00:00:11.140I'm coming at you from a couple of days after we recorded this episode because our wonderful producer, Mark Yoshizumi, got in touch with me and he's like, Moira, you mispronounce the name of this woman throughout the entire episode.
00:00:27.060And I'm like, what are you talking about?
00:01:50.520Whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right.
00:01:52.520So, Adrienne, today we are talking about a little lady who's made quite a big name for herself, somebody who began as sort of a campus culture warrior and now has brought that ethos of the cancel culture panic to some of the highest echelons in American media.
00:02:16.220That's right. We are going to be discussing one Bari Weiss.
00:02:20.640That's right. We were joking before we started recording that we only pick on billionaires now who can either sue us into oblivion or hunt us for sport.
00:02:29.320We're really just jonesing for a most dangerous game scenario here at this point.
00:02:34.560In absolute fairness to Bari Weiss, I'm not confident that she's a billionaire yet.
00:02:38.260Most of the estimates I found online of her personal net worth have a couple of hundred million dollars.
00:02:44.800But whether she has cracked that one billion dollar glass ceiling is still unclear.
00:02:49.560Can someone Google for me whether or not it costs less than a few hundred million dollars to hire a hitman?
00:04:36.780But, you know, basically, yes, it doesn't matter, but for all that, because our elites, our self-radicalizing elites are sort of the big story of the 2020s, it matters a great deal, right?
00:04:48.000There is something deeply unserious about her, but precisely for that reason, we need to take her seriously.
00:04:53.720I've not met Bari Weiss, but I'm familiar with her work, very familiar with her work.
00:04:58.920I used to subscribe to her newsletter for a while because, for research.
00:05:10.760Yeah, it is, well, it's literally the one article, yeah.
00:05:14.260I used to have this joke on Twitter when I was still on it
00:05:17.120that, like, the only acceptable reason0.95
00:05:19.740why they keep publishing the same fucking cancel culture article,0.97
00:05:23.160like, every week, is that if they don't,0.99
00:05:26.220maybe a slumbering, like, chthonic deity will, like, eat the earth.
00:05:30.080And so they have to be like, oh, we must publish the article.0.86
00:05:32.660Like, are maybe our censorious college students the real problem of our democracy?
00:05:39.780And they're like, whew, thank goodness we've warded off the great Lord Cthulhu for another week.
00:05:43.960Yeah, there really was one of those, like, once or twice a week in a major magazine for, like, a couple years during the back half of the 2010s.
00:05:54.340And Bari was both one of the leading practitioners of the genre and, as we're going to get into, somebody who really shaped the anti-wokeness and anti-cancel culture, 1500-word piece that was so much content production for a really long time.
00:06:11.640So who is Bari Weiss? What do you know about this woman?
00:06:14.240Yeah, I mean, she is a veteran of the campus culture wars who came up in online journalism, but really on the fringes of it, and then became a recipient of what used to be called wingnut welfare, but what we could just call anti-woke affirmative action, by getting scooped up by the New York Times alongside Brett Stevens in order to increase the conservative bona fides of that newspaper.1.00
00:06:40.020She then quit very, very publicly as a kind of cancel culture victim.
00:08:58.980If I had my brain cooked by Twitter and Substack for five years, I too might think that Tommy Dokupil is like America's idea of what a news anchor should be doing, you know?
00:09:11.240Because she starts off doing this fringe, frivolous shit that kind of only functions to gratify the like worst, most narcissistic impulses of the rich.0.97
00:09:22.900And now that's the only thing that is allowed to govern anything, you know?0.99
00:09:27.880So we're going to do a two-parter. We are going to start today going from birth through the New York Times, and then next week we will do New York Times up to the present.
00:09:38.840And that will hopefully allow us to both show what Bari is and then show how that sort of crucible of stupidity and self-regard that produced the ideology of Weiss now has come to govern all of our lives and be this inescapable force that suffocates out any other kind of thought.
00:10:00.960What, if anything, do you know about the origins of Bari Weiss?0.95
00:11:39.360This is the Pam Paul and Bret Stephens thing.
00:11:41.740And I think her idea of centrism is basically having someone debate who resembles her and someone who resembles her dad is sort of my suspicion.
00:11:49.880Yeah, she describes herself as a liberal,
00:11:53.160but she does seem to have grown up in a fairly conservative, though genteel environment.
00:11:59.400Not to spoil our magnum opens here, but she's not a liberal.
00:12:11.920Yeah. So after she graduates high school, she takes a birthright style gap year in Israel. So this is a person with like early and intense Zionist commitments, spends a lot of time in Israel, believes strongly in the Israeli national project, right?0.84
00:12:31.380she then goes and enrolls as an undergrad at Columbia and this is where sort of the legend
00:12:39.540of Bari begins so in 2004 a Boston-based Zionist group comes to campus and creates a
00:12:50.160documentary is a little bit of a grand word it's only like 40 minutes long I watched it this
00:12:54.820morning called Columbia Unbecoming. And this is a little sort of snippet with some talking heads
00:13:02.340from Jewish students at Columbia that centers claims of anti-Semitism and intolerance by
00:13:09.340Muslim and pro-Palestine professors. Adrian, have you ever watched this movie? I've watched clips,
00:13:15.040yes, which probably amounted to about a quarter of it, actually, because it's really short.
00:13:18.720It's really short. It's mostly talking head interviews with a couple of undergrads who claimed to have been made to feel uncomfortable by pro-Palestine professors.
00:13:32.020And then the rabbi who's the head of Columbia Hillel is also there and he talks about his colleagues and how he doesn't like them.
00:13:40.800The pro-Palestine professors, I should say like mostly ethnically Arab professors who are the subject of this documentary, are not interviewed.
00:13:52.220They didn't agree to be interviewed.0.79
00:13:53.460I think that was probably smart of them.
00:13:54.740But the documentary does do this thing where between talking head clips of the Zionist students, it will like put quotes from the Arab professors on the screen.0.61
00:14:06.840And whenever they do, they put on this weird, like, cartoonishly, like, faux Middle Eastern music.
00:14:14.980So it'll be like, here's a quote from this pro-Palestinian professor.
00:14:19.320And then it'll be like, boo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.0.99
00:14:24.360Some of the faculty really were intimidating when they got questions which they felt represented a non-pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian point of view.0.98
00:14:36.840It's like meant to exoticize them and make them seem scary.
00:14:42.880I got to say the actual complaints lodged by students are like laughably trivial.
00:14:52.400The question of how we aggregate and interpret campus anecdotes is a big part of my cancel culture book.
00:14:58.740And this is a pretty classic case of that.
00:15:02.140And it's, of course, particularly ironic, the central irony, really, of Barry Weiss's media career.
00:15:08.240She, more than anyone, has told college students to stop being so coddled and to actually, like, engage with other opinions.
00:15:14.440And then her political genesis and Colombians for Academic Freedom really comes out of people being pretty easily triggered, frankly, by, like, a movie being shown on campus.
00:15:25.900One of the complaints is that a professor showed a video clip or a movie in which Arab people were shown shouting death to Zionism.
00:15:38.720And one of the talking heads complains that she wasn't warned that this was going to happen.
00:15:43.720I was like, oh, a trigger warning. You wanted a trigger warning.
00:15:45.560I read all about how bad that is on the free press.0.97
00:15:48.040another recurring complaint is like oh there was no room for zionist viewpoints in these classes0.50
00:15:56.840and my professors didn't tolerate them but then all of these students have anecdotes where in fact
00:16:02.380like the anti-zionist or pro-palestinian professor they're like he talked to me for like 45 minutes
00:16:08.500and it's like oh actually it sounds like he was engaging you for quite a long time across difference
00:16:14.740in what seems like good faith, even in their telling.
00:16:18.700And it's like, this is exactly what Bari Weiss and her ilk
00:16:21.880will say they want on campuses, right?
00:16:23.560When she goes on to create something like the University of Austin
00:16:26.020or when she writes any number of subsequent
00:17:38.080The movie, It's True, complains mostly about the Middle Eastern, North African Studies Department, but they don't say what they want to have done about it.
00:17:47.020The Colombians for Academic Freedom are trying to get some of these professors fired.
00:17:52.340If you're wondering what that would look like, I would urge you to familiarize yourself with the last two years, which have brought exactly what Colombians for Academic Freedom had asked for.
00:18:02.420And I would ask you to consider who put that into place, namely Donald Trump and a fascist movement.
00:18:08.900And I'd invite you to consider whether that strikes you as the best defense of academic freedom or perhaps, I don't know, an assault on it.
00:18:16.340Yeah, this is the department that Colombia agreed to subject to federal oversight in its settlement with the Trump administration last year.
00:18:28.940This is, you know, New York City in the wake of 9-11, and it's not that anti-Muslim racism wasn't understood as bad at the time.0.52
00:18:42.140Certainly Muslims understood it as bad.
00:18:44.160But I think people like Barry Weiss had a lot of sort of political cover and like cultural leeway at that particular moment to really advance a aggressive persecution and like harassment campaign of Muslim and Palestinian people in public life in a way that would be more difficult, even more difficult now, right?
00:19:08.420And Bari really becomes the face of the organization, Colombians for Academic Freedom.
00:19:13.860She is writing op-eds for student papers.
00:19:18.300She's comfortable talking to the press.
00:19:20.760Particularly, she targets Professor Joseph Mossad, whose class she had taken.
00:19:26.520We should say a Columbia University review of Mossad's conduct at the time found the allegations against him to be unfounded.
00:19:33.000But Weiss went on the record saying that the real issue was what she saw as Zionist students being marginalized collectively for their views.
00:19:41.960So right away, very early in her life, she's like 20 years old, we see a focus on the conservative as an oppressed person, on the conservative as the subject of bullying.
00:19:55.580The conservative as somebody who is being oppressed by those who disagree with them, by those who might be rude to them, by the confrontation with dissenting views, right?
00:20:08.120This is a worldview in which leftists and liberals are villains and bullies, and that starts before she's even really fully an adult.
00:20:17.180There's a promise contained in her obvious inconsistency in this, right?
00:20:21.820She's able to get worked up about suppression of conservative speech and seems to see nothing wrong with having leftist speech suppressed.
00:20:30.880And not only does her sort of central shtick originate in this early contretemps at Colombia, so does her business model.
00:20:38.020Because it turns out that same blind spot is shared by a whole lot of conservative donor class.
00:20:44.640Some of them it's about Israel, some of them it's about U.S. power, some of it's about the unimpeachability of the national security state.
00:20:51.820Sometimes it's just about that you should be allowed to be a billionaire without anyone being mean to you. But that general idea that like maybe other people should be measured with a different yardstick than is applied to me is immensely seductive to our rich, powerful, and let's face it, totally inane.
00:21:08.800And so she has then made hundreds of millions of dollars off a series of dummies who occupy exactly that same space, where there's one set of rules for people that you like and who are like you, and a different yardstick applied to everyone else.
00:21:24.740This might be a moment where we just take a brief pause to note something about Bari's identity, because at Columbia, Bari is dating bisexually.0.52
00:22:26.560Nellie Bowles is an interesting character.0.99
00:22:28.420Another person who can hunt us down for sports if she wants to.
00:22:32.400Born very, very rich. Used to be a liberal. After the shitty media man list, she actually like DM'd me with some like earnest feminist sentiments. And then I realized that that was like right around the time, like just a couple weeks or months before she started dating Bari Weiss.
00:22:48.260So, like, things could have gone differently, Nellie, but she wrote a really insipid little book that we should probably do for a Patreon episode at one point about her own conversion from, you know, the excesses of liberal wokeism to a, like, high-minded conservatism via, it seems, her relationship with Bari, her wife.0.98
00:25:27.640So Bari graduates from Columbia in 2007.
00:25:30.520And she does sort of have this reputation as like a Zionist campus campaigner.
00:25:38.080She embarks for a couple years on a kind of undistinguished career in Jewish media.
00:25:44.400She's editing web reviews and book reviews, and she's writing a lot of the kind of short online pieces that news outlets have to put up a bunch of every day to keep their traffic numbers going.
00:25:58.700which nobody in the editorial teams really care that much about, right?
00:26:02.540She's in what we used to call during this time the content minds.
00:26:06.360So that's a time when a lot of very esteemed writers also come up
00:26:10.340in that same kind of content mill, right?
00:26:12.800Like Gio Tolentino sort of, I think, breaks through
00:26:15.140doing that kind of work at Jezebel around this time, right?
00:26:17.760Like there's a lot of people doing this work and doing it very interestingly,
00:26:20.700but it's very important that like Barry has the instincts
00:26:24.780in terms of grabby headlines, quick contrarianism, et cetera, et cetera,
00:26:28.940of that moment, but none of the writerly grace or intellectual heft
00:26:32.820of a lot of the women who come up around her around that same time, right?0.69
00:26:47.560She's at Tablet, which is now, like, really kind of diminished in its reputation,
00:26:51.580Like a few of these, you know, like your Newsweeks, like your CBS for that matter.
00:26:55.200But it used to be kind of a more serious magazine, although always a really committedly Zionist one.
00:27:00.700She's at all these for kind of brief stretches, right?
00:27:03.180She does one more miniature campaign against another Columbia University professor.
00:27:08.580This one, a Muslim archaeologist who criticized the way that Israeli archaeologists use excavations to make these like historically dubious claims about the nature of like Bronze Age Jewish presence in Israel.
00:27:19.620And Vahri kind of tries to go after her in the same way.
00:27:22.560It doesn't really take off the way her previous attack on one of her professors did.
00:27:26.880And she writes some anti-political correctness stuff.
00:27:30.220But that is a, like, sporadic and, like, tepid sort of attempt for her because the anti-woke column, the anti-woke piece as a genre, has not been formed yet.
00:27:41.280There's this kind of wilderness moment for PC stories.
00:27:43.560PC stories do really well until the early aughts, and then they take off again sort of, yeah, in the buildup to Me Too and right after.
00:27:51.980But there is sort of a moment when, to complain about political correctness, really is sort of for the hackiest of the hacks, where like Tony magazines don't tend to go for it, where you would never get an Atlantic cover story, or where a New York Review of Books wouldn't ask Susan Neiman to write 5,000 words about wokeness, apparently.
00:28:10.520But, you know, she goes through this period in the content minds and she lands on the opinion side of the Wall Street Journal, a famously very conservative opinion page.0.98
00:28:22.960She lands there in 2013 and has an editorial role, right, which means she is suddenly really immersed in the world of sort of higher end, more fancy and tony conservative opinion swindlers, right?
00:28:39.160She's assigning a lot of these pieces out.
00:28:41.960She's networking with right-wing writers.
00:28:44.700She is pumping out a couple of her own pieces for the Opinion website.
00:28:50.340And, Adrienne, I wanted you to read off a couple of these Bari Weiss pieces from her Wall Street Journal era.
00:30:09.120She is a, like, anti-feminist, I think she's, like, an English professor at a, like, arts college in Philly.0.79
00:30:16.720But she made her career as this public anti-feminist and sort of advocate for what are here glossed as masculine virtues, which is, like, kind of a, she's like, well, you know, like, doesn't it sort of betray a little bit of vitality when the frat boy holds you down in rape?
00:30:32.300You know, like that's kind of the Camille Paglia posture.0.57
00:30:36.900She's one of those leftists who never is caught saying anything leftist.
00:31:02.840Not willing to engage with, like, a robust adult resilience in the hustle and bustle of adult life, that kind of thing.
00:31:11.840It's interesting that you say, Adrienne, that Bari is sort of, like, pumping out these PC, like, anti-political correctness articles at a moment when the interest in that kind of commentary is sort of at an endear.
00:31:24.100Because this strikes me as another article where Bari is a little out of time, right?
00:36:34.720Bari Weiss is a journalist who derives her entire effectiveness from being a little bit better at using the internet than the people who read her.1.00
00:36:42.920Because her readers are old enough not to realize that you can do this any fucking day of the week.0.74
00:36:48.120Like, well, you're only focusing on this one thing,0.97
00:36:51.020but you're not focusing on these other things
00:37:13.780than the people who find her convincing.0.53
00:37:16.120There's also, like, a tension I want to point out in Bari's, like, emerging portrait of the ominous left, right, in which they are simultaneously frivolous and narcissistic and focused on things that don't really matter, but also powerful and capable of inflicting great violence, right?0.99
00:37:37.500They're these bullies who are stupid, but they're also really, really able of inflicting harm, right?0.99
00:37:44.640Yeah. And she is part of them and she isn't part of them. Right. Yeah. In this piece, one should say she does say I'm in favor of gay marriage, which like Lottie frickin da lady. But like, yeah, low fucking bar. Yeah. But often enough, like you're not even sure she holds those commitments. Right. She's a New Yorker. She eventually will come to work at a quote unquote newspaper.1.00
00:38:02.260And so basically she's like, well, I'm part of these people.0.98
00:38:04.920It's like, and yet nothing you ever say seems to suggest any meaningful membership in that group or identification with them seems more like you stand very close to them and then talk shit about them.0.98
00:38:17.180I'm one of you, which is why I hate all of you and everything you stand for and will say so repeatedly.0.70
00:38:22.520So, you know, we mentioned that Barry Weiss is at the Wall Street Journal at the moment of the 2016 election when Donald Trump wins the presidency over Hillary Clinton and the nation is sort of like, you know, shocked.
00:38:38.760And part of what happens is that at the New York Times, a new opinion editor, James Bennett, makes it his job, makes it his project to make the opinion section more appealing to conservatives, right?
00:38:52.520And he sets out recruiting conservatives.
00:38:56.140And from the Wall Street Journal, he recruits Bret Stephens, who by now is something of a mentor figure to Bari.
00:39:02.420And when Bret Stephens comes to the New York Times, he brings Bari as a package deal.
00:39:08.740So she joins the New York Times in the spring of 2017.0.54
00:39:13.940She will be there for just three years.
00:39:16.420And I want to say something that a few people I know at the Times or who have worked at the Times in the past always point out is that Bari Weiss was not an opinion columnist at the New York Times.
00:39:27.760Bari Weiss was a mid-level opinion editor, right?
00:39:31.480She's still doing – like her official title is kind of like a grunt title, right?
00:39:37.640She probably has a fairly modest salary.0.84
00:39:40.560She's got some responsibilities to commission and edit pieces, to bring pieces in from that stable of conservative writers that she developed while at the Wall Street Journal.
00:39:52.840But it is not her job to be the voice of the opinion.
00:39:56.740It is not her job to be articulating a line that she can embody and put forward as a personal avatar in the media itself.
00:40:04.600But she winds up doing that while at the New York Times.
00:40:09.460partly because she is at this point in her life
00:43:20.940And she really understands herself as a besieged victim of these online forces.
00:43:29.160And she starts writing more and more about cancel culture, about what would later come to be called wokeness.
00:43:38.800I would nuance that slightly and say, not only is she writing about the evils of cancel culture, there is that.
00:43:45.180But she also seems to get herself to the position that would later characterize common sense in the free press,
00:43:52.200which is that if the left got mad at you, it meant that you were right.
00:43:56.140She's starting to take these contrarian positions like, well, maybe there's something to it because leftists with blue hair are getting so mad about it.
00:44:01.720She's not writing just against wokeness.0.99
00:44:03.760She's writing sort of the anti-woke position where it's like, you forced me into saying this Nazi shit because you were so mean to that other Nazi or whatever, right?0.99
00:44:12.200Right. She has this very like the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Right. And so anybody who feels besieged by a liberal cultural environment, everybody who is uncomfortable with cultural directions sort of indicated by the social movements of the 2010s, anybody who's ever gotten yelled at online and feels like raw about it.0.99
00:44:33.880these all become people with whom Bari feels a great affinity, right?
00:45:08.260Yeah, the notion like, oh, Muslims are a threat to like women's rights and like gay rights is not something to which there's a ton of room for on the American right because the American right is like, well, yes, we also hate those.
00:45:19.640But like Bari will try to advance that argument in a sort of unusual American context.
00:45:24.120But really she starts writing basically about controversies on Twitter.
00:48:15.780So she is one of the first prominent voices mainstreaming this idea that Me Too has gone too far.
00:48:23.560She really comes to the defense of accused men.
00:48:27.120She really says that any kind of consequences for sexual abuse are de facto part of a liberal excess.
00:48:32.700And she really starts networking with accused men and like not just taking their side in public but also in private becoming their friend.
00:48:42.820So we talked a little bit on one of our episodes about Jeffrey Epstein and his opposition to the Me Too movement about how being accused of sexual violence during this time actually became kind of like a networking opportunity that like cued these men into other sort of alliances and other networks of mutual support on the part of the accused that actually allowed them to pursue new professional opportunities and sort of advance themselves along these new previously unavailable routes.
00:49:12.820I think part of what Bari does, part of the way we have to understand Bari is as sort of like a personal networker and like opportunity creator for the canceled, right?
00:49:23.320Like when we get to her hiring decisions, both at the Free Press and then later at CBS in our next episode, we're going to see a lot of like Me Too guys wind up getting hired by her because she is drawing from this very specific pool.
00:49:39.520But in Me Too itself, during late 2017 and early 2018, she really advances the idea of Me Too as a moral panic.
00:49:49.620Yeah, which is ironic because she was fomenting one of her own.0.70
00:49:53.240Yeah, this is also the beginning of what can only be described as a performance art project of Barry Wise really angling to get fired from the New York Times but not succeeding, which was very fucking funny to watch.
00:50:04.620and everyone was commenting on it at the time.
00:50:06.280And then the very snippy and oft-quoted letter
00:50:09.940in which she eventually resigned from the Times,1.00
00:50:12.720which still is today sort of held up by idiots, frankly,0.99
00:50:17.140as an indicator for what has happened to the climate of opinion1.00
00:50:53.240I mean, they can have a different kind of celebrity
00:50:57.500and a different kind of status, right?0.94
00:50:59.460And she kind of like clearly envies it. And what she's trying to engineer by participating in these Twitter fights, by drawing a ton of attention to herself, by like writing these incendiary columns is a situation in which she can get herself canceled, a situation in which she can experience consequences from which she can then go cast herself as a martyr and become much more rich, right?
00:51:24.720And it doesn't actually work, at least at this time, right?
00:51:28.980At the New York Times, she really embarks on this anti-MeToo crusade.
00:52:11.940And lost because he had molested so many girls.
00:52:15.800But there was a sort of like Project Veritas style false accuser where somebody who was being paid by a right-wing group concocted a false allegation against Roy Moore and tried to get it published by the Washington Post.
00:52:31.740Yeah, so Washington Post immediately was like, no, we've done vetting and you are lying, right?
00:52:37.220Which disproves Bari's assertion here that sexual violence victims are being too readily believed and too readily taken seriously.
00:52:47.740Yeah, it's one of those pieces that, as Michael Hobbs never tires of pointing out, where the premise of the piece collapses the moment you explain what happened.
00:54:04.540On January 18th, 2018, Aziz Ansari is guilty of not being a mind reader.0.97
00:54:10.380How did a movement for women's empowerment become an emblem for female helplessness?0.66
00:54:14.360As if she ever, like, supported it, right?0.99
00:54:16.520Like, a movement for women's empowerment.
00:54:18.340Actually, you said that it was dangerous immediately.
00:54:21.220Look, Aziz Ansari has been historicized as sort of a legitimate victim of woke excess because his accuser was treated very, very badly by the media, right?
00:54:31.520She gave an interview to a unserious outlet where somebody with no experience or competence to handle a sensitive topic just kind of transcribed her words verbatim.
00:56:31.700subhead questions that you can easily answer
00:56:33.640in the negative, but Bari Weiss and her co-author, Damon Winter, will not, in fact, answer in the
00:56:40.040negative. This is the reason why Jordan Peterson and people like that are taken way more seriously.
00:56:47.880This is a real, this is kind of a coming out moment for them, and they explicitly understand
00:56:53.580it as that in that moment. So what is Bari's argument in this piece about the intellectual
00:56:58.840dark web? Like arguments such as it is, I mean, we're always being a little generous saying that
00:57:03.580There's an argument in these things as opposed to just sort of an inchoate howl of wounded narcissism and bigotry.
00:57:09.440Well, it's that people aren't ready to hear it because it's too un-PC and that we ignore it at our own peril, right?
00:57:15.040She doesn't say, oh, because these people are fascists, which would probably be the fourth right thing to say, but like we are missing out on a whole piece of the conversation.
00:57:22.300It's essentially, it's a liberal chiding piece, if I remember correctly.
00:57:25.700Right. It's a bunch of people who have ideas that are either discredited by their fields, things like race science and eugenics or sort of like biological sexism, or which have been sort of abandoned because of their like very potent socially corrosive effects, right?
00:57:44.620And Bari Weiss says, no, no, no, it's not that these guys have been proven wrong.
00:57:48.920It's not that they're cranks pursuing rationales to justify their own bigotry against the actual empirical evidence.
00:57:55.520It's that the liberals are too scared, right?
00:57:59.480So she casts these sort of like fringe right-wing bloggers, like people like Jordan Peterson, like Steven Pinker, who've been doing the kind of work she's been doing to try and like mainstream some like commitments to human hierarchy.
00:58:13.620and cast egalitarian commitments of feminism and anti-racism as sort of egregiously wrong.
00:58:20.360And she cast them as like sort of like dangerous truth tellers against a stifling hegemony.
00:58:27.860Maybe a better title would have been Meet My Group Chat.
00:58:30.540Yeah, that's clearly what it is, right?
00:58:32.000These are clearly the kinds of guys who she has been introduced to and begun socializing with
00:58:39.580during her time as sort of a centerpiece
01:01:04.060So I want to look at Mari's use of gender in her anti-woke efforts, right?
01:01:10.420Because I think something she does a little bit now that she did a little less actually at the start of her career was use her gender and sexuality as credentialing factors, right?
01:01:21.900Like during this peak anti-woke era in the second half of the 2010s, she would have a line towards the start of each piece, like in her introductory or her second graph saying, I am a bisexual woman or I am a woman or I am a feminist, right?
01:01:42.000And I think that's an interesting feature because most of these anti-woke, anti-cancel cultural grifters, frankly, they're mostly men and they're mostly men a little bit older than her.
01:01:52.660And Bari has always made this claim that she is of the woke generation, that she is a liberal, that she is a urbanite, that she is a millennial and that she is like sort of much more embedded with this culture and has reluctantly come to disavow its excesses.
01:02:11.780but I think that's kind of a fig leaf to say the least you know I think sometimes she uses
01:02:18.340as conservative women often do her gender as a means of like sort of softening what is actually1.00
01:02:25.100the violence and coercion of her ideology like if we took this to its logical conclusion1.00
01:02:30.080it would wind up victimizing a ton of people and being really incompatible with like the dignity
01:02:37.100and equality of everybody, but you're not saying that.
01:02:41.840There's like a sort of affected innocence,
01:02:44.700which is, of course, what she accuses Me Too feminists of.0.94
01:02:47.100But I also wanted to call attention to her status0.74
01:02:53.900as like a bisexual person as what she will become,
01:02:57.900which is a very public transphobe, right?0.63
01:02:59.620And this is also something I think we're seeing more and more
01:03:02.660is the use of cisgender gay people in opposition to sort of like gender liberation projects
01:03:10.100and particularly like trans liberation projects.
01:03:12.880The conservatives have some token gay people now that they trot out to be transphobic
01:03:18.860and to provide a little bit more legitimacy to their transphobia
01:03:22.520the way that like Bari Weiss's womanhood is also supposed to provide legitimacy for her anti-feminism.1.00
01:03:28.720Yeah. So this kind of dual move where on the one hand, the left is secretly in league with the true enemy, which is usually Muslims. That's what the French call Islamogochisme, right? This is a very, very common trope on the right over there.0.94
01:03:44.260And then this other idea of like leveraging the presence of some LGBT people, well, minus the T, never the T, in these movements as sort of a figurehead in whose name you can then really crack down on other people, whether it's trans people or immigrants.
01:04:05.200Those are both extremely tired tropes, but here it comes, on the European far right.
01:04:11.020And I think part of Bari's genius is that she combines two tropes that are really far-right tropes with the self-presentation of a queer woman of liberal persuasion.
01:04:21.100And you're like, it's not true, but it's central to her success in this particular media ecosystem.
01:04:26.560I don't think it's really persuading normal people, but I think it's very persuasive to the rich conservatives who wind up being sort of the backbone of the Bari Weiss project.
01:04:38.480Like they really like having their anti-feminist positions ventriloquized by a woman.0.70
01:04:44.700They really like having their anti-queer positions ventriloquized by like a bisexual person, right?0.75
01:04:50.620That is like a little feather in their cap.0.96
01:04:52.960It's something that they will like pay a little extra for because it makes them feel good.
01:04:56.700And I also want to like talk about Bari's actual feminist politics, which I think we can really see emerging through her commentary on Me Too.
01:05:06.360And by feminist, I mean, I use that term very loosely, right?0.99
01:05:11.200I have a higher standard for that term than most people do.
01:05:14.080A lot of people who call themselves feminists, and I would include Bari here, in fact, oppose any, like, organized political effort to combat the oppression that women face as women and because they're women, right?
01:05:25.460And in that sense, like, they're actually kind of anti-feminists, right?
01:05:28.420I would say Bari is, in fact, an anti-feminist.
01:05:31.380But this is something we've talked about on this podcast before, that precisely because left-wing civil rights movements tended to be multipolar and often critiqued themselves very, very seriously and interrogated their own arguments, it opens up a space for people like that, right?
01:05:48.560People can be like, well, I'm saying this as a feminist.1.00
01:05:50.700And you're like, well, but then you never say anything feminist.
01:05:52.820It's actually a sign of how broad-based and how internally dialogic a lot of these movements are that bad faith actors like Barry Wise can sort of position themselves within their ambit, right?
01:06:06.000Like, can sort of don a mantle that, if you don't look too carefully, can resemble something a genuine feminist would say in a genuine disagreement.
01:06:14.100But then you're like, oh, wait, but the baseline commitments aren't there, as you say.
01:06:16.460Like, you actually don't think women as a class should be politically active and try and fight for this and this and this.
01:06:24.220Well, okay, so in which sense then are you a feminist?0.95
01:06:47.860So hers is a quote-unquote feminism that only ever says that to cite women as suffering is to patronize them or that to provide for them materially is to condescend to them.
01:06:58.740It is never a feminism about addressing women's grievances vis-a-vis, say, men or offering restitution or repair for their experiences of injustice, such as sexual violence.
01:07:09.420It is always about saying that women do not need reparation or rest or repair because they're tough, because they do not need sympathy, because they're capable of evil, right?0.57
01:07:21.280It's all about arguing for a withdrawal of care or money or attention or sort of like moral status for a woman under the guise of respect.0.89
01:07:30.980And in that sense, to any extent that you can call Bari a feminist,
01:07:34.960she's always and only a feminist of this kind of like moral austerity, right?
01:07:40.040She's always telling women that they need less and less,1.00
01:07:43.400always telling them to do more and more.1.00
01:09:15.920This is clearly a moment that Weiss wants to dwell on.
01:09:20.820That happened about a year before the book comes out.
01:09:22.900And so, you know, the book does some kind of things you would probably expect from a thinker like Bari Weiss.
01:09:30.100It claims an equality of anti-Semitism on the left and the right.
01:09:34.700It uniformly throughout casts anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism.
01:09:39.620And as Butler points out, it posits anti-Semitism as a kind of like ahistorical or trans-historical phenomenon.
01:09:46.280It sometimes uses the metaphor of a virus.
01:09:49.340It other times uses the metaphor of DNA.
01:09:52.900Right. It kind of places it in the body and it suggests that some peoples are more prone to anti-Semitism than others.
01:09:59.960So one of the things this book does is concludes that there is, quote, reason to worry about Muslim immigration.
01:10:05.360Well, we should say, given that it's been eight years since the Tree of Life massacre and there have been so many more and other anti-Semitic incidents in the United States since, Tree of Life was not committed by an immigrant Muslim or otherwise.
01:10:17.600It was committed by someone who had undergone a fairly straightforward right-wing radicalization and whose manifesto appeared to be drenched in Great Replacement Theory, which is an anti-immigrant and very clearly anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that's almost entirely a creation of the far right.
01:10:38.500Right. It was committed by a deranged Trump supporter who believed that he needed to kill Jewish people because they were facilitating the immigration of Muslims.0.98
01:12:03.880after there was a outcry within the editorial board and the newsroom, I believe,
01:12:10.720over a opinion by Senator Tom Cotton called Send in the Troops,
01:12:15.600which was a call to do exactly what Donald Trump is proposing to do in Minneapolis now,
01:12:21.380which is to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to crack down on Black Lives Matter protests.
01:12:27.840The op-ed, as I recall it, I haven't read it in a little while,
01:12:31.600is full of misrepresentations and lies.
01:12:33.700It casts as violent riots what were some of the largest peaceful demonstrations in U.S. history, and it seemed to want to use the U.S. military to crack down on them.
01:12:45.300I believe Cotton's phrase was overwhelming show of force.
01:12:49.080It was an op-ed that called for like blood in the streets, right?
01:12:53.340And I think it's interesting, Adrienne, that you point out both that what Bari Weiss was calling for to happen to the Middle Eastern Studies Department at Columbia back when she was an undergrad is what subsequently was done to that department by the Trump administration, right?
01:13:08.940And what Bari Weiss sort of like quit in protest over Tom Cotton's right to say in the New York Times op-ed section in 2020 is in fact what the Trump administration has now done, right?
01:13:19.460Sent in these occupying federal forces to put down protests and enforce this racial supremacy effort.
01:13:26.320That's also kind of what Tom Cotton was calling for in the New York Times in 2020.
01:13:44.480In the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd, those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters.
01:13:55.420A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn't be confused with bands of miscreants.
01:13:59.720Well, guess who's going to confuse those?
01:14:01.980The very troops you want to bring in, Tom.
01:14:04.340Anyway, so this goes over very poorly.
01:14:06.300the editorial board of the New York Times writes a response and says, like, no, protest is patriotic.
01:14:14.320Basically, I think Michelle Goldberg called it out for being fascist, which is absolutely true.
01:14:18.620James Bennett admitted that he approved the article for publication without having read it.
01:14:23.880Which seems like that would kind of be, you know, part of his job.0.98
01:14:26.320And as people who were there at the time point out, like, that appears to have been the main thing that ended up getting shit canned.0.99
01:14:33.360It was not that he had approved it, it's that he had approved it without doing his fucking job.0.98
01:14:38.160That he had created a situation where the New York Times had published fascist propaganda with lies in it0.98
01:14:43.760and hadn't even bothered to make sure that the fascist propaganda didn't have any lies in it.
01:14:49.480So that meant he had to go, and that brought on the sympathy of a person who only ever feels sympathy for people who are awful, namely Bari Weiss.
01:15:01.640So, Bari Weiss, now having failed to get herself fired for three years, decides to take this moment to quit.
01:15:12.100And she quits with a open letter to J.G. Schultzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, which she posts online, right?
01:15:21.580It's sort of the opening salvo of Bari's Act II.
01:15:26.900And I want to read just a part of that open letter here.
01:15:30.800Bari writes, Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times, but Twitter has become its
01:15:36.260ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper,
01:15:41.300the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told
01:15:47.480in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read
01:15:52.800about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists
01:15:57.420were charged with writing the first rough draft of history.
01:16:00.900Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing
01:16:04.300molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.1.00
01:16:48.900Like, it's just like completely internally incoherent.0.99
01:16:51.520But it is this defense of legacy media by people who really no longer sort of operate by the logic of legacy media, but really by the logic of social media that they relentlessly assail, right?
01:17:03.540Right. And that's why I wanted to sort of end our part one with this excerpt from Bari Weiss's open resignation letter.
01:17:10.260Because this, to me, this accusation that a social media echo chamber has now supplanted journalistic integrity, that reads to me now like a critique of CBS.
01:17:24.000That reads to me like a critique of the free press, right?
01:17:26.460It's an accusation that is a confession or rather a preview of what she is going to do.
01:17:32.020And look, I want to say I have egg on my face because this was clearly at the time a pivotal moment for Weiss's career.
01:17:39.640It was clear that she was going to leave the New York Times and try to launch herself as some kind of independent conservative media figure, right?
01:17:48.080She started that substack that she originally called Common Sense.
01:17:51.820In 2021, the year after she left the Times, she auditioned to be the token conservative on The View.0.99
01:17:56.940Meghan McCain was leaving and they needed a new right-wing girly.1.00
01:18:00.720And that sort of looked like what she wanted to do, right, to be a recurring bit player on TV.
01:18:05.640but it wasn't really clear that that was going to work out for her, right?
01:21:52.100And so next time in Bari Weiss part two, we are going to trace this transition for Bari, how this little opinion editor at the New York Times transformed herself into the de facto propaganda czar for our billionaire ruler class of two online nerd fascists.0.98
01:22:12.420And that's when Bari Weiss becomes stupid Goebbels.0.87
01:22:16.080See you next time on In Bed With The Right.0.98