Helen of Destroy:

While the Berliner affair at NPR may have been the general public’s first exposure to its new CEO Katherine Maher, her hire earlier this year was the culmination of decades of grooming by the ruling class political establishment, which raised her on the warm fuzzy feelings of American Exceptionalism via a who’s-who of western “civil society” – from the UN and the World Bank through the US State Department’s one-step-removed tentacles of plausible deniability pulling the levers of the Arab Spring to the helm of Wikipedia, one of the most powerful propaganda tools on the planet.

Maher’s intimacy with the Empire’s consent factories has long been a matter of public record: she is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a fellow of neoliberal-neocon think tank the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and only just recently stepped down from her membership on the US State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, presumably due to the flaming conflict of interest such a role might pose with her NPR appointment. After an internship with the Council on Foreign Relations, she worked for the World Bank, the National Democratic Institute, and UNICEF, using her linguistic skills (she majored in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University following a year in the American University in Cairo’s Arabic Language Intensive Program specializing in “colloquial Egyptian Arabic”) to carry out Washington’s directives in the Middle East in such a way that the locals thus targeted felt like the changes taking place were organic and coming from their peers.

Like NPR, Wikipedia – specifically the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the “people’s encyclopedia” and whose co-founder Jimmy Wales has been credibly accused of using it as his personal slush fund – has weaponized its nonprofit status to deflect criticism, avoiding much of the distrust which has (justly) accumulated toward Big Tech among populations it ruthlessly exploits because it does not directly monetize their use of its service. However, the Foundation’s largest donors handsomely bankroll its operations to the tune of over $100 million annually, despite server costs that amount to a rounding error next to its annual revenue. Like NPR, which boasts of its funding by “Viewers Like You,” Wikipedia and its parent foundation are constantly begging their audience for donations, claiming to be funded by these small-dollar amounts despite massive corporations having dominated their finances for decades.