Meet Wikipedia’s Ayn Rand-loving founder and Wikimedia Foundation’s regime-change operative CEO

 

 

Wikipedia has become a bulletin board for corporate and imperial interests under the watch of its Randian founder, Jimmy Wales, and the veteran US regime-change operative who heads the Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher.

By Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal

The Greyzone,  June 12, 2020

This is part 2 in a series of investigative reports on the systemic problems with Wikipedia. Read part 1 here: “Wikipedia formally censors The Grayzone as regime-change advocates monopolize editing“

Internet encyclopedia giant Wikipedia has listed The Grayzone as a “deprecated source,” censoring the independent organization, alongside several other news websites, on an official blacklist of taboo media outlets.

The blacklisting is the result of a long-running campaign run by a coterie of regime-change activists who have effectively hijacked Wikipedia, scrubbing the site of information that runs counter to their sectarian agenda and editing their political adversaries out of existence.

At no point has this cabal of editors pointed to a pattern of errors or fabrications by The Grayzone. Instead, they have argued for its blacklisting on the grounds of the political views of its writers, a wholesale violation of Wikipedia guidelines that demand neutrality in editing.

As detailed in part one of this series, Wikipedia founders and the Wikimedia Foundation have done nothing to address the fundamental corruption of the internet encyclopedia they oversee by a gang of hyper-partisan censors.

That might be because Wikipedia founder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales and the personnel behind the Wikimedia Foundation share the interventionist and corporate agenda that disproportionately powerful, neoconservative-oriented editors advance under their watch.

Jimmy Wales’ Randian philosophy, corporate and national security ties come to the surface

Born from seemingly humble beginnings, the Wikimedia Foundation is today swimming in cash and invested in many of the powerful interests that benefit from its lax editorial policy.

The foundation’s largest donors include corporate tech giants Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Craigslist. With more than $145 million in assets in 2018, nearly $105 million in annual revenue, and a massive headquarters in San Francisco, Wikimedia has carved out a space for itself next to these Big Tech oligarchs in the Silicon Valley bubble.

It is also impossible to separate Wikipedia as a project from the ideology of its creator. When he co-founded the platform in 2001, Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales was a conservative libertarian and devoted disciple of right-wing fanatic Ayn Rand.

A former futures and options trader, Wales openly preached the gospel of “Objectivism,” Rand’s ultra-capitalist ideology that sees government and society itself as the root of all evil, heralding individual capitalists as gods.

Wales described his philosophy behind Wikipedia in specifically Randian terms. In a video clip from a 2008 interview, published by the Atlas Society, an organization dedicated to evangelizing on behalf of Objectivism, Wales explained that he was influenced by Howard Roark, the protagonist of Rand’s novel The Fountainhead.

Wikipedia’s structure was expressly meant to reflect the ideology of its libertarian tech entrepreneur founder, and Wales openly said as much.

At the same time, however, Wikipedia editors have upheld the diehard Objectivist Jimmy Wales, as the New York Times put it in 2008, as a “benevolent dictator, constitutional monarch, digital evangelist and spiritual leader.”

Wales has always balanced his libertarian inclinations with old-fashioned American patriotism. He was summoned before the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Operations in 2007 to further explain how Wikipedia and its related technologies could be of service to Uncle Sam.

Wales began his remarks stating, “I am grateful to be here today to testify about the potential for the Wikipedia model of collaboration and information sharing which may be helpful to government operations and homeland security.”

“At a time when the United States has been increasingly criticized around the world, I believe that Wikipedia is an incredible carrier of traditional American values of generosity, hard work, and freedom of speech,” Wales continued, implicitly referencing the George Bush administration’s military occupation of Iraq.

The Wikipedia founder added, “The US government has always been premised on responsiveness to citizens, and I think we all believe good government comes from broad, open public dialogue. I therefore also recommend that US agencies consider the use of wikis for public facing projects to gather information from citizens and to seek new ways of effectively collaborating with the public to generate solutions to the problem that citizens face.”

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales testifying before the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Operations in 2007

In 2012, Wales married Kate Garvey, the former diary secretary of ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Their wedding, according to the conservative UK Telegraph, was “witnessed by guests from the world of politics and celebrity.”

Wales’ status-quo-friendly politics have only grown more pronounced over the years. In 2018, for instance, he publicly cheered on Israel’s bombing of the besieged Gaza strip and portrayed Britain’s leftist former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite.

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Katherine Maher: US regime-change operative with deep corporate links

Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation claim to have little power over the encyclopedia itself, but it is widely known that this is just PR. Wikimedia blew the lid off this myth in 2015 when it removed a community-elected member of its board of trustees, without explanation.

At the time of this scandal, the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees included a former corporate executive at Google, Arnnon Geshuri, who was heavily scrutinized for shady hiring practices. Geshuri, who also worked at billionaire Elon Musk’s company Tesla, was eventually pressured to step down from the board.

But just a year later, Wikimedia appointed another corporate executive to its board of trustees, Gizmodo Media Group CEO Raju Narisetti.

The figure that deserves the most scrutiny at the Wikimedia Foundation, however, is its executive director Katherine Maher, who is closely linked to the US regime-change network.

Maher boasts an eyebrow-raising résumé that would impress the most ardent of cold warriors in Washington.

With a degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Maher studied Arabic in Egypt and Syria, just a few years before the so-called Arab Spring uprising and subsequent Western proxy war to overthrow the Syrian government.

Maher subsequently interned at the Council on Foreign Relations and Eurasia Group, both elite foreign-policy institutions that are deeply embedded in the Western regime-change machine.

After a stint at London’s HSBC bank — which paid a whopping $1.9 billion fine after it was caught red-handed laundering money for drug traffickers and Saudi financiers of international jihadism — Maher went on to work at UNICEF.

At UNICEF, Maher oversaw projects funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), an arm of the US State Department which finances regime-change operations and covert activities around the globe under the auspices of humanitarian goodwill.

Next, Maher cut out the middleman and went to work as a program officer in information and communications technology (ICT) at the National Democratic Institute (NDI), which was created and is financed directly by the US government. The NDI is a central gear in the regime-change machine; it bankrolls coup and destabilization efforts across the planet in the guise of “democracy promotion.”

For most aspiring diplomats, these accomplishments would make for a formidable CV. But Maher was far from finished. After a year at the NDI, she moved over to the World Bank, another notorious vehicle for Washington’s economic power.

At the time of her employment at the World Bank, the Arab Spring protests broke out, and Maher established herself on social media as a major supporter of the movement for ousting governments and installing new leadership that bowed to Western demands.

In October 2012, in the early stages of the proxy war in Syria, Maher tweeted that she was planning a trip to Gaziantep, a Turkish city near the Syrian border that became the main hub for the Western-backed opposition. Gaziantep was at the time crawling with Syrian insurgents and foreign intelligence operatives plotting to violently topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

But Maher wasn’t done. Just two months later, in December, she tweeted that was was on the plane to Libya. Just over a year before, a NATO regime-change war had destroyed the Libyan government, and foreign-backed insurgents had killed leader Muammar Qadhafi, unleashing a wave of violence — and open-air slave markets.

Still today, Libya has no unified central government, and it remains plagued by a brutal civil war. What Maher was doing in the war-torn country in 2012 is not clear.

Today, while she serves as the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher remains a fellow at the Truman National Security Project, a Washington, DC think tank that grooms former military and intelligence professionals for careers in Democratic Party politics.

As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal reported, the most prominent fellow of the Truman Project is Pete Buttigieg, the US Naval intelligence veteran who emerged as a presidential frontrunner in the Democratic primary earlier this year.

The head of the Wikimedia Foundation’s extensive participation in US government regime-change networks raise serious questions about the organization’s commitment to neutrality.

Perhaps the unchecked problem of political bias and coordinated smear campaigns by a small coterie of Wikipedia editors is not a bug, but a deliberately conceived feature of the website.