Nellie Bowles, wife of Bari Weiss, is like Bari a talentless right-wing political hack, superbly detailed by a review by Becca Rothfield in the Washington Post:
Then, she fell in love with former Times opinion editor and writer Bari Weiss, to whom she is now married. Bowles grandiosely characterizes Weiss as a “known liberal dissident,” as if she were a renegade in a Soviet prison — not a canny businesswoman who left the Times vocally but voluntarily in 2020 so as to earn a purported $800,000 from an aggrieved newsletter the following year.
In the gulag that is life after the New York Times, the pair founded the Free Press, an outlet that designates itself as a stronghold of “fierce independence” and that specializes in sneering at the alleged excesses of progressivism. (“Camping Out at Columbia’s Communist Coachella,” reads a representative headline about a student protest that has since been disbanded by swarms of police in full riot gear — not the sort of characters usually in attendance at a music festival.) With Weiss’s help, Bowles suggests, she abandoned her youthful follies and entered true adulthood.
Hers is a familiar narrative, and one for which there is an eager audience. Publications like the Free Press, which boasts 77,000 paid subscribers, often publish confessionals in which newly minted centrists detail their conversions. Books abound with such stories, too. In a recent screed about the pitfalls of the sexual revolution, self-proclaimed “reactionary feminist” Mary Harrington explains that she pivoted rightward after a bout of hedonistic philandering in her 20s; the conservative commentator Sohrab Ahmari, in a 2021 memoir, admits that he arrived at college convinced of the wisdom of liberalism, only to be disillusioned as he came of age.
For the record, I don't believe the Free Press has 77K paid subscribers. I think it has 77K paid accounts some of which are underwritten by Bari Weiss's right-wing racist sugar daddies. Much like Substack. And until I see an audit of the accounts of the Free Press (or Substack) that proves otherwise, I will maintain that position.
Nellie Bowles revealed her true, hideous colors when she praised the psychopathic stochastic terrorist Libs of TikTok. A piece of smug right-wing hackery is no more than I would expect from that truly awful human being.
And where would a friend of the Intellectual Dark Web be without raging self-pity in spite of having an incredibly lucrative but also incredibly easy plutocrat-funded grift?
What mass movement — massive by design and definition — has no ridiculous constituents? Certainly not the movement of brave “free thinkers” who liken the harsh feedback they receive online to public humiliations in Maoist China, as Bowles does at length.
Hack grifter ghouls, funded to make the world a more hateful place.
