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

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.

"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…

 

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.

Bari Weiss wins the grifter olympics

TECH DIRT: Paramount Formally Hires Bari Weiss To Turn What’s Left Of CBS News Into A Soggy Right Wing Propaganda And Troll Farm

Weiss is a shameless opportunist and troll whose “expertise” (first at the New York Times then at her own Free Press newsletter) has largely involved trolling everyone left of center for engagement clicks with culture war dogshit and dangerously shoddy reporting, then crying like a full-diapered toddler when people criticize her for being generally terrible.

Weiss’ shtick is part of a much broader effort by the extraction class to frame the media’s steady lurch rightward as a necessary anti-woke corrective to mainstream media’s non-existent liberal bias. Its primary function is to punch down against the kind of academics, progressive reformers, and marginalized communities that speak truth to power. The kind of folks that white, affluent, center-right brunchlords clearly view as more dangerous to their wealth and power than violent authoritarianism.

Weiss is not really qualified to run a newsroom; she was a junior NYT editor who occasionally wrote opinion pieces in the NYT opinion section, helping the operation’s slow descent into a troll and clickbait farm that now coddles authoritarianism. Actual journalists have spent the last few weeks disgusted and embarrassed by Weiss’ fail-upward trajectory given her outlet’s past history of dangerous falsehoods.

David Klion provides some perspective on the grifter win:

As does the New Yorker:

Sometimes, the truth is viciously fought over. Trump and Weiss have certainly long been in combat mode, even if they might not always be on the same team. When Trump took on CBS earlier this year, its journalists did not back down from the stories they wanted to tell, either: one segment on “60 Minutes,” for example, quoted a source likening Trump’s intimidation of law firms to the behavior of a Mob boss, drawing another legal threat from the President; after Bill Owens, the show’s executive producer, quit, a correspondent said, bluntly, on air, that Owens felt he’d lost his independence from management amid the settlement and merger sagas. We’ll have to see what shape the fight takes from here. I don’t think that Trump has won just yet. I don’t think Weiss has, either.

Steven Pinker & Jeffrey Epstein & Bari Weiss & Larry Summers & Trump

Pinker and Epstein, apparently on the "Lolita Express"

Although Pinker has claimed to be opposed to Trump, the second Trump atrocity has been in some respects very good for Pinker:

• His "woke" enemies in Academia have been fired or intimidated into silence, thanks to the Trump administration

• Legislation targeting trans people is being promoted by the Trump administration

• Pinker is a long-time ally of Bari Weiss.

•  She is now controlling CBS News, a result of Trump allies/appeasers wanting to curry favor with Trump. And before Weiss completely destroys CBS News, she's making sure to help boost the career of Pinker by putting him in one of her ill-regarded Town Halls.

And although Pinker has criticized Weiss' The Free Press, that doesn't stop him from being a contributor to that right-wing piece of crap.

Well, I've said it a million times - Pinker is a weasel. He only cares about promoting his career and promoting race pseudoscience, and if ethical consistency is an impediment to either, he will jettison ethical consistency. 

A striking aspect of Pinker's intellectual output, long noted by critics, is his habit of promoting two mutually exclusive propositions, or as critics have often called it "wanting to have things both ways."

It seems the only thing that has done any damage to his career at all is his association with Jeffrey Epstein.

Salon:

When Weiss isn’t suppressing reporting on torture, she is busy transforming CBS into a platform for the fringes of the right. Along with hosting a town hall featuring Erika Kirk, Weiss has tapped noted associates of the deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including the attorney and law professor Alan Dershowitz and psychologist Steven Pinker, for collaborations. This also comes as Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, was spotted this weekend dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago after refusing to defend his agency’s independence in congressional testimony.

But as we see, thanks to Weiss boosting his career, even the Jeffrey Epstein connection has not significantly hindered his career.

Another long-time ally of Pinker, Larry Summers, was an extremely close friend of Epstein, asking him for advice on how best to sexually harass one of his professional colleagues.

Recently someone has shared a brief video clip of Pinker with Epstein on what appears to be the "Lolita Express" (see above.) It's funny how many images of Pinker and Epstein there are, considering Pinker claimed to try to keep his distance.

As Inside Higher Ed wrote:

Pinker’s response begins with what he calls an “annoying irony” about Epstein: that “I could never stand the guy, never took research funding from him and always tried to keep my distance.”

“I found him to be a kibitzer and a dilettante -- he would abruptly change the subject, ADD-style, dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack and privilege his own intuitions over systematic data.”

Still, he said, because “Epstein had insinuated himself with so many people I intersected with,” and since “I was often the most recognizable person in the room, someone would snap a picture; some of them resurfaced this past week, circulated by people who disagree with me on various topics and apparently believe that the photos are effective arguments.” He said that most joint engagements were before Epstein’s arrest, but one was after he served his sentence.

Regarding the 2007 letter, Pinker wrote that Dershowitz is a friend, “and we taught a course together at Harvard. He often asks me questions about syntax and semantics of laws, most recently the impeachment statute.” While he was representing Epstein, Dershowitz “asked me about the natural interpretation of one of the relevant laws, and I offered my opinion; this was cited in a court document.”

Pinker is friends with Trump's "confidant" Alan Dershowitz, lately seen encouraging Trump's dreams for a third term. Deshowitz was "part of the legal team that negotiated Epstein’s 2007 non-prosecution agreement in Florida and later represented him as allegations mounted in civil suits."

Pinker will be speaking to some of the wackiest crackpots of all, Randroids (aka "Objectivists") at their Summer Conference in 2026.

Back in 2013, on my personal blog, I did a deep dive into the career of Ayn Rand, with a focus on her magnum opus "Atlas Shrugged." I began with a pretty low opinion of Rand, but still, I was stunned by how bad "Atlas Shrugged' was on every level - literary, political, geographical and logical. And also by how much her "philosophy" was shaped by her mother giving away her favorite toy, a mechanical chicken, when she was five years old. 

Yes, in spite of the specter of Jeffrey Epstein, and Pinker's alleged dislike of Trump, Pinker and his allies are doing well during the second Trump administration.

Bari Weiss is a fascist - and now so is CBS news

 

AV Club:

Just when you thought the Paramount corporation couldn’t heap any more indignities on the head of poor, beleaguered CBS News—which got to spend months being abused by the Trump administration for the horrible crime of editing down an interview, before having to watch its parent company sheepishly shell out millions rather than fight it out on its behalf—multiple sources are now reporting that the venerable TV news brand might end up being handed off to former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss. This is per TheWrap, seemingly confirming a Puck report from earlier today suggesting that Paramount (now owned by Skydance, and under the watchful eye of its founder, David Ellison) is in talks to acquire Weiss’ media company The Free Press, potentially with an aim toward installing her at the top of CBS News.

Predictably, gutter racists like Razib Khan were celebrating.

Nathan Brand is a hard-core Republican which makes him a friend of fascism and racism, automatically.

Brand is apparently associated with Hillsdale, the far-right college that employs Ben Winegard, the twin brother (and fellow racist) of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard's flunky Bo Winegard.

As Tom Scocca noted above, Weiss is supremely untalented.

But she does have one amazing talent - to be a shameless courtier to fascist plutocrats, as I have discussed on this blog for years.

Larry David detests Bari Weiss.

Alex Jones is a creature of Bari Weiss' Intellectual Dark Web

Bari Weiss homage to herself
---------------------------------

The article by Bari Weiss, published when she was still at the New York Times, Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, was an introduction to the network of far-right grifters and clowns who have besieged us ever since - aided and abetted by mainstream media like the New York Times.

And Weiss herself has turned out to be the queen of the far-right clowns and grifters of the Intellectual Dark Web, ascending to lead CBS in order to aid and abet the evil that is the Trump administration.

One of the clowns mentioned in that foundational article by Weiss was Alex Jones:

Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).

Pinker may be on the opposite end of the Intellectual Dark Web spectrum from Jones, but it's clear that Weiss considers them all part of the same spectrum.

The spectrum of people who lack a conscience, I would say.

But Jones is particularly evil, and second only to Trump in his ability to lead idiots, psychos and freaks into doing horrible things, most especially to attack the poor grieving parents of the children murdered at Sandy Hook.

So it is a wonderful thing that the people who own The Onion have made the evil Jones its target, buying what was left of Jones' Info Wars after Jones was sued almost to oblivion by those same parents he attacked.

It's shocking still, that Jones was able to perpetrate his pure evil for as long as he did, and only defamation lawsuits were able to partially stop him - although it appears that Jones has started up again:

There is an excellent article in the Ringer called The Most Inspiring Media Story of the Year about the Onion take-over of the Jones empire of pure evil:

In December 2012, the 20-year-old gunman Adam Lanza murdered 26 people, 20 of them children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.1 By the following April, Jones was spreading the narrative that this event—which remains the second-deadliest school shooting in United States history—was a hoax, perpetrated by the government to advance a gun-control agenda. Jones pushed the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory for years, milking it for attention and ratings. His listeners, hopped up on his claims that the shootings were staged by actors who were hired by the anti-gun lobby, tormented, stalked, and harassed the bereaved parents of the dead first graders. One conspiracy theorist claimed to have urinated on the grave of a 7-year-old murdered in the attack; parents received letters from people threatening to dig up their children’s coffins to prove they were empty. Meanwhile, Alex Jones funneled money to help fund January 6.

The Sandy Hook parents sued Jones, and finally, in 2022, a court ordered him to pay $1.4 billion in damages for defamation and for the infliction of emotional distress. In 2025, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal, forcing the liquidation of Infowars and its assets to help cover Jones’s enormous debts.

And now, with the support of the Sandy Hook families, The Onion has agreed to a deal to turn Infowars into a parody website, making fun of precisely the kind of spittle-flecked conspiracy bellowing, interspersed with ad reads for dubious muscle powders, that Jones used to amass his fortune. The deal still has to be approved by a Texas judge, which is admittedly a terrifying sentence; nevertheless, and I’m speaking objectively, this is clearly one of the greatest things that has ever happened in the history of the world. 

The world is finally pushing back against the evil that has been hatched by the Intellectual Dark Web, including the full spectrum, from Steven Pinker to Alex Jones.

What is the connection between the CBS News-promoted company Herasight and Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard?

And did Kirkegaard talk about putting out a hit on his legal adversary?

The eugenics company Herasight was recently profiled by the Bari Weiss-controlled CBS News. 

This did not surprise me at all since Weiss (a right-wing grifter recently profiled by John Oliver) has long been close to people involved in race pseudoscience from at least when she promoted them as heroes in her Intellectual Dark Web piece in the New York Times. One of those featured is Michael Shermer, a good pal of Steven Pinker, who is so racist he's a big fan of infamous far-right racist charlatan J. Philippe Rushton.

So it's no surprise that CBS News decided to give Herasight thousands of dollars in free advertising.

Well today a former associate of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, (more evidence for how we know Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi) Andrew (formerly Erik) Ahrens has come forward to claim that Kirkegaard is behind Herasight:

And this company now Herasight and (Kirkegaard's) not listed there, neither is his friend Nima. But all of these other people, Jonathan Anomaly, Jeremy Li, Tobias Wolfram are listed even on the websites home page on the day that I record this, so they try to keep Emil in the background. That I know, and I can also prove this, that all of this, this whole research network there was kind of cultivated, for example, in this Vienna conference. Then later in 2023, I attended another retreat with Emil and a group of his associates. Jeremy Li was there in Italy and Como...

I've mentioned Ahrens on this blog before. The "Vienna conference" he refers to is the alleged private conference that Emil Kirkegaard hosted in a hotel in Vienna around the same time that the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) held its annual meeting in Vienna in 2022. 

Kirkegaard had been shunned by ISIR in 2022 because Abdel Abdellaoui, an ISIR participant complained about his participation in ISIR meetings. Although ISIR can't quit Kirkegaard (he and ISIR bigwig Emily Willoughby go way back) so Kirkegaard was a participant in the 2024 ISIR annual meeting.

Ahrens, who says he was at that 2022 meeting, shares details about the conference in this latest video and claims the following people, among others, attended Kirkegaard's side-conference:

• Helmut Nyborg
• Rosalind Arden
• James Thomson
• Jonathan Anomaly

Arden could be seen promoting Herasight in ultra-racist Quillette. Jonathan Anomaly has, naturally written for Quillette.

Unfortunately Ahrens does not provide solid documentation for a connection between Kirkegaard and Herasight, but the fact that Ahrens was a close associate of Kirkegaard adds credence to the claim, on top of the already very strange fact that so many of the listed Herasight team members have connections to the far-right and race pseudoscience and even, like Jonathan Anomaly, to Kirkegaard himself. 

As I said back in October:

...Kirkegaard can be seen promoting a company run by some of his associates, Herasight.

I think it's extremely likely Kirkegaard is an investor in this company since its team and advisor lists include: 

• Jonathan Anomaly, who has contributed to Kirkegaard's Aporia podcast;
• Tobias Wolfram, an ally of far-right, neo-Nazi friendly (if not an actual neo-Nazi) Martin Sellner;
• Spencer Moore seen here contributing to a comments section of Aporia;
• Timothy Bates - likely Timothy C. Bates, a one-time president of gutter racist organization International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) an organization with a well-documented association with Emil Kirkegaard;
• Alex Strudwick Young who likes to retweet Aporia contributors/notorious racists Razib Khan and Cremieux, both far-right political operatives.

On top of all that, Ahrens says that Kirkegaard talked about putting a hit out on his legal adversary Oliver Smith:

I know that Emil reached a settlement with this English Oliver (Smith) person who he had lost the lawsuit against and they reached an out of court agreement. No, I must say Emil told me in the past when he was drunk, this must have been in 2023. And he said this multiple times that he was going to get someone to or thinking about getting someone to kill this person. So he said that he might set up a crypto bounty on this guy's head and for 50,000 that someone would likely just get rid of him. And um. He, he told me this personally, I know that ultimately he reached an out of court agreement with him, so he didn't enact his threat. Just this is what these people talk about, right? So now that I make this video and I make all of this public, of course, there might also be talk in these circles about basically setting a bounty on my head.

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if Kirkegaard said that. People who have devoted their lives to racism and far-right politics are horrible people by definition. I put nothing past them.

Instead of paying to have him killed, Kirkegaard was likely behind the smear campaign against Oliver Smith that included an article in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal attacking Smith as a former neo-Nazi (ironic isn't it?) 

Smith successfully sued City Journal into removing the article. 

That smear campaign against Smith was gleefully promoted by gutter racists Steven Pinker and Charles Murray.

I would love to have more information about any connections between Kirkegaard and Herasight or Bari Weiss and some of the people associated with Herasight.

I had to laugh though when Ahrens tried to defend Kirkegaard against a charge of antisemitism at minute 25:24 in the video, by saying:

"(Kirkegaard) told me that he likes Jews because they are smart and he thinks they are good with money."

Jamelle Bouie on Bari Weiss - she was hired to be a regime censor

Bouie details what an absolute grifting right-wing fraud Bari Weiss is. 

It was obvious to me how evil Bari Weiss is when she published her Intellectual Dark Web article, and was a major reason why I started this blog.

NYTimes columnist Bouie is a long-time critic of the race pseudoscience gang, even linking to my personal blog over ten years ago when racist Razib Khan was on the verge of being hired by the New York Times. Which is most likely why Khan hates Bouie so much.

Weiss of course was an employee of the New York Times, which helped boost her grifting right-wing reactionary career, leading to the destruction of CBS news. Unfortunately the only alternative to the New York Times is the even-worse, oligarch owned and controlled Washington Post. 

That's what happens to mainstream journalism in an age of oligarchs and fascism. 

How it started:

How it's going.

 

Moral of the story: grifters gonna grift.

Oh, so that's how Peter Thiel knows so much about the antichrist.

The Fourth of July, the American media and the plutocracy

To commemorate the Fourth of July, I enjoy watching two movies back-to-back:  first 2017's "The Post" which recounts the fight over the Washington Post's publication of the Pentagon Papers, and then 1976's  "All the President's Men" which continues the chronological story of the government versus the press in the scandal called Watergate.

It's bittersweet, since these movies are about the glory days of the Post, before the diabolical billionaire Jeff Bezos decided to destroy it. The Wikipedia page on the Post contains a pretty succinct history of the downfall:

After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the Post adopted the slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" for its masthead.[163] Communications Director of the Post Shani George said they choose this slogan because it "conveys who we are to the many millions of readers who have come to us for the first time over the last year". He also stated that the slogan was not added in response to Trump's actions.[164]

In February 2025, Jeff Bezos announced that the paper's opinion pages would endorse "personal liberties and free markets" to the exclusion of other views. According to the NPR, the announcement suggested the Post was adopting a libertarian line.[125] In October 2025, columnist Marc Thiessen stated that the paper's opinion section was now conservative.[165]

In April 2026, Nathan J. Robinson said that the paper has shifted from a centre-left economical stance to a hard-right one, opposing taxation of rich individuals, rent control, public transport, social housing and other social services. A significant number of articles in The Washington Post reportedly criticised labor unions and supported construction of new AI data centers.[166]

And on top of that, CBS is being destroyed by Bari Weiss and her diabolical billionaire sponsors. Weiss is the original inspiration for this blog. 

I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post when Bezos refused to allow the paper to endorse Kamala Harris. Again from Wikipedia:

More than 250,000 people (about ten percent of the Post's subscribers) cancelled their subscriptions, and three members of the editorial board left the board, though they remain with the Post in other positions.[180][181][182] An endorsement of Harris was subsequently published by the paper's humorist Alexandra Petri, who explained that "if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement", and that "I only know what's happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there's no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear."[183]

Condemning the Post's decision, several columnists, including Will Bunch, Jonathan Last, Dan Froomkin, Donna Ladd and Sewell Chan, described it as an example of what historian Timothy Snyder calls anticipatory obedience.[184][185][186][187][188]

I also cancelled my account with the Bezos-owned Amazon, which I had had for a quarter century.

And then there's the New York Times. It has been apparent to many that there is a slowly creeping conservative influence there, especially when it comes to transgender rights.

This phenomenon was noted by both the journalist Tom Scocca and the satirical newspaper The Onion as I wrote about in 2023. 

The Onion published an article mocking the NYTimes' apparent anti-trans crusade: It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible.

Tom Scocca published a blog post THE WORST THING WE READ THIS WEEK: Why Is the New York Times So Obsessed With Trans Kids? - 

This is pretty obviously—and yet not obviously enough—a plain old-fashioned newspaper crusade. Month after month, story after story, the Times is pouring its attention and resources into the message that there is something seriously concerning about the way young people who identify as trans are receiving care. Like the premise that the Clintons had to have been guilty of something serious, or that Saddam Hussein must have had a weapons program worth invading Iraq over, the notion that trans youth present a looming problem is demonstrated to the reader by the sheer volume of coverage. If it’s not a problem, why else would it be in the paper?

I think that the New York Times, every bit as much as the Washington Post, helped get the treasonous, rapist, orange monstrosity back into the White House.

And this latest piece from the Dissident confirms it: Exclusive: How The New York Times Changed Its Coverage of Trans People notes the change in the NYTimes' editorial tone by 2022.

Over the last several years it has become readily apparent that there has been a shift in the editorial framing and focus of the New York Times when it regards issues relating to transgender people. This is particularly pronounced when it comes to issues of gender affirming care for transgender youth. The Times has contested this accusation of bias or editorial shifting of their priorities and framing, often by pointing to individual stories and claiming that the stories are rigorously fact checked and true. The issue is that any particular article can be argued about in isolation about whether or not the framing is biased against transgender people but when viewed in the aggregate the shift can become much more pronounced and difficult to defend.

While many organizations and activists before me have attempted to categorize and catalog the bias of the New York Times when it comes to transgender issues such as Assigned Media, GLAAD, Media Matters, and others, no one has fully analyzed the entire corpus of transgender coverage by the New York Times since 2014 to see exactly the nuanced changes in editorial focus and framing by the New York Times.[1]

The same paper that once gave a trans writer the page to argue for trans survival later treated that survival as an open question and let her contract lapse during the fight over how it covered her community. This shift in framing and coverage by the New York Times is measurable, and this piece measures it.

...

When the paper of record treats your existence as a debate, the framing does not stay on the page. The New York Times effectively sets the terms of what is considered respectable mainstream liberal opinion. What the Times treats as settled, the country treats as settled. What it frames as an open question shows up in courtrooms, in statehouses, in exam rooms, and in the minds of parents deciding whether to believe their own kids. I'm both a trans person and a lawyer. I have watched how the framing of these stories lands directly on people I know.

It is no wonder that Republican elected officials, Republican-appointed judges and Supreme Court justices, and far-right anti-trans hate groups have all cited the New York Times in their efforts to restrict transgender rights. The harm can be measured in the number of people forced to flee their homes and even their country as a result of these policies. As Howard Zinn once said, you cannot be neutral on a moving train. The New York Times chose to cynically change its framing and coverage around transgender issues in a bid to appeal to conservative voices. They did so knowing that the trans community was too small and politically powerless to effectively push back against the paper. And the organizations that did stand up would quickly be attacked by the Times itself through selective investigative reporting meant to silence criticism.[9]

I was amazed that odious Jesse Singal was not mentioned in the piece, but then by 2022 he had already been at it for several years, since at least 2018, helping to pave the way for anti-trans hostility, supported by racist far-right Quillette.

Fortunately there is still the Guardian - which is not American media.

Bari Weiss & CBS News suppress information about Trump torture camps

Good reactions from the Majority Report, who are long-time critics of Weiss.

   

 Meanwhile, on Bluesky, the spiked 60 Minutes report has been posted. 

Now we are seven ~ happy birthday Pinkerite

In the past year the biggest stories were: Jesse Singal and Razib Khan teaming up to come after me on Bluesky; Steven Pinker going full neo-Nazi, my disappointment with Adam Rutherford and his support for behavioral genetics (now as one long article on Medium); and the crazy lawsuits and secret agreements with RationalWiki thanks to people associated with Emily Willoughby and Jonathan Kane.

Last year was the exposé of Emil Kirkegaard and his racist machinations from Hope not Hate, and since then one of Kirkegaard's co-conspirators, Erik Ahrens, has come over to the good guys' side. The exposé's undercover reporter published a book about the experience.

And both Bari "Jerry Maguire moment" Weiss and Peter "I know about the antichrist" Thiel have been discussed and mocked in the mainstream media.

Other topics:

• I discovered physicist Angela Collier - yay -
• - and Zohran Mamdani and enjoyed voting for him, knowing how much billionaires and courtiers of billionaires hate him. AND HE WON! LET'S HEAR IT FOR NEW YORK!
• CBS goes full fascist and fires Stephen Colbert.
• Charlier Kirk taken down by our insane gun laws.
• I got a copy of the program for the 2025 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research although they did not post it on their website. 
• The "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" is still an untested and far-fetched paper authored by racists, now 20 years old.
• This blog got a shout-out in Undark.
• The Murderbot TV series, based on the book series, is also gloriously woke.
• I discussed all the people who worked for Emil Kirkegaard's publications, people who knew they were neo-Nazi publications.
• I published an updated version of EMIL KIRKEGAARD'S RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE AND NAZI NETWORK.

The top most-visited individual posts this year:

• PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous - #1 for the second year in a row. And well deserved - 1.43 K views.

• That gloriously woke Murderbot - first published over two years ago, but undoubtedly benefitting this year from the Apple TV+ show - 1K

• Three more race pseudoscience ghouls SLAPP Rational Wiki - 871

• The great New Yorker article with the bad title ~ "What Did Men Do To Deserve This?" - 873 - only recently posted, but hugely popular, which I did not expect.

• The Maxine Margolis interview - 732

• EMIL KIRKEGAARD'S RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE AND NAZI NETWORK (updated) - 675 

• The War on Science - thirty-nine infamous reactionary grifters, racists and transphobes edited by creepy Lawrence Krauss - 644

• Quillette, Phrenology and Biosocial Criminology - 630

• New Evidence of E. O. Wilson’s Intimacy with Scientific Racism - 619

• What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 1 - 582