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Bari Weiss is taking over as editor-in-chief CBS News after selling The Free Press to David Ellison’s Paramount for a reported $150 million in cash and stock.
This is just one piece in the Ellisons’ new media empire which has been assembled rapidly with the backing of his father Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. They’ve also taken over a big piece of TikTok and are reported to be after Warner Bros. Discovery which includes CNN.
Bari Weiss’ role at CBS will be somewhat analogous to that of Biden administration and IDF veteran Erica Mindel’s at TikTok:
Mindel previously worked with the U.S. State Department under Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden Administration’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, according to Sada Social, a body that monitors and documents digital violations against Palestinian content.
Mindel previously served as an instructor in the Israeli army’s Spokesperson’s Unit…
It stated that in her new role, Mindel “will be tasked with formulating TikTok’s hate speech policies, shaping relevant legislative and regulatory frameworks, and monitoring trends—particularly those related to antisemitic content.”
The Ellison Media Empire is Just Part of Israel’s 8th Front
The Ellison’s neo-media empire is, in turn, part of an expanded hasbara campaign by Israel and its allies that seems a bit desperate in the wake of plummeting American support among Democrats, the young of both parties, and even American Jews.
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) October 6, 2025
This incredible X.com thread by GenXGirl lays out “a timeline of a sophisticated, well-funded and deliberately opaque influence operation conducted by Israel and its allies within the US to target conservatives. Polling data shows Israel has permanently lost the American left and they are losing the American right, particularly young conservatives. Israel’s campaign seeks to recast criticism of a foreign nation’s policy as a form of bigotry, weaponize faith, and co-opt American institutions, all while systematically evading the laws designed to protect the American public from such foreign propaganda.”
Weiss’ project at CBS News must be seen as part of this broader effort which Caitlin Johnstone has characterized as an attempt to “Propagandize The World Into Liking Israel Again:”
It’s cute how the Zionists think they’ll be able to manipulate and propagandize the world into liking Israel again.
Yeah, saturate all online platforms with weird-faced influencers telling us Israel is awesome. That’ll make us forget those years of genocidal atrocities.
Sure, buy up the social media platforms that young people are using so you can censor criticism of Israel. That’ll convince them that Zionism is cool.
Go on, take control of CBS and make Bari Weiss the boss. That’ll make us forget all those videos of mutilated Palestinian children.
…
Propaganda is an effective tool of mass-scale psychological manipulation, but it isn’t magic. It isn’t going to miraculously erase what people know in their bones to be true.
…
It won’t work, though. Even if propaganda could convince us that we haven’t seen what we’ve seen and don’t know what we know, propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. These past two years have made even relatively apolitical members of the public acutely aware that there is an aggressive campaign to manipulate their perception of the state of Israel, and that anyone pushing them to support that state is untrustworthy. Nobody’s going to buy into the propaganda if they don’t trust the source.
…
The world’s eyes are open to what Israel is, and they are never going to close again. You can’t take off the Mickey Mouse mask, show the kids the snarling Freddy Krueger face underneath it, and then put the mask on and hope they start calling you Mickey again. Nobody’s going to forget what you showed them.
The Building of Bari Weiss’ Anti-Establisment Billionaire-Friendly Brand
I’ve quoted this paragraph from Yasha Levine in a previous piece, but I must repost it because it introduces her so well. I’ve also added many links to back up his references:
Bari is a real operator and a genius suck up to power. She came from an affluent suburb, her parents own the upscale Weisshouse furniture store. Bari first came to public attention while a student in Columbia, where she led a campaign to cancel teachers critical of Israel and tried to get Joseph Massad, a Palestinian professor, fired. She then went on to quickly rise through the ranks of zionist activist journalism — first starting out at Jewish outlets like Tablet, then writing op-eds and reviewing books for the Wall Street Journal, where she worked directly under Bret Stephens, the arch-neoconservative now known simply as “bedbug,” and then getting beamed up to the New York Times op-ed department. Her Times job was what you’d call a Trump first term DEI hire. She was picked up to generate controversy and serve up conservative opinion to the libs. While at the Times, she constantly got glowing profiles from her liberal colleagues — and even got dressed for a photoshoot by Vanity Fair. People who know Bari say that she has real charisma — and she’s used that gift to ingratiate herself to power. And she seems to have a special way with billionaires. “She doesn’t just speak to the 1 percent. She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1 percent. And they’ll listen,” Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, explained the Bari Method to the New York Times’ Matt Flegenheimer.
Weiss’ next brilliant career move was quitting the NY Times in July 2020. Her resignation letter was carefully calculated to set up her next moves:
I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers.
I was honored to be part of that effort, led by James Bennet. I am proud of my work as a writer and as an editor. Among those I helped bring to our pages: the Venezuelan dissident Wuilly Arteaga; the Iranian chess champion Dorsa Derakhshani; and the Hong Kong Christian democrat Derek Lam. Also: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Masih Alinejad, Zaina Arafat, Elna Baker, Rachael Denhollander, Matti Friedman, Nick Gillespie, Heather Heying, Randall Kennedy, Julius Krein, Monica Lewinsky, Glenn Loury, Jesse Singal, Ali Soufan, Chloe Valdary, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Wesley Yang, and many others.
But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. …
Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space.
My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.
Bari Weiss: Serial Entrepreneur
Bari Weiss next made a series of moves astonishing in their ambition. First she founded the “anti-woke” organization F.A.I.R.
This led The New Yorker’s Emma Green to handwring “Is It Possible to Be Both Moderate and Anti-Woke?”
The organization would be called FAIR: The Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. The name was an initial act of defiance, implicitly painting the group’s opponents, self-described “anti-racists,” as the real racists. The founders’ dream was for the group to replace the A.C.L.U. as America’s new defender of civil liberties—a mission they believed the A.C.L.U. had abandoned. The vision involved a three-pronged approach: legal advocacy, via letters and lawsuits; grassroots advocacy, via a network of volunteers; and education about the issues, spread through projects such as explainer videos and training programs.
Weiss and the other founders recruited an informal board of advisers—a mix of podcasters, journalists, academics, and lawyers. Among them were the media personality Megyn Kelly, the writer Andrew Sullivan, and the anti-critical-race-theory activist Christopher Rufo. In some circles, these people are celebrities: Angel Eduardo, who later joined the staff as the director of messaging and editorial, described one adviser, Daryl Davis, a Black musician known for persuading white nationalists to leave the Ku Klux Klan, as “my Obi-Wan.”
Jezebel reported on on F.A.I.R. donor, Harlan Crow who ponied up $500,000:
Crow, who collects Nazi artifacts and has a garden filled with statues of dictators, made his half a million dollar donation in 2021, while several other donors gave $1 million each. FAIR developed its own corporate diversity-training program and a free ethnic-studies curriculum for schools, but it sounds like the organization faced a mutiny from staff and volunteers who wanted it to be more explicit than it was about concepts like critical race theory and to speak forcefully against “gender ideology”—aka acceptance of transgender and nonbinary people.
Suzy Edelman, one of the million-dollar-donors, wrote in a 2022 email to FAIR staff: “Sex-based rights matter. Single sex spaces for women and girls must be protected. Transgenderism is a fiction designed to destroy.” Weiss was apparently concerned that Edelman was airing her grievances to other donors. “I am quite nervous that she has gotten to the Crows, which would be really damaging to me personally,” Weiss wrote to a FAIR cofounder in August 2022, referring to Harlan Crow. Weiss told the New Yorker reporter: “I leaned on many of my personal relationships and friendships to help launch this nonprofit. I was sick over the idea that their time, trust, and money wasn’t being properly protected.” Hmm!
Bari Weiss tries to paint herself as an independent, centrist journalist, but it is not centrist to start an anti-woke nonprofit, let alone one funded by a GOP megadonor—a man whose relationship is so valuable to you that you’re concerned it could be damaged via some emails.
Bari Weiss also found time to found the University of Austin which Inside Higher Ed covered in 2024:
The university, sometimes referred to as UATX, markets itself as an institution born out of alarm over the “rising tide of illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America’s universities” and says it is committed to “the pursuit of truth.”
…
The university is not accredited but received approval from the state of Texas to grant degrees, which allowed it to begin accepting applications last November. Students can earn a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies with a concentration in one of the fields offered by the university’s “centers of academic inquiry,” which include STEM, arts and letters, and economics, politics and history. The university currently employs about 20 faculty members, with no tenure system. Tuition is $32,000 per year.On convocation day, students met with Governor Greg Abbott at the Texas state capitol.
Brian Hansbury listed some of the funders Bari Weiss convinced to chip in:
University of Austin received $200 million in seed money from the following billionaires:
- Joe Lonsdale, Palantir co-founder and Trump backer
- Peter Thiel, Palantir co-founder and J.D. Vance backer
- Harlan Crow, Supreme Court corrupter who also provides the school with classroom space in his buildings.
- Len Blavatnik
- John Arnold, criticizes labor unions and seems to have been radicalized to the Weiss cause by the “censors” at the New York Times
- Jeffrey Yass, who gave $35 million to start UATX and deeply funds MAGA candidates
Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi and The Twitter Files
Before we get to the crown jewel in the Bari Weiss empire, I want to briefly cover her role in “The Twitter Files.”
One screengrab of a headline is worth a thousand words:
https://t.co/8pMqSCKse1 pic.twitter.com/kcXN7H28ev
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) October 6, 2025
The Insider piece is worth quoting from as well:
- Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and others were given access to the so-called “Twitter Files” by Elon Musk.
- Weiss and Taibbi are controversial figures who struck out alone after working for major media outlets.
- They share Musk’s anti-establishment outlook, and have been granted the inside track on a major story.
Bari Weiss focused her Twitter Files thread on “shadowbanning” — a practice where some content is quietly suppressed. She discussed screenshots of how Twitter employees making “blacklists” and limiting certain trending topics and accounts.
Some saw a smoking gun, proof of longstanding claims by conservatives of censorship. Others argued that what Weiss described was simply what all content moderation looks like.
And unlike her colleague in that effort, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss has managed to stay on good terms with the mercurial Elon Musk.
UPDATE: I should say that unlike many critics, I believe the work that Taibbi, Weiss, and their colleagues did on the Twitter Files was of immense value.
The exposure of the pressure to censor user voices from Senator Mark Warner and then Congressional Rep. Adam Schiff in particular were valuable and exposed a post-RussiaGate ethos of information suppression on the part of “the Resistance” that arguably peaked with the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story on the eve of the 2020 election.
But Taibbi has gone beyond reporting when it comes to Bari Weiss. Lately, Taibbi has been singing her praises (and their friendship is likely why he is not opposing the Zionist genocide in Gaza):
I’ve had differences with Bari Weiss. I’ve disagreed with her politics more than once and mistook her arrival on the Twitter Files project as a sign that I would be squeezed out. I also wasn’t sure about the decision to pick the start of work on the Twitter Files as the moment to launch The Free Press. As a reporter with zero business sense I couldn’t imagine taking on something else at that harried moment. But this is who Bari is. She combines an innate sense of audience with rare entreprenurial energy. Additionally she understood, in a way her spineless now-complaining former colleagues from the mainstream press world never did, that in order to survive and retain her audience, she would need to take risks and bet on herself.
For instance, when 1,000 of her New York Times peers signed a Khmer Rougian denunciation of former Editorial Page Editor James Bennet in 2020, securing his resignation for running an editorial by Senator Tom Cotton calling for National Guard against anti-police protesters, Weiss balked. She went public, explaining the business was plagued by a schism between believers in “safetyism” and civil libertarianism, then soon after resigned from a plum job in the Times opinion section.
Two years after that she launched TheFP. While lunatic former Times workers were looking around the office to see whose career they could destroy next (star health writer Donald McNeil was a subsequent project), Bari pushed Elon Musk in ways I could not and got him to physically show us what a Twitter “P2” viewer looked like — this was a display screen that showed Trust and Safety executives the history of Twitter user accounts in visual shorthand. That single moment led to pictures of Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya’s “trends blacklist” notation, an image which exploded myths about shadow-banning and had far-reaching implications, leading to a Supreme Court case and an incredible future change in NIH leadership.
Bari Weiss and Her $150 Million Media Property
The crown jewel of Bari Weiss new empire was The Free Press. The New York Times described it thus in 2024:
Bari Weiss has long been blessed with two superpowers, those close to her say: She knows how to make useful enemies, and she knows how to make useful friends.
As the founder, public face and heat-seeking curator of The Free Press, a new media company with ambitions to overtake the old media, Ms. Weiss, 40, has identified a mélange of reliable foils: the illiberal left; diversity, equity and inclusion programs; opponents of Israel; The New York Times, where Ms. Weiss worked until 2020.
…
She has shared Shabbat dinner with David Mamet, the culture-warring playwright who moonlights as a Free Press cartoonist, and dazzled executives at the Sun Valley Conference, walking sheepishly past cordoned-off journalists she met in a previous life.
…
She has asked “boobs or butts?” of Kim Kardashian in a buddy-buddy interview and compelled Jerry Seinfeld to schlep to watch someone else talk into a microphone — and, for his choice, face chants of “genocide supporter!” as he left Ms. Weiss’s speech about “The State of World Jewry” in Manhattan.She has headlined a public discussion of antisemitism in a cozy environment (“Sheryl Sandberg, welcome to my living room,” one June podcast began) and a private one last year for Hollywood dignitaries like Disney’s Robert Iger at the Bel Air home of Dan Loeb, the hedge fund titan.
And she held court last summer at the kingly Hamptons estate of Bobby Kotick, the former chief executive of Activision Blizzard, where a smattering of billionaires and moguls listened to Ms. Weiss talk up Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican presidential candidate, and question President Biden’s mental capacity, according to people familiar with her visit.
The Free Press has certainly enjoyed success, acquiring over 1 million subscribers by December, 2024.
Matt Johnson took a stab at explaining the appeal of The Free Press:
One reason for The Free Press’ popularity is that it offers intellectual reassurance to legions of anti-anti-Trump readers—sophisticated conservatives who may be uneasy about Trumpism, yet want to believe that wokeness and other left-wing excesses are the primary threats to Western civilization. Trump’s trade war and the ensuing market meltdown might give them some pause, but they’re desperate for intellectual ammunition to convince themselves and others that the administration’s crusade against “wokeness”—and associated initiatives like DEI—was necessary even if it meant trampling our democratic institutions.
Ideologically sympathetic outlets like The Free Press convince a wider swath of Americans that the Trump administration’s culture-war agenda is justified. Precisely because it pretends to be governed by journalistic values like objectivity and fairness, The Free Press helps sustain the society-wide hysteria over wokeness while downplaying the country’s descent into authoritarianism.
…
If there was a Free Press pitchbot, it could hardly come up with a better headline than the one affixed to columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon’s article last week: “I Used to Hate Trump. Now I’m a MAGA Lefty.” The headline gives the impression to an unfamiliar reader that Ungar-Sargon’s conversion is something new, when she has been a dependable Trump cheerleader for years. Most recently, she’s been claiming that Trump’s tariffs will reverse not just America’s manufacturing but also, preposterously, its masculinity crisis. In her MAGA conversion piece, she describes Trump as “socially moderate, anti-interventionist, and committed to America’s blue-collar workers.”
In her email announcing the Paramount acquisition today, Bari Weiss wrote of her plans for CBS News:
What does this mean for CBS News? It means a redoubled commitment to great journalism. It means building on a storied legacy—and bringing that historic newsroom into 2025 and beyond. Most of all, it means working tirelessly to make sure CBS News is the most trusted news organization in the world.
We would not be doing this if we did not believe in David Ellison, and the entire leadership team who took over Paramount this summer. They are doubling down because they believe in news. Because they have courage. Because they love this country. And because they understand, as we do, that America cannot thrive without common facts, common truths, and a common reality.
The Wall Street Journal celebrated The Free Press effectiveness at a vehicle for Israel’s hasbara in November, 2023:
the Israel-Hamas war has been the breakout moment for Free Press, which is appealing to readers hungry for an alternative to what they view as an unfair characterization of Israel in mainstream media. Among its recent stories are “Why My Generation Hates Jews,” a piece about polling that showed many young people siding with Hamas in the conflict; a story about a wealthy couple who are providing financial backing for pro-Palestinian rallies; and a piece about people tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children.
…
Weiss said Free Press’s coverage is resonating with people who feel the mainstream media is creating “moral confusion,” for example by using terms like insurgents to describe Hamas, instead of labeling it a terrorist group.In one article, Weiss took the New York Times to task for a headline that said Israel had bombed a Gaza hospital, information it attributed to Palestinian authorities. The Times later updated its reporting after Israel denied responsibility, as did The Wall Street Journal, and both outlets eventually said evidence pointed to a Palestinian group being responsible. The Times published an Editor’s Note saying that its initial coverage relied too heavily on claims by Hamas.
…
Early on Oct. 7, after Weiss and her wife, Nellie Bowles, had returned home from a Shabbat dinner, Weiss’s phone blew up with messages about Hamas’s attack on Israel. Weiss immediately began commissioning stories, and the next day a number of employees converged around her kitchen table in Los Angeles to drum up ideas.In her first column after the attack, Weiss wrote: “You are about to withstand a barrage of lies about the war that broke out today in Israel.” She has penned columns about “Jew hate” on college campuses and examined the views of Gazans who don’t support Hamas. Weiss interviewed an Israeli mother whose two young sons had been taken by Hamas as hostages.
Surely I don’t need to point out that Israel did indeed bomb that hospital and that they have continued to bomb it, and virtually every other hospital in Gaza.
Bari Weiss and the Murdered Martyr
I want to wrap this up by focusing on one incident in the career of Bari Weiss: her role in the death of Palestinian poet Dr. Refaat Alareer.
Current Affairs summarized the situation:
Alareer was one of the most important literary voices of Palestine—a poet, essayist, and professor of English literature whose work has changed the lives of countless people, both in Gaza and far beyond. His life was brutally cut short by an Israeli airstrike, which Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor describes as “surgical” and “apparently deliberate,” targeting his sister’s apartment “out of the entire building where it’s located.” It was the second time Alareer had been the target of Israeli bombs, after he and his family survived a strike on their own home in late October 2023, and it came after weeks of death threats from Israeli soldiers and their supporters over his online activism—threats spurred on by Free Press editor Bari Weiss, who painted a target on Alareer’s back on social media.
But I’ll let Dr. Alareer’s tweet exchange with Bari Weiss speak for itself:
If I get killed by Israeli bombs or my family is harmed, I blame Bari Weiss @bariweiss and her likes.
Many maniacal Israeli soldiers already bombing Gaza take these lies and smears seriously and they act upon them. https://t.co/ILUJuB6oVQ pic.twitter.com/vp2iQwi1vW
— Refaat in Gaza 🇵🇸 (@itranslate123) October 31, 2023
The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca was not able to name the fascists who murdered him, but Refaat Alareer was.
Lorca’s death is shrouded in mystery, something he predicted in his poem “The Fable And Round of the Three Friends” (translated from the Spanish via Lithub:
Then I realized I had been murdered.
They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches
…. but they did not find me.
They never found me?
No. They never found me.
I’ll end with a quote from Alareer’s 2012 poem, “I am you”:
I am just you.
I am your past haunting
Your present and your future.
I strive like you did.
I fight like you did.
I resist like you resisted
And for a moment,
I’d take your tenacity
As a model,
Were you not holding
The barrel of the gun
Between my bleeding
Eyes.
I’m glad you included Taibbi saying that he disagreed with Weiss’ politics, however I’m not sure why any of his opinions of Weiss are relevant at all here. Pretty easy to show how awful she is, which you documented very well, without including Taibbi.
At the risk of being a broken record here in defending Taibbi, I think he has very valid reasons to dislike the corporate media (they did nothing to defend him when he was smeared, in fact quite the opposite). I believe that was his basis for highlighting Weiss’ business acumen, if not the subjects she chooses to report on. Also, I don’t remember him mentioning it before, but in a recent podcast discussing the surveillance of Tulsi Gabbard, he mentioned that he had been followed in recent years as well. This is on top of the IRS paying a visit.
Anyway, excellent article, and thank you for highlighting Alareer at the end. Very poignant.
Did you see the RacketNews link NWT included? https://www.racket.news/p/in-gaza-does-silence-equal-violence
I don’t see why you think Taibbi is worth defending…it’s a truly nauseating piece.
I am a subscriber and read every article that’s posted on his site. While that one was far from my favorite piece from him, I am an internet poster using a pseudonym and Taibbi is a journalist publishing under his own name, and has suffered quite a bit of backlash that I and most other anonymous posters have not. So I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and let him rail against the corporate media as much as he likes until I’ve walked a mile or two in his shoes, even if it makes the likes of Barry Weiss look a little better than she deserves as a result.
I also don’t agree with everything I read at NC, but I’ve been reading here for nearly two decades and still donate to the fundraisers, give more here than I do to Taibbi, and will continue to do so, despite any disagreements I might have. And I encourage everyone else to donate as much as they can to NC to keep the great journalism going.
I certainly don’t have a problem with him railing against the corporate media.
But anyway, I agree with you regarding supporting NC.
But if he is taking the same don’t talk about it stance as the corporate media on the biggest (IMO) story going then how is that a critique? For many of us bringing up the MSM collaboration with the MIC is the critique.
And it wasn’t true on the old CBS where Cronkite supported Vietnam until he didn’t. Cronkite was important. Scott Pelley is Scott Who? to go with Bari Who?
Perhaps that’s the real message here. The Ellisons think TikTok will pick up the reins.
From the linked Taibbi article:
American advocates for Palestine don’t bother arguing. Since they don’t admit the possibility of honest disagreement, they move straight to the corrupt reasons you must have for failing to already embrace their view: payoffs, blackmail, cowardice, or submission to the Great Jewish Conspiracy. That once-forbidden last idea they suggest with the giddiness of teenagers who’ve just discovered oral sex.
This once (to me) admirable man has been broken by the years of TDS/PDS abuse thrown at him.
As Alice X says, the only issue is the genocide.
Agreed Ben and Alice X. It’s the ONLY ISSUE of our time
I die another day, every minute
Devastated,
tawal
PS Calling All Good Angels, at a loss of what else to do
Taibbi is worth defending. I don’t agree with all of his politics (funny how one is obligate to write those words these days), but his journalism is top notch. This includes his corrections when he is in error. I think a lot of the hate for Taibbi comes from the vote-Blue-no-matter-who crowd. They don’t like that Taibbi stands on principles over their party.
I used to defend Taibbi the way I still would defend Greenwald, as someone with principles. I don’t think that about Taibbi anymore. And if he is keeping his mouth shut about Gaza because of Weiss or for any other reason, really, that just shows he isn’t worth defending.
Yes, he was right about Russiagate. So are others. Plenty of people can criticize the “blue no matter who crowd” without pandering to the MAGA people.
Hmmm, as a true blue-hater who enjoyed reading Taibbi for over ten years, I have to disagree. I loved his joyful, brutal, entertaining take-downs of Biden and others, knowing full well that he was someone who stood on principles, particularly the fundamental press freedoms. And then Trump came along, shredding free speech along with just about every other freedom we imagined we had, and, gee, very little comment from Mr. Taibbi, just a lot of deflections and victory laps around Russiagate, et al. as we descended full on into fascism. It was truly shocking.
It was then that I also began to really note how little he ever mentioned Israel/Palestine. His silence made perhaps more sense during the Biden years when he simply claimed it really wasn’t his beat, but under Trump there is simply no way to talk about freedom of speech without also acknowledging the noxious connections between Israel and it’s supporters and their endless campaign to suppress criticism here, and the way Trump has used ‘antisemitism’ as a hammer to destroy everything in his way. No, there’s something odd about perverse about Taibbi in this moment, and after turning people on to him for years, I now find him one of the most repellant journalists in a landscape of sorry creatures, precisely because he so lavishly cloaks himself in this light breezy air of iconoclastic independence.
I cancelled my subscription to Racket News because he no longer covers financial fraud, which was his specialty. I think he was compromised by the twitter files because he never writes about Elon Musk or DOGE, or anything about the impending societal collapse these days. He’s too busy “Owning The Libs” with his buddy Walter Kirn. It’s really disheartening to see him become so self-absorbed.
Just look at the comments section on his website. It’s mostly right wingers…
I canceled my Taibbi subscription when he said he believes in a “free market.”
This coming from the guy who called Goldman Sachs a Vampire Squid.
He did have the guts to respond to some of my comments so I guess I still sort of have hope that he will eventually come around but I’m not holding my breath.
🪦
I should have mentioned that I too am a long-time admirer of Taibbi’s work especially his work on the Twitter files. I even like what Weiss did with the Twitter files. I should have made that clear as well.
I included the stuff about Taibbi and Gaza because I think neutralizing Taibbi on this topic is one of the most important accomplishments of Bari’s work for Israel.
This comment thread shows how people are easily inclined to reject people if they disagree with a tiny proportion of their writings/activities/positions/beliefs.
Yep. I have been reading Taibbi for a very long time. He has been flat wrong in his defense of Jay Bhattacharya as a “victim” of cancel culture. Bhattacharya is/was wrong on the science of Covid and Taibbi never seemed to grasp that the Great Barrington Declaration was a typical eructation of the Merchants of Doubt (in this case the American Institute for Economic Research, which long predates the Powell Memo). But the totality of his work has been essential. Plus, he named the latter-day Goldman Sachs the Vampire Squid.
Bari Weiss on the other hand, has been little more than a doxxer since her days as the precocious undergraduate at Columbia. She comes from a long line of similar Ivy League personalities. Somewhere in the Great Beyond William Paley, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Eric Severeid, Winston Burdette, Douglas Edwards, Charles Collingwood, Richard C. Hottelet and a host of others are gobsmacked at the present state of their art and craft.
Maimonides was correct: Accept the truth no matter who utters it. That is the NC way.
Hear Hear
Weiss has one superpower and that´s complete lack of integrity and honesty which makes her no journalist but egomaniacal entertainer. If Hollywood won´t fall apart she´ll end up there after or before in some major government function.
Compared to her Taibbi is a choirboy and Kirn a preacher walking from village to village.
Weiss is that sort of person why our society is falling apart.
p.s. I am sorry if this is pure speculation but I have the feeling that Taibbi´s IRS encounter and his delusions re: Gaza are connected. If he isn´t careful his business could collapse very quickly. In that sense he applies self-censorship in a rather classical way. He has a family he has to take care of and he knows how relentless power can turn in an instant.
That doesn´t mean he is right. I have been criticizing some of the childishness re: Marxism, the Left etc. But Weiss is driving a tank rolling over protesters while Taibbi is riding a bicylce trying to work out a conversation between both sides…
Weiss should be reading “Mephisto” by Klaus Mann, the German novel about a mediocre actor who sells out to Goering and with that makes a star career in Nazi Germany.
🙊🙉🙈
Thank you, and I suspect you are largely correct regarding his take on Gaza.
I’d also add that Taibbi is a journalist who is abundantly cautious, and he has a different life experience than most of us, having spent years in the Soviet Union. I remember being rather annoyed that he didn’t take up the Russiagate story until long after many of his independent colleagues did, and he tended to have a general anti-Russian view like most of the mainstream press. I really don’t know why he refused to talk about a scandal that seemed pretty obvious to much of the crowd here at NC, but he did eventually come around.
Aha! I always assumed that Taibbi had been among the first to pull it into the light of scrutiny. However I did so because he claimed that himself. (First next to the late Cohen and Aaron Maté).
Problem is, I came to that party very very late and had much catching up to do because fwiw in Germany Russiagate never really made it as a major piece of news. Despite all the Russophobia somehow somehow legacy media sensed that the rabble wouldn´t buy….
while it was accidental for me(i had nowhere else to go, at the time), moving out here pretty much cured me of all that tribalism.
of the people who reliably vote, 2/3 are gop true believers(1/3 versailles dems), but the vast majority of these folks are a-political(more or less) small-C conservatives, often with their religion worn on their sleeve.
it was a real eye-opener, to say the least.
Where is “out here” if I may ask?
Hill Country, Texas IIRC
Ah, that is some interesting cultural terrain. We’re headed out there next weekend. The # of Trump signs in 2024 was way way down from 2016 or 2020.
When that “tiny portion of they’re writing” is genocide denial I think it should matter alot.
While he hasn’t said anything much about it, his silence after being THE free speech crusader but never uttering a peep about zionist censorship says it all, he’s either a gutless coward or zionist POS.
It has to be ultimate straw man to complain that a freelance reporter doesn’t cover the topics you want…
I believe Taibbi has addressed why he doesn’t bring up Palestine.
He said on an episode of America This Week that his focus is America 🇺🇸. Plus, everyone else is focused on Palestine so why bother?
He’s free to cover what he wants, of course, but government and private use of weaponized claims of antisemitism as a means of influencing discourse and suppressing protests on Palestine would have been a logical and principled follow-up to the Twitter files. This is very much a domestic issue.
I think there is another person who influences Taibbi’s views on Israel – his podcast partner Walter Kirn.
I actually wrote a long comment here awhile back, critiquing Kirn, and I will quote from it now to provide a data point on his views re: Israel:
From America This Week, Episode 60, “Tragedy in the Middle East”:
That’s quite likely true. I am not a listener of that podcast and pay very little attention to Kirn.
I did notice Taibbi cut ties with Katie Halper, which I thought was lame.
Yeah, that’s the time-frame when Matt lost my interest. Not sure why, or how, he partnered with Kirn instead of Halper for his weekly podcast. But ever since, he has effectively been neutered.
His podcast is so mundane and irrelevant now.
One thing is clear about Taibbi: he’s no Hunter S. Thompson.
I remember exactly where I was driving in the car together with my good lady and two dogs to a dawn hike when I heard that. It felt like betrayal. Months later after the next ATW episode in which they addressed the extermination, and after Taibbi’s lazy smear of Kelton in which he revealed himself in the comments, I wrote him saying his friends Katie and Aaron can fill him in on the history, or I’m sure Norm F will give him time if he is open to it, and cancelled my Racket sub.
Like Nat I am grateful for Taibbi’s work on many topics and I thought he did a great job with all the censorship investigations, of which Twitter Files was only one (very big one). As an unlicensed psychoanalyst I put him, Greenwald and Dore in the same bag of people who felt so betrayed, understandably, by a political institution they used to align with that they focused their resentment on it and found, with their superb communication skills, an even bigger audience than before doing so. Weiss otoh seems to have been Israel fundamentalist from the start.
The silence is violence thing is too upsetting for me to finish reading it. It’s strawmaning. He’s framing it as a propaganda conspiracy that he’s victim of. That resonates.
Weiss is a Goebbels of our times.
Not to defend Goebbels, but I see her as more of a sycophant and climber than a truly brilliant, but evil, master of propaganda. Much like Trotsky, Goebbels was worth multiple tank divisions. It’s hard for me to think of any communicator alive today I fear as much as Goebbels.
Goebbels learned well from the Creel Commission.
yes he did and from Bernays and Ivy Lee as well.
If it were available in English – which I believe it´s unfortunately not – I would suggest you read German elite journalist Margret Boveri´s take on journalism and the German press before, during, after 3rd Reich, “Wir lügen alle – eine Hauptstadtzeitung unter Hitler” – “All of us lie – a capital city daily paper under Hitler”.
It´s a long excellent study about all kinds of figures on both sides of the line including countless who even in the eye of the beast tried to build bridges, like e.g. Theodor Wolff, a Jew, who wasn´t willing to denounce Germany, wouldn´t go to the US either after being forced to leave Germany for France and would end up in the Jewish hospital in Berlin after having been dragged through a dozen camps by Nazi thugs to die there in 1943.
It also shows how Goebbels was also couched in by others in his ministry who had the Führer´s ear. Some of those propagandists survived just to serve in various functions after 1945, like in the Operational History (German) Section which I mentioned before. Former PR-experts re-writing military history…
p.s. Theodor Wolff was offered to go to Palestine but he rejected Zionism
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll have to brush off my abysmal college German!
There’s a great moment in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where a weirdly aggressively Jewish producer at Hulu tells the character Larry David, as he’s on his way out of a pitch meeting “come back for shabbos dinner! We had Bari Weiss last Friday, she was fabulous!” David slams the door on his way out and blows off the meeting.
In real life, somebody asked Larry about Bari and his reply was, “let me guess, it was about supporting Israel”.
Worth watching. Israel has lost us normal Jews.
https://youtu.be/30gxmVLaBJI?si=Od8_YDxXH-TF4Xj7
If history is any guide, when propaganda eventually fails, the next phase of the struggle becomes violent and murderous. I for one did not foresee ICE becoming our present day Brownshirts. As has been attributed to J F Kennedy, as peaceful dissent has begun to be prohibited, violent dissent is now inescapable.
Barri Weiss is not just painting “lipstick on the pig,” she is now arguing that the pig is Kosher.
Stay safe, and sane, if you can.
“Barri Weiss is not just painting “lipstick on the pig,” she is now arguing that the pig is Kosher.”
Which is why more people are losing their touch with reality as more people convert to the Dark Side for the better pay and benefits, aside from the loss of soul. But the converts never say that they are switching sides and when reality eventually shows their true colors, the realization that one has been gaslighted is discombobulating.
This sentence
allows me to conclude: she is a culture warrior. A very well paid one. In that sense much like the late Mr Kirk.
She doesn’t have a fraction of Kirk’s reach or talent. I’m not confident she’ll thrive at CBS or even establish control. I should probably go back and add some quotes from mutinous CBS staffers.
You’d know better than me about that. I only observed that she’s a well-paid culture warrior.
What I mean by culture war is it’s the ideology that says that politics is what the Democratic and Republican parties agree to shout at each other about. Thus foreign policy, economics, defense budgets, class war, freedom for banks etc. is all stuff the cartel agrees to agree on and keep quiet about. Those topics must be exiled from the domestic political agenda. Barri’s job, like so many others, is to 1) keep everyone fighting as noisily as possible about culture war so as to drown out questions on forbidden topics, and 2) re-frame any other questions that penetrate the public consciousness as culture war. Thus questions about genocide and ethnic cleansing are transformed into ones of race, ethnicity, religion, and prejudice. And you remember I’m sure how questions of socioeconomic class were transformed into sexism and prejudice. There are lots of examples.
Monomaniacal anti-Trumpery is annoying. It’s also easy to criticize and to raise to the level of despicable (also Taibbi’s game). Hence anti-anti-Trump is actually a solid culture war play.
agree with all that.
NWT: She doesn’t have a fraction of Kirk’s reach or talent.
She’s a creature of the elite, not the base. And the fracture between these will only get wider as 1) material conditions fail to improve 2) wars do not end 3) the base is told to keep supporting Israel because Israel.
Concur with the Caitlin Johnstone quote in your piece.
In my opinion after this in 10 years democrats voters will become Zionist that is why in my opinion Israel want these TV channels and tiktok. Sad really for USA and the rest of the world
I don’t think the Zionists have 10 years.
From your lips to God’s ears, Nat.
#Inshallah
Taibbi made my ‘pay no mind’ list with what came out in his fallout with Musk, notably that he was being deferential to Musk publicly with the criticisms of his reporting on the Twitter files (Medhi Hassan most notably).
Musk completely burnt him over petty bs and the chump that he is, just sat there and took it. It signaled to me the guy who had built a career speaking truth to power was now more than happy to curl up at it’s feet. Into the trash – next!
The main story is the Genocide.
Always. Murder will out no matter how many people Zionist billionaires pay $150 million to lie on their behalf.
I want to send rays of love to you, Alice, and all the victims of that genocide. And I want to send rays of hatred to those conducting it.
I learned this phrasing from Nika Dubrovsky https://www.patreon.com/posts/my-opinion-on-of-42824424
I am naught, they are not. Humanity is rising. Let it rise and stop the genocide, give comfort. But not to the system that enables such things.
How to describe Bari Weiss. Not really a useful idiot. I find a parallel with AI where some people have been “selected’ to become billionaires and have lots of power based more on their beliefs rather than technical acumen or skills. Bari is the same. Throughout her career she has been “boosted” by her guardian angels leading her to her present position. She may not be a billionaire yet but if she continues to please the people that she works for, it is on her horizon.
Another excellent detailed article, thanks Nat.
I’ll throw a couple more tiny details:
Weiss will report directly to Ellison
Weiss will answer directly to Paramount’s chief executive, David Ellison, rather than to the president of CBS News, or the head of CBS.
I’m happy to see mention of UTAX aka Palantir U. Another of the Twitter files journalists (Shellenberger) is ‘CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech’ at UTAX. Shellenberger is (as far as I can see) the Thielites pet journalist. His writing while in SF closely mirrored the concerns of the SV elite. And he was the surprise witness that shut down the (smelling of Palantir/Anduril) UFO/drone story at the Congressional hearing in December.
This is true. It was especially essential at a time when the power baton had swung to the democratics, who dutifully stopped caring about internet censorship. The republicans in turn have stopped caring now that power in in their grasp.
But in the interstices of partizan politics, the desperation of the public leaves a gap for someone to gain trust. The more partizan the politics, the more insane those in power grow, the more opportunities for influencers to inveigle themselves with a new section of the public. The lobby hitches itself to another wagon, to be kept in pocket until later.
All that said, the subtle low cost methods are being discarded in favor of outright and expensive seizures of the means of media distribution. It will go all the way to shutting down, banning, suing and where required seizing alternative media sites. The phrase “8th front” has left out the “of the war” part, and people should be aware of how Israel conducts war by now.
I’m smelling a “Peter Principle” moment: people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence”. Employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
She will turn out to be not quite as slippery as she needs to be for this job.
I think and hope you are correct.
There is no worth in hating worthless whores… But here I am w/ this worthlessfucking-zio-Whore .
Glenn Greenwald: Trump’s Alarming Domestic Terrorism Memo (w/ Ken Klippenstein)
21 min.
https://scheerpost.com/2025/10/06/glenn-greenwald-trumps-alarming-domestic-terrorism-memo-w-ken-klippenstein/
p.s. secondary: The first 4 minutes are awful proving Orson Welles´s point that many intellectuals have no clue of entertainment. Others may still find it funny or entertaining. And then, I never liked “ANNIE HALL”.
While a footnote in the Weiss saga, I think revisiting her stated reason for resignation from NYT is interesting. In the immediate aftermath Bennet claimed he didn’t read the op-ed which became a story of its own. There were counter-claims that he did not only read it, but edited it. Be that as it may, according to Cotton himself someone at NYT asked him to write it:
Archived version of Washington Times
Given the times we are in now I think it is relevant to note that five years ago the paper of record intentionally wanted to create “sending in the troops” as one acceptable position in a debate on state reactions to demonstrations. The media creates an intense debate within a very narrow scope, and it was apparently in 2020 important for a certain part of it to make sure that “send in the troops” was within the debate.
Oh man, I’d forgotten that Tom Cotton op-ed debacle. Thanks for refreshing my memory.
I think the crucial issue of the moment is that Trump sabotaged his own peace plan from the outset and which guarantees the genocide will continue. Less important is what Taibbi, a good independent reporter, has or hasn’t said about Gaza and Bari Weiss.
Trump said that if his peace plan is not accepted by Hamas, Israel will “get the green light to finish the job.” As Netanyahu is neither interested in peace nor a Palestinian state, he now has every incentive to make sure the peace plan fails, and genocide continues. Bibi is shrewd, able to outsmart Trump, and place blame on Hamas or someplace else.
As to Weiss, I think she can smell money so when billionaires, with access to the White House and Congress, are committed Zionists, it doesn’t take a risk, like betting the farm, on joining that group.
I think this Larry Ellison project is an opportunity to put another nail into the legacy media coffin. There was a time during the Ted Turner days when CNN was referred to as the Communist News Network. One can begin to label it ZNN for Zionist News Network together with CBS, Tik Tok, etc. Now that it is tied to Israel, Ellison’s msm buys do not deserve promoting Israel above American interests.