If Katherine Maher isn’t in the market for a crisis PR professional already, she should be. The new NPR CEO, who took over at the taxpayer-funded radio station in January, has spent the past month lurching from one bad news cycle to another. Christopher Rufo, the Right’s activist-organizer par excellence, has her squarely in his crosshairs. Elon Musk does too. Powerful legacy media outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post have begun to take notice. Conservatives smell blood in the water; the right-wing internet has spent the past week gleefully digging through all of Maher’s old posts — and for good reason.

Maher’s month-long journey from an obscure, standard-issue managerial-class apparatchik to the butt of a national joke began earlier this month, when a veteran NPR editor published a bombshell exposé in the Free Press titled: “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” The editor, Uri Berliner, is no conservative — in the piece, he describes himself as “an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite” who “drive[s] a Subaru” and “eagerly voted against Trump twice.” But Berliner’s essay describes an NPR newsroom in which employees explicitly view themselves as activists rather than journalists and use their platform — funded by U.S. tax dollars — to advance “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”

The NPR Berliner describes has become a kind of government-funded propaganda outlet, an American Pravda. “An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR,” Berliner writes. “[W]hat’s notable,” he later adds, “is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.”

Soon after publishing the essay, Berliner was promptly suspended without pay, with NPR itself reporting that his essay “angered many of his colleagues.” (Maher told the outlet that he had “tried repeatedly to make his concerns over NPR’s coverage known to news leaders and to Maher’s predecessor as chief executive before publishing his essay”). Today, he officially resigned.

But Berliner’s essay had already set in motion a chain of events that would put Maher — and, eventually, all of NPR — in the hot seat. Maher’s social media posts reveal a woman who is not only a fierce partisan of the Democratic Party but an out-and-out radical, expressing an almost parodically absurd version of the elite college-campus-style ideological tendencies that have consumed America’s governing institutions over the course of the past decade:

NPR's new CEO is just as insane as you'd expect her to be pic.twitter.com/BDob66lNne

— Nate Hochman (@njhochman) April 14, 2024

What is perhaps most notable about Maher’s radicalism is how utterly conventional it is. While her posts may be exceptionally risible, her views are par for the course in most of America’s elite institutions — in many cases, they are the price of entry. Maher herself sports impeccable elite credentials: Prior to NPR, she served as CEO and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia. According to a 2021 biography, Maher was also “a fellow at the Truman National Security Project,” has written for outlets such as Foreign Policy, the Atlantic, and the Guardian,” and serves as “a member of the Advisory Council of the Open Technology Fund and the board of the Sunlight Foundation.”

These are the people who run our country. Maher’s only distinction is that she was marginally clumsier about concealing or soft-pedaling her ideas in the public eye.

This may come as a surprise to many elected Republicans, who have happily forked over government check after government check to institutions like NPR, but we are not actually obligated to fund people and organizations that hate us. The problem is that we do — to the tune of billions of dollars. This goes well beyond both Maher and NPR: An entire ecosystem of powerful left-wing activist groups, NGOs, and nonprofits is sustained by tax dollars, often with the (conscious or unconscious) assent of the congressional GOP. As Indiana Rep. Jim Banks noted in the American Mind last year:

The Claremont Institute has tracked federal funding for leftist institutions and activities since 2016, which amounts to over $3 billion taxpayer dollars. This money is spent not only to spread anti-American doctrines which will tear the nation apart; it also funds a class of activists, paying their salaries so they can be a perpetual revolutionary class.

Astonishingly, Congress sent more funding to woke institutions and activities in 2017 and 2018, when Republicans controlled both chambers, than it did in 2019 and 2020 with Nancy Pelosi in the Speaker’s chair. This Congress, we should aim to eliminate all such funding.

If Republicans in Congress are interested in actually doing something for once, ending the tax-dollar gravy train for groups and individuals that are actively working against them might be a good place to start.