Bari Weiss is The Enemy Within
The Lucrative Laundering of “Centrist” Extremism
In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. Just like Anne Frank.
I’m not locked in an attic, but I do see Nazis marching openly on Substack’s biggest political publication. Most people are fundamentally good—vexed and complicated in our singular concerts of harmful and beneficial behavior. But for redemption to be real, for people to be good, it must still mean something for people to be bad. At a certain point, we must stand up and assert: some people are beyond redemption and should have no place in public life.
is one such person—more than just a deceptive journalist; she is a symptom of a system that rewards grifting, misinformation, and reactionary politics under the guise of centrism and independent thought. She is a masked agent of fascist decline.It’s time for an honest accounting of Weiss’s impact on our culture and politics, yet her assault on truth and decency has been so dynamic it’s difficult to know where to start. So let’s start at the beginning: a failed attempt to get three professors fired—in the name of free speech—when she was a pro-Israel undergraduate at Columbia University. Columbia was never going to fire faculty members for reasonable self-expression, so Weiss made waves and launched her brand by playing the aggrieved victim in response to the university’s principled inaction.
This 2004 episode presaged several patterns that would define her career. First, everything she does is a base attempt to attract eyeballs and investors. Under the guise of morality and—later—journalistic integrity, her only enduring motives appear to be attention for its own sake and the nihilistic pursuit of profit.
When Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threatened to cancel up to $5 Billion in federal commitments to Columbia, that line of idiocy didn’t emerge organically from the brilliance of his resident brain worm. It came directly from the fever swamps of Bari Weiss’s ‘The Free Press.’
A second pattern launched at Columbia employs a traditional Zionist tactic, inverting power dynamics to claim victimhood while moving to victimize an actually oppressed minority. Again and again, she demonizes Palestinians and their advocates, always framing herself and her allies as the true victims. Over time, Weiss expands this Orwellian technique to target trans people, rape victims, and anti-authoritarian Jews. She decries the bogeyman of “cancel culture” even as her original claim to fame—and enduring impulse—is to try and cancel Palestinians who speak truth to power.
More broadly, the college campus emerges as the central focus of Weiss’s fraudulent thought leadership. It is her skeleton key, her mental—and ultimately physical—home base. Weiss’s origin story of campus advocacy foreshadows how deeply hypocritical her career would become. One might expect the former activist to laud those who followed in her footsteps. Instead, Weiss has nothing but disdain for the next generation of student activists. She tried and failed to get fired from The New York Times in 2020, then self-canceled, leaving the paper after colleagues critiqued her endorsement of violently suppressing protestors and her incessant diatribes against campus “wokeism.”
When Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threatened to cancel up to $5 Billion in federal commitments to Columbia because of alleged “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students,” that line of idiocy didn’t emerge organically from the brilliance of his resident brain worm. It came directly from the fever swamps of Bari Weiss’s .
On March 3, Kennedy Jr. tweeted: “censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture have transformed our great universities into greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence.” The following day, President Trump upped the ante: “All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on [sic] the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!”
Thank you Bari Weiss. Before, during, and after her tantrum as the Times’ Opinion Editor, Weiss’s crusade against the campus left has been a thinly veiled attack on liberal education and liberalism itself. Consider her post-October 7 screeds about pro-Palestinian students challenging their institutions’ support for genocide and ethnic cleansing. Smearing these students as antisemitic and anti-American, passionately arguing for the removal of their civil liberties, betrays an eagerness to discard our most fundamental freedoms: association, assembly, and speech. It’s almost as if nothing actually matters to Bari Weiss.
When you have no moral compass, it’s easy to be “centrist,” “moderate,” or—my favorite—a “heterodox” thought leader. This type of liberal serves as a vector of vitriol, laundering bad ideas into respectable mainstream discourse. There’s nothing new or novel in Weiss’s worldview. Her role in the marketplace of ideas is simply to amplify bigoted views for an audience unlikely to take them seriously from the original, openly illiberal source material.
Even this role is not unique. There have always been self-identified iconoclasts who paint false equivalencies between those with power and those without, casting victims of fascism as a threat equal to or greater than their oppressors. Bill Maher is a legend in this space. Younger media figures like
, Pamela Paul, and Scott Galloway have joined the chorus. Within the Democratic Party, Senator John Fetterman and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries jump at every chance to cozy up to the right by punching left.There is no shortage of alleged liberals who contort themselves to demonize marginalized people while savaging the Constitution in the process. Much of the mainstream media has done this over time.
recently illustrated how the Times rigorously dehumanized trans people in one season, then asserted the damage is no big deal in the next.This is not a new phenomenon. So why single out Bari Weiss? Because Bari Weiss is special. She is Substack’s poster child, prominently featured as the publisher of a leading political page on this crucial independent platform. Others play a similar role, but few have been as influential. She even launched an anti-woke, billionaire-funded fake “university” in 2021.
Weiss stands out further for how she weaponizes her multitude of marginalized identities: she is a woman who advances rape culture, a lesbian who denigrates trans people, a Jew who justifies antisemitism.
Weiss stands out further for how she weaponizes her multitude of marginalized identities: she is a woman who advances rape culture, a lesbian who denigrates trans people, a Jew who justifies antisemitism. She’s built a career attacking intersectional activism—almost as if to mock the very premise of liberation through solidarity. The call is most effective coming from inside the house.
“She takes ‘intersectionality’ to be a framework that reverses conventional hierarchies, endowing the most oppressed groups with special access to truth, authority, and judgment, and silencing those identified with dominant forms of power. And yet she does not deeply engage the positions of thinkers like Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberlé Crenshaw who launched the development of intersectional theory—and whose work explicitly opposes the notion of a hierarchy of oppressions,” writes Judith Butler in Jewish Currents.
“Instead, Weiss rails against identity politics as part of left extremism even as Jewish identity forms the central tenet of her own political approach, one that gives priority to a communitarian sense of ‘we Jews’ over modes of alliance that cross divisions of religion, race, and nation in a deliberate opposition to all forms of detention and persecution, including antisemitism.”
Every accusation is a confession: Pro-Israel advocates like Weiss use progressive language and coalitional concepts to manipulate liberals into discarding tactical solidarity itself. These claims about left-wing endangerment of Jews project their own manipulative tactics against the progressive left.
Driven by apparent ethnocentrism, Weiss and her ideological bedfellows cast the progressive left as a greater threat to Jewish safety than the Christian white supremacist right. “Because of the way it can be smuggled into the mainstream and manipulate us, anti-Semitism that originates on the political left is more insidious and perhaps more existentially dangerous,” she writes in How to Fight Anti-Semitism.
While plainly ludicrous, this One Weird Trick to Demonize the Left makes more sense when understood as psychological projection: Pro-Israel advocates like Weiss use progressive language and coalitional concepts to manipulate liberals into discarding tactical solidarity itself. Zionists conflate Democratic party membership with progressivism, then condemn pluralism when it extends to Palestinians and triggers their own moral cognitive dissonance. These claims about left-wing endangerment of Jews are mere projections of their own manipulative tactics against the progressive left.
“I think even talking about the left at the same time we’re talking about white supremacists with assault rifles is just such a false equivalence,” said Ellen Surloff, former president of Dor Hadash synagogue, in Jewish Currents. “But Bari’s going one step further: she’s not just saying they’re similar, she’s saying the left is worse, and nothing could be further from the truth. A white supremacist from the right walked into Tree of Life synagogue and murdered people. This has nothing to do with the left.”
Bari Weiss is right about one thing: the bad people on the extreme right don’t hide their intentions. Yet her role is far more insidious: laundering their ideology under the veneer of credibility. Why does she do it? Sometimes the simplest explanation is best: it’s all about the Benjamins.
Smearing pro-Palestinian students as antisemitic and anti-American, passionately arguing for the removal of their civil liberties, betrays an eagerness to discard our most fundamental freedoms: association, assembly, and speech. It’s almost as if nothing actually matters to Bari Weiss.
Weiss’s benefactors include anti-trans billionaire Joe Edelman, MAGA mega-donor Harlan Crowe, reactionary tech authoritarians Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, military-tech moguls Peter Thiel and John Lonsdale, and Chase Koch, son of Charles Koch. And there’s more where that came from.
Do fascist elites fund Bari Weiss because she authentically stumps for their views, or does Weiss propagate anti-American ideology because her friends and funders want her to help them repeal the 20th century? While ideological trendlines certainly exist within her body of work, the overarching hypocrisies and lies imply more than anything else a base alignment with the billionaire class and the elite power structure.
As a result, we are watching in real time the grievous effects of a public square dominated by misinformation motivated only by money and proximity to power. Weiss’s years-long campaign to vilify trans people is more than moral depravity; she gifted Trump with a potent campaign issue to bludgeon Kamala Harris in 2024. Trump is now dismantling the government and sabotaging American global leadership because nothing means anything, the bad guys are the good guys, all truth has evaporated into thin air—courtesy of well-fed propaganda outlets like The Free Press.
Incredulity overwhelmingly stacked against those without power is not the product of a brave truth-teller, it’s the handiwork of a bootlicking demagogue.
There is, of course, something to be said for nonpartisan critical thought and openminded interrogation of conventional wisdom. Yet despite its modicum of quality content, The Free Press amplifies rightwing propaganda far more than it exposes it. Incredulity overwhelmingly stacked against those without power is not the product of a brave truth-teller, it’s the handiwork of a bootlicking demagogue.
The time has come to draw a line in the sand. We cannot continue inviting bad actors like Bari Weiss to shape our discourse while pretending they operate in good faith. Truth only survives when we insist on it, amplify it, and refuse to reward those who deny it. If we care about justice, if we care about a future where ideas matter, then it’s time to stop supporting these scumbags and start amplifying those who stand for something real.
Get fooled by Bari Weiss once, shame on her. Get fooled again, shame on me. If I keep going back to The Free Press in good faith, I’m just seeking a safe space to nurture anti-American values. We know who Bari Weiss is, so the only question remains: who will we be?
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Wrote this as a bubbled over vent in the conversation group… I’m new to Substack. Anyway posting it here too, apologies to anyone reading it twice but I’ve been keeping this inside a long time.
I went to college with her and lived in a shared dorm apartment with her sophomore year. I haven’t read any of her recent writing, because I didn’t like her then and from the random quotes I see here and there she’s gone from her college rage baiting to just utter toxicity. She was in a relationship with Kate McKinnon (of SNL fame) when I knew her, but I guess they broke up and she must have gone down an increasingly right wing path. Too bad the people who rub shoulders with her now would have turned their backs on the person she was when I first met her.
I always felt uncomfortable after a late night conversation we had where she explained to me in detail why it was so important to make sure traditional Jewish communities in Africa never were exposed to outside influences because it meant they maintained a more “pure” form of Judaism. She was utterly shocked when I said that I didn’t think it would be terrible, if they were interested, to offer young people from any culture where (for example) a cd player is banned an object from the outside, and that young people should be free to make their own decisions about whether they want to continue living in a traditional way or make other choices. That many people would gladly choose a traditional culture over a modern one, if the values it holds are strong. I grew up in a household where cultural studies and anthropology were big topics, and a major theme of my own studies has been the resilience of traditional cultures in the face of modernism and cultural supremacy/ erasure.
I just remember how what felt like an honest late night college conversation one second suddenly felt like a bizarre litmus test—the inauthenticity of her deeply shocked reaction to my open responses to her questions. It felt manipulative and weird.
I also remember the way she ran into my room to tell me the guy I was dating had a very famous and important mother, as if she was doing me a huge favour instead of just making me incredibly uncomfortable by implying that I should be happy and I could be benefiting from our association or something like that… I knew from the beginning that this was a person who cared very deeply about becoming famous and I can see how she saw a pathway to that through hate speech and racism, and why she has been rampantly and falsely accusing people of anti-Semitism when she is fully aware of how wrong she is.
She was deeply unlikeable, even in a relationship with a cool, popular actor in our college and knowing lots of interesting people, and it’s clear that she eventually realised that doubling down on her unlikeablility would be her ticket to fame. That’s what Trump is right? And Vance and all these guys? That’s their ticket—the whole “we want you to hate us, we want you to be repulsed! The people who feel hated and repulsive will eat us up!” She is culpable, for the rest of her life, of having helped write the playbook they’re following.
My last college memory of her was hearing about her instigating witch hunts against professors who didn’t agree with her increasingly right wing politics. She started her own paper (since the college ones weren’t very interested in her writing) literally just to get a more right wing vehicle for her hate speech. And that’s what she ended up using it for. Destroying careers and now, apparently, much worse.
This is a very shallow and dangerous person who has limited depth and a desire for fame that runs so deep that she doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process.
I’ve still only read a few quotes from her writing here and there and have zero interest in reading more. I’ve never written about my encounters with her in college before because we had mutual friends who spoke up on her behalf and tried to convince me she wasn’t fully responsible for her actions, that she had been brainwashed or something, but that argument only goes so far.
I subscribed to TFP almost 1 year ago today, because I was attracted to the promise of balanced coverage and perspective (and note of the Fox News variety). Some of their content was really interesting, and kept me coming back. But as I continued paying attention, I began to see the bias. Sure, they throw some red meat content out for the libs (tofu perhaps?) But I began to see a distinct and specific alt right bias, whose presence was perhaps softened but Weiss’ own identity as gay, female and Jewish, but ultimately apologetic to the creep of the worst elements of the right coming into the mainstream.
Spending time in the comments section on TFP articles really cemented the view that this was a right wing apologist publication, draped in a thin veneer of centrist perspective. While I’ve encountered some intelligent perspectives in the comments, I mostly encountered people ranging from typical Fox News viewers, to essentially proto-Nazi provocateurs.
I’ve since cancelled my subscription, and blocked their stuff from my feed. In the time since, I’ve realized just how much great content is out here on Substack that is truly independent, with a diversity of perspective. I no longer believe in paying Weiss for the privilege of reading her pre-packaged version of fair and balanced, supported by the billionaires with whom she hobnobs. She is, and continues to be a part of the actual elites in this country… building an alt-media empire in service of the destruction of liberal democracy.