If you don’t remember “Car Talk,” it was a radio show that lasted more than three decades on NPR, until it ended in 2012. The idea was that people called in with practical questions and dilemmas relating to their cars, and then the hosts dispensed advice — whether it was about car maintenance or repair or whatever. The show no longer exists, though, because the NPR that broadcast that show for 35 years no longer exists. The idea of a show that actually addresses people’s problems in real life, based on knowledge of how markets and automobiles or anything else actually works, has been unthinkable to the management of NPR for some time. Shows that cover the news from an objective factual perspective, to the extent possible, are also out of style. Instead, for the past decade, NPR has been controlled by activists who have devoted themselves to two primary pursuits.
The first pursuit is blanketing the airwaves with identity politics at every conceivable opportunity. That’s why they run segments on diverse gender representation in dinosaur emojis for example.
The second pursuit has been shutting down stories that are inconvenient for the politicians who are voting to spend your money to finance NPR’s operation. Infamously, NPR’s executive editor, Terence Samuel, claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop scandal wasn’t a “real story.” He said it was a “distraction.” And instead of firing Samuel, NPR promoted him. American University even invited Samuel to deliver a lecture entitled, “How Journalism Can Save Itself and Democracy.”
It’s harder to think of a better way to summarize what NPR has become. They aren’t simply bumbling propagandists. They’re also incredibly self-satisfied and narcissistic. They believe that they alone can save American democracy. And they think that, in order to do that, they need to control what kinds of information you can see. It’s not that they thought the Hunter Biden laptop story was “unvetted” or “Russian disinformation” or whatever the excuse was. They always knew it was factually accurate. But just because something is factually accurate, in NPR’s eyes, doesn’t make it true. According to NPR, truth is subjective; whatever’s most expedient politically for them is what’s true.
For a long time now, this position — which really amounts to nihilism — was unstated at NPR, at least publicly. But now it’s explicit, thanks to a new CEO and president by the name of Katherine Maher who recently took over at NPR. Maher very clearly does not believe that the truth is objective. She also doesn’t believe it’s worth trying to find out what the truth may be. This is an extraordinary position for the chief executive of a publicly funded news organization to have, but it’s what Katherine Maher believes.
This is a speech of hers that’s been making the rounds this week. It’s from back when she was running Wikimedia, which is mainly known for Wikipedia. Watch:
This is what passes for good public speaking these days. But she speaks in a robotic, sing-songy voice that makes it sound like she’s a kindergarten teacher lecturing a bunch of 5-year-olds. She has the tone of someone who believes firmly in the superiority of her own intellect, even though what she’s saying is so abjectly stupid.
She says truth is subjective, and that everyone in the room has his or her own “truth.” But here’s the problem. Truth exists because reality exists. Either something is a part of reality or it isn’t. To deny objective truth is to deny reality. And you can’t even deny reality without asserting a reality — the reality that there is no reality. So the relativistic view is not only false, but so false as to be incomprehensible if you think about it for more than two seconds.
Maher’s remarks are the same idiot relativism that you can hear from any freshman philosophy student, but she goes to great pains to make her take seem nuanced and innovative. She talks in circles and ends back at “there are many different truths.” She says this even after acknowledging that the truth exists. Again, those are two contradictory ideas, but that doesn’t bother Maher for a second. Like most of our overeducated elite class, she’s incapable of speaking without a parade of cliches while making tedious and absurd ideas sound far more complex than they really are.
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Also according to Maher, we have “glorious chronicles to the human experience in many different cultures” because we have “many different truths.” But that’s not what these “glorious chronicles” show us. Instead, they show us that the truth is objective and eternal. Different cultures and people across time have had different ways of perceiving the truth — talking about it, accessing it, embracing it, or rejecting it, yes. But the truth remains the same. That is what makes the study of history, and different cultures through history, so fascinating. It is precisely because all of these different people across time and space lived in the same reality, and yet had wildly different ways of existing in it, and responding to it.
Katherine Maher doesn’t seem to understand this, or at least she pretends not to. She repeats her theory of truth at every possible opportunity. Here’s some more footage from a conference two years ago. Maher begins by explaining that Galileo was prosecuted for saying that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun, which is a basically accurate if wildly oversimplified retelling of that historical episode — although it doesn’t prove what Maher seems to think it does. Then she makes an incredible statement. Watch:
“The truth, by definition, is malleable,” says Maher. Really? By whose definition exactly? You can make the case that postmodernists thinkers and their precursors — like Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Rousseau — might agree with that statement. But you won’t hear many traditional thinkers (prior to, say, Heidegger) saying that the truth is “malleable.” So why should we adopt the postmodern belief and not the traditional one? There has to be some reason to side with one school of thought and not another.
In any event, if truth is merely “malleable” — if there’s no knowable, essential structure to it — then definitions themselves are just language games. There’s no significance to any of it. It’s just a power struggle. When you get down to it, that’s really what Maher is saying. She’s asserting that “the truth” is “malleable” as an act of political will because she doesn’t believe in any objectively true definitions. She keeps saying, over and over again, the words “the truth,” only to make it clear that she has no idea what that is.
And from that very shaky foundation, Maher starts to derive some very shaky corollaries. At one point, Maher implies that people don’t trust the media anymore not because the media lied to them, but because people have different mistaken “truths” that they’re clinging to. Watch:
It’s another revealing statement that Maher makes without any justification. She’s implying that democracies aren’t (or can’t be) xenophobic or nationalist. But the Greeks were both. Greek democracies were very much “xenophobic” — if that’s how you want to put it — and nationalist in nature. There’s no doubt about that. So why is democracy the goal here? Is that even her goal?
Really, her only given justification for thinking our traditional conception of truth is inadequate, and needs to be reworked, is that the “truth” we have now is the product of a history which is also political. “History is written by victors” is one of the many cliches she invokes throughout her speeches. And she says that excludes various potential sources of knowledge like “indigenous” perspectives and practices, or women with their “emotional intelligence.”
But that’s not incompatible with the reality that “the truth” is real, is universal, and many aspects of it have been uniquely uncovered by Western thought, science, and technology. Even if you bought into Maher’s talking points about a “plurality of perspectives” being better than “one alone” for getting at “the truth,” the fact remains that it took 2,000 years of Western, Eurocentric, supposedly white supremacist, heteronormative, misogynist history for us to reach the point at which these minor tail-end improvements she’s suggesting could be made.
It took 2,000 years of history to create the civilization that Maher is now critiquing. And if she thinks this new approach will cause some kind of “scientific revolution,” it won’t. The more likely outcome is that it will destroy the civilization that was built over thousands of years. That is the point after all. And this is the essence of what we call wokeness. The Left likes to put conservatives on the spot by demanding a definition of “woke.” Well, here it is — the rejection of truth as a category. That’s what wokeness is, when boiled down to its most fundamental parts.
As for Maher, it’s tempting to dismiss all of this footage as the ramblings of a single woman who has no idea what she’s talking about. But it’s a bit more significant than that. Maher was selected to lead NPR, after an allegedly careful vetting process. There’s no way that NPR didn’t scrutinize her beliefs, which Maher has expressed many times over the last few years in public social media posts and numerous speeches.
On Twitter, Chris Rufo has exposed some of the more deranged posts from this woman. There are really too many to mention, but suffice it to say, she’s like a woke AI bot that churns out the least original woke liberal woman talking points you can possibly imagine. She uses the word “folx,” with the “x” at the end. She says “Latinx.” She called Donald Trump a racist and cried with joy when Biden took office, of course. She wrote that she once dreamed of going on a road trip with Kamala Harris eating “nuts and baklava.” She expresses her happiness when she logs into the public WiFi at a COVID clinic and the password is “HeSheThey,” recognizing the lived experience of nonbinary patients. She calls the Internet “sexist.”
At one point, she apologized for using the phrase “people who identify as women,” because it’s a form of “trans-erasure.” She writes about the importance of “transit justice” and vegetarian Thanksgiving, and rants about the “male gaze” and “late-stage capitalism,” even as she drew a salary of $800,000 a year. There are many more examples; Chris Rufo’s feed has categorized many of them.
To burnish her intellectual credentials even further, Maher even sat on a panel with Lizzo at a Ted conference where tickets cost more than $10,000. The name of Lizzos’ talk was, “The Black history of twerking — and how it taught me self-love.”
But Maher doesn’t need lessons on self-love, she has that covered. What she’s looking for now is power.
In a video posted by the Atlantic Council and unearthed by Rufo, Maher explains that the First Amendment — which you’d think journalists would support, since it’s the one thing keeping journalists out of prison — is not a sacred constitutional principle. Instead, she says, it’s a “challenge” to be overcome. Watch:
The only people who view the First Amendment as a “challenge” are government censors who want to shut down any dissent by force. And now that she’s running a state-funded media outlet, that’s exactly what Maher is. She’s a state-funded censor.
To that end, she no longer believes in transparency. The irony is that, when she was running Wikimedia, Maher kept talking about the importance of showing people everything that’s going on inside the company. Every edit on Wikipedia, she said, is public for a reason. Disclosure is sometimes “painful,” she said, but it’s necessary.
Transparency is key, she said at the time. But apparently this is one of the malleable “truths” that Katherine Maher has decided to discard. As you’ve probably heard, she just forced out an NPR whistleblower who wrote a damning column in the Free Press about the organization’s corruption and overwhelming bias. She suspended this 25-year veteran of NPR without pay because he pointed out that the organization is now completely one-sided.
For example, the whistleblower wrote:
Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. 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.
That’s not the kind of transparency that the new NPR CEO appreciates, apparently. She’s happy to talk about how NPR employs too many white men. But she definitely doesn’t want to talk about political bias, or how useless NPR has become. It used to be that NPR at least pretended to be embarrassed about this. In 2011, NPR’s CEO at the time, Vivian Schiller, resigned after a Project Veritas sting exposed what she thought about conservatives in the Tea Party movement. To summarize: she didn’t like them. Schiller had to resign once her views came to light. Back then, NPR believed that the appearance of fairness was at least a little important.
But that was the “Car Talk” era of NPR. Now they believe their CEO can categorically reject the idea that there’s any truth to report on. This is a belief system that’s now in vogue in newsrooms all over the country. It’s a big reason for the rise of transgenderism, COVID hysteria, and all the media’s lying we had to endure under the previous administration.
This is the belief system that insists that men can become women, because the meaning of the words “men” and “women” are subjective. And it will spell the end of Western civilization unless we reject it. That is, of course, the point of everything Katherine Maher is saying. In the absence of truth, there is only a struggle for power. And right now — and hopefully not for much longer — it’s people like Katherine Maher who have that power.