“[Tech] products and the global problems they seek to solve are more often than not based on those in the rooms making the decisions, and we know that the majority of those in the room default to predominately people of the Western world, predominantly male, and mostly white.” — Katherine Maher at the Oxford Union Society, 2018

This week, on the heels of a whistleblower piece published at the Free Press, Katherine Maher, the new head of NPR, is under fire. Journalists and activists like Christopher Rufo have resurfaced her long history of making public, inflammatory statements about her political and ideological enemies, and what’s emerged is a picture of a far-left ideologue who conforms, almost exactly, to the archetype of a social justice warrior: she’s branded former President Trump a “deranged racist sociopath,” called the First Amendment “the number one challenge” in the fight against “disinformation,” and supported censorship to “eliminate” content she deems “racist, misogynist, transphobic” or otherwise discriminatory.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, what has also resurfaced is Maher’s consistent track record of characterizing Silicon Valley as, in one way or another, a net negative for society.

Maher laid out this position most coherently in a February 2018 speech before the Oxford Union, where she argued in support of a motion that “the rise of tech empires threatens society.” Though she concedes that tech products themselves are not necessarily the problem, quipping about her affinity for Google Docs and arguing elsewhere that we should be optimistic about AI’s upside economic opportunity, she contends the structure of major tech companies — most of which are headquartered in America and publicly traded — makes them a societal net-negative. In part, this is because their scale makes them difficult to regulate, she says, but mainly it is because they are dominated by Westerners who are “predominantly male, and mostly white.” To this end, Maher cited “voice recognition software that struggles with the accents of non-native English speakers,” algorithms that don’t recognize darker skin tones, and “the allocation of bioengineering research to wealthier, whiter research subjects” as evidence that, in the tech world, “harassment is not a design priority” and “racism can be encoded at scale.” The question to consider when evaluating America’s tech companies, per Maher, is not whether they provide good jobs or increase GDP, but rather whether we’re willing to accept convenience at the expense of institutional integrity — “personal ease” for “the erasure of marginalized and minority groups,” in her words. “I, for one, am not,” she declared.

On her personal Twitter, Maher has repeatedly insinuated tech leaders exclude and exploit women and racial minorities, and has at times retweeted bizarre, conspiratorial takes on tech news, such as when she reposted a tweet calling Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X) “a white man haphazardly strip-min[ing] an app built and popularized by people of color and activists.” Or when she put the Ku Klux Klan in the same category as VC firm Founders Fund. Replying to a tweet about Hereticon, a Founders Fund conference promoting dissent, she likened its promotional image — a 1950s-era snapshot of a crowd of conformists — to the Ku Klux Klan, saying, “A room full of masked white people seems about on brand.”

The list goes on. During the OpenAI coup in November, she took aim at the company’s board on the grounds it did not have “a single women or person of color.” In 2020, likely animated by the Floyd riots, she argued with Balaji Srinivasan that the “real issue” driving “misinformation” was that “America is addicted to white supremacy.” (She also suggested Srinivasan and “VC Twitter” more broadly would ignore her response because she is a woman; according to Maher, “Is the internet sexist? Yup.”) Last March, she posted that tech companies mandating employees return to offices represents the “barely concealed desire” of “cranky white dude CEOs” to “return to pre-organized labor levels of exploitation."

Maher’s now widely reported contempt for her political opponents is enough to raise misgivings about her suitability as head of a taxpayer-funded national media organization. But her clear disdain — both personal and philosophical — for those at the forefront of tech rounds out her position as a cartoonishly prototypical member of the leftist professional managerial class. Is someone who’s openly opposed to one of our country's most competitive advantages, and who derides her political opponents as sociopaths, really the best option to lead our National Public Radio? Is this what the American taxpayer deserves?

— Sanjana Friedman