THE PUBLIC RADIO DUMPSTER FIRE RAGES.

Cold Spring Shops, Tuesday.  "When you make a neurotic Karen, er, Katherine, the manager, good things will NOT follow."  That post concluded, "We'll certainly call attention to further developments."

Further developments there surely were.  Washington Examiner columnist Conn Carroll crowned Katherine Maher "Queen of the Karens."

Sometimes, a person enters the public spotlight and is such an embodiment of an established stereotype that it seems impossible for him or her to be a real person. If Tom Wolfe wanted to capture the essence of arrogant, alienated progressivism, he would reject NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, as too unbelievably on point.

The daughter of wealthy parents whose wedding was announced in the New York Times, Maher grew up in a wealthy white suburb of New York City before studying at the American University in Cairo, the Institut français du Proche-Orient in Syria, and finally New York University.

I haven't decided, from a day or two of seeing her social media posts, whether she's the kind of Westchester neurotic who would boil a bunny, or maybe she's Buckwheat in whiteface.  Her biography, though, would be too on point even for Tom Wolfe.

She then got internships with the Council on Foreign Relations and Eurasia Group in London and Germany before landing a job in New York City at UNICEF. She had stops with the National Democratic Institute and the World Bank, among other global nonprofit groups, before rising to become the CEO of Wikimedia in 2019.

It would be impossible to create a resume of a person more disconnected from Americans and more intertwined with the wealthy, urban, globalist elite who run the largest banks, media companies, and nonprofit groups in the United States. In other words, Maher has the perfect resume to run NPR.

And her tweets prove she is the perfect person for the job.

When you get validated in all your prejudices by all the allegedly smart people, isn't that how things go?

She’s a vegetarian. She hates cars. And white men flying on planes. She supports race-based reparations, rioting, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She believes “America is addicted to white supremacy.”

She doesn’t want to become a mother because “the planet is literally burning.” She uses phrases such as “CIS white mobility privilege” unironically. She admits to growing up “feeling superior … because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves.”

Maybe she's feeling ashamed about growing up in New England among all those Mayflower descendants and being new money.  Anyone who has documented Mayflower descent has found civil records from the colonial and early Federal periods with Negroes either freed or bequeathed in the will.

But like other self-despising New Money types, she's full of herself.

Maher and others of her ilk aren't trying to inform Americans. They're trying to trap them in ignorance and indoctrinate them in Bureauspeak.

That's not free speech. That's fascism, definitionally, as a combine of government and centralized corporate power enforcing the whims of the ruling elite.

It's possible that, like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, she took too strong an interest in the wrong guy.

NPR deliberately suppressed any mention of the evidence and argument for a lab leak as the origin of the novel coronavirus, among other failings in its coverage. Rather than address these specific criticisms, most of which weren't even about Maher's leadership, Maher chose to conduct a public attack on [Uri] Berliner's character as a non sequitur distraction from NPR's failings.

Berliner chose today to become a former senior editor at NPR.

Red State's Sister Toldjah suggested that Mr Berliner is preparing the battle space post-resignation.  "As to where Berliner goes from here is anyone's guess, but I think it's safe to say he will not be going quietly into the night."  That's on Ed Morrissey's mind as well.

The mention of disparagement sounds like a saber rattling for an upcoming lawsuit. If nothing else about Maher gets NPR's attention, that might. And NRO's Jeff Blehar wondered last night if Berliner had set a deliberate trap for Maher, knowing it would be irresistible to the Right -- and maybe to the Queen of the Karens, who just blithely stepped into it.

That's surely not the behavior of a man who wants to spend more time building a model railroad or working on his chess game.  All mockery aside, the episode demonstrates, once again, Kurt Schlichter's point that Normals will let elites do elite things if they're competent.  How many more demonstrations  of their incompetence do we have to contend with?

Jeffrey's entirely justified chortling aside, this entire episode demonstrates the intellectual rigidity and determined ignorance of the censoring elite. Even when they admit that no one really knows anything, they are willing to impose a party line to extend that ignorance as long as it protects all the best elites. That's especially true in media circles, and even more so with government-funded media platforms like NPR.

Perhaps, dear reader, you find my contention that the use of tax funds for public broadcasting is censorship per se is extreme?  Might you be prepared to grant that the use of tax funds for public broadcasting is unproductive?