The New York Times kisses Bari Weiss's grifting ass

Bari Weiss and her grifting pals.
But they are all making sooooo
much money as courtiers for racist,
democracy-hating billionaire fascists. 
I guess that means they "know exactly
what they are doing."
--------------------------------------------------------------

 The New York Times published an article glorifying Weiss, Bari Weiss knows exactly what she's doing.

Weiss knows what she's doing in the sense that she knows how to be the best, most grotesque courtier ever to right-wing techno-fascist billionaires like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen who are trying to destroy American democracy to avoid paying taxes.

It's called "being a grifter."

She's a right-wing political operative pretending to be a journalist. She's trying to do what her paymasters want her to do: move the Overton window by portraying right-wing views as centrist.

Something her good pal, racist right-winger Claire Lehmann likes to talk about. And something the NYTimes is doing its best to help her achieve.

Weiss and the NYTimes are utterly disgusting.

More of my opinions about Bari Weiss and her equally disgusting wife.

A GRIFTER IS BORN - Uri Berliner joins the Bari Weiss racist right-wing grift "The Free Press"!

Jerry Seinfeld is apparently a member of the Bari Weiss right-wing racist club

The Washington Post slams Bari Weiss's grifter wife

The Free Press - the right-wing racist Bari Weiss grift

Majority Report vs. Bari Weiss and "sugar daddy Harlan Crow"

Where it all started - when Bari Weiss promoted a gang of racists and Peter Thiel employees known as the Intellectual Dark Web: Why Pinker? Why Pinkerite? Blame Bari Weiss.

Not all corporate media loves Bari Weiss, fortunately. While googling "Bari Weiss" and "grifter" I found this fun New Republic article My Night Among Bari Weiss’s Free Speech Warriors:

By now, most of the very online are familiar with Weiss’s schtick. The intellectual dark-web doyenne presides over a lucrative media empire centered on The Free Press, technically the most popular newsletter on Substack with over 600,000 subscribers, upward of 77,000 of them paying at least $8 a month. That reach and income have allowed Weiss to run The Free Press as much more than a newsletter: It has a staff, columists, podcasts—including a sympathetic platform for J.K. Rowling—and, naturally, events. The brand forcefully represents itself as a forum for people and ideas that have passed their sell-by date in today’s more enlightened and politically sensitive times, or, as their About page puts it, “We focus on stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative.” You can argue among yourselves whether Rowling has really found herself without other outlets to air her grievances—at The Free Press, this is as canonical as the whole of her Wizarding World.

And of course this classic from Gentlemen's Quarterly, 2018: The Free Speech Grifters

Two days prior, Weiss's column titled "We're All Fascists Now" highlighted the protest of a Christina Hoff Sommers talk at Lewis & Clark Law School, the latest example in an overexposed series of well-meaning college students acting like morons. It was riddled with misrepresentations. To frame the debate as another instance of the liberals attacking fellow liberals, Weiss described Ms. Sommers as a "self-identified" feminist and a "registered" Democrat. To that end, she withheld from readers Sommers's more relevant professional affiliation: resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative think tank, which counts feminist Democrat heroes Dick Cheney and Dinesh D'Souza among its past fellows. 

 

Among the Free Speech Grifters, Sommers has perfected the art. She likes to call herself a feminist, specifically a "factual" one. But if there has been one feminist cause worth addressing in the past 30 years, you wouldn't know it by reading her work. She has had plenty to say on how biological preferences may account for gender distribution in STEM fields, while she's been silent on harassment of women in tech and finance. And she's been outspoken about the due-process rights of men accused of rape on college campuses, but apparently has no interest in addressing the complexity of a crime that is notoriously difficult to prove.

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.

Go go Gizmodo

Wow great article in the Australian incarnation of Gizmodo. It contains these perfect paragraphs (my highlights):

But it also includes the New Atheist movement, which eventually spiraled into Islamophobia; the cringe-aly-titled “Intellectual Dark Web,” which portrays itself as a ragtag crew of “unclassifiable renegades” while parroting right-wing talking points; self-proclaimed anti-“cancel culture” activists; and gender warriors who have tried to gussy up anti-trans talking points as serious intellectual insights.

Substack has become a sort of hive for those latter groups, who have used it as a refuge from bans or perceived harassment on social media sites — because these are media types we’re talking about, they usually cite “Twitter mobs” as the source of their oppression. It’s also served, as in the case of The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald or amateur race scientist Andrew Sullivan, as a lucrative landing pad for writers who were supposedly forced out of their prior publications due to censorious liberals.

Substack has recruited those people with big cash incentives in some instances, though it doesn’t disclose who it pays upfront. (Professional victim Bari Weiss quit the New York Times last summer and is reportedly pulling down $US800,000 ($1,084,560) a year on Substack.)

Kudos to author Tom McKay!

The article links to a MarketWatch piece about "professional victim Bari Weiss" and how much money she is pulling down through Substack:

So far, ‘Common Sense with Bari Weiss‘ has signed up more than 14,000 paying subscribers at $5 each in her first six months, she tells me. She has another 75,000 nonpaying followers. The numbers have been confirmed (with Weiss’s permission) by Substack.

That means her revenues are running at an annual rate of more than $800,000 a year. And rising.

When I did the math my jaw dropped. Weiss’ newsletter has become very successful very quickly. It gave me a startling insight into the kind of money other Substackers are pulling down, including some who have many more paying subs.

The article doesn't mention that Weiss' Substack has the perfect motto for Weiss, combining the obnoxiousness and self-regard that has become the Bari Weiss brand: "Honest news for sane people."

I have doubts that 14K people are interested in paying 5 bucks per month to read what Bari Weiss has to say. I'm not saying there aren't that many right-wingers, I'm saying I suspect the kind of people who are interested in Bari Weiss whining about critical race theory are not, typically, readers, they get their information from Fox News and OAN.

I also have questions about this part of the NewsWatch article:

If you’re fed up with your employer and you want to quit your job, you probably don’t want to do it the way Bari Weiss did it.

The opinion writer and editor quit the New York Times just over a year ago without a backup plan ready.

And she publicly trashed her former employer on her way out the door as well, in a devastating open letter.

“When I left the Times I had no plan, which in retrospect was completely foolish,” she says. “I had no idea. I didn’t make a choice for a while because I was so in a way shocked by what I had just done and wasn’t sure what the next step would be.”

She was, she says, “blackout emotional.”

“I was…overwhelmed and really nervous about what was going to happen next,” she says.

Meanwhile, “It was clear I wasn’t going to get a job in the corporate press, because who would want to hire me after I had done such a thing?”

Now I don't have a high opinion of Bari Weiss' intelligence but I think she's at least strategic enough that she didn't willy-nilly quit her high-profile decently-compensated job without knowing "what was going to happen next." 

We know Substack has paid people advances to join: they paid Matt Yglesias $25,000; they paid Danny Lavery $430,000; Grace Lavery $125,000; for New York Times writers Liz Bruenig and Taylor Lorenz, it offered between $200,000 - $300,000.

What are the odds Substack neglected to offer Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss big advances? Very small, I'd say.

Both Weiss and Sullivan have very high profiles and both joined Substack after leaving their respective jobs with great fanfare and loudly-brayed grievances. Clearly Substack would benefit by all the publicity.

Then there is the issue of possible dark money. If you've seen Breaking Bad, you may recall the episode in which Saul Goodman helps Walter White set up a money laundering system via his son's website. SaveWalterWhite.com - the website is still online.

Why wouldn't it be possible for right-wing plutocrats like Koch to have flunkies set up a system to do essentially the same thing, for their favored pundits on Substack, Patreon or other membership platform payment system? I have yet to find assurance, anywhere, that this could never happen. Or even a discussion of the possibility on mainstream media.

Bari Weiss is simply too connected to too many other people funded by Koch - including several members of the Board of Advisors of FAIR - for me to believe she has been left out of the wingnut welfare system. 

I mean, in addition to the money she's made writing for the Koch-funded City Journal.

Speaking of FAIR, to my surprise the founder of FAIR has been identified - a rich guy named Bion Bartning. More about him and the New York Times' Michael Powell soon.

Bari Weiss and her allies

Although James Lindsay, Christian nationalist ally/business partner and Trump-lover and shameless hypocrite, was not mentioned in Bari Weiss' article about the Intellectual Dark Web, I was not kidding when I said that he is what passes for an intellectual in the IDW world.

Today we see Bari Weiss retweeting James Lindsay, who then retweeted her retweet.

 

The "liberals aren't liberal, right-wingers are the new liberals" line that Weiss is promoting in this tweet is a leading strategy for those associated with the Intellectual Dark Web, a strategy which Claire Lehmann admitted in her reference to the "Overton Window."

A stooge like James Lindsay, who claims to be a leftist while voting for Trump is a prime example of that IDW rat-fucking strategy.

Currently Bari Weiss' pinned Tweet is promoting a variation on the same IDW strategy, suggesting that American liberalism is a dangerous ideology now.

She's worried about the Jews, but she doesn't seem to be at all worried about the fact that leading IDW intellectual James Lindsay has a business partnership with a Christian nationalist kook like Michael O'Fallon, nor that he is cozy with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.

It's striking how supportive these IDW-connected people are of each other, refusing to criticize each other for anything. It's almost as if they are all working for the same bosses and the bosses wouldn't like to see signs of disharmony among the employees. 

The possibility that the IDW gang are getting paid by a group of rightwing plutocrats would go a long way towards explaining the disconnect between what they say they care about and what they actually care about, well-illustrated by this Twitter thread.

As Jamison Foser points out, the people who signed onto the Harpers letter seem far more concerned about the well-known and well-paid being criticized for their right-wing opinions than the Trump administration's abuses of power. Bari Weiss seems perfectly comfortable that her pal James Lindsay is an outspoken Trump supporter.

It seems that anything goes in the IDW world as long as someone hates the 1619 project and "critical race theory" as James Lindsay does. 

Here he is demonstrating once again how to have difficult conversations through civility.

The IDW gang, although dominated by white conservatives, does have Black associates, whose primary focus is to attack the work of other Black people. Coleman Hughes, Quillette author who also works for the Koch-funded City Journal is a leading example. 

Here is a City Journal piece from yesterday, promoting Charles Koch's thoughts on "solving America's social problems."

Fourteen percent of the people who signed the Harpers letter had Koch connections and the initiator of the Harpers letter, Bari Weiss' friend Thomas Chatterton Williams, (the "self-expelled guy,") was given a job at the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute some months after the Harpers letter was published.

Thanks to Bari Weiss retweeting James Lindsay, I discovered another Black Quillette author,  Chloe Valdry, being promoted by Weiss as providing an alternative antiracism to DiAngeloism.

I'm a long-time critic of Robin DiAngelo & White Fragility, but I doubt that an antiracism campaign created by someone aligned with the race science-promoting Quillette is a significantly better alternative. Valdary's IDW connections indicate she is unlikely to have any problems with "racial essentialism" - or at least not enough to cut her connections to the IDW & Quillette.

Valdary runs a project called Theory of Enchantment and there is no information on its site as to where Valdary gets her funding. I have a few theories about that.

So why doesn't Bari Weiss criticize James Lindsay for supporting Trump, or for being friendly with Richard Spencer or for going into business with Michael O'Fallon? Why are Coleman Hughes and Chloe S. Valdary unconcerned that Quillette and the IDW promote race science? 

The answer as always is likely wingnut welfare. As Krugman said:

Wingnut welfare is an important, underrated feature of the modern U.S. political scene. I don’t know who came up with the term, but anyone who follows right-wing careers knows whereof I speak: the lavishly-funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks, media outlets, and so on provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear. Lose an election, make economic forecasts that turn out laughably wrong, whatever — no matter, there’s always a fallback job available.

The plutocrats who fund wingnut welfare are keenly interested in swaying pubic opinion, as we see with Charles Koch sharing his thoughts on "solving America's social problems." And they have access to incredible amounts of money. Why wouldn't they use it to buy people to support their right-wing causes? And they don't even care if the people they buy are smart - James Lindsay is a manifestly stupid oaf. But he had a success in the conservative world with his laughable hoax grift - for which he was paid although he refuses to say who paid him. Plutocrats don't care if Lindsay is a fool - he is willing to spend hours online promoting their interests which are then retweeted by the higher-profile Bari Weiss or praised by Steven Pinker.

And if we look at the things James Lindsay says online, when he isn't insulting those who question him or disagree with him, it's clear that one of the things his bosses care about most is erasing Black history in order to promote the notion that Black people are innately less intelligent and their failure to thrive, post-Emancipation is the fault of their own bad genes.

Bari Weiss' pal Andrew Sullivan is well-known for that very thing, from promoting the Bell Curve to his attacks on the 1619 project.

"She is murdering CBS news" - the Bari Weiss media shambles

So many stories out now about problems with Bari Weiss and CBS News.

The Ankler:

“She is murdering 60 Minutes,” Scott Pelley said to his new executive producer, Nick Bilton about Bari Weiss during a meeting on Monday that might as well have been live-streamed to our esteemed media reporter class (given the speed with which the remark was summarily spread online through what appears to be several recordings). “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

The whole spectacle of Weiss taking over CBS News is one of the most befuddling and perplexing to write about of the kerfuffles I’ve kerfuffled.

On one hand, repeated studies have shown that the group of people running big, mainstream institutional media since the 1990s is the most sanctimonious, full-of-themselves group of professionals ever assembled in human history.

Believe me, I worked at a giant media organization, and hardly an employee there didn’t think of themselves as the barrier against a new dark age. If anyone so much as suggested they might empty their wastebasket, a company-wide town hall was convened to assert the newsroom’s commitment to democracy. (That commitment rarely applied internally, however, as the mainstream media newsrooms were hierarchical, top-down workplaces to a degree that would make the military blush.) 

Après moi, le déluge was the personal motto of every employee.  

And as their work became steadily more mediocre and less relevant over the past few years, individual egos continued to swell to the size of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade floats.

So I get the instinct to roll your eyes at this one. Broadly, ensconced media lifers are the worst possible spokespeople for the cause of journalism and have been crying wolf so long that we are almost incapable of hearing them any longer.

But a funny thing happened. While they were busy crying wolf, the wolf showed up.

And now we’ve got to decide what we’re going to do about it. Because the problem with Hollywood is that an industry that has lost its way as deeply as this one invites the wolves in.

NYMagazine

In his termination letter to longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley on Tuesday, the show’s brand-new executive producer, Nick Bilton, complained that Pelley had decided to “ambush” him with “a performative display of hostility” during a Monday meeting with the show’s staff. There was certainly an element of the theatrical, possibly even the premeditated, in Pelley’s confrontation with his new boss, with Pelley delivering the kinds of withering lines (“You have slender qualifications for this job”) that aggrieved employees can only dream of — all of which were instantly leaked to sympathetic reporters and spread far and wide. Pelley clearly wanted a fight.

The question then became how Bilton and the person who hired him, Bari Weiss, would respond to this massive display of disrespect. They chose not only to fire Pelley, but to blame the entire dispute on him. Bilton’s letter accused Pelley, a 30-year veteran at CBS, of having “no interest in contributing to the future success of the show.” Pelley fired back that Weiss and her team, among other offenses, “instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.”

NYTimes

“Despite our attempts to engage with Scott Pelley and to find a way back, unfortunately we weren’t able to do so, and so we had to part ways,” Ms. Weiss said. “We did not want that to happen, but that’s the path that he chose.”

These were Ms. Weiss’s first remarks to her staff about the decision to fire Mr. Pelley, who was informed of his dismissal on Tuesday evening. CBS News has not issued an official statement about the firing.

Mr. Pelley, in a statement on Wednesday, disputed Ms. Weiss’s account of their interaction. “There was no effort of any kind to ‘find a way back,’” he said.

Mr. Pelley met on Tuesday with Ms. Weiss, Mr. Bilton and Tom Cibrowski, the CBS News president. He said that the meeting had turned hostile and that he believed the network had little interest in engaging with his concerns about the future of “60 Minutes.”

Mr. Pelley, who joined CBS in 1989, had been enraged by Ms. Weiss’s decision last week to fire the leadership team of “60 Minutes,” including its former executive producer, Tanya Simon, and two on-air correspondents, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.

At the Monday staff meeting, which Ms. Weiss did not attend, Mr. Pelley said that Ms. Weiss had been “brought in to kill” the long-running Sunday program, “and she’s been doing exactly that.” He told Mr. Bilton, who has never worked in broadcast news, that he had “slender qualifications for this job.”

Zeteo: Inside ‘Coward’ Bari Weiss’s ‘Shitshow’ at ‘60 Minutes’

Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest media dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex and Bari World. In today’s special edition, we dive into the five-alarm fire that is the current state of ‘60 Minutes’ and CBS News after Scott Pelley was ousted for dressing down Bari Weiss’s handpicked executive producer of the show while accusing her of “murdering” the network. Strap in for a slew of exclusive details and insights about this latest Bari trainwreck…

 

Quillette author gently criticizes Bari Weiss in the Daily Beast

Bari Weiss has been part of the IDW
since the beginning. Quillette founder
Claire Lehmann celebrates Weiss partying
with long-time Koch-funded grifters
---------------------------------------------------

Well I am on a roll with Bari Weiss lately.

I was glad to see Weiss receiving some criticism in the Daily Beast in an article entitled Is Bari Weiss Embarrassed by the Intellectual Dark Web? 

But I thought there were some glaring omissions in the article - no mention of what was a pretty big bombshell only a year ago - Weiss's sugar baby status as fund recipient of Supreme Court corrupter Harlan Crow. 

And although the Bari Weiss article about the "renegades" of the Intellectual Dark Web mentions Quillette as the "publication most associated with this (IDW) movement" the Daily Beast article does not mention Quillette once.

Then I realized the name of the author was familiar - ah yes the same Matt Johnson who has written for Quillette - and surprise surprise, Johnson's connection to Quillette is not mentioned in his Daily Beast bio, leading to this question: 

Is Matt Johnson embarrassed by Quillette?

Johnson has written fifteen articles for Quillette so far, the most recent in March of this year. Including a softball  interview with Steven Pinker - that's the only kind of interview anybody associated with Quillette would conduct. 

Johnson gives the impression that Weiss was at one time an outside (albeit sympathetic) observer of the IDW - but she's always been a member of the gang, which is why she is now so tight with far-right racist plutocrats associated with the IDW, including Peter Thiel. Weiss could be seen partying with IDW types a month after her renegades article ran.

Johnson has written for the equally right-wing garbage magazine Areo. And he adores misogynist Islamaphobe Christopher Hitchens. What an ass. 

Really it's kind of a miracle that Johnson has written anything against Weiss no matter how mild - but maybe this is an indication that the Quillette branch of the IDW is mad at Weiss for stealing their thunder - and maybe some plutocrat funding - by creating "The Free Press," the Bari Weiss version of Quillette.

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

The Free Press - the right-wing racist Bari Weiss grift

Bari Weiss calling her media outlet "The Free Press" is about as accurate as Donald Trump calling his media outlet "Truth Social." But many people are stupid and willing believers of right-wing grifters and fascist traitors.

I recently predicted in a comment on Threads that NPR's former editor Uri Berliner will soon reappear as either an employee of Weiss; running a right-wing plutocrat-funded Substack; or as a member of a right-wing think tank. So far my comment has received 223 likes. People are finally beginning to recognize the right-wing grift that was practiced by Weiss herself.

Weiss threw a fit and quit the New York Times, claiming it was too liberal and Uri Berliner quit NPR for the same reason. Weiss quit not long after she had a chance to promote her good buddies as "The Intellectual Dark Web." 

In 2020 I discovered Quillette's former editor Toby Young (recently seen on the racist Substack Aporia) complaining that the big article Weiss was planning about him and other far-right racists - no doubt another excuse to complain about liberals and the left - was not going to be published since Weiss had quit.

I suspect that the NYTimes refused to run a second "Glory of the IDW & friends" article and that is one of the reasons Weiss quit. 

Weiss has done very well for herself since then - financially, if not reputationally - by making friends with a bunch of right-wing activist billionaires, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and most notoriously, that corrupter of Clarence Thomas and the Supreme Court, Harlan Crow, Weiss's "Sugar Daddy." 

"The Free Press" has a soft spot for filthy, treasonous, would-be dictator Trump, as discussed in this New York Magazine article.

Berliner hasn't yet revealed his new career as a right-wing grifter, but I'm keeping a look out. I took a look at "The Free Press" writers list to see if he is there yet, but did not see him. But as you might have guessed, the list is full of right-wing ghouls, grifters and racists, many of whom have written for far-right racist Quillette:

• Francesca Block - right-winger who claims on Twitter that her working for right-wing propaganda outlet "The Free Press" means journalism is not dead. I assume she was hired on the basis of her work for the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, writing articles like "Meet the American millionaire Marxists funding anti-Israel rallies."

• Nellie Bowles - wife of Bari Weiss. She's a big fan of stochastic terrorism-promoting psychopathic LibsofTikTok. 

• Katherine Boyle is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen is a leader of techno-fascism. So I should add Marc Andreessen to the list of Bari Weiss's right-wing billionaire pals.

• Margi Conklin - hyper-natalist Nazi-sympathizer Elon Musk better not find out about Conklin's refusal to have children. Conklin is managing editor of "The Free Press" and doesn't appear to have written anything for it yet. Unfortunately for Margi, her husband Christopher Yates has nice things to say about NPR - the current target of the Uri Berliner-lead attempt to defund public radio. Margi's bosses better not find out!

• Matti Friedman - appears to write exclusively about Israel, and was accused by the Associated Press of lying when Friedman claimed the AP was biased against Israel. Which is undoubtedly why "The Free Press" hired him for this round of Israel-Gaza hostilities. Attacking critics of Israel is Bari Weiss's oldest and possibly favorite public cause.

• Martin Gurri - right-wing ghoul, works for the Koch-funded and -controlled think tank the Mercatus Center, author at the disgraceful, sued-for-libel City Journal and denier of systemic racism (of course.)

• Rob Henderson - right-wing racist ghoul who loves Peter Thiel oh so much, has written for Quillette. Pals around with neo-Nazi Richard Hanania.

• Coleman Hughes - a reliable source of attacks on all Black-related issues such as reparations and the 1619 Project and is a defender of race pseudoscience in Quillette. 

• Eli Lake - claims to be anti-Trump but often defends Trump and others on the far right. Promotes Quillette on Twitter.

• Walter Kirn - business partner of disgraced journalist  and infamous misogynist Matt Taibbi.

• Douglas Murray - British white supremacist, named member of the Intellectual Dark Web. I've mentioned him quite a few times on this blog. Current Affairs writes: "...as earlier critics of his work have noted, he packages white supremacist and xenophobic ideas in a way that makes them more palatable to the mainstream." Which is undoubtedly why "The Free Press" hired him. Murray has written for Quillette, of course.

• Joe Nocera - token liberal, but maybe he's becoming right-wing now for that easy post-retirement grifter income.

• Vinay Prasad - anti-vax crackpot - "In October 2021, Prasad prompted social media controversy when he published a blog post comparing the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic response to the beginnings of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich."

• Olivia Reingold - the Trump-loving Republican Security Council are big fans. Reingold can be seen on Twitter promoting the "Twitter files" lies and defending hiring far-right racist piece of shit political hack Ben Shapiro a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web. Reingold claimed hiring Shapiro would "legitimize" Politico. To understand what a far-right ghoul Reingold is, it helps to learn more about Shapiro at the always excellent Some More News. 

• Peter Savodnik has written for racist Quillette, taking up the standard right-wing racist political line that systemic racism must not really exist because "we certainly can’t experience systemic racism, not in the way that “experience” is understood by philosophers or, for that matter, judges." I have no doubt that Savodnik is, like Quillette and its founding editor Claire Lehmann, an "hereditarian."

• Abigail Shrier - right-wing ultra-ghoulish trans-phobic political operative. So perfect for the Bari Weiss grift. Quillette author, naturally.

• Rupa Subramanya - right-wing Canadian idiot, big fan of Julian Assange and Elon Musk, "slave to (her) cat." Hates Justin Trudeau, of course.

• Suzy Weiss - sister of Bari Weiss, so unsurprisingly a right-wing grifter, enjoying that sweet nepotism.

• Oliver Wiseman - defender of that weasel Steven Pinker for the far-right Libertarian think tank Foundation for Economic Education. That says it all.

• Leighton Woodhouse - right-wing ally of far-right nuclear power shill and climate change denier Michael Shellenberger

• Emily Yoffe - odious right-wing grifter who has written for the equally odious "Persuasion" and  prefers to blame drunken women for rape.

So there you have it - all the far-right favorites: racism, neo-Nazism, Trumpism, transphobia, anti-vax crackpottery, misogyny, climate change-denialism, stochastic terrorism and worship of far-right activist billionaire sugar daddies. 

What a toxic brew.

University of Austin: Clown Car of Intellectual Dark Web Dweebs

Some good responses to IDW University (University of Austin.)

Palantir Co-Founder Starts Anti-Woke University With Clown Car of Intellectual Dark Web Dweebs

The University of Austin or UATX, which is absolutely not to be confused with the University of Texas at Austin, a real school, aims to offer “forbidden courses” that will spark students to ask “provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities.” It boasts a bevy of headache-inducing personalities on its Board of Advisors, which consists largely of the type of people who have branded themselves as the last defenders of liberalism (against the tide of woke liberals).

Those personalities include Bari Weiss, a former New York Times opinion editor who has spent most of her professional energy yelping about left-wing Twitter mobs; conservative British historian Niall Ferguson, who left Stanford after leaked emails showed him encouraging campus Republicans to do “opposition research” on a left-wing student; former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who has somehow tried to make the “wokeness” of central bankers a culture-war issue; amateur race scientist and self-declared ethnic penis size expert Andrew Sullivan; scorched-earth culture warrior Sohrab Ahmari; and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, an identity politics alarmist who is popular with the neoliberal crowd. One of its “founding faculty fellows” is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Hoover Institution scholar who believes Islam is inherently violent and has more recently begun parroting the line that “wokeism” is just like white supremacy.

Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan’s New University of Austin Is Already Getting Trump University Comparisons

Journalist Bari Weiss announced Monday that she and a team of likeminded colleagues plan to launch a university to counter America’s “broken” higher education system. It will be called the University of Austin, but it is already garnering comparisons to Trump University.

Bari Weiss Has a New Grift in the Unaccredited “University of Austin’s” “Forbidden Courses”

Professional cancel culture victim Bari Weiss introduced a new grift Monday, announcing that she and a number of other right-wing figures are founding “a new university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.”

The new university is called The University of Austin and if you’re thinking to yourself, “Wait, isn’t there already a University of Austin?”, there is not. You’re thinking of the University of Texas at Austin. But also, this new university isn’t really a university at all, in that it’s not accredited, offers no degrees, and does not have a physical campus. It is seeking accreditation, but apparently it’s doing so from an accreditor that doesn’t operate in Texas.

 

Conservative thinkers, ideologues announce creation of 'fiercely independent' University of Austin alternative college

A slew of conservative thinkers, ideologues and media personalities have signed on to the creation of a new alternative university in Austin, Texas, according to tweets and articles published by the newly-announced school's staff Monday morning.

Called the University of Austin, the college announced in a Monday video tweet its charter, objectives and a list of staff and supporters. Those associated with the new institution range from former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss to experimental psychologist and one-time Jeffrey Epstein associate Steven Pinker. 

Palantir Founder Is Backing Bari Weiss’ No-Degree ‘University’

The former New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss, known for her diatribes against “cancel culture,” announced on Monday that she is helping launch a new “university” that will be “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.”

The somewhat vague mission statement suggests that the institution—called the University of Austin, or UATX—will be a home for those who have been shunned from “illiberal” college campuses.

“Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars,” griped UATX’s inaugural president, Pano Kanelos, in an essay announcing the new venture, which was posted to Weiss’ Substack newsletter.

Buried in the school’s FAQ section: it does not actually offer degrees, nor is it yet accredited.

I Will Create A Winning Basketball Program At The University Of Austin

Whatever it winds up being, though, the University of Austin promises to be an institution dedicated to litigating the same hoary “forbidden questions” about race and gender and The West that have been beguiling stupid people for generations, and to creating some institutional credibility around the small, wrong answers those people want those questions to have; it will be, as Sarah Jones put it, “a Bible college for libertarians.” Or anyway it might be, if it becomes something more than what it is now, which is nothing. If everything goes right for the University of Austin, this movement—dusty Koch Brothers cynicism re-skinned as a bold and dangerous exercise in intellectual insurgency—may someday have a diploma-granting institution dedicated to institutionalizing that grandiose and curdled worldview. If not, maybe we’ll get a version of Prager University with an actual physical plant. Or maybe not.

Who’s Afraid of Higher Education?

Consider the parties involved. As a student at Columbia University, Weiss developed a censorious reputation of her own. A campus organization Weiss co-founded “did demand that the administration change the department’s curriculum and make it easier to file complaints against professors, measures that would have affected certain scholars’ responsibilities and duties, as well as their future job prospects,” the writers Mari Cohen and Joshua Leifer observed in Jewish Currents. Weiss and her fellow activists targeted Arab professors for speech they deemed hostile to Israel, efforts she’s since downplayed to better portray herself as a campaigner for free expression. A University of Austin “founding faculty fellow” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has called Islam “a nihilstic cult of death” and has claimed that violence is inherent to the religion, which bodes ill for any Muslim who might wish to attend the new university. The new university’s positions on sex and gender aren’t hard to guess, either. Another fellow, the anti-trans academic Kathleen Stock, voluntarily resigned her position at the University of Sussex, claiming that student protests curtailed her own academic freedom. Put another way, Stock found free expression a bit too lively to tolerate.

Others linked to the university stand accused of crossing professional lines with female students. One, Joshua Katz, received a year-long suspension from Princeton University over an inappropriate relationship with an undergraduate woman. Another, Joe Lonsdale, has been accused of raping a woman he mentored, an allegation he vehemently denies. Lonsdale’s nonprofit, Cicero Research, is “fiscally sponsoring” the new institution.

So what rights will a University of Austin student actually possess? They can’t count on a right to free expression, that much is clear. The presence of Lonsdale and Katz raises further questions about the university’s position on due process for survivors of sexual misconduct. Students won’t even benefit from an intellectually diverse faculty. Survey the school’s website, and you won’t find a single leftist scholar. Nor should we expect to find one. Lonsdale’s nonprofit, Cicero, says it’s committed to “free-market based solutions to public policy issues.” And as a private institution, the University of Austin will retain the broad freedom to censor students and faculty as it sees fit — as does Liberty and my alma mater. What we’ve got, then, is a Bible college for libertarians. Those disturbed by progress will find shelter on campus. Pledging freedom from wokeness, the University of Austin actually seeks freedom from free exchange. There is a soupçon of social liberalism, which extends no further than equality for LGB people and not to trans people and which is too inadequate to greatly distinguish the school from other conservative institutions. In this university, Falwell would see kindred minds. There’s nothing new here.

I'm disappointed the author didn't mention Hirsi Ali's husband, Niall Ferguson, who created a scandal in higher education in 2018:

A conservative Stanford professor plotted to dig up dirt on a liberal student

Ferguson seemed to view Michael Ocon, a left-wing student activist slated to graduate in 2020, as a threat to the program. In an email to two members of the Stanford Republicans, John Rice-Cameron and Max Minshull, he wrote that “some opposition research on Mr. O [Ferguson’s name for Ocon] might also be worthwhile.” Minshull, who works as Ferguson’s research associate, said he’d “get on” the dirt-digging.

Some of the emails had an overtly sinister tone. Rice-Cameron, who is, oddly enough, the son of Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice, wrote in one email that “slowly, we will continue to crush the Left’s will to resist, as they will crack under pressure.”

Ferguson wrote in another note, “now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee,” adding that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”

More complaints about Bari Weiss as a tool of the Trump administration

Vanity Fair has an article about the groveling sycophancy of the Bari Weiss-lead CBS.

Weiss' efforts to turn CBS into Fox News are doomed to fail - there is already a Fox News, completely obedient to the Trump administration. Weiss' efforts will only destroy CBS and make everybody hate her - even more.

The article provides examples of Weiss shamelessly sucking up to the Trump administration:

On Monday night of Tony Dokoupil’s first week as anchor of the CBS Evening News, Bari Weiss walked into the newsroom and asked to see the script. This was unusual—the network chief does not typically edit scripts directly—but Weiss was the new boss. After some objections from the show’s producers, she was given access and proceeded to add a few lines to a January 5 segment on the US military raid targeting Nicolás Maduro. Weiss’s edits, according to a former CBS producer, sought to cast President Donald Trump’s operation as a cunning maneuver to box out China, Russia, and Iran.

“Of course she writes it in the wrong place,” recalls the producer. The text was added to the teleprompter twice, leaving her new star anchor flummoxed, stumbling over his words for several excruciating seconds. “First day, big problems here,” he told the millions of viewers who’d tuned in.

“What a disaster,” says one former CBS News anchor. “Honestly, I would’ve fucking killed her. Are you serious? On the first night?”

*** 

Hegseth dedicated much of the interview to praising President Donald Trump’s “bold and audacious” leadership. Dokoupil hardly pressed the secretary, at one point noting Hegseth’s earlier boast that Maduro “effed around and found out.”
“I was horrified,” recalls one staffer. “Because it was such a softball interview.” But one person seemed to be happy with the display: Kim Harvey, the executive producer, who seemed intent on impressing Weiss. Weiss had personally booked Hegseth, and Dokoupil was delivering the right blend of major access and deferential tone that she wanted for the new show.

The sucking up is so insane - but Bari Weiss has no shame and no ethics - she does whatever she needs to do to court the powerful. That has been the secret to her success for her entire career, including having a "sugar daddy" in Supreme Court-corrupter Harlan Crow.

The night after the start of the war in Iran, Dokoupil interviewed Douglas Murray, a conservative commentator known for his vigorous defenses of Israel. “We’ve started to see more opinion commentators coming in to talk about what they think about what’s going on versus showing and telling from reporters,” the CBS journalist says. Meanwhile, the daily editorial calls now often feature analysis from Aaron MacLean, a former adviser to Senator Tom Cotton who recently joined CBS News as an analyst. In an October piece for The Free Press, he called for Trump to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Douglas Murray is a white supremacist, and named by Weiss herself as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web. The Current Affairs review  of one of his books discusses his awfulness:

...Murray’s work is worth examining not just because it is bad, but because, as earlier critics of his work have noted, he packages white supremacist and xenophobic ideas in a way that makes them more palatable to the mainstream. His work has been called “gentrified xenophobia” because it shows fear and disgust toward immigrants, but tries to make the position seem like common sense and fit for discussion in polite society. Indeed, The War on the West concludes with a full-throated defense of “white culture” and a case that non-white people are in various ways inferior. But Murray’s book is published by HarperCollins, not a neo-Nazi group, and he publishes in mainstream outlets like The Wall Street Journal and The Spectator. Despite the laziness of his thinking, Murray insidiously spreads views that should be consigned to the fringes of public discourse.

Which makes him a perfect fit for the Bari Weiss network.

Elon Musk is a stochastic terrorist

KRIS GOLDSMITH

Per CNN:

Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has fled his home due to an escalation in threats resulting from Elon Musk’s campaign of criticism against him, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday.

Yoel Roth, who resigned from the social media company in November, has in recent weeks faced a storm of attacks and threats of violence following the release of the so-called “Twitter Files” — internal Twitter communications that new owner Musk has released through journalists including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.

Roth’s position involved him working on sensitive issues including the suspension of then-President Donald Trump’s account in 2021. On Monday, Weiss posted a series of screenshots purported to show internal Twitter documents where Roth and others discussed whether to ban Trump’s account, with some employees questioning if the former president’s tweets violated the platform’s policies.

While Musk had initially been publicly supportive of Roth, that soon changed after he left the company.

Roth has since been the subject of criticism and threats following the release of the Twitter Files. However, things took a dark turn over the weekend when Musk appeared to endorse a tweet that baselessly accused Roth of being sympathetic to pedophilia — a common trope used by conspiracy theorists to attack people online.

A person familiar with Roth’s situation told CNN threats made against the former Twitter employee escalated exponentially after Musk engaged in the pedophilia conspiracy theory. 

This is the second time Musk has falsely accused someone of pedophilia. It's insane he didn't lose the first case. Clearly he has no qualms about using false accusations to smear people. He needs to be sued into bankruptcy.

The American far-right loves stochastic terrorism. And by far-right I am very much including the Intellectual Dark Web. 

Elon Musk is clearly a member in good standing of that crowd of ghouls. 

It's curious, that the far-right and the Intellectual Dark Web pretend to hate pedophilia when, as I have documented, they love blatant pro-pedophilia Camille Paglia.

Although for the last four years, this blog has focused on criticizing the race pseudoscience promoted by the Intellectual Dark Web, which has been aided and abetted by mainstream "celebrity intellectuals" like Steven Pinker, I have also ended up writing about the various stochastic terrorism projects connected to members of the Intellectual Dark Web.

• Maybe one of the earliest examples of social media-delivered stochastic terrorism was Gamergate, in 2014, with its connection to three members of the Intellectual Dark Web: named members Christina Hoff Sommers and Milos Yiannopoulus, and Cathy Young. The guy who attacked Paul Pelosi was a fan of Gamergate.

• Pizzagate in 2016 promoted by Mike Cernovich, a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

• The entire career of former Quillette staff member Andy Ngo, who lent his free speech grift to the Trump campaign, which hoped to use ANTIFA-panic as an excuse to declare martial law.

Oh how the Intellectual Dark Web loved Andy Ngo. Sommers calls for backup from members and fans of the IDW in this tweet.

• The career of James Lindsay, a beloved "intellectual" of the Intellectual Dark Web and influencer of the guy who attacked Paul Pelosi. Bari Weiss was a big fan of "Conceptual James."

I recently wrote about Libs of TikTok, the account created by self-proclaimed stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik. LOTT is funded by Seth Dillon. LOTT is defended by Bari Weiss. 

Is there any stochastic terrorist who Bari Weiss DOES NOT LOVE?

Libs of TikTok goes far beyond expressing political opinions about transgender issues. That would certainly be allowed under Twitter’s policies, which exist to curb harassment, violence, and hate speech, not opinions. In fact, Libs of TikTok has repeatedly highlighted specific individuals, events, and institutions with inflammatory language, often falsely suggesting they are guilty of heinous acts against young children. The account’s spotlight has repeatedly resulted in harassment and violent threats toward the individuals involved, in a process typically referred to as stochastic terrorism. Those targeted include doctors and hospitals that provide gender-affirming care for youth, teachers and schools with inclusive policies, and all-ages or youth-focused drag events.

"The Twitter Files" is Musk selectively releasing email exchanges in the hopes it will make old Twitter look bad. Musk has asked right-wingers Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss to help him.

When her access was granted, Bari Weiss tried to show that Libs of TikTok was treated unfairly. As Kevin Drum writes:

...Bari Weiss, a writer whose primary motivation in life seems to be her deep resentment of liberals, is the author of Part 2, and she provides the names of three political actors who were de-amplified:¹ 

• Charlie Kirk
• Dan Bongino
• Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok)

And that's it. Weiss doesn't explain why she picked these three to highlight. She doesn't say why these three were de-amplified. Nor does she say if she also knows of any liberals who were de-amplified. And even though Musk has given her access to anything she wants to see, she provides no statistics about how many people were de-amplified; the reasons they were de-amplified; how long they were de-amplified; or anything else. She just provides three hand-picked names and that's the end of it.

Charlie Kirk is another named member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

Apparently Weiss failed to show Libs of TikTok was discriminated against, and in fact revealed it was given special consideration. 

The American far-right tries to discredit the concept of "stochastic terrorism" - at least as applied to its members, as seen recently in a piece by Koch employee and all-around soulless political operative Christopher Rufo a friend of James Lindsay and member of the IDW-loaded FAIRforall board of advisers. Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger are, of course, also advisors of that organization.

But I'll end this post on a high note:

Elon Musk HUMILIATED When Crowd Turns On Him And Dave Chappelle

and:

Musk, the CEO of Twitter and Tesla, joined Chappelle onstage Sunday night at the Chase Center in San Francisco, where Chris Rock was also headlining. 

“It was more boos than I’d ever heard,” an attendee, Jason, said in a direct message. “Sustained jeering.” 

Two audience members said they booed Musk because of the widespread firings and layoffs at Twitter. A third person said he booed Musk because of his political agenda — before the midterm elections, Musk urged followers to vote for Republicans. The three people shared screenshots of their tickets to the show with NBC News and spoke on the condition that only their first names be used to protect their privacy and to avoid backlash from Musk’s fans.

Both cheers and boos can be heard in videos of the event, which were viewed millions of times on social media Monday. Later on Twitter, Musk attributed the mixed reception to his recent embrace of conservative politics.

“Technically, it was 90% cheers & 10% boos (except during quiet periods), but, still, that’s a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter),” Musk tweeted. 

He added, “It’s almost as if I’ve offended SF’s unhinged leftists … but nahhh.”

All three audience members said that Musk’s tweet was inaccurate and that the booing drowned out the cheering.

The incident and the audience members’ explanations represent a shifting tide for Musk, who has reached a new level of notoriety since he took over Twitter while vocally supporting conservative causes.