An insight into the illiberal ideologues now running America’s major institutions.

Andrew Sullivan

Apr 19, 2024

I used to be quite fond of NPR. Each time I’d tune in, I’d be treated to calm, reassuring voices, occasional folk music and high-minded liberalism. Yes, it was biased — but in a tolerable, occasionally hilarious way, still relaying facts about the world, occasionally even letting an always-qualified “conservative” voice on its airwaves. Yes, we used to refer to “All Things Considered” as “All Things Distorted,” but it was a tease, not an indictment.

And so when I read the NYT story about the new NPR CEO, Katherine Maher, being criticized for past tweets that were “embracing liberal causes,” it felt like a blast of ‘90s nostalgia. Who running the MSM doesn’t “embrace liberal causes”? Ditto the WSJ’s description: that the tweets “indicate liberal leanings.” Or the Washington Post, which wrote that Maher’s tweets included calling Tump a “deranged racist” and a photo of her “wearing a Biden hat, or wistfully daydreaming about hanging out with Kamala D. Harris.”

Nothing to see here. Nothing new. Just a liberal CEO getting blasted by a far-right activist (in this case, Chris Rufo), after an NPR stalwart, Uri Berliner, wrote a public critique of NPR. A tale as old as the MSM.

But of course, the MSM is lying — by obfuscating Maher’s politics and her tweets to make her views seem far milder than they are. She is not, in fact, a liberal of any kind. She is — as the tweets and the record prove — a near-parody of an illiberal leftist, dedicated to replacing open and free debate with benign censorship, and to constructing a journalistic regime rooted not in the pursuit of truth but in the urgent task of dismantling “white supremacy.”

She tweeted “white silence is complicity” in June 2020. She went after James Bennet for “platforming” Tom Cotton. She’s frustrated by the robustness of the First Amendment. She refers to her “cis white mobility privilege.” She chided Hillary for saying “‘boy and girl’ — it’s erasing language for non-binary people.” She even self-flagellates over her own “trans-erasure.” She is Titania McGrath — Andrew Doyles’ comic Twitter parody of a deranged SJW. Literally. Matt Taibbi — peace be upon him — has a delicious side-by-side comparison.

All of this, of course, is precisely why Maher was selected to be NPR’s CEO, just as Claudine Gay was picked to run Harvard. Maher’s predecessor, John Lansing, was clear about the recent change in NPR’s mission: “When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism, we can be agents of change.” In 2020, he said:

The leaders in public media — starting with me — must be aware of how we ourselves have benefitted from white privilege in our careers. … And we must commit ourselves — body and soul — to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions. We must do all this not as a ‘project’, not as an extracurricular activity, we must do this because, by definition, it is our work.

If you want to understand why NPR is now cringe, look no further. If you want to understand why social justice is best understood as a religious cult, ditto. Body and soul? The journalist sounds like a revivalist.

Maher’s tweets perfectly define our new cultural overlords. And I’m not just talking about tweets like this typical one, as cities burned and countless small businesses were destroyed in the mayhem of the summer of 2020:

I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. 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. Also, reporting on extinguished shoe store fires is just lazy reporting. … Cheesecakes are insured; the right to be black and breathe is without measure.

Maher’s full tweetage is a deep dive into the successor ideology. First and foremost, it means an end to the Enlightenment idea of empirical truth, discoverable by a curious human being, regardless of his or her identity. This idea is, in fact, a “white male Westernized construct,” as Maher once explained in an interview. “Seeking the truth, and seeking to convince others of the truth, might not be the right place to start,” Maher argued in her TED talk. “In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction … We all have different truths. They’re based on things like: where we come from, how we were raised, and how other people perceive us.”

That’s why, in Maher’s woke mind, you have to start not with an individual but with an identity. A white reporter is not interchangeable with a black reporter, or a female reporter with a male reporter, and only black reporters know the truth about race, just as only “nonbinary” or trans people can speak about gender. There is no objective truth; there are only narratives based on unfalsifiable “lived experiences”; and the job of NPR is to elevate the narratives that help dismantle the racist, heterosexist, patriarchal, transphobic regime of “whiteness” — and suppress those that don’t.

Those, like Ezra Klein on Threads and Kara Swisher on the Dishcast this week, who argue that the CEO has no editorial input, have to acknowledge that the content of NPR has obviously changed — exactly along the lines laid out by the last CEO and championed by the new one. They have to acknowledge that the last CEO argued that dismantling whiteness was, “by definition, our work.” Maher is aligned with the new NPR formula.

And that formula is why the hiring, firing and promotion practices at NPR are now primarily about race and sex and gender identity, and why NPR even catalogues the race and sex of every source in every story. The journalists themselves are siloed into identity groups at NPR. Among them:

MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (Black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

This marination in identity politics, now common in the MSM, changes people. It makes journalists representatives of various groups, which helps explain why, in covering social issues, the MSM now takes its terms and language directly from outside activists. And that’s how the content of journalism gets shaped internally: by minority journalists and “allies” on staff calling out any deviation from the correct narratives, and always demonizing the author as a racist, sexist, transphobe and the rest. Which is, of course, not just unpleasant, but career death. And so the bubble tightens.

No surprise then that Maher’s own response to Berliner reflexively called him a racist: “Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.” Code Switch, the critical race theory show on NPR, responded to Berliner’s critique thus:

[S]ome humble advice from someone who’s spent the last 15 years studying the dynamics of racism: Don’t get thrown off by the smoke and mirrors. Instead, when someone says they’re ‘just asking questions,’ think long and hard about whether those questions ever needed answering to begin with.

The writer targeted Berliner’s view that no one at NPR ever even questioned the idea that “systemic racism” was a fact in America in 2024. The response:

In regard to the question posed by the essay: We know that systemic racism exists.

Not my italics. But that merely confirms Berliner’s point, does it not? Ditto for a rambling essay in Slate, which argued that NPR wasn’t woke, but finds “the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought.” But, as Taibbi noted, isn’t that precisely what Berliner was saying: that at NPR, elite ideology is passed off as empirical truth? Katie Herzog, a lifelong NPR listener, explains:

It doesn’t bother me that NPR talks about race. It bothers me than NPR talks about race to the exclusion of everything else, and that they have one acceptable narrative about race that no one ever deviates from. … They’re so entrenched in their worldview that they don’t even see that they have a worldview.

Berliner, a lone public voice of dissent, quit NPR this week after 25 years. As Jeryl Bier quipped, “NPR, under fire for tolerating only left-leaning viewpoints, suspends editor who wrote an article criticizing NPR for tolerating only left-leaning viewpoints.” No one came to his defense. Why would they? Berliner wrote in his resignation, “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new C.E.O.”

The point I have been trying to make for years now is that wokeness is not some racier version of liberalism, merely seeking to be kinder and more inclusive. It is, in fact, directly hostile to liberal values; it subordinates truth to ideology; it judges people not by their ability but by their identity; and it regards ideological diversity as a mere dog-whistle for bigotry. Maher has publicly and repeatedly avowed support for this very illiberalism. If people with these views run liberal institutions, the institutions will not — cannot — remain liberal for very long. And they haven’t. Elite universities are turning into madrassas, and media is turning into propaganda.

Yes, Fox News is worse. The right-leaning media, apart from the WSJ, is woefully lacking in solid reporting and sober argument. But that’s why it matters that the big fish remain liberal. And it’s one thing when propaganda pervades private institutions, but at NPR, you and I are also subsidizing it with our tax dollars. I fail to see how that is in any way fair or sustainable — for its listeners or donors.

NPR’s biggest staff cuts since the Great Recession and its rapid decline in listenership — while radio and podcasts are booming everywhere else — are telling us something. It’s just something that the smug fanatics now running the place don’t want to hear.

New On The Dishcast: Kara Swisher

Kara is a journalist who has covered the business of the Internet since 1994. She was the cofounder and editor-at-large of Recode, and she’s worked for the NYT, the WaPo, and the WSJ. She’s now the host of the podcast “On with Kara Swisher” and the co-host of the “Pivot” podcast with Scott Galloway, both distributed by New York Magazine. Her new memoir is Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. It’s a fun read, and it was good to hang out with her again after many years. We were both web pioneers and it’s good to remember those days of the blogosphere. And we get fiery at times.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — debating how woke the MSM really is, and how readers are smarter than journalists. (Money quote from Kara: “I feel like a conservative at NPR events, and I’m a lesbian from San Francisco.”) That link also takes you to listener debate over the episodes with Eli Lake on Israel, Richard Dawkins on religion, and Christian Wiman on suffering. And some lighter fare at the end — on Truman and two gay comedians.

The Deafening Silence

A short note on the MSM coverage of last week’s publication of the Cass Report — the most comprehensive review of all the scientific evidence around the sex reassignment of children. There was barely any. Nada at CNN. Zippo by the Washington Post. NPR — surprise! — ignored it. So did NBC, which covers trans issues obsessively, and CBS.

The transqueer groups who’ve backed transing children with gender dysphoria — primarily HRC and GLAAD — have also said nothing on their websites. GLAAD was the group that brought a van with the words “The Science Is Settled” to intimidate the NYT into not covering the issue. You might think they’d say something, now that a definitive study has shown the science is anything but settled. But nah.

The New York Times ran a real story; so did the WSJ; David Brooks has a piece today praising the fairness and compassion of the Cass Repot; and the Washington Post, despite its news division, published a remarkable op-ed by a gay detransitioner, reflecting on how his own internalized homophobia had led him astray under the guidance of the trans industry. That’s the first time I’ve read in the MSM how transing children is putting countless gay kids at terrible risk — a vital point, deliberately obscured by formerly gay rights groups that have now gone fully trans. So there’s hope in the wilderness. But not much.

Heads Up

Chris and I are taking a spring break next week. I just arrived in England to visit family and friends (and some bluebells), and Chris is traveling to Oregon to visit family for his birthday. So see you the Friday after next.

Money Quotes For The Week

“I won’t tolerate that. I won’t have any jurors intimidated in this courtroom,” – Judge Juan Merchan to Trump after he made comments and gestures during the questioning of one juror.

“There was no insurrection. That is a left/media talking point. It was a riot, yes. It was not an insurrection. Those who believe this don’t actually care about the truth though,” – Erick Erickson this week.

“This was insurrectionist, and it was inspired by the President of the United States — I don’t care about your damn feelings this morning. … [Trump] encouraged people to storm the United States Capitol to stop a democratic election after lying [about it] for two months” – Erickson on January 7, 2021.

“Harvard has literally named someone who is rabidly anti-merit to serve as president of the Harvard Board of Overseers. This is a terrible moment for Harvard and for academic excellence and fairness. Anti-racism is actually still racism,” – Garry Tan on Vivian Hunt.

“It is difficult to imagine the world in the year 2000, by which time versatile microprocessors are likely to be as common as simple calculators are today. [This will lead to] the probable reduction of human contact…. In such a dehumanized society, the fellowship of the local church will become increasingly important — whose members meet one another, and listen and talk to one another in person rather than on screen. In this human context of mutual love, the speaking and hearing of the Word of God is also likely to become more necessary for the preservation of our humanness, not less,” – John Stott in 1982.

Dissents Of The Week

A reader writes:

Big Trans? Dear me. Forget about the culture war for a moment and think critically about the conspiracy theory that a trillion dollar global industry has decided to maximize its profits by trying to increase sales of generic drugs to a group that historically made up less than 0.5% of the population and now, after decades of relentless propaganda designed solely to juice the market, might just be pushing 1%. The VP of Sinister Schemes would be laughed out of the boardroom with such a weak pitch. It’s patently absurd.

As is the “patient for life” myth. I’m a 20-year, post-op trans person. I am not taking hormones or any other medications, and I have not done so for almost a decade. I am fit and healthy and medically unremarkable. Amazingly, trans people are just like anyone else: some of us take medication and some of us don’t. It’s entirely uncontroversial to reduce HRT with age, in line with the risks. Please don’t perpetuate the notion that trans healthcare is some kind of radical experiment, as if we only popped into existence a decade ago.

There is no conspiracy, and I never said there was one. There is simply an incentive for the medical and pharma industries to ignore the lack of any solid scientific proof for the effectiveness of sex reassignment for children, disproportionately gay ones, and treat them. That may shift as the malpractice lawsuits mount — as they surely will. On the second point, my reader is right. Trans healthcare for adults is indeed established, and I support it wholeheartedly. And yes it isn’t for life for everyone, strictly speaking. But it’s often a long dependence. My concern with sex reassignment is entirely about children.

Another dissent:

Your statements condemning puberty blockers and other gender-affirming care go far beyond the Cass Report, which doesn’t actually say these treatments are universally wrong. It says we don’t know enough about them to use them as readily and as widely as we do, which isn’t the same thing. The report calls for more caution until there are more studies, and in fact, there will still be clinical trials of puberty blockers for young trans people. More stringent guidelines will be applied, but the science of this could still ultimately come out to support their use in the long run, depending on the evidence.

You only talk about the political pressure applied by the pro-treatment groups, which has been relentless and bullying, but the Cass report actually talks about the pressure coming at professionals from both sides. It calls for the end of polarization and the application of reason and science, not for people’s heads. I’m so tired of this divisive approach, where it seems it isn’t enough to disagree with someone; you must also condemn them morally for disagreeing with you and ascribe to them sinister motives. There may be individuals who deserve that, but mostly I think people just get things wrong because they’re human and the modern world is a complicated, confusing place.

Two things: I haven’t “condemned” puberty blockers. I’ve noted the lack of any evidence to support their use, and the fact that they are irreversible in effect. I agree too that some of the far-right transphobia has been sickening. But the people pushing the envelope are from the woke left. They are abusive, violent and foul-mouthed.

As always, keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Mental Health Break

When a giant iguana is man’s best friend:

Yglesias Award Nominee

“The Bee is not betraying anyone by making jokes about Republicans. In fact, we’d be betraying our own principles if we weren’t willing to. If you don’t get that, then you don’t understand satire. The hypersensitivity and insecurity on the right these days is just embarrassing,” – Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee.

In The ‘Stacks

• Bob Wright discusses why the pwned attack from Iran helps Israel. They should take the win and not retaliate. “Iran’s attack could be replicated by China against Taiwan,” warns Stephen Bryen.
• Blocking a ballistic missile has come a long way.
• Did you know dolphins are serving in the Ukraine war?
• Joe Klein on the Gettysburg address from Trump: “It’s always American Carnage, even with a plummeting crime rate.” Noah Smith has more good news — on wages, climate change, etc.
• Is the gun-show loophole really gone?
• The nanny state in the UK grows stronger after the smoking ban sails through the Commons.
• Have you heard about Tickle v. Giggle, the new trans case out of Australia? Enjoy.
• Louise Perry interviews Hannah Barnes on the Cass Report. Here’s a fact-check of the critics.
• How to measure anti-Semitism?
• Should we implement a Genius Basic Income?
• A personal look at how “DEI screws black math nerds over.”
• Loury and McWhorter ask, “When is racial stereotyping acceptable?”
• The “Sex at Dawn guy” lists the reasons not to be non-monogamous — and tackles dissent from readers.

The View From Your Window Contest

Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.

See you on May 3rd.