NPR’s president and CEO Katherine Maher made headlines after NPR punished journalist Uri Berliner for exposing the network’s leftist bias … and then for her past outrageous statements about free speech. But is she even more nefarious than we thought? Blaze News staff writer Joseph MacKinnon joins Glenn to explain the theory that she is also a government asset: “From 30,000 feet, she looks like not just a tech-savvy media queen, but someone who spent a lot of time around color revolutions.” Glenn and Joseph run through Maher’s odd history of visiting nations that the CIA has helped overthrow and speculate whether she’s part of a plan to stage a color revolution in America as well. But whether she’s a CIA asset or not, MacKinnon argues, one thing is clear: “She might as well have been.”
TranscriptBelow is a rush transcript that may contain errors
GLENN: I want to go over this NPR boss. Which was, you know, kind of funny, at the beginning.
And then the more you learn about it. The more you're like, well, hang on just a second. Because she would be a -- a very important tool in the hands of the government. And she's being paid, by National Public Radio. So she's being -- she is a tool of the government, in many ways.
Can she separate herself, from her own personal beliefs?
Or is that even wanted at nonprofit? We wanted to bring in Joe MacKinnon. Joe is a Blaze News Staff Writer. And she's been following up on this. Joe, take us from the beginning. From the -- the -- the whistle-blower, if you will.
All the way to Christopher Rufo. And then let's pick it up from there. So can you tell us the beginning of it, Joe?
BIDEN: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. So Uri Berliner earlier this month. Had this damning exposé, in the free press, April 9th.
He goes after NPR, after having worked there for a quarter of a century, as a senior business editor. There's zero diversity, particularly after the former CEO had made it an activist organization.
And that allied it effectively with the Democratic Party.
This is a publication according to Berliner, that didn't want to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story.
That worked with Adam Schiff to push the Russian collusion hoax.
So he goes to town, on NPR. And draws the ire of someone who has not been on a lot of people's radar. That's Katherine Maher. Or Maher, I should say. So Maher comes up with this long response, and effectively cusses him out. In more charitable terms. And he subsequently, he is offended. And then he resigns. So people start looking into Maher after -- after this. Because she was with Wikipedia before.
But I guess, flew under the radar. For a lot. Particularly on the right. Or those -- among those who are critical of the government.
And at first blush, she looks just like another shrill left partisanship she has the obligatory photo. Wearing the Biden campaign hat.
She has an unhealthy obsession with race. That photo exists. The tweet speaks for itself. And you keep digging as Rufo has. And you realize, really quickly, that there's something going on here.
From 30,000 feet, she looks like not just a tech savvy media queen. But someone who spent a lot of time around Colour Revolutions and the orient, enough to know how they might be replicated.
GLENN: Okay. So hang on just a second.
The campuses and boardrooms are full of leftists. But you're saying, and Christopher Rufo is saying, she is not your ordinary leftist.
She has been around Colour Revolutions. What does that mean, she's been around Colour Revolutions.
JOE: Okay. One of the many interesting posts she's had. I should note at the outset here, she's a World Economic Forum, World Global leader.
She's worked with the World Bank. She's worked with various NGOs that are in the tech, coms, and, well, foreign policy space.
So around 2010, 2011. And Rufo chronicled her travel itinerary. She's with the National Democratic Institute. And that's a spin-off of the National Endowment for Democracy, committed to -- yeah. Exactly.
You know where I'm going with this. This is an organization that tries to transition, unwilling regimes to become liberal democracies.
GLENN: Can I redefine that a little bit?
It's a CIA front.
JOE: Well, Mike Benz -- he was in the Trump administration at the State Department. He said, exactly that. He said, to carve out for the CIA. And other people have said just as much.
In fact, I think it was Ron Dixon, at the New York Times, back when, he said the NBI was actively fomenting protests during the so-called Arab spring.
GLENN: Uh-huh. We -- we know this. I exposed that, when we were at Fox.
We've known that from the beginning. It didn't take a brain surgeon to figure this out.
Then, when you go into Ukraine, and see what they were doing and the phrases that they were using. Saying, you know, we can -- we can spread this now. We kind of perfected it. In the Middle East. And we can spread it. And that's exactly what we were doing, in Ukraine.
JOE: Well, precisely, Ukraine. Libya. Egypt. Yemen. Tunisia. And so she's kind of been on a pilgrimage to these toppled regimes. And in some cases, as they're falling.
So Rufo notes, that she goes to Tunisia a couple times. She goes to Gedden (phonetic) in Southern Turkey. Just as rebels are making inroads, along the highway between Damascus and I believe it's Aleppo. And she actually said, not a long time ago. She framed the timing differently. She said in the aftermath of the revolution, she was doing research on the ground. With, quote, unquote, human rights activists.
And independent journalists.
And so she -- she is with the NBI. She's going to Tunisia. And she raises a couple of alarm bells. There's this Tunisian cabinet official. And, well, he basically -- he straight-up said, it's a likely case, that she works for a certainty letter agency. And a lot of people have been speculating about that in recent weeks.
GLENN: So what is her -- what is her background in broadcast? And news?
JOE: Well, she deals a lot with -- in terms of news, she's been critical of the ways that governments have weaponized their state broadcasters. Which I think --
GLENN: Right. Yeah. Yes. But what is she -- does she have a background in -- in news?
Is she a journalist.
Is she -- I mean, why is she -- I see she's traveled the world. That she's with the World Bank. And the WEF. And she's been with NGOs. And she's been around revolutions. But that doesn't necessarily scream CEO of NPR.
JOE: Well, I think Wikipedia, where she ran the show for, for several years.
GLENN: Oh.
JOE: Yeah.
And it was under her reign, that it quickly became clear that this was -- well, supposed to be a repository for human knowledge. Right?
GLENN: Right. It's not.
JOE: Recently you talked about how memory is the key to where we are. Well, Wikipedia is instrumental to capturing and curating that memory for a lot of people. So she may not be a journalist. But she was very much, I don't want to suggest there's a causation, she pretends that the Wikipedia editors who are working on their own.
But while she's in control, there's very much a narrative curation going on. A kind that you might want, at taxpayer funded broadcasts --
GLENN: Gosh. Jeez.
Okay. So the rumor that she's with CIA. Where did that originate?
JOE: So I mentioned, she went to Tunisia a couple times, right?
GLENN: Right.
JOE: So this cabinet official. I think I'm pronouncing that right.
But Slim Amamou. I think I'm pronouncing that right. But Slim said in 2016, it's a bit of a retrospective.
He's looking back. And I believe it's around the time. She's getting a promotion over at Wikipedia. He straight-up says, she's probably CIA.
He's not mincing words. He says, she's come over under different affiliations. With World Bank.
With USAID. And he suggests. And this is going on Twitter.
Still called that.
He suggests that she may as well have had CIA written on her front.
So Slim was in the transitional government.
He dropped out to protest, so-called. And he -- you know, not entirely, the top of the food chain. But someone you might at least want to hear out.
And so she is prickled by the suggestion.
She responds saying, I am no sort of agent. You can dislike me, but please don't tie me.
But then, that brought even more scrutiny.
Because people took notice of the way she framed that response.
So Christina Pushaw. She's on the DeSantis team. She said, for instance, okay. You may not have been an agent, but you could have just as well have been an asset.
GLENN: Yeah.
JOE: But the CIA element, I think, you know, I haven't seen any incontrovertible proof.
It's also largely immature.
She's also directly worked with the Biden administration.
She's worked with and brushed shoulders with all these regime change groups. So whether or not she has CIA on the card, somewhere, tucked into her desk.
She may as well have been.
GLENN: And this is -- this is part of the group, that -- I mean, Hillary Clinton, that infamous clip, where she said, we came, we saw, and died.
And laughed about it.
I think who she was talking about, at the time.
Might have been Samantha Power. Who is Cass Sunstein's wife. Author of nudge.
And somebody, who knows how to nudge people into new positions.
But Sam now works at USAID. She's the head of USAID.
So if you have the head of NPR, also working with Samantha Power, at USAID. That is also a CIA front.
JOE: Oh, absolutely. And I think it was Michael Waller and Rufo. She's a national security analyst. And he said, he drew that same connection with power.
And intimated said that Maher is part of his revolutionary vanguard movement.
So, you know, they're all in bed together. By the looks of it, I should say.
I don't want a mean tweet. And then, you couple this, with her public comments. And then, it lends even more gravity to this -- well, her becoming the head of NPR. Which was --
GLENN: Give me some of her -- give me some of her public comments, that I may not know.
JOE: Okay. Well, and I did a little bit of a -- a lot of these already are circulating.
GLENN: Uh-huh.
JOE: But Donald Trump -- so, you know, for instance, in 2021 interview, and this one caught a lot of people's attention in recent days.
She described the First Amendment as the top challenge in the fight against disinformation.
So the challenge -- yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It's a challenge, because, quote, it's a little bit tricky to really address some of the real challenges of where, does that information come from? Sort of the influence peddlers who made a real market economy around it.
And, by the way, when she's talking about disinformation. She means skepticism of COVID-19 vaccines.
GLENN: Right.
JOE: Which will lead it to the show. Which was mentioned, that --
GLENN: Correct.
JOE: Devastating impact. Well, so is disinformation, according to the former head of Wikipedia. She also learned that it won't fly for her.
So an Atlantic Council 2021 event, she says Wikipedia isn't a free expression platform.
And so that -- a lot of people are wondering why. And she suggests, and I created content that people can add confidence to.
That they can make determinations in their right. So in that right, they have access to high integrity content, often sort of trumps the right to free speech.
Now, pair that with the fact that she suggests, straight out, in a TED talk, that, quote, a reverence for the truth, might be a distraction.
And it's getting in the way of finding common ground for getting things country. So I don't know who that common ground belongs to, by the way.
But it's certainly not the people.
GLENN: Yeah. That's a fantastic. Okay.
I'm going to come back. Let me take one minute to break for a sponsor.
And then I want to come back. And then I want to ask you.
So if she was a tool, even a little bit in Colour Revolution.
What is the fear that she could do? Or what is the impact she could have here in America? By being the CEO of nonprofit?
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So we're talking to Joe MacKinnon, who has written extensively for TheBlaze news.
You can go to Blaze.com. And find his work on NPR's CEO, who is looking to be far worse than what anybody thought she was. We just thought she was a crazy liberal. Or progressive.
But she seems to be. Possibly much more than that. Including, possibly working with the CIA.
But she -- she spent a lot of time around Colour Revolutions. We'll talk about that. Coming up in the next break.
But I just wanted to ask you, Joe, before you go. What is the impact, if this is true, that she could have with NPR at her disposal?
JOE: NPR has long been a joke. It's ineffective. Its viewership has dwindled immensely. She's shrewd. She's effective. This is an individual who had people believing that cultural Marxism is a far right conspiracy theory, when she was running with them.
And all the insights she's gleaned, when she was doing her, again, pilgrimage of farm state. And her understanding that capture of a state broadcaster could ultimately mean capture of the state.
Means that nonprofit is a weapon in her hands.
Potentially a weapon in her hands. There's over a thousand stations broadcasting at NPR programming. There's thousands of employees.
A bunch of bureaus across the country.
Now, I don't think they're going to do business as usual.
In fact, she's telegraphed that there's going to be a transformation behind the scenes. Nonprofit was already a leftist propaganda element.
Now I think it's going to be used, to foment. Or at the very least control.
The protests. And to at least have the power to weaponize various groups across the nation.
Send your marching orders, essentially out via NPR.
So Wikipedia -- and I'm surprised you left Wikipedia honestly. I think that's a more consequential place.
Wikipedia controls the past. And therefore, controls the future.
GLENN: Yes. Right.
JOE: I think NPR under her helm, I think the game, anyway, is controlling the present.
GLENN: Joseph MacKinnon, from theBlaze.com.