Woke Was But a Dream

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, March 27, 2025

 

I’m perfectly fine with cutting off the annual $30 million in federal funds that go to NPR. But, if Donald Trump is the master dealmaker he claims to be, maybe something can be worked out. If we can get a guarantee that NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher will subject herself to an annual public grilling, even double the current amount would be money well spent. Maher testified before Congress yesterday, and it made for more riveting entertainment than anything you’ll hear on NPR or elsewhere. 

 

Maher, who tried to defend NPR’s objectivity, is to rich, white liberalism what the Gerber Baby is to baby food. In various high-level positions, she has built a career as the global brand ambassador for a worldview that’s now in rapid retreat. As she herself once tweeted, “I grew up feeling superior. How white of me.”

 

She was asked about that tweet, along with many others, at yesterday’s hearing.  And it was fascinating to witness her claim not to remember certain statements or note that her thinking has “evolved” out of wokeness altogether.

 

When asked by Rep. Brandon Gill why she tweeted that “America is addicted to white supremacy,” Maher responded: “I don’t recall the exact context, sir. I wouldn’t be able to say.” Asked if she believes that “America begins in black plunder and white democracy,” she said, “I don’t believe that, sir.” Gill then pointed out that she tweeted that quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book The Case for Reparations. When she claimed never to have read it, Gill reminded her that she had also tweeted about having taken a day off work to finish the book. Maher’s response: “Apologies. I don’t recall that I did.”

 

It was as if she was being confronted with the humiliating details of her wayward youth, only her wayward youth was five years ago when she was 36 years old and the CEO of Wikipedia.

 

Asked if she believed that white people should pay reparations, Maher said, “I have never said that, sir.” Gill, again, tried to jog her memory by reading out one of her tweets: “Yes, the North, yes all of us, yes America. Yes, our original collective sin and unpaid debt. Yes, reparations. Yes, on this day.” Maher explained that she wasn’t referring to fiscal reparations but was merely observing that “we all owe much to the people who came before us.” And, finally, she bobbed and weaved around questions over this 2020 gem: "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.”

 

Forget tax dollars. I’d pay for a streaming show featuring Maher responding to her own words. 

 

And I’d start with this masterpiece of cringe from 2020, which didn’t come up at the hearing: “Had a dream where Kamala and I were on a road trip in an unspecified location, sampling and comparing nuts and baklava from roadside stands. Woke up very hungry.”

 

Yesterday, Maher seemed to believe that her entire involvement in the social-justice revolution was a nightmare from which she had just awoken with an upset stomach.

 

For the record, the one piece of her testimony I do believe is that she never read The Case for Reparations. Because for woke C-suite executives, the whole point of the revolution was to broadcast support for radicalism, not to, as they say, “do the work.” What was made clear yesterday is that what’s so “white of” Maher isn’t that she “grew up feeling superior”; it’s that, as an adult, she fostered a sense of superiority by embracing a fashionable brand of anti-racism that she would discard the moment it became a liability.

 

Wokeness, she reminded the country, was a white, boutique trend—little more. As Wilfred Reilly wrote in the November 2021 issue of Commentary: “According to the best publicly available data, members of most minority groups dislike PC culture more than whites do. Eighty-eight percent of Native American Indians, 87 percent of all Hispanics, 82 percent of Asian Americans, and 75 percent of blacks (vs. 79 percent of whites) call political correctness ‘a problem’ for the United States. Per several studies, the only group that strongly supports the movement of speech in a more woke direction is made up of young liberal white women.”

 

That’s you, Katherine Maher. I don’t blame you for trying to forget it.