The Bari Weiss Haters Club

An editor and her cultured despisers

Yesterday morning, I woke up to an email from a reporter working on a story about the possible sale of Bari Weiss’s website The Free Press to CBS, a move that, sources say, could involve the elevation of Bari—I know her, so I’ll first-name her—into some sort of management at CBS. The reporter wanted to know what I thought this would mean for Jews (and, presumably, for everyone else). The reporter (who is good, and whom I wish I could have helped) was curious about my thoughts as an ex-colleague of Bari’s, and so I had to correct him and say that Bari and I have never been colleagues. By the time I was working part-time at Tablet, Bari had left her position there as news editor. I think she may have edited me once or twice at The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, and I know that she published me once at The Free Press—the one piece I have written for her latest project; it was basically a reprint of a piece I had written for my magazine, Arc, about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s father; read it!—although she was not the hands-on editor. I was not the droid this reporter was looking for.

However, I do have something to say about Bari’s role in the media world, and why she is so controversial. Before I do, let me get the last of my disclosures out of the way: Bari once appeared onstage with me when I at an L.A. synagogue, when I was hawking my book about the Tree of Life shooting (Bari is from Pittsburgh). Her father granted me an interview for that book. Bari was also once a guest on my old podcast, Unorthodox. She is somebody who collects friends and acquaintances, so while she and I know each other, and have even texted, I don’t flatter myself that I am one of her hundred most important acquaintances. I may make the top five hundred. You can just trust me when I say that I have no stake in flattering her, and the mildly positive piece you are about to read comes from the heart and is not a cynical suck-up.

Okay, with that out of the way, I want to proceed by using my friend Jay Michaelson’s discussion of Bari as a starting point. Jay is, unlike Bari, a good friend of mine—we met when he was briefly my T.A. for a class I took in college (I had to transfer to another section for scheduling reasons), in the spring of 1995, and have had a warm relationship ever since. He is smart and learned, and it’s my honor to publish him in Arc. His Substack newsletter, Both/And, is one of my favorites. He is a rabbi, a lawyer, a Buddhist teacher, a gifted fiction writer, and a mensch. He is taller than I am. And he’s done me the service, in this case, of writing a piece about Bari that is a good foil for what I want to say about her.

So here goes.

Jay’s attack on Bari—measured, moderate attack, but attack nonetheless—basically has three points, and I’ll to take them in turn, then circle back to draw some broader conclusions.

First, Jay writes that Bari is guilty of

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

This is a common charge against Bari and her publication—and her prior iterations as an editor, writer, and public figure: that she is a closet conservative, masquerading as a liberal. I encourage you to read Jay’s full explication of this point, which starts with the fact that she campaigned against anti-Zionist professors when a Columbia undergrad, took an internship at a conservative think tank, and has seemed more interested, as an editor, in commissioning pieces that attack liberals than ones that attack conservatives. He makes a good case that she has never been much of a liberal, in the vernacular Nation sense of the word (or even the Ezra Klein sense of the word). If you’d said at any point in her public development that she voted for, say, McCain over Obama, I would not have been shocked. And Jay is right that her passion for “free speech” seems to wax and wane depending on whose speech she is defending.

Jay is irritated that

…Weiss’s secret ability is to make … basic, conservative talking points while still persuading people that she’s a reasonable centrist-liberal.

And he says this, about the preponderance of pieces she has run lately at The Free Press, a majority of them tilting right, or anti-left:

Which would be fine if the Free Press were simply honest that they are a conservative outlet. But they’re not honest; they claim to be centrist or independent or whatever, but that is not reflected by their editorial choices.

To which my main rejoinder is, “So what?” If the pieces are good, they are good regardless of whether they are positioned as quirky-liberal, contrarian-centrist, traditional-conservative, or Fruit-Loop-itarian anarchist. By the same token, if they are bad, stupid, wrong, or toxic, it’s no defense that they are “positioned” as conservative. Writing is good or bad, winning or not, appealing or not, conducive to good public debate or not. Who cares how it is “framed” by media insiders?

For what it’s worth, I am not sure where Bari has ever claimed that she is just a disillusioned liberal. Perhaps she has; it’s not a crazy thing to assert. My sense of her, having read her stuff for over a decade, is that she is more troubled by left-of-center idiocies because the left-of-center is her native culture; she grew up in a family of Pittsburgh Jews, went to Columbia, etc. It’s not surprising that she would be more triggered when people to whom she feels cultural kinship are publicly stupid (as she sees it). Also, she is married to a woman, and she likes living in big cities, she probably owns a plethora of tote bags—I mean, of course she would have more of a neurotic, Oedipal quarrel with the left than with the right. As to her actual politics, she is pro–gay marriage, pro-choice, anti–identity politics, and pro-Israel. That describes a lot of people I know who held their noses and voted for Kamala Harris. Did Bari vote for Trump? I have no idea; I hope not. But she’s basically a hawkish Democrat circa 1980 (possibly right down to misgivings about heavy immigration, which were Barbara Jordan–era Democratic orthodoxy), except she is clearly to the left of 1980 Dems on an issue like gay marriage.

Vintage screenshot of early Bari Weiss hatred

In any event, whatever one thinks of her politics, it’s not clear why her publication would be less noxious if it publicly identified as “conservative.” The pieces are either good or not. I happen to think they have run a lot of bad pieces (and at least one good one—mine!). But my problem with them would never be that Bari has a dishonest public persona. My problem is that they are bad.

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Jay then moves on to his second charge against her:

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

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

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

I have no idea how much money she raised or whether the funders were right-wing. I agree that publications should disclose their funding sources. Many don’t, but when they do, hats off—for example, the left-wing publication Jewish Currents lists all donors of over $5,000, although one of the donors listed is “Anonymous,” which kind of misses the entire point, no? But hey, they do better than most publications. I wish Bari saw what a positive move it would be to disclose her funding sources.

Second, I really don’t think Bari would describe herself as an outsider. Was she othered and scorned by colleagues at the Times? Actually, I know that she was. In NYC media circles, she really was mocked, derided, etc. I was privy to some of it. But I suspect she knows that in the culture at large, in 2025, she has mucho access.

As to the Times letter she posted online, please read it. It’s not a whiny, self-aggrandizing letter that positions her as a martyr. It’s a polite, measured letter in which she accuses the Times of having abandoned objectivity and given in to the online cancellation mentality. She writes,

Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired. If a piece is perceived as likely to inspire backlash internally or on social media, the editor or writer avoids pitching it. If she feels strongly enough to suggest it, she is quickly steered to safer ground. And if, every now and then, she succeeds in getting a piece published that does not explicitly promote progressive causes, it happens only after every line is carefully massaged, negotiated and caveated.

I know a lot of people at the Times, where I wrote a religion column from 2010 to 2016, and nearly every one of them would agree that there is a good measure of truth in this description of how things went at the time. Keep in mind this was also the era of James Bennet being forced into resignation for the Tom Cotton op-ed. If you don’t remember that era, you can read Bennet’s version here. That’s not the only version, and maybe you will decide that his critics were more right than he was. But Bari was surely right that she left the Times at a time when the climate was inhospitable to her, an editor who had been hired to diversify the voices brought onto the opinion pages. (Here’s a thought experiment for the Bari haters: Do you honestly think that, when she was at the Times, she was treated with courtesy, her opinion sought out, her contributions cheered and valued? Do you think those who disagreed with her on politics either told her so to her face, perhaps over coffee in the building cafeteria, or else kept it to themselves, refraining from badmouthing her behind her back and in Slack channels? How much money would you bet on that?)

Jay elaborates further on Bari’s faux-outsiderness:

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

Ironically, the only members of Weiss’s frieze of IDW heroes who haven’t descended into madness are Sam Harris, who broke with the crowd over their embrace of pseudo-science, and Ben Shapiro, who alone among the group was a self-described conservative from the start.

The argument seems to be that Bari is not just lying about being a heterodox thinker, but that she has used that pose to elevate other pseudo-heterodox thinkers—and that being treated as “heterodox” is, it seems, a dishonest way to smuggle reactionary views into the discourse. Here I’ll just remark that I’m not sure why the labels are so important to Bari’s other critics. If Jordan Peterson makes bad arguments—and he does—it hardly matters if they are seen as conservative-bad or heterodox-bad.

I think the answer is supposed to be that “heterodox” confers a measure of respectability in liberal circles, which allows the views to travel further, to elude gatekeepers, to be smuggled into polite discourse in a way that “conservative” or “reactionary” views could not be. To which I would respond, first, that the sociology of this seems off: perhaps the views have gained such traction because they are popular, and fall on fertile soil, and not because their peddlers are lying about the proper classification of the views? And second, who cares? We have to fight bad views by calling them bad. The average Peterson-pilled young man needs to be reached with better arguments; more daylight; and subscriptions to hard copy of Harper’s and The New York Review, and to Jay’s newsletter and to Arc.

Look at the faint praise for Ben Shapiro, who has way lamer views than most Free Press writers, for being “a self-described conservative from the start.” There is admiration here for the full disclosure, the honest self-description. I think I am on safe ground saying most Bari haters hate her more than they hate National Review or Rod Dreher or other founts of right-wingery; they probably haven’t heard of them. Something about center-right (let’s say) Bari being dishonest about being (let’s say) center-left is more loathsome than actually being homophobic and reactionary. It’s about purity, somehow.

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Jay’s third charge is that

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

I think Jay is right about the Yale University incident. And I would encourage you to read the rest of his post to see some specifics about other ways in which he has found her paper’s coverage to be flawed. I agree that when news sources get stuff wrong, they should run corrections. Jay is persuasive when he argues that The Free Press has sometimes failed to do that.

As to the idea that there is something uniquely dishonest about Bari’s work, I simply don’t think that is true. I am sure that she and her editors have their blind spots, but you’d be hard-pressed to persuade me that their blind spots are more pervasive than those of other news/opinion magazine editors. I could spend my time picking apart The New Republic or The Nation (on the left) or National Review or The American Conservative (on the right), but I’m not sure that would get us anywhere. I will simply say that—again, read Jay’s piece—his idea that “negligent sloppiness has long been part of Weiss’s M.O.” is not born out by what he has written.

Moreover, I don’t really believe that this argument, as presented by Jay and others, is falsifiable. That is, if we did some sort of rigorous analysis, based on agreed-upon criteria, that showed that The Nation got more things wrong in the past two years than The Free Press, or was more stingy with corrections, would that persuade anyone? Would anyone change their feelings? I don’t think so.

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Because, ultimately, what I think drives some people mad about Bari is not her hustle, nor her success—this same crowd surely dislikes, say, Jeff Bezos, the unrepentant monopolist and union-buster who has done more than anybody to destroy the small businessman or -woman, but they are not as personally agitated by him. Nor did they care as much when Facebook plutocrat Chris Hayes, a man who made his money by being an early investor in a loathsome company, bought The New Republic.

So what does upset people so much about Bari? I have a lot of ideas. She is a lesbian who now finds herself, on trans issues, to the right of the LGBT movement. She is a Zionist. She is possibly a pawn of secret dark money forces (as they see it), and there is something more unseemly about being a happy pawn than about being the dark money people themselves. I don’t know if Marc Andreessen is funding Bari, but if he is, it’s Bari they’ll be mad at, even though the products Andreessen and his Silicon Valley bros are putting out in the world are, well, what they are, and what Bari is putting out is opinion journalism.

(They are mad at her because she is a journalist, and so they expect more from her; but one could just as easily say, “Wait, isn’t any journalist better than any tech monopolist?”)

And maybe that gets us closer to the problem at hand. For many people, there cannot be a good opinion journal that in any way platforms Trump enthusiast Batya Ungar-Sargon and DEI skeptic Coleman Hughes—even if it also platforms old-school liberals like Zeke Emanuel, Emily Yoffe, and Ruy Texeira. The old model of a centrist opinion magazine, one that featured people from across the political spectrum, the model I grew up on, Michael Kinsley’s Slate and New Republic, earlier incarnations of Salon—is defunct for certain critics. If you run COVID skeptic Alex Berenson, it doesn’t matter how much liberal or milquetoast liberal stuff you run—you’re shilling for the right. You are a Trojan horse. You are not on the team.

Let me come at this another way. One can read the mish-mash that is The Free Press and get angry at all the stuff one disagrees with, and look for evidence that whatever Bari Weiss describes herself as—disaffected liberal, free-speech enthusiast, etc.—is a hoax or a lie, and be mad that it’s not another magazine. Or one can say that the messiness is a feature, not a bug, that a magazine that is not afraid of ideas will run some ideas that any one of us will find stupid, and some pieces that should never have been run, and that’s the cost of doing business. When I read Alana Newhouse’s essay about her son and his hereditary condition, or Jonathan Rosen’s essay on birding, or Agnes Callard’s essay on Taylor Swift and marriage, and I think, “I’m glad somebody published these.”

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Call it the Abundance Agenda for media. There aren’t enough magazines out there. Too many have closed. Newspapers are barely keeping their presses running. With very few exceptions, I am rooting for publications to succeed, to find readers, to pay writers, to keep on keeping on.

I think there are those among the Free Press haters who see the wrong kind of publication as pernicious; they’d rather it not exist at all. The thinking—and here I am not ventriloquizing Jay, but some others I have talked with over the years—is that once upon a time a publication with a diversity of views might have been a nice thing to have, but now the stakes are too high. To run a pro-life piece is to contribute to the enslavement of women; to run a piece against affirmative action is to contribute to the dehumanization of people of color; to run a pro-Israel piece is to facilitate the slaughter of Palestinians; to run a piece that dissents from gender orthodoxy is to downplay the murder of trans people. All of it gives aid and comfort to Trump. And to operate a magazine that lures in unsuspecting liberal readers with the promise of approved liberal voices, but then give them conservative voices, is the worst thing of all. It’s a kind of treachery. Conservatives must be kept cordoned off, in their own publications, where they can be warned against.

This kind of thinking elevates the quest for certain policy outcomes over the broader good of free speech in a robust marketplace of ideas. I get it; there are issues I care so, so much about that I can summon a kind of hatred for publications that don’t “get it.” Take animal rights. There is no defense of factory-farming meat. Every one of us who eats meat should have the decency to spend the extra money to get humanely raised meat. If you don’t, you’re making a serious moral error and directly contributing to the suffering of animals. I am daily flummoxed by how people who are otherwise sensitive to suffering and who go out of their way to be kind can exclude animals from their sphere of concern, either because they just like the taste of bacon or, worse, because they have decided there is something virtuous, in a foodie way, about having a broad palate. Every time I see the Times (to pick a publication I generally respect) run a recipe for brisket or roast, totally insensitive to the suffering involved, I cringe.

And yet, I’d be despondent in a different way if there were no pro-carnivore articles (you could call them “recipes”) in the media. It would be a terrible thing if religious magazines closed their pages to human supremacists who think animals are here to serve us, for example by being tasty. Although I hope meat eating will eventually become as passé as slavery, and therefore an uninteresting topic for opinion writing, as long as it’s not, I want there to be people writing on both sides of the issue. Because that’s what happens in a free society with a free media.

But that’s not the way everyone thinks. Some people want certain views to be given no hearing, except in publications that, by virtue of being avowedly uniformly “conservative,” can be cautioned against, dismissed, safely ignored. They never want their disfavored views to bump up against more acceptable views, in a publication that has diversity of viewpoints, because then good people could be misled into bad ideas. And so they demand purity, and they want labels.

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