What Bari Weiss Doesn’t Get About CBS News
The Free Press, the site she soon built in her own image, catered to people who agreed with her and who believed, preposterously, that the Times was too hard on Israel and too soft on trans children. It turns out that many of the people who hold these beliefs are older and quite wealthy. For a specific type of very rich person, Weiss is a prophet—and in Larry Ellison, she landed a true believer.
When critiquing—or even just making fun of—Weiss and The Free Press, it’s hard not to sometimes feel like you’re playing their game: They want to present themselves as blazing truth tellers, heterodox thinkers, and, above all, the enemies of, say, liberal opinion columnists at The New Republic. But make no mistake, there is nothing uniquely dangerous or radical—or even particularly interesting—about anything Weiss is doing. You don’t have to travel far to find someone expressing vaccine skepticism, advocating “colorblind” politics, defending the state of Israel, or expressing concern that kids these days are just a little too “woke.” The Free Press exists for people who believe these things but also want them presented in ways that are familiar to longtime readers of the Times (because they are old and don’t know how to get YouTube on their TV because their grandchildren don’t talk to them).
Weiss’s real strength at The Free Press was flattering people with these hoary views by suggesting that they were actually members of a hunted and intellectually oppressed minority of reasonable, level-headed people with forbidden ideas. The world had gone mad, it had lost its common sense, but the readers of The Free Press got the red pill just in time. Older people have always been afraid of younger people, who they see as dangerous radicals and Jacobins, but Weiss valorized the readers of The Free Press: They understood that, this time, college students really were Jacobins, bent on instituting pogroms and making gender-reassignment surgery mandatory. Those pesky kids would have gotten away with it, if The Free Press hadn’t blogged it.
