Times Failures in Israel Coverage Point to Larger Bias: Experts; The newspaper’s long record of bias in its coverage of Israel and Jewish issues has worsened with an influx of young ‘woke’ reporters, experts say. https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/new-york-times-failures-in-israel-coverage-point-to-larger-bias-experts-5619646 Katherine Maher’s Color Revolution; It appears that new NPR boss Katherine Maher has been around, around color revolutions all over the world while working for intelligence linked NGO National Democratic Institute. https://www.city-journal.org/article/katherine-mahers-color-revolution South American state to sever ties with Israel; Colombia will cut diplomatic relations with Israel over its “genocidal” leadership, President Gustavo Petro has vowed https://www.rt.com/news/596858-south-american-promises-to Shai Davidai comes from a long line of assholes. A short piece on his family’s ties to the weapons industry (and other shady dealings). https://vxtwitter.com/joshua__frank/status/1782499910509789365 Columbia Professor Shai Davidai’s Family Tied to Weapons Manufacturing https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/22/columbia-universitys-shai-davidais-family-tied-to-weapons-manufacturing/ Images show US military building floating pier off Gaza. Pentagon says it will cost $320 million https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/30/middleeast/gaza-floating-pier-images-aid-intl-hnk/index.html Bill Proposes “Antisemitism Monitors” for Colleges that Would Limit First Amendment; Shocker: Rep. Ritchie (D-NY, who co-authored the bill) is swimming in AIPAC money, $372,994 in this election cycle. https://needtoknow.news/2024/05/bill-proposes-antisemitism-monitors-for-colleges-that-would-limit-first-amendment/ REVEALED: George Soros is PAYING left-wing activists to head up camp outs at colleges across America – as huge wads of cash they’re getting are shared https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13353941/George-soros-paying-left-wing-activists-college-protest-camp.html George Soros is paying student radicals who are fueling nationwide explosion of Israel-hating protests https://nypost.com/2024/04/26/us-news/george-soros-maoist-fund-columbias-anti-israel-tent-city/ A GWU! (Student) Guide to Avoiding Gaza Protests https://getwokeup.com/a-gwu-student-guide-to-avoiding-...

[oww666]

that goes for the military the education admin the military the bureaucracy the universities the media etc etc ..why do you think pelosi had all that pork in the those budgets ?

[darkeagleruins]

Not a dime more of taxpayer money for this propaganda

[darkmaga-retard]

by Jonathan Turley | Sep 11, 2024

National Public Radio has had a rough go in the last few years with declining audiences, financial shortfalls, and the recent exposure of its political bias by longtime editor Uri Berliner. However, if you tuned into the comments of NPR CEO Katherine Maher this week at the Texas Tribune Festival,  you would think that the only challenging decision for NPR is picking the design of the next pledge drive tote bag.

Despite comments that were repeatedly evasive and misleading, a room full of journalists seemed to just nod like William Safire’s “nattering nabobs.”

Mayer led with what many former employees like Berliner may have seen as a literal punchline: “I stand here to defend the integrity of the newsroom and to defend the integrity of the reporting and to say that every single day our folks get up, and they want to stand there and make sure that they are serving the American public in the best possible way from a nonpartisan perspective.”

NPR, however, has lost much of the public. Ironically, it is now more liberal and white than ever with relatively few minority, male, or conservative listeners.

NPR’s audience has been declining for years. Indeed, that trend has been most pronounced since 2017 — the period when Berliner said the company began to openly pursue a political narrative and agenda to counter Donald Trump. The company has reported falling advertising revenue and, like many outlets, has made deep staff cuts to deal with budget shortfalls.

[emmabeverage]

NPR CEO Katherine Maher WOKE DEI Leadership Revealed: Robby Soave

[undergroundusa]

“The top executive at NPR, Katherine Maher, failed to appear at a congressional hearing designed to examine alleged bias at the news outlet despite being funded by taxpayer dollars, saying it was due to a scheduling conflict…”

This is the arrogance of the neo-fascist, Marxist, American Fifth Column. This woman works for a publicly funded organization. Her “bosses” – representatives of the American people – called her to answer questions about intellectual malfeasance, and she has a “scheduling problem”?

Would your boss accept a no-show excuse like you have a “scheduling problem”?! You’d be out on your ass…as she should be!

Learn more about Maher here: https://www.undergroundusa.com/p/a-radical-marxist-progressive-takes

[media-bias-fact-check]

House Republicans Ask NPR CEO To Appear At Hearing After Bias Allegations

House Republicans Ask NPR CEO To Appear At Hearing After Bias Allegations

House Republicans are calling for NPR CEO Katherine Maher to appear at a hearing on May 8 following a now former staffer’s allegations of bias in news coverage. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, joined with two other House Republicans in a letter to Maher. “The Committee has concerns about the direction in which NPR may be headed under past and…

[beardedmrbean]

NPR defended embattled chief executive Katherine Maher against "online actors with explicit agendas" on Wednesday as her old social media posts continue to go viral for exposing her personal left-wing ideology. 

What seems like a never-ending supply of social media messages Maher posted before running NPR have been unearthed in recent days by critics of NPR, including Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo. 

Maher, who served as the CEO for Web Summit and Wikimedia Foundation prior to taking over NPR last month, showed her support for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 while regularly sharing liberal talking points and criticizing Donald Trump. Many feel that someone with such blunt partisan views running NPR on the heels of veteran editor Uri Berliner penning a scathing takedown that detailed the "absence of viewpoint diversity" at the organization could be troublesome, but the organization chalked up the resurfaced tweets as "bad faith" attacks. 

"This is a bad faith attack that follows an established playbook, as online actors with explicit agendas work to discredit independent news organizations," an NPR spokesperson told Fox News Digital. 

"In this case, they resorted to digging up old tweets and making conjectures based on our new CEO’s resume," the spokesperson continued. "Spending time on these accusations is intended to detract from NPR’s mission of informing the American public and providing local information in communities around the country is more important than ever."

Rufo has also unearthed old video of Maher saying the First Amendment makes it too difficult to censor "bad information." But much of the controversy surrounding her is the result of posts on X, the platform previously known as Twitter. 

Before taking over NPR, Maher tweeted essentially whatever was on her mind. For example, she once shared details of a dream where her and Kamala Harris were on a road trip together "comparing nuts and baklava from roadside stands" before she "woke up very hungry." 

Others were more political. 

Maher wrote on X in May 2020 that while "looting is counterproductive," it was "hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people's ancestors as private property." In another post on the thread, Maher said that property damage was "not the thing" Americans should be upset over. 

In another 2020 post, Maher is seen donning a Biden for president hat and said it was the "best part" of her efforts to get out the vote.

"I can’t stop crying with relief," she wrote after Biden won. 

Maher also took issue with the infamous New York Times Tom Cotton op-ed in 2020, saying it was "full of racist dog whistles." She argued it was based on the "false premise that the country is in a state of ‘disorder.'"

Several of her old posts that have resurfaced reference concern over White privilege and "White silence."

In June 2020, Maher declared "White silence is complicity." 

"If you are White, today is the day to start a conversation in your community," she continued. 

Maher identified herself as an "unalloyed progressive" supporting Clinton in the 2016 election. However, Maher had some criticism for Clinton at the time, saying she wished the then-Democratic presidential nominee "wouldn't use the language of ‘boy and girl,'" because it was "erasing language for non-binary people."

In 2018, she wrote, "I’m angry. Hot angry, slow angry, relentless angry. This anger is going to fuel and burn for a long time, and it will deliver back exponentially," during Christine Blasey Ford's testimony accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

Rufo joined Fox News on Tuesday to explain why he’s been busy circulating Maher’s old tweets. 

"I spent the last day or two digging through her tweets to show people exactly what she believes. It’s actually incredible. It is the most vapid, left-wing propaganda imaginable," Rufo said on "Jesse Watters Primetime."

"She’s been at it for year. She’s a supporter of BLM, she believes in the pseudo-science of White privilege, White fragility, she criticized her own Whiteness," he continued. "It’s like Mad Libs for left-wing women." 

In addition to the deluge of old social media messages being resurfaced, NewBusters reported on Wednesday that Maher has donated to Democratic candidates such as Stacey Abrams. NPR did not immediately respond to a request for comment about her donations.  

Berliner, who resigned after blowing the whistle on NPR’s liberal bias, doesn’t think Maher is fit for the job. 

"We're looking for a leader right now who's going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about," Berliner told NPR media reporter David Folkenflik prior to quitting. "And this seems to be the opposite of that."

Berliner also scolded Maher when he stepped down. 

"I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years. I don’t support calls to defund NPR," Berliner wrote in a statement published on X. "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 cited in my Free Press essay," Berliner continued.