Bari Weiss’s Remarkably Successful Shell Game

The Right's favorite reactionary centrist prepares to take over a major news organization.

Despite the occasional urge, I’ve chosen not to write about Bari Weiss for ten years now, and I still don’t feel like doing it. Whatever my views of Weiss’s work, I don’t do hit pieces, and I don’t attack other journalists.

But the rumored ascendancy of Weiss to be editorial director of CBS News is all that’s on my journalistic mind right now. So I’m going to write about it.

Why do I care about this? First, I have many close friends and colleagues who think that Weiss really is who she says she is —an aggrieved centrist-liberal who finds herself “politically homeless” — instead of who she actually is, which is a lifelong conservative whose heavily-subsidized endeavors push a consistently right-wing, anti-liberal line. They trust someone who has consistently betrayed that trust.

Second, as I wrote about a year ago, I have seen firsthand how the rage and hyperbole that Weiss promulgates drives people apart and contributes to the Putinesque free-for-all that has come to dominate our culture. Her publication is degrading our public discourse: exaggerating, misleading, and enraging. She really is doing harm. And she is soon, it seems, to have an even larger platform to do so.

I’m still not going to write a hit piece. Rather, I’m going to focus on three core features of the journalistic charlatanism that has propelled Weiss’s career to the zenith of our profession:

1. Presenting herself as a disillusioned liberal when she is not in fact one, and maintaining a myopic, obsessive focus on the excesses of the Left to the exclusion of anything bad that happens on the Right — all the while taking large amounts of money from conservative mega-donors who have an obvious ideological interest in her doing so.

2. Depicting herself as an anti-establishment outsider, martyr, and independent when, in fact, she is an establishment insider with unparalleled access to right-wing figures, and

3. Holding extremely sloppy journalistic standards that turn rumors into facts, marginal figures into representatives of the great evil, minor incidents into major scandals. In a society struggling to tell truth from bullshit, the “Free Press” is part of the problem, degrading our public discourse and stoking rage for clicks.

Okay, let’s go.

1.

Once upon a time, Bari Weiss was a mere pundit, like yours truly. She first gained prominence, in an incident now drenched in irony, back in 2004, when as a student at Columbia University, she campaigned to get three professors fired for allegedly making anti-Israel and/or antisemitic comments in class. It’s almost like we’ve come full circle — only now the moral panic Weiss helped create is threatening the entire university.

In fact, there were no substantiated accounts of the incidents happening – only a 20-minute quasi-documentary about the incident, Columbia Unbecoming, featuring the kind of snowflake-safe-space stuff that, when it comes from the Left, Weiss would later excoriate. According to the documentary, students saying they felt attacked and unsafe in class because Professor Joseph Massad and others said disturbing (to them) things about Israel. Which maybe he did or maybe he didn’t: Massad has strong anti-Israel views, to be sure, and has made statements that I, too, find troubling. An ad hoc committee convened by Columbia found the account credible, though not proven true.

Still, for someone who would later claim to be fighting for academic freedom, this is the exact opposite of it: campaigning to get professors fired for things they say in the classroom. But this hypocrisy would become Weiss’s signature move for the two decades to come. When conservative speech is at stake, she campaigns for free expression and derides cancel culture. When liberal or radical speech is at stake, she campaigns for censorship and cancellation.

For the next ten years, Weiss gradually worked her way up in the field. As a university student, she spent a summer in Israel working for the right-wing Shalem Center and did a variety of pro-Israel programming. Weiss then worked as a book reviews editor, opinions editor, and writer (I have a pitch email I sent her in 2014 when she was at the Wall Street Journal) and eventually reaches a pinnacle of the field in 2017, as an opinion editor and columnist for the New York Times, whose new opinion editor, James Bennett, was seeking to hire more conservative voices.

This resume may surprise readers who have read Weiss’s self-presentation as a liberal who is disturbed, shocked, and surprised by the excesses of the left. But that is because Weiss has never been a liberal. For over two decades, her perspectives and editorial choices reflect a garden-variety moderate-conservative who hates the welfare state, supports Israeli policies no matter what, and has no patience for uppity minorities seeking anything more than color-blindness. There has never been anything heterodox about these views — people who hold them currently control all three branches of the federal government. The views are just conservative. It’s misleading to call them otherwise, or to pretend that one has commitments one does not in fact possess.

Weiss’s schtick — some would call it a grift — made its first major mark in August, 2017, when shortly after taking her perch at the Times Weiss wrote a piece about the Women’s March entitled “When Progressives Embrace Hate,” focusing on objectionable statements made (not at the March) by four of its organizers. Weiss first claims that “The Women’s March moved me,” and forgives some missteps because “Trump had campaigned on attacking the weakest and most vulnerable in our society. Now was the time to put aside petty differences and secondary issues to oppose his presidency.”

But Weiss apparently reconsidered that position, and the bulk of the piece is focused on a handful of comments by Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and others which, Weiss claims, reflects a hateful cancer combining extreme politics and outright bigotry. More than that; these isolated comments show how the Democratic Party has

fall[en] prey to movements that are, at base, anti-American. That is true of the populist, racist alt-right that helped deliver Mr. Trump the White House and are now hollowing out the Republican Party. And it can be true of the progressive “resistance” — regardless of how chic, Instagrammable and celebrity-laden the movement may seem.

This is, factually speaking, nuts. A half-dozen posts from four women, read in the worst possible light, shows that an entire party has fallen prey to an anti-American movement? That “progressives” embrace “hate”? Weiss writes so well that her elisions in logic can get lost in the prose. But this is totally insane, right? This is a few posts by a few radical people who don’t represent the Democratic Party, or even the march itself, anymore than Richard Spencer represents all Republicans. It’s a ludicrous generalization to move from one to the other.

The Women’s March piece set the tone for the next eight years: Yes, both sides are bad, but I’m going to focus all of my attention, firepower, and rhetoric on the Left. Thus began eight years of harping on every woke excess on college campuses while ignoring, I don’t know, the January 2021 insurrection against the United States, the Big Lie that animated it, and the multiple convictions of Donald Trump. Her primary enemies are, not coincidentally, the same as the Trump administration’s: universities, the media, the woke elite. It’s almost too easy, yet Weiss’s secret ability is to make these basic, conservative talking points while still persuading people that she’s a reasonable centrist-liberal.

But that is bunk. Just look at The Free Press today, September 4, 2025. In the past two months, an autocratic administration has sent the military into US cities; mandated patriotic ideological conformity at the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian, and other institutions; sent masked agents to kidnap legal residents and throw them in inhuman jails for a week; used fake “emergencies” to violate all kinds of legal and constitutional rules; and illegally fired government employees whose jobs are protected by law. Yet here’s the front page of the Free Press:

A story criticizing an association critical of Israel, three pieces criticizing Zohran Mamdani (and a fourth cheering his opponents), and a random piece on Silicon Valley. Is this liberal, maverick, independent, heterodox, or in any way balanced? It has a different vibe from Fox News, but the ideology is the same.

Which would be fine if the Free Press were simply honest that they are a conservative outlet. But they’re not honest; they claim to be centrist or independent or whatever, but that is not reflected by their editorial choices. Lately, for example, the Free Press has published articles like “Things Worth Remembering: The Empathy of J.K. Rowling”, “Daniel Penny’s Innocence—and the Shame of Alvin Bragg,” “Camping Out at Columbia’s Communist Coachella,” and “The Secret Service Failed. What’s That Have to Do With DEI?” But hardly anything on creeping authoritarianism in our midst. On today’s site, I scrolled down: there was only one piece on the front page critical of Trump, and it was about litter in Yosemite National Park. Why the deception?

2.

Together with Weiss’s self-presentation as an aggrieved moderate-liberal, Weiss has styled herself as an independent, politically homeless, anti-establishment martyr even as she became one of the most successful insider-journalists of the century, taking millions of dollars from right-wing donors and gaining unparalleled access to right-wing political figures. Whether this outsider pose is self-delusion or just a marketing ploy, I don’t know, but it certainly isn’t the truth.

After Weiss’s departures from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times (those scrappy outsider publications) Weiss raised several million dollars from investors who, to this day, remain largely anonymous and unknown, and was given untold incentives by Substack to set up shop on this platform. All the while, Weiss spun herself as a martyr for free speech, posting a 1500-word resignation letter online that complained about online discourse while declining to take any responsibility for her editorial missteps, which I’ll discuss in the next section.

Now, one must admire Weiss’s business acumen. There are a lot of centrist pundits out there who do the same thing she does — Matt Taibbi, Yascha Mounk, Michael Shellenberger, the staffs of Quillette and Persuasion — but she alone built an entire media organization. She is clearly a unique, brilliant self-marketer and entrepreneur. As Peter Shamshiri put it on the podcast If Books Could Kill, “All I know is that for ten years, every columnist on Earth was writing the same article about cancel culture. And Bari’s the only one to turn it into $100 million.”

But none of this is outsider behavior, and none of this is “heterodox.” William F. Buckley did the same thing when he founded the The National Review in 1955, except that his main funder was his dad. Rich people pay thought leaders all the time and gain handsome returns on their investment. After all, who would have thought that Buckley’s intellectual descendants would convince a majority of working-class and middle-class Americans to accept “trickle-down economics” in the name of freedom and the American way? Whoever is funding Weiss has obviously learned from history.

Klim Musalimov, via Unsplash

These days, of course, Weiss is on the inside of the inside. She was hand-picked by Elon Musk to review the so-called “Twitter Files,” her reporters have an inside track at the White House, and the Free Press has run interviews with, or first-person pieces by, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Robert Iger, Marco Rubio, and other conservative figures (almost no liberal ones). She hobnobs with Trump-supporting billionaires like Dan Loeb, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks and Bobby Kotick. And she parrots nearly every establishment talking point that comes down the conservative pike, from vaccine skepticism to lies about immigrant crime to insinuations about Joe Biden’s cognitive capacities. This is the least outsider figure in America.

But there’s still that pose. Jia Tolentino wrote in her book Trick Mirror that

at times it seems that Weiss’s main strategy is to make an argument that’s bad enough to attract criticism, and then to cherry-pick the worst of that criticism into the foundation for another bad argument. Her worldview requires the specter of a vast, angry, inferior mob.

Like the billionaire president of the United States still claiming that he is the target of sinister elites, the soon-to-be billionaire pundit of the ‘center’ still claims that she is an outsider who dares to speak the truth, rather than an insider who speaks exactly what her donors and readers want to hear.

And her newest coup is perhaps the greatest of all. Just look at the story: a nationalist strongman wants to suppress the news media and a right-wing billionaire says he’ll do it if the strongman lets him buy a media company. Voila, the strongman approves the purchase. And lo and behold, in comes Bari Weiss, that independent heterodox maverick outsider, to end CBS News as we know it. Because that’s definitely what liberal-minded maverick outsiders do.

Weiss has also conferred this outlandish faux-outsider pose on an entire sector of the journalistic world. In a viral 2018 op-ed, Weiss elevated an entire cadre of thinkers — the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web,” a term coined by one of its members — who turn out to be, like Weiss herself, just plain conservatives, along with several nuts. Joe Rogan has platformed numerous conspiracy theories, puffed up Trump (he has since expressed regret), and may have helped swing the 2024 election. Dave Rubin went MAGA and has abandoned his former calls for civility and now calls any woman he dislikes a “cunt” – though some of his colleagues have now turned on him, since he and his husband have had a baby through surrogacy. The moralistic scold turned drug addict Jordan Peterson now alleges globalist conspiracies to decrease world population by means of climate regulations, but is still praised by The Free Press. Candace Owens became, or revealed herself to be, a raging antisemitic conspiracy-spouting lunatic. Bret Weinstein spreads anti-vax lies on right-wing media.

Ironically, the only members of Weiss’s frieze of IDW heroes who haven’t descended into madness are Sam Harris, who broke with the crowd over their embrace of pseudo-science, and Ben Shapiro, who alone among the group was a self-described conservative from the start. (Other figures listed in Weiss’s initial piece have also retained their sanity, but their work was not described in any detail.) Harris and Shapiro, in other words, have been honest and consistent about who they are. But the other people Weiss lifted up have revealed themselves to be ultra-nationalists, kooks, or people who give a platform to them and claim to be just asking questions.

And throughout, there’s the pose of being something other than who they are. As Anthony Fisher put it in a recent podcast episode,

These people claim to be lifelong Democrats, some of them say that they were Bernie Sanders supporters and they’ve not had a nice thing to say about a single Democratic politician or liberal commentator or liberal idea in the last six years… A lot of these people are anti-left, all the things they see on the left are things that are ‘threatening Western civilization,’ which is why they latch onto people like Tulsi Gabbard, somebody who’s nominally a Democrat… but for the most part seems to be playing toward the MAGA right audience.

Now, obviously, Weiss doesn’t control any of these people and isn’t responsible for what they say. But it is telling that the “outsider” intellectual avant garde she praised and elevated has, by and large, revealed itself to be either reactionary, loopy, or happy to promote reactionary loopiness. What does this say about the people she will champion at the new CBS News?

3.

Finally, there are the details. Weiss and The Free Press are incredibly sloppy, frequently bending the truth, distorting sources, and engaging in irresponsible hyperbole. And since Weiss is clearly intelligent and capable, that sloppiness has to be by design. I’ll start with one example into which I took a deep dive last year: an alleged stabbing of a pro-Israel activist at Yale University.

What actually happened, as captured on video, was that a conservative student journalist, Sahar Tartak, decided to ‘cover’ an anti-Israel rally at Yale which was, as such protests are wont to do, ‘occupying’ a square in front of Beinecke Library. Tartak antagonized the protesters, yelling “I have freedom of movement!” as if clearing the plaza were her job description. And then, as you can see in the video, she was standing quite close to a group of student protesters who were marching in Beinecke Plaza, when one of them grazed Tartak with a flag he was waving.

Having watched the video many times, it looks to me as if this was accidental. The protester was waving a flag, and she was standing practically on top of them. She may even have walked into the path of the marchers; I can’t be sure.

The Free Press ran an article by Tartak headlined “I Was Stabbed in the Eye at Yale.” Worse, in the piece, Tartak proclaimed “I was stabbed in the eye last night on Yale University’s campus because I am a Jew.”

Again, none of that is accurate. She wasn’t stabbed and whatever happened wasn’t because she was a Jew (it didn’t look intentional at all). Why did the Free Press not fact-check any of these allegations? Did they even watch the video?

This, of course, reminds one of Weiss’s hyperbole back in 2004, only this time, Weiss has a huge megaphone, and the Free Press’s story was repeated, multiple times, on Fox News and in right-wing newspapers. Eventually, a sincerely worried member of my Jewish community asked me about it in distress. The word “stabbed” was a lie, but to traumatized Jewish ears, reeling from October 7 and from actual antisemitism that was in fact on the increase, it sure sounded like truth.

This is but one example of hundreds of such exaggerations, distortions, and incitements that Weiss and the Free Press have run. The Free Press has elevated pseudoscience about gender identity so frequently that it now seems like actual science. It published a piece claiming that Derek Chauvin didn’t kill George Floyd that was completely rebutted by an expert, but never retracted or even annotated by the newspaper. Far from being a beacon of truth, The Free Press has contributed to our culture of omnipresent falsity.

Moreover, the whole convenient tornado around wokeness, ‘safe spaces’ on campus, ‘cancel culture,’ and rampant antisemitism on campus is built on these distortions. They aren’t lies: radical college students can indeed be doctrinaire, intolerant, and, well, a little foolish. And sometimes, university administrators have been too afraid of them; the chilling effect was real, and I have felt it myself. But they are massive distortions, often of minor events — like when a single student complaining about Banh Mi at Oberlin turned into national right-wing hysteria about wokeness, cancel culture, and political correctness. Again: It was all based on bullshit.

And of course, there’s Israel. In the Free Press anyone who shouts “Free Palestine” at some rally is deemed to be saying “Destroy Israel and Kill All the Jews” while any Israeli extremist who shouts “Destroy Gaza” on television is either ignored by the Free Press or deemed to be merely making comments in the fog of war. Weiss has relentlessly exploited Jewish fears about antisemitism, fanning every possible ember of rage into a firestorm of misinformation and exaggeration — except when those embers are found among administration staff members who have close ties to antisemitic extremists, of course.

All this negligent sloppiness has long been part of Weiss’s M.O. — and then, when mistakes are called out, she blames the woke mob. For example, when The New York Times published a now-prescient but then-shocking op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton suggesting that troops be sent in to repress Black Lives Matter protests, over a thousand staff members protested and the Times issued an apology with specific examples of how “the editing process was rushed and flawed…. For example, the published piece presents as facts assertions about the role of ‘cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa’; in fact, those allegations have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned… The assertion that police officers “bore the brunt” of the violence is an overstatement that should have been challenged.”

But when Weiss resigned a month later, after opinion editor James Bennet was fired in the wake of the controversy, she didn’t address these facts in her 1,500 word resignation letter, instead claiming that the Times had a double standard when it comes to conservatives. “If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome,” she wrote. The glaring errors in the piece went unmentioned.

If Bari Weiss were some kind of inexperienced rookie, these might be excused as incompetent rookie mistakes. But she is an veteran editor and writer. She knows better. This is deliberate irresponsibility.

4.

No one can predict what will happen in the billionaire phase of Bari Weiss’s career. She has defied her haters many times already, and will probably do so again. But what that means is anyone’s guess.

Will Weiss awaken to the fact that, in the context of militarized cities and the total abdication of American leadership abroad, Zohran Mamdani’s plan for free buses is not the most worrisome issue of the day? I don’t know. Lately, as Trump 2.0 has unfurled itself, Weiss has occasionally criticized some on the Right. For example, in a speech given in February of this year, Weiss called out Tucker Carlson’s holocaust revisionism, albeit by claiming he’s a bit like the Left:

While the left, long sympathetic with Stalin, today sympathizes with modern-day Nazis in the form of Hamas—this new right eulogizes the original ones. And in rehabilitating Hitler they are not merely demonizing Jews, but demonizing America, Britain, and the millions who fought and died to preserve our freedoms.

Indeed, in the same speech, she seemed to worry that the tables have now been turned. Speaking of the MAGA movement’s power grabs, Weiss said

If that continues without being challenged, we may wind up spending the next few years watching the same story we just lived through on the other side, as the far-right… devours what remains of the center-right.

Such comments can inspire some degree of hope. (They certainly enraged Carlson, who shot back that Weiss was just shilling for Israel.) First, if Weiss would simply come out as a longtime center-right believer herself, that would clear up much of the misrepresentation I’ve discussed in this post. And second, perhaps with the excesses of MAGA authoritarianism now quite apparent — and quite personal, as they are threatening Weiss’s and my families — some kind of balance might emerge in Weiss’s editorial decisionmaking.

And yet, in the same breath as these statements, Weiss shows that she has not changed her schtick at all. Notice the preposterous claims about “the Left”: that they sympathize with Stalin (which literally no one on the Left does) and Hamas, conflating people opposed to the starvation of Gaza with people who support terrorists murdering, raping, and shooting rockets at Israelis. Those are obviously totally different viewpoints, but this is Weiss’s usual sleight-of-hand: pick the worst possible example of extreme left-wing behavior, then ascribe it to the entire Left, and then to the entire Democratic party. It’s no Weissian exaggeration to say that this kind of incendiary hyperbole has played a significant role in the degradation of our political discourse.

And there’s that reversal of victim and oppressor — as if some misguided collegiate protesters are somehow equivalent in threat to the theocrats, ethno-nationalists, and religious fundamentalists in the White House, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. In a sense, it’s hilarious: Weiss is warning us that the entirety of the federal government could end up being as dangerous as Students for Justice in Palestine. But of course it isn’t hilarious when it legitimizes the regime’s attacks on higher education, which endanger thousands of livelihoods and threaten American leadership in technology and medicine. So forgive me if I’m not feeling optimistic yet.

And now? Will a Weiss-led CBS News challenge voter intimidation that threatens to undermine the 2026 midterms or complain about pronouns? Will it address the scrubbing of the Epstein files or focus on Zohran’s city groceries? Will it bring scientific experts to discuss climate change or will it “balance” them out with junk science and fossil-fuel propaganda? I have no idea. But I’ve already seen how Weiss’s combination of concerned-liberal cosplay, outsider-chic, and sloppy journalistic standards has had an impact on society. I’ve seen it firsthand in my communities.

At least with Fox News, you know where you stand.

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Note: The initial version of this post speculated that Weiss may have been involved in editing the Tom Cotton op-ed for the Times. Though it was hedged, this speculation could be incorrect and misleading, and I have removed it. I also added a sentence clarifying that university administrators, not only students, were sometimes involved in campus controversies.

Thanks to my paying subscribers for your support of this work. Here’s some of what I’ve been reading lately:

• Speaking of The New York Times, the Times did a great, comprehensive rebuttal of the vaccine-autism myth a couple of weeks ago and a great long-form on how the Far Right has thoroughly been integrated into the Trump administration.

• Here’s some actual antisemitic stuff and some more actual antisemitic nationalist stuff that I wish Bari Weiss would cover.

• Richard Galant on William F. Buckley is great reading.

• Finally, please learn about the Posse Comitatus Act.

See you next week.