Christopher Rufo and his Clown College failure

Great episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about the idiot fascist Republican attempt to faschify a college, but ended up making it basically into a baseball scouting service.

Rufo has - of course - promoted his bullshit via Bari Weiss' "Free Press."

The Guardian made the connection between Rufo and race pseudoscience in 2024:

Activist who led ouster of Harvard president linked to ‘scientific racism’ journal

Christopher Rufo recommends a newsletter to his readers that has published several supporters of discredited genetics theory

The rightwing activist Christopher Rufo has links to a self-styled “sociobiology magazine” that is focused on the supposed relationships between race, intelligence and criminality, and which experts have characterized as an outlet for scientific racism.

At the time of reporting, Aporia was one of 19 Substack newsletters Rufo links to in the “recommended” section on his own newsletter, which according to Substack has more than 50,000 subscribers. Rufo also appeared on Aporia’s podcast, which has published flattering interviews with proponents of scientific racism and eugenics.

Rufo, a close ally of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and one of America’s most prominent activists fighting so-called “wokeism”, has repeatedly described his goal as “colorblind equality”, but his links to Aporia raises questions about Rufo’s proximity to extremists.

Most recently Rufo has been credited in conservative media and beyond with playing a central role in the ouster of former Harvard University president Claudine Gay, who is Black.

The Guardian emailed Rufo with questions on his apparent endorsement of Aporia, and how he reconciled that with his professed “colorblindness”. He did not respond directly to any questions put to him but instead made a crude sexual insult to a Guardian reporter.

I wrote about it at the time. 

Is Nellie Bowles the worst writer in America?

The answer will not surprise you.

More at Defector:

It is not difficult to find praise for Nellie Bowles, who writes a weekly column for The Free Press, a website owned by her wife, Bari Weiss. "If you don’t read ⁦Nellie Bowles every Friday, you are leading a sad, barren, and empty existence," says Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson. Conservative writer Caitlin Flanagan says that Bowles's columns "have the exact spirit of the 70's writers whom I adored and who were so damn funny—and also deeply in the know. "

A couple of years ago her book was being trashed by enjoyers of good literature.

I will add that Bowles is also a terrible person, cheering on the stochastic terrorist Libs of TikTok versus a lesbian bar. It's what you expect for someone who is a courtier of wealthy fascists. And because she and her regime censor wife control so much media, there will always be toadies lower on the food chain to praise Bowles.

Happy Mamdani New Year!

This goes out to all the reactionaries and hysterics and race pseudoscience promoters like Claire Lehmann and Bari Weiss, freaking out over Mamdani.

The vocal track comes from Mamdani schooling Andrew Cuomo during a debate. It is magnificent.

Everybody hates Bari

 

Well as I was saying, CBS News, under the horrific new leadership of Bari Weiss, decided to promote a company that appears to be funded at least in part by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard.

And now there are the lousy ratings for her town halls.

Wonkette:

It turns out that Bari Weiss is bad at everything. Shockingly, being an uninteresting contrarian with no nose for news, zero discernible personality, and a perpetual stick up your ass about all the things in the beginning of this sentence don’t quite equip you to be the editor-in-chief of CBS News, the network that used to be home to Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow.

Oh, and she isn’t very good on TV, which sucks, since it turns out all she really wants is to be on TV.

The hilariously lousy ratings for her “town hall” with JonBenet Scamsey or the Widow of Chucky or whatever you want to call the equally un-compelling Er*ka K*rk have apparently convinced Weiss that when you’re running a network into the ground, the only proper course of action is to keep digging. So she’s going to do more “town halls,” with equally un-compelling guests, about subjects nobody who matters cares about. They are, on the other hand, the kinds of subjects hopelessly online weirdos like Bari Weiss care about. So look forward to more ratings bonanzas!

The article includes a link to an article where CBS staffers complain about Weiss:

CBS News staffers are less than thrilled with the idea of Bari Weiss, the network’s new editor-in-chief, booking herself as the moderator for a televised town hall that will feature Charlie Kirk’s widow.
“How embarrassing,” one network staffer told The Independent. “Bari’s been Editor-in-Chief for five seconds and has revealed that all she really wants is to be on TV herself.”

Connie Chung could recently be seen ripping the right-wing owned, courtier-lead incarnation of CBS News a new one.

And it looks like Bari's university, the still-unaccredited University of Austin, dedicated to providing a safe space for right-wingers is headed south:

The school, founded in part by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and then-ex New York Times journalist Bari Weiss, promised to upend the traditional university model, which its founders believed had become unwelcoming of dissenting opinions and open inquiry. And proud to never accept government funding, UATX announced earlier this year that a massive donation from libertarian billionaire Jeff Yass would make tuition free forever.

But quietly, it appears that things in anti-woke paradise are not what they seem. According to an analysis from the Chronicle of Higher Education, many of the people who joined UATX at the beginning of the project have departed, either by choice or due to public disagreements with the school's trajectory. Among the group of nearly 20 university employees that have left UATX this year were individuals in vital roles including the president, the provost, the executive director of admissions, and operations staffers.

Lonsdale is (surprise surprise!) a huge asshole.

The article also mentions Weiss' sugar daddy Harlan Crow, who did his best to corrupt the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile Bari's reactionary ghoul gang, The Free Press is still shitting itself over Mamdani.

Bari has been failing upwards her whole life, at this point she can either only go down - or get a job with the Trump administration. 

UPDATE December 22: Everybody hates Bari EVEN MORE

Apparently Weiss spiked a story that was bad for Trump:

In a move that drew harsh criticism from its own correspondent, CBS News abruptly removed a segment from Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” that was to feature the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to what the program called a “brutal” prison in El Salvador.

CBS announced the change three hours before the broadcast, a highly unusual last-minute switch. The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment. CBS News said in a statement that the segment would air at a later date and “needed additional reporting.”

But Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, rejected that criticism in a private note to CBS colleagues on Sunday, in which she accused CBS News of pulling the segment for “political” reasons.

The only thing that Weiss has ever been good at is telling wealthy right-wing men what they want to hear, to get money out of them.

Even Glenn Greenwald

Bee-yoo-ti-ful takedown of Bari Weiss by John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight"

Normally when I post Youtube videos here, most are from excellent but fairly obscure content creators. 

To be sure, I have posted content from "Last Week Tonight" before, but there has never been an episode so perfectly aligned with the Pinkerite mission than this week's report on Bari Weiss taking over CBS news.

What an absolute thing of beauty, especially the frequency with which Oliver mocks Weiss's egomania, starting with her self-aggrandizing characterization of quitting the NYTimes as her "Jerry Maguire moment."

And this Last Week Tonight episode may have finally made Bari Weiss notorious enough that even those to whom I have mentioned the name "Bari Weiss" in the past will no longer immediately respond "Barry White started a right-wing publication? Wait, isn't he dead?"

Right out of the gate, Oliver points out that Weiss was given control over a news organization when she herself has no experience in news - she's always been op-ed. Her rightwing garbage heap "The Free Press" is opinion-heavy - and often from right-wing extremists and racists as I discussed a year and a half ago.

Oliver mentions Weiss's idiotic retweet of the parody Twitter account @OfficialAntifa and her mischaracterization of (aka "lies about") NYTimes staff meetings.

He mentions the rightwing plutocrats who bankrolled her including techno-fascist Marc Andreessen.

I have been discussing the awfulness of Bari Weiss since I began this website so there was little new I learned from the report, although I did learn that the Free Press has been publishing shitty editorial cartoons by right-wing playwright David Mamet - who I knew was a right-wing hysteric 18 years ago.

Oliver fact-checks The Free Press.

• Its article about trans-care that turned out to be utter bullshit.

• Lies told by the Free Press about crime in Austin, Texas.

• Claims that reports of malnutrition in Gaza were fake.

Then Oliver gets into Bari Weiss's clown college for racists, known as the University of Austin, which I have discussed so many times here.

The result of this magnificent report will be that the circle of people who consider Bari Weiss a far-right sleaze-merchant and laughingstock will grow considerably.

• Salon: John Oliver slams CBS for putting Bari Weiss in charge

• Daily Beast: John Oliver Tears Into Nepobaby Billionaire Trying to Take Over HBO

• Variety: John Oliver Slams Bari Weiss’ Takeover of CBS News: She’s ‘Spent Years Putting Out Work’ That ‘Is at Best Irresponsible and at Worst Deeply Misleading’

Of course there are some who will celebrate Weiss's career as the world's most successful courtier, raking in that right-wing money by bending the knee and kissing the ass. On Bluesky, Jamelle Bouie questions the awful Sally Jenkins about her promotion of a celebration of the Weiss victory by the awful Caitlin Flanagan.

And like gutter racist Claire Lehmann (she and Bari go way back) Weiss is shitting her pants over Zohran Mamdani, as if there were not already enough reasons to vote for him.

Delusional religious fanatic Peter Thiel is still delusional

As noted by SFGate:

The PayPal billionaire and longtime California resident is back in the news this week, joining media provocateur Bari Weiss’s “Honestly” podcast for its Nov. 14 episode. About 10 minutes into the two-hour conversation, Thiel, an early supporter of Donald Trump, let fly a truly bizarre metaphor. 

 

He’d been talking about the “intellectual straightjacket” that he sees the Democratic Party forcing people into. He said there’s no room for “individual thought” on the left — not mentioning Trump’s sidelining of the critics within his party — before explaining his point with a “Star Wars” reference.

"Provocateur" is a funny way to describe Weiss. I think "handmaiden to fascist plutocrats" is more accurate.

I have no doubt that Thiel has funded Weiss's "Free Press" project in an effort to add to the right-wing media network led for so long by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News.

To get an idea of how truly weird and semi-coherent and religion-fanatical Thiel is, check out my transcript of his speech from a few years ago, given to the right-wing whine festival, known as the "Stanford Academic Freedom Conference." It was an event where hardcore racists like Amy Wax could go to complain that they get pushback when they publicly attack non-white people.

Thiel himself has used Star Wars references before, to express his own extreme racism:

These were Thiel’s people, and he spoke at the closed-press event with a lot less nuance than he had in our interviews. His after-dinner remarks were full of easy applause lines and in-jokes mocking the left. Universities had become intellectual wastelands, obsessed with a meaningless quest for diversity, he told the crowd. The humanities writ large are “transparently ridiculous,” said the onetime philosophy major, and “there’s no real science going on” in the sciences, which have devolved into “the enforcement of very curious dogmas.” 

 

Thiel reprised his longtime critique of “the diversity myth.” He made a plausible point about the ideological monoculture of the DEI industry: “You don’t have real diversity,” he said, with “people who look different but talk and think alike.” Then he made a crack that seemed more revealing. 

 

“Diversity—it’s not enough to just hire the extras from the space-cantina scene in Star Wars,” he said, prompting laughter.