Congratulations On Getting Bari Weiss To Leave The New York Times

I haven’t checked, but I assume she now has less influence than ever

This column is not about who is right and who is wrong. It is about the real world and how it works.

Let’s imagine you are a left-of-center American and view yourself as an enemy of Bari Weiss. You disagree with everything she stands for. Again, neither the specifics nor the merits matter, for the purpose of this exercise. What matters is that you want Bari Weiss to have as little influence as possible.

It’s 2020. You are increasingly furious that Bari Weiss gets to work at The New York Times. You’re furious because you hate the notion of her ilk having such a prominent position. She has the power to both write and assign columns for the most important center of opinion in your world.

At a time of tremendous unrest inside the Times building, marked most dramatically by the widespread claim by journalists there and elsewhere that a Tom Cotton column “puts Black @nytimes staff in danger,” Weiss tweets that she thinks there’s an ongoing divide in the building between two factions:

However mad you were before, quadruple it. First of all, according to others at the Times — and to an “investigation” by Vox — she’s just lying. She’s making this up. Nothing like this is going on. She’s a liar. Secondly, how dare she publicly air the internal laundry of the Times like that? You tweet up a storm about how ridiculously unfair this is. As you do so, some sort of door in your brain shuts, separating your conscious experience from the part of your brain that is aware that other Times staffers have been doing this exact thing, and that it was in fact the reason she tweeted what she tweeted in the first place.

By now — again, this is early June of 2020 — there’s a full-blown carnival celebrating Bari Weiss’s awfulness, and you are a joyful participant. In the process, you and your friends dig into her past a little more and hoo boy, is this a horrible person. Did you know that she tried to get a professor fired at Columbia just because he was pro-Palestinian, or something? (Did she?) Also, she did an egregiously offensive and ignorant tweet in which she celebrated a figure skater of Asian descent — a tweet that proves, to your satisfaction and the satisfaction of your friends, that she just might be a racist.

Eventually, you and your friends’ campaign works: Bari Weiss leaves in a huff, announcing in a resignation letter she’s taking her football and going home. She complains of “constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views” and said she found the “illiberal environment especially heartbreaking.”

What a loser! Guess she couldn’t take the heat of the “marketplace of ideas” after all. There’s another round of celebration on Twitter — ding-dong, the witch is dead — and then it’s on to the next thing.

Mission Accomplished

Okay, you guys know where I’m going with this: Weiss eventually founded The Free Press and it became wildly successful. So successful, in fact, that Paramount just bought it for roughly $150 million and appointed Weiss herself as editor-in-chief of one of its media holdings, CBS News. A little more than five years after her resignation letter, she’s at the absolute peak of her powers.