'Woke card' all punched
Lefty CEO really ticks every box
If there was a game called Woke Bingo, Katherine Maher, the controversial new CEO of National Public Radio, would win it every time.
Maher, who has only been on the job since March 25, is already at the center of a firestorm that began when veteran NPR reporter and editor Uri Berliner wrote a Free Press essay critical of the network’s increasingly hard-left bias.
Maher suspended Berliner without pay for five days; he responded by resigning Wednesday.
She’s now in the hot seat herself, both for what she’s said in the past and for how much her life resembles an almost too-on-the-nose script from someone like Lena Dunham.
A brownstone life
To begin with, she lives — where else — in progressive Park Slope in Brooklyn. Maher and her husband, lawyer Ashutosh Upreti, who wed in August 2023, bought their threebedroom brownstone for $2.7 million last fall.
Maher’s LinkedIn ticks off every possible far-left box: stints at Wikimedia, the World Economic Forum, Stanford University, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council and UNICEF, as well as forays into high finance at HSBC and the World Bank, prior to joining NPR in January.
The Elizabeth Warren fan’s X account reveals references calling Donald Trump a “deranged racist sociopath” and a dream in which Maher and Vice President Kamala Harris were “sampling and comparing nuts and baklava on roadside stands.”
Maher’s meet-cute with her husband, as described in a New York Times “Vows” column after their wedding, happened at a friend’s “interdenominational seder” in San Francisco’s Mission District in l2019.
The two later went out for drinks, with Maher mistakenly thinking that Upreti was angling for a job as counsel with Wikimedia.
Tony upbringing
Maher grew up in blue-chip Wilton, Conn. — one of three children of a commodities operations man, Gordon Roberts Maher, who called himself a “spiritual Parisian.”
Maher’s grandfather worked for IBM and “family lore contends he may or may not have been a postwar spy,” according to Gordon Roberts Maher’s 2020 obituary.
Conservatives have had a field day unearthing Maher’s vast archive of over-the-top neo-Marxist tweets and a now infamous TED Talk in which she said that a “reverence for the truth” is a “distraction.”
“Perhaps for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth and seeking to convince others of the truth, might not be the right place to start,” Maher said during the TED Talk. “In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
Conservative activist and commentator Christopher F. Rufo culled the X archive of Maher’s 29,400 tweets in an essay, “Quotations from Chairman Maher,” published on his website Wednesday.
“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,” Rufo wrote.