April 17, 2024

URI BERLINER BURNED HIS BRIDGES AT NPR, THEN SET THE HOUSE ABLAZE:

In a profession where journalists and pundits read these sorts of big dishy insider pieces differently than normal folks do — searching for hidden implications, listening for dog whistles, and frankly sometimes wearing tinfoil hats — that paragraph instantly sounded a blaring klaxon. “PLEASE TAKE NOTE OF THIS INCOMING BOSS WHO I WILL MENTION BY NAME AND WHO I MIGHT ADD LACKS ANY JOURNALISTIC BACKGROUND WHATSOEVER.”

And, mother of God, look what turned up once people like Christopher Rufo did just that. You see, it turns out that Katherine Maher is no ordinary ascendant progressive media executive. No, this woman’s social-media history reveals her to be the Kwisatz Haderach of white wokeness, presumably bred through generations of careful genetic selection to be the supernaturally perfect embodiment of Affluent White Female Liberalism. (As many have noted, she not only acts but looks like Titania McGrath.) It’s vaguely unreal: If there was a trendy progressive take floating around on Twitter and popular within media circles, then you can reliably bet she was there to voice it in the most preeningly insulting way possible.

I cannot possibly do justice to the comical depth and breadth of her posting history. (Matt Taibbi has a fun summary here, framed as a journey through the American holiday calendar with NPR’s incoming CEO.) This is a woman who loudly condemns her own “cis white mobility privilege,” and I’m still not sure whether she’s referring to her ability to quickly change jobs or her ability to roll out of bed in the morning. Maher is so cringe-inducingly woke that she almost reads like an intentionally cruel parody of wokeness from beyond the uncanny valley — as if she were tweeting in the progressive equivalent of blackface, her endless ultra-orthodoxy an act of desperate, sweaty-palmed minstrelsy. I prefer an empathetic take myself: Don’t hate the player, hate the game. As a rich white heterosexual woman from Connecticut in a world of brutally cutthroat media identity politics, she needs to give a truly committed performance at all times simply in order to survive.

Do you think Uri Berliner was unaware of any of this? Do you think he failed to do research on the background of the new CEO before he gave her a shout-out by name at the end of a piece savaging NPR’s decaying ethical culture? I don’t. He might as well have wished her luck with a capital “F.” He had to be aware of what would happen when he shot a giant signal flare into the air at the end of a piece like this: People like me would notice, and soon investigators would come a-calling. He basically scripted his own one-act play: Waiting for Rufo. As it draws to its climax, I am left with one overwhelming question: Why on earth are American taxpayers footing the bill for any of this, again?

Excellent question. In the meantime – at least before Maher locks down or deletes her Twitter account – Rufo’s Twitter feed is currently full of Maher’s Titania McGrath-style woke performance art over the past decade.

Saul Alinsky smiles: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage…Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it:”


UPDATE:

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll