00:00:34.840Now with 100% better pronunciation of the name of the person we're making fun of.0.98
00:00:41.180So when we left off last week, Barry had just quit her job as an opinion editor at the New York Times after making her career there as sort of like an anti-woke provocateur.
00:00:51.720And she publishes this open letter when she resigns saying that the Times, and by implication, other ones of these like mainstream institutional news sources, were hostile to conservatives in a way that distorts their depiction of the truth.
00:01:07.900Today, we're going to see Berry launch her own independent publication, a newsletter she at first calls Common Sense, but then later rebrands as an opinion outlet called the Free Press.0.99
00:01:18.540She's going to ingratiate herself with the billionaire tech elite.0.66
00:01:22.920She's going to get acquired by the billionaire Ellison family, the founders of Oracle, and become the editor-in-chief of CBS News as a conciliation to the right after the Ellison's Skydance Corporation buys Paramount.0.99
00:01:38.220And we're going to see her now at this moment in March of 2026 eyeing even more conquests as she looks to become an editorial leader across an even bigger territory of media outlets as the Ellisons seek to buy up Warner Brothers and its properties at CNN and HBO and really consolidate their control of the media.0.98
00:02:02.800Yeah, that's right. There's that famous meme of a tiny little domino and then there's a row of like intensely upsized dominoes right behind it. Like Barry Weiss writing that resignation letter is sort of like the reason I wrote The Cancer Culture Panic. And I cannot tell you the number of talks I've given around that book where people are like, well, what about the Barry Weiss letter? Do you disagree with that? And I'm like, oh boy, do I?0.84
00:02:27.880Yeah, that's interesting because, you know, we left off last week by talking about that open letter where Barry resigns from the Times.
00:02:36.160And, you know, she claims to have been bullied by her liberal colleagues for like, quote unquote, wrong think.
00:02:42.140And yes, indeed, that is the phrase she used.
00:02:44.340She compared people being like rude to her on Twitter to the authoritarian dictatorship in George Orwell's 1984.
00:03:04.720But not everybody mocked this, as you mentioned.
00:03:07.700Like, a lot of people found this letter, you know, really resonant, and they used Barry's departure from the Times as an opportunity to voice their own grievances about the media.
00:03:20.000So, Adrian, I have here some tweets that were made in response to Barry's departure from The Times in July of 2020.
00:03:36.440If you want to get a glimpse into today's enlightened media, and in this case, The New York Times, you need to look no further.
00:03:42.120NYT editor Barry Weiss resigns in stunning fashion and exposes The Times' rampant attacks on anyone who breaks from the far-left narrative.
00:03:49.900Quote, speak your mind at your own peril.
00:04:49.560Did your ghostwriter crap that one out for you too?
00:04:52.220Wait, tell our listeners who Brent Bozell is.0.89
00:04:55.160Oh, so Brent Lee Bozell III is, yeah, the third in a line of conservative activists and writers.
00:05:04.040He founded the Media Research Center, which is a clearinghouse for, like, liberal media bias kind of stories that then make the rounds on Fox News or on Twitter.
00:05:17.260He is also the current ambassador, I believe, to the Republic of South Africa.
00:05:34.040That Barry is attracting as she launches away from The New York Times.
00:05:39.540And amidst this outpouring of right-wing goodwill, she launches her own newsletter, which she initially calls Common Sense.
00:05:48.620So I think it's important to note that at this time when Barry launches her newsletter in January of 2021, you're really seeing kind of like a flourishing of newsletters.
00:06:00.480There's these alternative sources of employment to the establishment media outlets emerging on these newsletter platforms because those big establishment media outlets are contracting, right?
00:06:13.500They're laying off tons of people at the end of every corridor.
00:06:19.000They're failing to maintain legitimacy with readers in the Trump era, both on the left and the right, which is, of course, something that Barry facilitated during her time at The Times.
00:06:28.100And as those jobs disappear, more and more journalists are trying to make it independently with their own newsletters.
00:06:35.300And a few of them are having a lot of success.
00:06:38.180So this is already a pretty established career pivot, especially for the cancels.
00:06:44.820Barry is just following a script, right?
00:06:47.340When she leaves the Times, she is following a pre-established route for somebody to go down to make a different kind of media career.
00:06:56.740Yeah. Andrew Sullivan walked so that Barry could run.
00:07:00.260Yeah, exactly. Right. She reportedly just launches this out of her own home.
00:07:04.860And that much will be familiar to a lot of us. Right. She's a gig worker.
00:07:09.700But I think that we have to pause for a second and think about Barry's pivot from establishment to independent media in 2020 and 2021 as having to do with her broader relationships to institutions.
00:07:24.400Because a lot of people, when they leave these big media companies and then try to make it on their own as independent journalists, they're doing that because there aren't any jobs at these big media companies anymore, right?
00:07:36.400They're sort of indifferent to the institution or like wish that it was treating its employees a little better.
00:07:42.480They would probably like to be at a bigger news outlet where they could get health insurance, et cetera, and not have to do everything themselves.
00:07:51.080But that sort of career path has been taken away from them.
00:07:54.700And so they're trying to make it in this hardscrabble way on her own.
00:08:00.200She's not just venturing out on her own.
00:08:02.780She's also making a critique of that establishment outlet.
00:08:05.900She's now on the outside of the mainstream prestige media and she's looking in.
00:08:10.920And this is also kind of the posture she took at Columbia.
00:08:13.720She felt excluded from the prestigious institution.
00:08:17.220She felt anger and woundedness at that exclusion.
00:08:21.080And then she launched her own, like, little institution, Columbians for Academic Freedom, where she felt like she was an insider and she would launch a critique of the big guys, right?
00:08:31.720That's also what she did at the New York Times. The bullying she complains about in this letter appears to have been that she was compulsively tweeting out things that people said in closed editorial meetings, which is highly unprofessional behavior.
00:08:45.560And a lot of what she experienced as bullying was people like, Barry, please don't do that.
00:08:53.240Yeah, it's also maybe worth mentioning that the New York Times has a really, really strict social media policy that applies to everybody except those in the opinion department.
00:09:01.320So when Barry goes on Twitter during her New York Times years and says, oh, this happened at the staff meeting, the New York Times is totally captured by the woke agenda.
00:09:12.180Nobody else who's in that meeting has the ability to go on Twitter and correct the record because doing so risks their jobs.
00:09:19.840Right. So Barry has sort of like singular access to the public depiction of that workplace at the time.
00:09:27.020But, you know, this is a pretty common approach to institutions for her, right?
00:09:36.920And I don't want to put her on the couch too much, but I think one thing you see with these right-wingers who pay a lot of attention to elite institutions, people who critique universities, who critique the media, is this sort of, like, longing to be brought back in, right?
00:09:51.820To defeat this, like, Oedipal father of the institution that created them, like the Times, like Columbia, and also change and reform that institution and remake them in their own image.
00:10:04.000So Common Sense, her newsletter, which she later rebrands as the free press, isn't so much positioned as like an alternative or competitor to the Times.
00:10:13.400It's positioned as like the Times' estranged daughter, like trying to shame that bigger institution into changing.
00:10:21.200Yes, there is this kind of attempt to recreate the institution outside of the institution, right?
00:10:27.580But in the end, you can really tell that Barry, because she is such a dropout, because she spends so little time in these institutions, doesn't really understand them all that well.
00:10:40.880Being at the opinion side of the New York Times doesn't give you a good insight of what the newsroom works like, right?
00:10:45.420Being an undergrad at Columbia doesn't give you, sorry, but particularly good insight of what Columbia is like as an institution.
00:10:52.120So there's also this kind of outsider's view that thinks it's far more savvy and can replicate what it observed at an institution, but without much of the institutional know-how.
00:11:01.740And I do think that when we get to the University of Austin, that is a school envisioned by someone who doesn't understand what a school functions like.
00:11:08.740And I think the free press is if someone tried to come up with a newspaper who's only had cursory experiences with newspapers, and just so that people don't think I'm just bashing conservatives, this is not true for all conservatives.
00:11:19.660The Daily Caller was Tucker Carlson's attempt to do a right-wing media conglomerate with robust fact-checking from someone who knew how fact-checking worked, who had done right-wing but pretty esteemed journalistic work.
00:11:37.500And there he is trying to replicate what he had observed, and he understood the institution.0.97
00:11:42.540In the end, he ended up not fact-checking that much anymore because he just went completely fucking crazy.0.88
00:11:49.040She did not do what Tucker Carlson did and sort of, like, come out of actual reporting.
00:11:53.420She comes out of a very passing, glancing familiarity with the things that she's then trying to clone.
00:11:59.540Not only is she sort of a tourist in a lot of these elite institutions,
00:12:02.900just sort of like dipping in for brief periods of a couple of years before moving on.
00:12:08.460She also has a very, very specific kind of media experience, right?
00:12:12.900She's somebody who writes and edits book reviews and writes and edits opinion columns.
00:12:17.740That is one way to describe my career, right?
00:12:20.580I am somebody who writes a lot of reviews and I write a lot of opinion pieces.
00:12:25.080What I do is not investigative reporting.
00:12:28.180It is a totally different set of skills that I have had to learn and try to grow with and acquire, but it's not my wheelhouse to begin with, right?
00:12:37.920That is not something Barry has ever tried to do.
00:12:41.580Barry is only an opinion writer, only a reviews writer, only kind of a cultural critic who takes established facts and depict them in a way that is convenient for her agenda or, like, promotes her worldview.
00:12:56.900that's different from establishing the facts in the first place.
00:13:00.140And when she gets to CBS, that difference of experience
00:13:04.360is going to really challenge her credibility
00:13:07.000with the people who are now working for her.
00:13:09.580So all that said, she establishes this newsletter in early 2021
00:13:14.380and doesn't exactly find its footing right away.
00:13:17.880So Barry launches Common Sense about five months after leaving The Times.
00:13:56.080I was upset about Biden being president, so I started a newsletter.
00:14:01.120In these first couple months and weeks of her newsletter, she's sort of trying to do the same cancel culture hucksterism that she was doing at The Times.
00:14:10.580You know, she looks to amplify stories of individuals who claim that they have been canceled by the woke mobs that control elite institutions.
00:14:18.100So one of her first pieces, her very first pieces, is an interview with this anti-vax bodybuilder woman who claimed that Disney had fired her from a minor role she had on the TV show The Mandalorian, also known as Baby Yoda, because she was a COVID skeptic and, like, wouldn't take the vaccine.
00:14:46.860So this is also a little bit of foreshadowing, right? Because she's already very early in her career at an independent outlet, opening the door to like anti-vaxxers, COVID skeptics, and these like proto-Maha types.0.88
00:14:59.680Yeah, it's interesting, too. One of the things about Barry's influence with the free press is that, like, it's very clearly not fact-checked. And one way to think about this kind of crop of preoccupations that you've outlined here is that those are things we tend to be okay with not robustly fact-checking, right?
00:15:19.820If you do a full-on piece about a senator who, like, I don't know, is having an affair or stole money, like, you better fucking fact-check that shit.0.99
00:15:27.360Saying, I was canceled by Disney for my cool views, right?0.99
00:15:32.620Like, no one's ever going to push back.
00:15:35.540And this Maha style, like, it often flies under lifestyle, even though it's deeply political.0.98
00:15:39.960And therefore, too, you can sort of say random shit in print or online without really exposing yourself.0.88
00:15:47.200So, like, it's both her new perch and her old obsessions reinforcing each other mutually, I feel like.0.86
00:15:52.940I would say at The Guardian, my opinion columns are fact-checked, which, thank God, I think it does a little bit of a disservice to writers at places like The New York Times, where at the time that Barry was there, opinion columns were not fact-checked.
00:16:06.840But that's another thing about being an independent journalist is that, you know, you set your own standards when you are the sole proprietor and the only editorial authority.
00:16:19.060So, meanwhile, Barry seems to really want to be on TV.
00:16:24.340According to Variety in the summer of 2021, so just a couple months after she launches her newsletter, she is lobbying pretty hard to be a host on the women's daytime panel talk show The View.
00:16:38.180She had been a guest a couple of times on The View before, but her agents at CAA were really gunning to get her a contract, and it didn't go exactly the way she wanted.
00:16:50.020Adrienne, would you read this little bit of highlighted text here?
00:16:52.280I didn't know this, so I'm excited to read this.0.50
00:16:54.800In the summer of 2021, the producers of The View cast a wide net to find their token conservative co-host after Meghan McCain's exit.
00:17:01.960Barry Weiss, who had guest-hosted a few episodes of the panel show and was making waves with her just-launched news outlet, The Free Press, wanted the job, and her then-CAA agents lobbied hard.
00:17:11.840But Weiss didn't test well with audiences who didn't understand her centrist right contrarian politics.
00:17:16.580In fact, her focus group scores were so low that she wasn't invited back to guest host, according to insiders.
00:17:22.280Instead, Alyssa Farrah Griffin, a former Trump White House Director of Strategic Communication, landed the gig.
00:17:29.840And I mean, I dwell on this early failure at The View, not just for the sake of mocking Barry, although obviously we are, but to show that at this point in 2021, she doesn't really have a plan.
00:17:42.060I think it's easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to think that Barry left The Times with this grand vision of how she's going to conquer media.
00:18:22.860Well, this person is like negative charming, so we can't use her.
00:18:26.100But it'll just be some communication director from the Trump White House.
00:18:29.700I always think of the grab machine at the fair.1.00
00:18:32.040Like you're just waiting to be grabbed by the great conservative media claw in the sky by some billionaire who happens to like your shit.1.00
00:18:40.180And until that moment, you're just writing your dumb substack.1.00
00:18:43.180Like, again, nothing against Substacks, but write your dumb Substack and, like, try to get a guest spot somewhere and, like, maybe get, quote-unquote, canceled for the right thing.0.99
00:18:53.080And then suddenly, like, a sugar daddy will materialize.0.68
00:18:56.040And it's about to materialize for Barry because at the time, her newsletter, Common Sense, was already doing pretty well.
00:19:03.880So she reportedly passed the mark of $80,000 a year in annual subscriptions within the first week of her launch.
00:19:11.500If I was a betting woman, I'd say that $80,000 a year is about like ballpark what she had been earning at the times.
00:19:18.840By the autumn, she has 100,000 subscribers.
00:19:47.720When we ended our podcast last week, we marked Barry's departure from the Times in the summer 2020 as a pivot moment that really changed her career.
00:19:57.640I actually think the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022 is when Barry becomes what she is now.0.88
00:20:04.340And here I want to shout out Claire Malone at The New Yorker, who's a really talented media reporter over there.
00:20:10.120She did a great and like very thorough profile of Barry a couple months back that covers this stretch of several months of like late 2021, early 2022, better than I've seen done elsewhere.0.70
00:20:23.780Because around this time, Barry does what Americans frequently do when they are looking to reinvent themselves.
00:21:28.560Barry becomes a fixture at dinner parties in Los Angeles, and she gains the attention of some of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley who really feel that her anti-woke politics reflects their own frustrations and aspirations to reorient culture away from wokeness and from the social movements of the 2010s towards something different at the beginning of the Biden era.
00:23:18.300But also, and this is something that maybe people outside of Silicon Valley didn't notice so much, they sort of came into the pandemic crisis thinking, well, we're going to solve this the way we solve everything else, right?
00:23:28.920Like, we're going to put it on the blockchain.
00:23:30.840Like, all these buzzwords would be trotted out.
00:23:32.980Turns out viral research is not a pitch meeting.
00:23:36.120And the virus didn't care that they had all this AI power they were going to train on this virus.0.98
00:23:41.640And in the end, it was doctors being like, hey, we should lock this shit down.0.98
00:23:45.640And then other doctors being like, hey, I think we found first a vaccine and then a treatment for this thing.0.99
00:23:53.220And so this must have been the moment when Barry comes onto their screens and where there's this real readiness for people who already were right wing.
00:24:02.200Right. A lot of the people at the Founders Fund that's run by Peter Thiel or people who were sort of experiencing their own radicalization.
00:24:09.520Right. This would be a lot of folks over at, I think, Y Combinator, for instance.
00:24:12.760they were ready to kind of hear these messages.
00:24:16.800Famously, Musk is someone who reached out to Peter Thiel
00:24:20.380to sort of go on that black pill journey or whatever he's on now.
00:24:24.460Right? I mean, Nicole Shanahan, RFK Jr.'s...
00:24:29.540Yeah. Sort of got radicalized during COVID.
00:24:32.580She's the ex-wife of one of the Google founders.
00:24:35.460So she was at the right place at the right time, from what you're telling me.
00:24:39.080Yeah, and I think you're right that these were rich people sort of primed to hear this anti-woke message by their own latent prejudices and by, you know, historical circumstances that had encouraged those prejudices or encouraged them to think of them as righteous.
00:24:55.420Well, the reason why sort of cancel culture and anti-wokeness really worked for that set, and again, like the number of these people is not huge and they really are fairly uniform, is also because a lot of these people are getting older and are grappling with a life where the central fact, where the thing they're most famous for is that they got unbelievably lucky.
00:25:18.220And as someone who's getting older and got pretty lucky, I can tell you it's not fun to contemplate about the fact that, like, you kind of owe it all to chance.
00:25:26.520It's nice to think, like, oh, I worked hard for it and I deserved it and other people didn't.
00:25:33.140This kind of hierarchized thinking has always been attractive to the people who've succeeded beyond anyone's imagination, any measure in Silicon Valley.
00:26:13.140Yeah. So when Barry was forging her career as a right wing provocateur at The New York Times in sort of the late 2010s, 2017 to 2020, one of the things you would consistently hear from her defenders is that she is really, really nice.
00:26:29.220Yeah. So you'd see like the likes of Katie Roife or Bill Maher make this point in public.
00:26:34.760But in private, I would hear it from all kinds of like Gen X media elites, right?
00:26:40.340My boss, back when I worked at, you know, Redacted Magazine in 2017, once made a point of telling us all that he had met her at the home of one of his friends and found her incredibly gracious and charming, even though he claimed he did not share her politics.
00:26:55.440So we've talked about how Barry isn't really good on camera.
00:28:02.480stiff candidate in 2004 it's like if you're in the room with him you're like oh this guy has
00:28:07.160tons of charisma and then you zoom out and you see him on camera like oh weird none of that
00:28:11.280translates it is a thing right because like of course people in the room are a big part of making
00:28:16.420the decisions yeah and then maybe when they even watch someone on tv they're like well this is
00:28:22.080still the same person that i interacted with and i loved it but it's very different for those of us
00:28:26.800who have never interacted with this person in close quarters i don't know like does she put a
00:28:31.660spell on you or something what's what's going on here it's actually really professionally important
00:28:36.520to be a good hang yeah yeah you have to have a good vibe and apparently she does it's atrocious
00:28:43.020in every exposure i've had to her but by all accounts in a room she's very very different
00:28:49.460that's why podcasting is the medium for us i'm immediately off-putting but uh
00:28:54.540no one knows because i come to them only through their airpods
00:28:58.720So she's a charmer, right? And she starts charming at these dinner parties in L.A. in the early 2020s as she's looking to expand her newsletter into something more like a newsroom.
00:29:11.240So at the end of 2021, she raises over a million dollars in funding, almost all of it from these conservative Silicon Valley billionaires, including the big pro-Trump guys, David Sachs and Marc Andreessen, and the former Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz.
00:29:31.000He was a Starbucks guy and he ran like a brief, like centrist campaign for the Democratic primary in 2020 and then had the good sense to back out.
00:29:39.440But he did not have the good sense to not give hundreds of thousands of dollars to Barry Weiss.
00:29:50.800At the same time, we should also say that raising a million dollars in funding from David Sachs and Marc Andreessen is frankly, that's peanuts for them.
00:30:00.880They probably shit out like 35 times that for like some weird startup idea that someone like wrote down on a cocktail napkin, right?
00:30:08.320Right. I mean, consider she is at the end of 2021 raising a million dollars in funding or just over a million dollars in funding.
00:30:15.520And in 2024, I believe, she will sell her company to the Ellisons for $150 million.
00:30:23.000So this is something that grows very, very fast.
00:30:27.060So in early 2022, Common Sense rebrands as the Free Press.
00:30:32.260She hires a bunch more employees and starts churning out a truly staggering amount of content.
00:32:41.060because she has a lot of these rich men's money to play with.0.98
00:32:44.060So she is a valve through which conservative billionaires0.94
00:32:46.800are funding what they hope will be0.98
00:32:49.020a right-wing cultural and political shift.0.99
00:32:51.340She is the tool of the right-wing elite1.00
00:32:53.480that they are using for that purpose.0.99
00:32:55.180And I think the way she hands out these kind of employment favors is conspicuous.
00:33:00.800So we also discussed in our episodes on the Epstein Files how cancellation and sexual misconduct allegations during this period became, through a kind of conservative network of the sort that Barry is really good at creating and navigating, a way for accused men to actually access new professional opportunities.
00:33:18.180So when Barry is going on this hiring spree at the free press, she's hiring canceled men.
00:33:23.420One thing that really jumped out to me is that when Barry wanted to launch her podcast, she didn't hire any one of the, trust me, many, many talented radio and audio producers who are out there looking for work.
00:33:36.040She hired Andy Mills, who is a former producer of the New York Times podcast The Daily, who had resigned from The New York Times following sexual harassment allegations.
00:34:05.960So it's often said, including by us, that Barry's signature political posture,
00:34:12.240This brand of reactionary centrism in which she casts the right as victims of an overzealous left-wing cultural dominance, but does not herself actually avow a right-wing cultural agenda.
00:34:24.780We've said that this doesn't actually have a big audience, right?
00:35:38.200And that begs the question, what is Barry actually selling at the free press?
00:35:43.180I would like to posit that Barry is actually quietly abandoning what were always pretty flimsy claims to liberal cultural values and Trump skepticism.
00:35:53.180I think now the free press has managed to expand, not just because of these billionaire subsidies that Barry has, but because it is de facto a pro-MAGA outlet.
00:36:04.540It's very different in style, but not really that different in substance from the rest of the right-wing media market, from places like Fox News or Breitbart or even like OANN.
00:36:16.400And to make this argument, I'm going to look at some of the things that the free press is actually publishing.
00:36:22.480So let's look at three major pieces that have been put up by the free press during its tenure.
00:38:52.500Because by then, the piece in the free press had already been used
00:38:57.520by the Republican Attorney General to launch an investigation into the clinic.
00:39:03.060And by August, which is just six months after Barry publishes this piece in the Free Press,
00:39:07.720Missouri has passed a law banning medical transition for minors.
00:39:11.700Yeah, and I mean, this is not kind of a silly culture war story.1.00
00:39:16.340Like, kids are suffering because of this stupid story, because of these stupid lies.1.00
00:39:21.420One reason I believe we gave it the Kirstie the year it came out.1.00
00:39:24.660Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of these, like, culture war stories actually wind up inflicting a lot of suffering
00:39:28.980Yeah. On people who are different and are made not into people, but into symbols of these other unrelated grievances by people who don't know them. That's something Barry is very good at doing.
00:39:43.460I wanted to draw your attention to another major piece that they publish, you know, just under a year later in January 2024.
00:39:54.680Yes. What Really Happened to George Floyd by Coleman Hughes?
00:39:58.980So this is the George Floyd died of an overdose or maybe a heart attack or something other than, you know, Derek Chauvin smothering him by kneeling on his neck.
00:40:17.800So this is a free press piece by Coleman Hughes, a sort of like right wing or like anti-anti-racist black writer.
00:40:25.360And it's put out as part of a press rollout for a documentary called The Fall of Minneapolis, which is a movie that seeks to advance the notion that George Floyd was not murdered but died of natural causes and to recast the Black Lives Matter uprisings of the summer of 2020 as like this moral panic of the left in a violent frenzy.
00:40:44.940Yeah, the fall of Minneapolis, oddly enough, was tons of neighbors getting together, marching for police accountability.
00:40:53.500It was not, I'm guessing, the U.S. government sending an invasive force trying to abduct children at the local Kroger's.
00:41:03.260So this piece gets debunked on like pretty straightforward factual terms.
00:41:08.380Like the trans piece, it was sort of subject to an outcry.
00:41:13.620But then Radley Balco, who's a libertarian journalist and a critic of police power, really not a woke ideologue by any stretch of the imagination, but like a guy who had an interest in the story, let's say.
00:41:27.720He did a long series of, I think it was three articles, thoroughly debunking every single claim in the documentary and in Hugh's piece and establishing, to my mind, really beyond a doubt, that George Floyd was indeed murdered, right?
00:41:42.720Yeah. Like with the trans teen story, again, the free press does not retract the Coleman Hughes article when it is shown to make these demonstrably false claims. Instead, Weiss tries to, like, get more content out of the controversy. She invites Balco onto her podcast. To his great credit, he declines.
00:42:03.020This is the evolution playbook, right? Like, teach the controversy. Like, let's get a creationist in there. It's such a shitty game to play, and I'm glad that Radley Balco didn't go for it.
00:42:13.320So, Adrian, what is this third piece?0.93
00:42:17.000The third piece, yeah, is hard to put into words. This is Olivia Rheingold and Tanya Lukyanova.
00:42:25.300They became symbols for Gazan starvation, but all 12 suffer from other health problems.
00:42:31.080This is the Gazan children are not being starved.
00:42:35.200They're not starving technically, which means that Israel did nothing wrong in causing their deaths.
00:42:41.400So this piece was published in August 2025, about two years into Israel's genocidal war on Gaza.
00:42:49.580And it is responding to a New York Times piece documenting the starvation deaths of children as the Gazans, of whom there were at the start of the war about two million.
00:43:00.300Their population is dwindling and is being subjected to a really brutal blockade that has created famine conditions.
00:43:08.580And, yeah, it's it really kind of shocks the conscience.
00:43:11.640The argument here is that these children had pre-existing conditions and hence their deaths of starvation should not be blamed on or seen to reflect on Israeli conduct.
00:43:25.180This is just a piece that I really think ā like I don't know how to talk in a way that won't like undermine my credibility, but I don't think you should be allowed to work again or like show your face in public again if you try to justify the starvation of children.0.72
00:43:36.820Like this is really just egregiously morally depraved in a way that I don't find just like stupid or annoying, but like actively sick.
00:43:46.060And it gives you a good sense of the reach of the free press because this reporting, as far as I know, got repeated ad nauseum in especially the European press, which of the 80,000 people subscribed to the free press, probably like 10,000 are European news editors.0.93
00:44:37.600And so, like, this is the kind of stuff that the free press is putting out, right?
00:44:41.540And I think one answer to the question of, like, okay, well, if Barry Weiss's reactionary centrism doesn't have a constituency, why is the free press doing so well?
00:44:54.120Is that, like, that's not actually her politics, right?
00:44:57.600These are not, to me, like daringly heterodox, boldly centrist ideas.
00:45:03.200These are not ideas that challenge, as Barry Weiss has claimed to challenge, the excesses of both the left and the right.
00:45:24.520Yeah. In slightly smarter, slightly more knowledgeable ways than you might at OANN, right? But like it's the same playbook, but in kinder language.
00:45:34.640They're just wearing business casual. That's all it is.
00:45:41.480So Barry has also, we should say, become much less vocally anti-Trump.
00:45:47.600During her years at the Times, she was critical of the president. Now she's come to kind of cautiously embrace him.
00:45:54.020In 2025, she says that she used to have Trump derangement syndrome and has suggested that left responses to Donald Trump are more dangerous than Trump himself.
00:46:06.640Trump, meanwhile, has come to affirmatively like and praise Barry Weiss.
00:46:11.480He has sung her praises effusively in public.
00:46:24.420Because I don't think any real history of Barry's career would be complete without addressing the institution that cites her as one of its founders and has a marble bust of her face in its library.
00:46:52.480It is as yet not accredited. It is sort of right wing startup institution. And in their library, they have a marble bust of none other than Barry Weiss, her bespectacled face. I got to say, it's weird to see a marble bust and know that the face depicted there, it looks like it's seen an iPhone. You know what I mean?
00:47:13.420It's like, oh, the most terminally online person in the world is now here, immortalized in a marble bust, like way far beyond the dignity that she deserves.
00:47:23.620So, Adrian, what is the University of Austin?
00:47:27.620So it was launched the way most great American universities are on Substack.
00:47:33.180No, it started as an article on the Free Press in October 2021, which is something like,
00:47:40.020America's universities and colleges are broken, so we're starting a new one.
00:47:45.380Like, you always know that your foundation has great dignity when you're using the standard editorial format of clickbait to announce the formation of the school.
00:47:54.240It was started by Pano Canelos, the former president of St. John's College in Annapolis, which is a famous great book school.
00:48:02.940Great books, something that conservatives profess to love.
00:48:06.000And listeners will remember the Wall Street Journal article that Barry Weiss wrote about how to survive the PC University.
00:48:13.960The whole thing premised on the idea that like the famous class is called the Forbidden Courses or something like that or Forbidden Texts.
00:48:20.840And I've seen the list, and it's all texts thatāI mean, I would say I've taught 80% of those texts.
00:48:26.380It's like the Federalist papers on there.0.92
00:48:28.300Like, yeah, gee, that's real fucking forbidden.0.81
00:48:29.900I might be shocked if anyone at Stanford taught that anymore.
00:48:33.220But it's like the University of Austin sort of comes out of a headspace, again, of people who have a pretty distorted view, frankly, of what university instruction looks like right now, and in whose mind Shakespeare is no longer taught in the academy because it's all been replaced by, I don't know, Alice Walker, right?
00:48:49.080The way that these people fear Alice Walker.
00:48:53.200What did the color purple ever do to you?
00:48:55.820I mean, in my book, I show that like they haven't updated that talking point for like 35 years.
00:49:00.100Like Alice Walker is probably not taught at all anymore on college campuses.
00:49:03.700But it's the only black woman they can think of who like wrote a book, you know?0.96
00:49:07.660Well, I think they don't want to say Toni Morrison because then it's like, well, it's actually really fucking good.0.58
00:49:13.840They can't argue with Toni Morrison, but they feel like they could win an argument against Alice Walker.
00:49:17.980Which is also wrong, but, you know, still, it's like that maybe they like their chances.
00:49:23.080The University of Austin is also, of course, another invitation for the same deep-pocketed donors that made the free press what it is to basically sink more money into a right-wing counter institution.
00:49:38.200It's another way to sort of pull down Silicon Valley billionaire money.
00:49:41.460It is currently, and again, like this happens to many a storied institution after they've been around for a couple of hundred years, it seems to be riven with some infighting and some disagreements over strategy and vision, which cynics, not me, but cynics might say is what happens when you base your entire educational model on a bizarre paranoid fantasy.
00:50:08.020And also, we should say that in a truly shocking turn, this school that was founded to give a landing pad to academics and to students who had not been allowed to say what they wanted to say and who would be unafraid to engage with challenging ideas seems to be undone slightly by people being told what to say and not to say and people also being triggered by things that happened on campus.
00:50:38.020Yeah, you know, so this university, such as it is, is currently imploding because some of the people who originally signed on thinking it was going to be a bastion of free speech are now shocked, shocked to discover that it's actually a right wing partisan outfit.
00:50:55.480And a couple of other people were really outraged when a student who exhibited some kind of misbehavior on campus was dismissed without what they thought was a adequate due process for his rights.
00:51:07.520So, you know, the actual realities of running a functioning institution are running up against these people's desires to like sort of grandstand and post a lot.
00:51:17.460But, you know, this was a university that, as you said, Adrian, was conceived as sort of a alternative to what they believed were the supposed liberal consensus on elite campuses.
00:51:31.200And it was conceived by Weiss, by Pano Canellos, the former great book scholar, the right-wing historian Niall Ferguson, and billionaire Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale.
00:51:43.920Supposedly, they all had a meeting in Austin.
00:52:40.540So I think this branding of the forbidden courses, to me, it echoes the piece Barry did at the New York Times on the quote unquote intellectual dark web, right?
00:52:51.340It's an attempt to cast conservatism as transgressive and forbidden and sexy.
00:52:57.360this move to start the university of austin also echoes for me again this strategic divide in
00:53:04.920barry's career regarding her relationship to institutions right because on the one hand you
00:53:10.060see her building these alternative conservative institutions like the free press as an alternative
00:53:15.580to the times and the university of austin as sort of like an alternative to columbia or like a
00:53:20.240version of what she wished she'd gotten at columbia but her real desire i think is to capture and0.98
00:53:26.520defeat these institutions and to make them hers.0.65
00:53:29.400So this is like a consolation prize or a substitute a little bit, which might explain why she0.87
00:54:21.840The University of Austin of TV networks
00:54:25.000So in 2025, Barry has just completed a $15 million round of funding for the free press.
00:54:34.640And the company in that funding round was advertising its own value at $100 million.
00:54:41.360A father and son pair called the Ellisons sweep in and they buy it at a overvalued $150 million.
00:54:52.100Adrian, who are Larry and David Ellison?
00:54:55.820So Larry Ellison is the founder of Oracle, and his son is his son.
00:55:00.540That appears to be the beginning and the end of his qualifications for anything.
00:55:05.420There's also a daughter in there, Megan Ellison, who seems to be like comparatively normal.
00:55:09.700But basically, Larry and David are big Trumpy tech guys.
00:55:14.600Yeah, Larry Ellison is, I think, about Trump's age or maybe a little older.
00:55:19.380He founded Oracle, which is a tech company, made a ton of money off of it.0.98
00:55:23.960He looks like a ham wearing a fake mustache.0.96
00:55:28.420He's one of these guys who's really disfigured himself with plastic surgery and looks really grotesque.0.95
00:55:35.680If Florida were your uncle, if the state of Florida were your uncle, that's what you're picturing when you picture Larry Ellison.
00:55:41.860And his son, David, has decided to take his father's money and use it to consolidate a media empire.
00:55:49.820So in 2025, the Ellisons were negotiating with their media polling company, Skydance, to buy Paramount, which is a massive media conglomerate that, among other things, houses CBS and CBS News.
00:56:07.400You might remember, listeners, that Donald Trump had sued CBS over a like editing of an interview they did with Kamala Harris during the 2024 election, a really frivolous lawsuit. Right.
00:56:21.020But as this merger is pending and as Trump-appointed regulators have the power to either stop it or put it through, CBS settles that lawsuit and pays Donald Trump what Stephen Colbert classifies as, quote-unquote, a big fat bribe in order to allow the merger to happen and get the Redstone family to be able to sell Paramount to the Ellicons.0.69
00:56:44.300As part of that deal, as something that is explicitly meant to sweeten the deal and give Donald Trump a prize, the Ellisons posit that they are going to bring in Barry Weiss and make her the editor-in-chief of CBS News.0.51
00:56:59.840And she will be tasked to basically everyone's acknowledgement with shifting the editorial direction of CBS further to the right and making it more favorable to Donald Trump.
00:57:51.260She is taking a private plane everywhere, which is costing the network a ton of money.1.00
00:57:55.660And she ends her first editorial meeting by saying, let's do the fucking news, which is like a Brett Kavanaugh, like doing a keg stand kind of a posture.0.98
00:58:03.860You know, it's just really boorish and silly and not equal to the dignity of the work that these people are trying to do.0.98
00:58:09.780So one thing that's happening right now is CBS is still hemorrhaging talent.
00:58:16.180They are still trying to leave because they can't do the work that would allow them to continue to respect themselves and be of service to the public under her leadership.
00:58:29.260And one of the things that really seems to spur a ton of people to leave is a decision Barry makes to pull a segment from CBS at the last minute.
01:02:42.400Well, except that I'm not even sure she would see the contradiction because I think she's always been fine with ideological echo chambers and ideological conformity, so long as it also conforms to her sense of how things ought to be and who matters and who doesn't.
01:02:57.440I mean, what's really telling there is her choice for CBS Evening News anchor, right, Tony Dokupil, who I think was picked on the merits of one single exchange in an interview, right?0.76
01:03:09.160This was about a September 2024 interview about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with Ta-Nehisi Coates, where Dokupil did things that Barry Weiss loves and that it turns out Summer Redstone and the Ellisons also loved, which is to say he challenged the black guy.
01:03:27.440He basically accused someone reporting and describing the Israeli attack on Gaza and
01:03:34.740on the West Bank as essentially being akin to hate speech.
01:06:25.140James Fishback is a 31-year-old Florida financier
01:06:29.240who is running currently, as we record,
01:06:32.360in the Florida Republican gubernatorial primary.
01:06:35.300James Fishback is a griper and he is a pretty avowed anti-Semite.
01:06:41.660So one of the things he does is talk about, like he tweeted about like goyslop.0.97
01:06:46.460He's like, oh, school lunches are goyslop, alluding to a conspiracy theory that Jewish people like control the food supply and give non-Jewish people like unhealthy food to keep them like fat and lazy.
01:06:58.300he is a stark anti-israel uh critic in a way where you know like anti-semitism and anti-zionism are
01:07:05.740not the same thing but his are you know and james fishback is a a guy whose criticism of israel is
01:07:12.440not based in like humanitarian concerns for the rights of palestinians but in like anti-semitic
01:07:17.740concerns about like the nefarious power of jews and this is also a guy who got his start launching
01:07:25.700his like public persona on the right.0.90
01:10:13.640It is from at J underscore Fishback, a blue check, so you know this guy sucks.0.91
01:10:20.940Great to catch up with the incredible at Barry Weiss tonight in D.C.0.96
01:10:25.160So this is a picture of James Fishback, who, again, is an anti-Semite who believes that, like, Jewish people are secretly controlling the world.
01:10:33.360having a warm conversation with Barry, who is looking at him like he is a little puppy. I mean,
01:10:40.320find somebody who looks at you the way Barry Weiss is looking at this Nazi in this picture.0.75
01:10:46.200So, you know, that's all, folks. I think Barry is here to stay for a little while. I think we've got0.71
01:10:52.780a little more time seeing how far she manages to fall upwards and what her career will look like.
01:11:00.680But I think that it is fair to say of Barry Weiss that she will never, ever surprise you.
01:11:06.280I mean, there's one possibility, right?
01:11:08.140As you were describing it, she runs institutions while also positioning herself as this kind of inveterate outsider of these institutions.
01:11:15.080She also seems to be destroying these institutions, right?
01:11:17.380I mean, the free press is still doing well, but like University of Austin isn't doing so hot.
01:11:21.760I don't think CBS is going to really thrive under her leadership.
01:11:24.360So a person runs the institution into the ground while also positioning themselves as an outsider and, like, never takes any responsibility for what happens to that institution.
01:11:33.700Might Barry be shattering the last glass ceiling and just become Donald J. Trump?0.90
01:11:47.760Thank you for coming along on this insane journey with me.0.99
01:11:50.420I do really appreciate In Bed with the Right and all of our listeners who make this possible for giving me the opportunity to just be like a really dedicated and detail-oriented hater.