The Gospel of Bari Weiss
She is self-aggrandizing, sensationalistic, deliberately contrarian, and a useful puppet of oligarchical power. Mainstream media can't get enough of her.
If you haven’t heard of Bari Weiss, that’s probably to your betterment. I apologize for ruining your blissful ignorance, but over the last several years, she has gained outsize influence in our politics, our culture, and our news coverage. So, it was with equal degrees of self-loathing and anger at the New York Times for even writing about their flameout opinion editor that I read this profile that ran in the Sunday edition this week.
I do have to give it to the writer, Matt Flegenheimer, who managed to insert some subtly illuminating observations about Weiss and how she operates. She’s joined an obnoxious clique of pseudo-intellectuals called “radical centrists”—largely comprised of college professors whose research is sloppy but who espouse contrarian views like Weiss does, and who are just welcoming enough of differences to look good in their Times profiles, many of whom Weiss authored herself during her stint there. These same faux-radicals like Jonathan Haidt, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, and Douglas Murry spend an inordinate amount of their time fawning over clowns like Apartheid Clyde, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Bill Ackman, whose only contributions to society are being billionaires. Perhaps these “centrists” see constant discussions about declining white birthrates, the Roman Empire, and the supposed stifling of free speech on campus as rigorous intellectual fare, but the rest of us just see a bunch of weirdos who really need better hobbies.
For Weiss, though, these billionaires help fund her Substack, The Free Press, which I will not bother linking for the safety of your mental health and my blood pressure. She cited the influence of her pseudo-intellectual claque of Peterson, Haidt, et al., in starting TFP. Weiss also cofounded the still-nonexistent University of Austin, which allegedly will begin holding classes next month (with only 23 named faculty, don’t hold your breath). This “university” is a perfect example of how her “radical centrism” is nothing more than a vehicle for billionaire beliefs with a side of bigotry. One of her largest funders in the effort is Harlan Crow, the billionaire who owns Clarence Thomas and his Supreme Court votes. Her university’s advisers include notorious racist Richard Dawkins, vaccine denier Heather Heying, Haidt, and colonial apologist Niall Ferguson. Sterling choices, all.
Pivoting back to The Free Press, it is as white as most media outlets, which is a sad commentary on journalism. However, when you dig deeper, there is a repeated strain of writing/reporting taking place—one completely hostile to anyone who believes that America is still a very racist nation. For example, there is only one Black writer on staff, Coleman Hughes, whose entire body of work is aimed at trying to disprove systemic racism. Hughes is probably most well-known for his startling obsession trying to prove that George Floyd’s death had no racist component to it. Hughes has written for a number of right-wing magazines pushing his pet theories, which they love, because it’s cover for their own thinly veiled racism. There are two South Asian writers, also conservative. That’s it for diversity. Great stuff all around here.
Weiss will defend herself against charges of being a right-winger in disguise by saying she voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden (and Mitt Romney), but in New York, was she really taking some bold stance? She apparently finds Donald Trump abhorrent, but is happy to let some of his shittiest supporters write for her Substack (more on that shortly). What’s more revealing about her ideology can be found in two episodes of her life. The first can be seen in how she encouraged this moment involving her sister Suzy (also a writer at The Free Press).
Depending on your viewpoint, that is either self-awareness of Bari’s queerness, or an ugly look into how the Weiss sisters view the Arab world. The second episode dates back almost twenty years to 2005, when Bari was a sophomore at Columbia and started a group (don’t laugh) titled “Columbians for Academic Freedom” (seriously, don’t laugh) that was based on the premise that pro-Zionist views were stifled on campus. Weiss got lots of fawning media coverage and a star was born, as they say. The reality, for anyone with a functional brain, is that Columbia admits a disproportionate number of IDF veterans to their school; that at the administrative level they have been virulently pro-Zionist; that they have, via an administrator who simultaneously works for the university and the New York Police Department, an office in Tel Aviv which helps expedite the applications of these IDF soldiers to be educated at a premier Ivy League school in America; and that the administration this past spring had the NYPD not once, but twice, come to campus to beat the shit out of their students for daring to hold an opposing view whilst the destruction of Gaza demonstrated the toxicity of Zionism in the twenty-first century.
A reminder before we move along that Bari Weiss went to Columbia University, and Suzy went to the University of Michigan. Bari went on to edit at the New York Times before she turned 40 and Suzy at the New York Post as a features editor before she was 30. Please, do not shed a tear for their invented suffering—but understand that it is part of their shtick. Again, more later.
Another example of somebody with more rightwing sympathies than they’d like to admit is how Bari Weiss wrote a Times column in 2018 titled “We’re All Fascists Now” that approvingly cited a number of right-wingers and used a fake Twitter account to make some of her argument. And as I noted a couple of grafs earlier, for someone who supposedly hates Trumpism, just read this quote from Christopher Rufo, one of the most noxious fascist fucksticks in this country and best buds with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a wannabe Trump in his own right:
I’m sorry, but if that disgustingly racist piece-of-shit is complementing Bari Weiss admiringly, and even wrote for her, it demonstrates both her distinct lack of editorial judgement (which, given the above episode at the Times, should not be surprising) and that she’s sympathetic enough to his deliberate lies about race and gender that she platforms him.
Also unsurprising is how Weiss’s colleagues at the Times reviled her. Weiss has said on more than one occasion that it was because they’re too woke. I suspect it’s because Weiss is one of those obnoxious people who cannot stop talking about the “brave stands” they take, when in reality, they’re just a giant asshole. As the Times piece points out, there is a type of piece that the Free Press repeatedly runs: the brave outlier at an allegedly left-wing [insert type of job or facility here].
The hospital whistleblower was, as it turns out, a liar, but per usual, media runs with the loudest voice, not the truthful one. The Missouri Attorney General, a far-right extremist, and the “whistleblower” both claimed last month the transgender center at Washington University in St. Louis was celebrating and did a victory lap in the media. That was also a lie, but if you run a Google search, the lie received far more coverage than the correction.
That also flows into my next part, which is to say the idea that NPR is governed by a narrow radical left-wing ideology is pretty laughable, unless you consider not running completely false, unarticulated bullshit from right-wingers radical leftism. And as for climate change, well, I don’t think we can say that the environment is simple, but by God, there’s a lot of phenomena happening that all coincides with steadily rising global temperatues. The subsurface temperatures of the Gulf of Mexico should not be hot enough to boil fish and bleach coral reefs. Large icecaps should not be melting in the polar regions. Ancient bacteria and viruses should not be released by exposed permafrost, which in one awful example, led to the deaths of scores of reindeer in the Russian Arctic. All of those deadly phenomena have one thing in common: fossil fuel-driven climate change causing hotter average temperatures and more extreme weather events.
So, how should somebody view Weiss and her outfit? Viewpoints worthy of time and discussion? Entitled drivel from a darling of the one percent? The thread of Bari Weiss’s life was to be a famous “truth-teller” who would have a spotlight shone upon her and be a hero for her pet causes. The desire for that spotlight and broad acceptance pulled her into the orbit of people who, for their own selfish reasons, are supportive of her act. I call it an act for one simple reason: I think what is paramount when reviewing the work of Weiss and her staffers is that they aren’t interested in truth derived from facts. They want to reach people in their gut, hit them with news stories that feel true, and so because the vibes are right to those readers, they will then accept these stories as fact, regardless of actual fact.
That isn’t journalism. It’s propaganda, and her choice of title is an insult to the many journalists who fight against a profit-driven tide in the industry. In a way, I suspect it’s meant to be an insult to them. Good journalists drove her out of the New York Times, which many consider the peak slot in journalism (I question that belief in light of the last thirty years of their work covering politics), and Weiss will never forgive her former colleagues for that. She will tear down good journalism so she can feel better about herself, and damn the consequences, because she is a wealthy woman of forty with an attractive younger wife that works for her, residing in Los Angeles, protected by the leftism she reviles in her work. It’s a great gig, the Gospel of Bari Weiss, if you’re willing to sell your soul to preach it.