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In our 40th episode of This F*cking Guy, Erin dives deep into the origins of anti-woke crusader turned CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss. From her origins as an antagonizing student at Columbia University to a career of ill-researched op-eds and launching her own media company, to running CBS News and her relentless campaign to promote Zionism, this may be our most manipulative guy yet!

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast, episode title, and episode date.

Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web (NYT)

Give ’em hell (X)

Inside Bari Weiss’s Hostile Takeover of CBS News (The New Yorker)

Here is what the new apparent CBS News segment “Whiskey Fridays with Tony Dokoupil” may look like (Bluesky)

Bari Weiss ‘Meddles’ With ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ Story on Palestine (Zeteo)

Inside Bari Weiss’ shaky, arms-length relationship with the president of CBS News as ratings hit all-time low (NY Post)

‘CBS Evening News’ Ratings Disaster: Tony Dokoupil Hits Rock Bottom (TV Insider)

I’m Glad the Dyke March Banned Jewish Stars (NYT)

Jewish marchers say they were kicked out of a rally for inclusiveness because of their beliefs (Washington Post)

The Limits of ‘Believe All Women’ (NYT)

The Summer Bucket List of a 35-Year-Old Woman (NYT)

Imagining Comey’s Texts to His Wife (NYT)

CBS News staffers rip ‘shallow’ Bari Weiss for moderating ‘absurd’ network town hall with Erika Kirk (Independent)

We’re All Fascists Now (NYT)

The Free Press’ Passage Into the Dark Side (The Unpopulist)

Despite political differences, Jewish values unite Squirrel Hill couple (Jewish Chronicle)

Columbia Unbecoming (2004) (YouTube)

Sam Harris X Eric Weinstein: Israel-Palestine (The Portal)

I Used to Hate Trump. Now I’m a MAGA Lefty. (The Free Press)

Mad About Bari Weiss: The New York Times Provocateur the Left Loves to Hate (Hive)

Ad Hoc Grievance Committee Report (Brooklyn College)

Procedures Clarified and Enhanced Following Release of Ad Hoc Committee Report (Columbia Magazine)

Bari Weiss Has Thrown the CBS News Killswitch (TNR)

Megan Greenwell Tweet (X)

Bari Weiss Tweet (X)

Bari Weiss’s Unasked Questions (Jewish Currents)

Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation (NYT)

Tim Dillon mocks Bari Weiss for interviewing Mossad boss (Reddit)

Bari Weiss Suuuuuuucks (SF Gate)

The merit-first fantasy of Bari Weiss’ “anti woke” university https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-merit-first-fantasy-of-bari-weiss-anti-woke-university 

The “Merit-First” Fantasy of Bari Weiss’ Anti-Woke University (Current Affairs)

The Petition (The New Yorker)

Columbia’s Own Middle East War (New York Magazine)

NYT’s Bari Weiss Falsely Denies Her Years of Attacks on the Academic Freedom of Arab Scholars Who Criticize Israel (The Intercept)

Unbecoming Returns’, Spurs Continued Debate (Campus Watch)

AZM: Israel in the Write Light – Bari Weiss (YouTube)

TRANSCRIPT

Erin Ryan: Welcome to another episode of This F*cking Guy, the series where we spotlight one fucking guy making America worse and explain why they suck. I’m Erin Ryan, host of Crooked Media’s Hysteria podcast. And on this, the 40th episode of This F*cking Guy, happy 40th to us, we’re discussing one of today’s most successful professional victims. Anti-woke crusader turned CBS News editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss. Bari is a pioneer in the same way that actual pioneers were pioneers. That’s to say that, ideologically speaking, She shows up in places where people have been living for thousands of years and acts like she discovered this cool new thing called being a center-right conservative with a Zionist streak. Weiss was born on March 25, 1984, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her parents, Lou and Amy, owned companies called Weiss House and Weiss Lines, which sell interior design notions and flooring, respectively. Weiss and her three younger sisters were raised in the historically Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, and she had her bat mitzvah at the Tree of Life Synagogue. She was the student council president in high school and a self-described nerd. Picture Lisa Simpson, but a yinzer. She claims that her parents differed politically. Her dad was the conservative and her mom was the liberal, but in an interview with a local newspaper, they both claimed that the most important issue to both of them was what was good for Israel. Writer Glenn Greenwald would later claim that Zionism has always been Bari’s North Star. For our purposes, we’re using the definition of Zionism contained in Encyclopedia Britannica, which is, to paraphrase here, a Jewish nationalist movement that originated in the later half of the 19th century with the goal of establishing a Jewish national state in Palestine. Today, people who call themselves Zionists tend to defend and justify Israeli actions as part of the state’s right to defend itself, even as those actions appear morally indefensible to a growing number of people. Additionally, self-identified Zionists, including Bari Weiss, are often associated with anti-Arab and anti-Islam animus. Now, to be anti-Zionist is not the same as being anti-Semitic. Jewish people are among Israel’s most outspoken critics. But as we’ll see soon, Bari Weiss’s worldview depends on the definition of anti-Zionism to encroach so far onto the definition anti-Semitism that the two are the same. Bari didn’t invent doing this, but she’s certainly one of the most prominent practitioners of it. And now the word Zionism has been stretched and pulled in so many directions that it means everything and nothing. That’s the bait and switch. Don’t want to let Israel do whatever it wants? You’re anti-Semitic. You’re not antisemitic. Then you stand for the systematic exclusion of people critical of Israel from mainstream thought. For a more in-depth and much, much funnier version of this, please check out the podcast Bad Hasbara, hosted by my pal, Matt Lieb. But back to Bari. After graduating from high school, Weiss went straight to Israel on a gap year program, where she studied at a feminist Yeshiva and helped build a hospital for Bedouins in the desert. When she was there, she got into musical theater, Which. To think of it, she does kind of give theater kid who never made it out of the chorus. Weiss then attended Columbia University, where she fell in love with a female classmate by the name of Kate McKinnon. Yes, that Kate McKinnon, as in the comedian. The two dated on and off for years, and Bari claims they’re still good friends. Which in Kate’s defense, if what Bari says is true, I’ve heard that Bari Weiss is a great hang, as she is a shitty opinion-haver, and who among us doesn’t have a problematic friend or two? Columbia was where Bari began her decades-long career of attacking and smearing people she deemed insufficiently pro-Israel. She was the crown princess of cancel culture before the term was even a pet expression of podcast ridoids. And all while claiming that what she was doing was actually defending freedom, George Orwell would be proud. So here’s the story of Bari’s first crusade. In 2002, a group called The David Project was formed to quote combat anti-Isreal bias on university campuses, end quote, “Document campus harassment of Jewish students.” Cutting through the media-friendly spin, The David Project is a right-wing organization founded by Ralph Avi Goldwasser and David Jacobs, two bald old men, not college kids. Rich guys pour money into campus activism all the time. The Daily Wire, Prager University. The David project walked so Turning Point USA could strut through a corridor of pyrotechnics. In 2004, that group, in collaboration with pro-Israel students at Columbia, created a short documentary-style film called Columbia Unbecoming, which was shown several times around campus. Among the film’s wrapped audience was a young Bari Weiss. Columbia Unbecoming featured a series of interviews with a handful of Columbia students and one rabbi, accusing professors in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures Department, or MEALAC, of bullying Jewish students and teaching classes that were unfairly biased against Israel. It singled out three professors specifically, George Saliba, Joseph Massad, and Hamid Dabashi.

[clip of student]: I took Professor Saliba’s intro to Islamic civilization. At the end of the semester, I guess, the icing on the cake was that we saw a video about contemporary politics in the Middle East. And without any framing at all, we witnessed a video that showed a march of Arabs from the region, annual march, in which they hold up banners that say, death to Zionism, and they chanted slogans like death to Jews. While that may be an accurate portrayal of what goes on in the Middle East, I was kind of surprised that he didn’t frame it with anything like, this is not my perspective, or what you’re going to see here may bother you a little bit.

Erin Ryan: Now, this video was specifically made to perpetuate one particular viewpoint, and that’s that Arab professors at Columbia were targeting and intimidating Jewish students, and for that, they should be disciplined, maybe even fired. The film does a pretty shitty job of proving its case. It bleeds with histrionics, like in the clip we just watched, where it sounds like a girl was upset she didn’t get a trigger warning. Now, that’s the kind of thing that columnist Bari would point to as a sign of generational fragility if it had to do with any other topic. But before Bari Weiss was clutching her pearls over the perceived snowflakery of college protesters threatening free speech on campus, she was a college snowflake threatening free-speech on campus. Radicalized by this highlight reel of unsubstantiated complaints, Bari and a handful of her Jewish classmates founded a group that led a campaign against the professors and named it Columbians for Academic Freedom, or CAF. It was a big enough deal that it drew the attention of prominent pro-Israel figures like then-Congressman Anthony Weiner. The university launched an investigation into the claims that were made. But here’s the thing, the film fell apart under scrutiny. For example, none of the students complaining about Professor Masad in the film had actually taken a class of his. An article about the controversy quoted Bari Weiss, who claimed that all Masad talked about in his class was Israel. Another student who had taken the same class said he’d only devoted a couple of weeks to it. The internal Columbia investigation found that there was, quote, “no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that reasonably could be construed as anti-Semitic,” and, quote “no basis for believing that Professor Massad systematically suppressed dissenting views in his classroom.” Not only were the professors not guilty of the offenses they’d been accused of, but the report found that the professors had been victimized by a smear campaign organized by outside groups, some of which were trying to spy on the professor’s classrooms. Massad eventually did get tenure. He still gets harassed quite a bit, though. Bari wasn’t done. In 2007, an anthropology professor named Nadia Abu El Haj was up for tenure at Barnard College, Columbia’s all-women sister school. Abu El Haj had written an award-winning scholarly book called Facts on the Ground, which questioned the Zionist narrative that a long archeological record of Jewish presence in Palestine justified the establishment of a Jewish state in the region. The campaign against Abu El Haj’s qualifications and worthiness was led by Bari Weiss’s group in cooperation, once again, with outside groups determined to pressure the college into denying the professor tenure. The petition, which was started by an Israeli settler, contained fabricated quotes from El Haj’s work. It still got thousands of signatures. While Weiss and company were successful in helping make Abu El Haj’s life a nightmare for a short period of time, they were ultimately unsuccessful. Nadia Abu El Haj was granted tenure that fall after Weiss graduated. At the time, Weiss was brand new on the masthead of the opinion section of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, where she wrote a column condemning Abu El Haj being awarded tenure called Facts in the Air. Weiss, who is neither an academic nor an anthropologist, accused Abu El Haj’s anthropological work of undermining the very nature of facts themselves. That’s some mediocre white man confidence right there. After college, Weiss entered the star-making, frothing ideologue pretending to be a mild-mannered center-right opinion-haver pipeline. From here, she worked at the Forward and Tablet, and then, at just 23 years old, the Wall Street Journal opinion page snatched her up. Bari would fall under the mentorship of then-Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens, whose opinions have always been about as interesting as an expired tub of plain yogurt. But they loved that shit at the New York Times, so in 2017 Weiss followed her mentor from the Wall Street Journal to the Gray Lady. Once there, she got straight to the business of being delighted by microwaved Reagan-era leftovers she’d rebranded as thrillingly naughty transgressive beliefs. Bari wasn’t afraid to take bold swings, like the time she published a column about how women’s march organizers were antisemitic, which was a sort of rehashed version of another column she’d written earlier that year for Tablet. Which also claimed that the women’s march organizers were anti-Semitic, which is a rehashed complaint she’s been making against Arab Americans and Muslims since she was a wee college complainer. During her time on the Times Opinion pages, she buttered her bread with columns critical of the #MeToo movement. Well, not the actual #MeToo movement, a version of the #MeToo movement that she made up in her head by cobbling together a collage of the most extreme voices on Twitter. You’ll find more straw men in Bari Weiss columns than you will in all the fields in Kansas. Take, for example, her column headlined, The Problem With Believe All Women. Weiss argues that the #MeToo movement had created an atmosphere of fear for men and given a permission structure for bad actors to exploit a cultural moment to lob false accusations. She cites the case of Roy Moore, who at the time was running for Senate in Alabama, and facing a smattering of stories that as an adult man he’d preyed on teenage girls. One woman had approached the Washington Post claiming that Moore had impregnated her and pressured into having an abortion. The Post reporters grew suspicious of the woman’s story and discovered that she was actually part of a right-wing sting operation designed to discredit the other accusers. The Post did not believe that woman. The reporters did their jobs. There was no outcry from feminists about the Post reporter’s refusal to believe her without question. But somehow, in Weiss’s view, this incident revealed a fatal weakness in the #MeToo movement. Now, let’s stop for a second, revisit that headline, and I’ll see what the headline did. It puts the phrase, “believe all women” in quotes. As though it’s a quotation. But in the article, the only person who says believe all women is Bari Weiss, who has declared it the Huntress’ war cry. So technically a Huntress that Bari Weiss came up with said it, not Bari, I guess. To prove her case that feminism had run amok and was out to take down innocent men, Weiss quoted a tweet from a Teen Vogue columnist and claimed that countless women were sharing similar views in private. What women? How many Bari? How do you know? I was working in a different newsroom at the time, also writing columns about the #MeToo movement. Nobody serious was saying believe all women. The phrase was believe women, a slogan that meant take allegations of sexual misconduct seriously. To take allegations seriously is to follow up on them by looking into whether or not they are true. Some of them will turn out to be true and some of them won’t. But it was easier for people like Bari Weiss to portray the folly of the #MeToo movement. If she pretended that the battle cry was believe all women. Rather than engage with the complexity of reality, which was that society was grappling with how to balance justice for victims and fairness for the accused. Feminists were not in lockstep about this. There was a lot of debate and discussion. Bari pretended we were this big group of blue-haired slut walkers going around confiscating the ball sacks of men who told them they were pretty at work one time. Bari did this shit all the time. Rather than engage in reality, she engages with a sillier version of things that exist only in her imagination or on Twitter. And pretends that everybody on the left is like this, and then beats up on that imaginary monolith. This was on display in her hit parade of tedious contrarianism, like I’m Glad the Dyke March Banned Jewish Stars, wherein she tells the story of how a Pride parade in Chicago kicked out three women displaying rainbow flags with the star of David on it. Quote, “has there ever been a crisper expression of the consequences of intersectionality than a ban on Jewish lesbians from a dyke march,” she wrote. Hold the phone. The words she used imply that all Jewish lesbians were banned from a march or that the Jewish lesbians were banned because of their Jewishness, which would have been bad. But the real story is that three women carrying the one specific flag were kicked out and that’s not the same as all Jewish lesbians being banned. Furthermore, according to the Washington Post, there was more to the story. From the march organizers, the three women, quote, “repeatedly expressed support for Zionism during conversations with Chicago Dyke March collective members. We have since learned that at least one of these individuals is a regional director for a wider bridge, an organization with connections to the Israeli state and right-wing pro-Israel interest groups. The Chicago Dyke March Collective is explicitly not anti-Semitic. We are anti-Zionist, the statement added. The Chicago Dyke March Collective supports the liberation of Palestine and oppressed people everywhere.” But Bari never let facts muddy up a story of the demise of reasonability at the and indulgent left. Her now notorious column, We’re All Fascists Now, had to have a correction tacked to it when one of the random Twitter accounts she cited as evidence of systemic oppression of conservative voices turned out to be fake. Bari Weiss’s Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation pretends that random bloggers and Twitter accounts engaging with separate, distinct discussions about the origin and ownership of specific cultural artifacts were the ones dictating what every progressive thought about everything. Now, I could go on and on about Weiss’s pathological straw manning, but… I don’t want to raise my blood pressure. Plenty of people have dove in on Weiss’s weakness in fashioning an argument. I haven’t seen as many people talk about Weiss’ weakness in fashion-ing a joke when she tries to be funny and shits out prose that reads like a treasury of Cathy cartoons. Folks, humor-wise, Bari Weiss is a tote bag. She’s an attitude tee knotted at the corner, worn on a 5K fun walk through Branson, Missouri. Her jokes are stale popcorn. Her piece, The Summer Bucket List of a 35-year-old Woman, is a litany of gentle self-deprecation that Bridget Jones would have used as an emergency maxi pad. Try not to drink more than half a bottle of Pinot Grigio on weeknights. Restart Weight Watchers. Tell Jenny to drag you to Saturday morning meetings. Get a little tan. Was this column written by the inside of those Dove chocolate wrappers? I cannot believe that this ran in the New York Times. Hmm, okay, so maybe her column, Imagining Comey’s Text to His Wife, will be funnier. Here’s an excerpt. 2:06 PM, DT cornered me, telling me to drop the Flynn thing. Let it go, he just wouldn’t stop. Remember what he said to Billy Bush? Was like that. 2:07 PM, feeling bad about summer again, sad face. Tell me again about that thing you said about hindsight, need reminding. 3:16 PM, BTW, can we get a grandfather clock for the house? Sending you some eBay links to check out. This shit makes Maureen Dowd sound like Tina Fey. No wonder she thinks her wife Nellie Bowles is the funniest writer in the world. But I wanna take some time now to reflect on the legacy of a piece that aged. Just about as poorly as a piece of op-ed journalism can age. And that’s the feature Bari wrote on the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, or IDW. When it was published back in May 2018, Meet the Renegades of the Intellectually Dark Web—that’s the real headline—was immediately met with ridicule. People called it the Intellectual Dork Web. It didn’t help that the people featured on it are dorks, and that accompanying the article were portraits by Damon Winter that were so self-serious that they were silly. Winter had won the Pulitzer Prize in photojournalism for his work covering the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. And now, he was taking a glamor shot of Jordan Peterson furrowing his brow. But anyway, I digress. A lot has changed since 2018, so let’s catch up on all the luminaries Bari identified as the IDW. All right, so there’s Sam Harris, who is largely known for palling around with the author of The Bell Curve, a widely debunked book that claims racial differences in IQ are due to inherent differences in biology. Since the piece ran, he’s taken a big zag toward Zionism, argued that Islam is the motherload of bad ideas, and has released a podcast episode titled Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism. There’s Eric Weinstein, a stay-puffed marshmallow man-shaped scientist who has been called a physics grifter and a pseudo-intellectual charlatan by his critics, but more importantly works closely with Peter Thiel over at Thiel Capital, and perhaps most importantly is a pro-Israel. Also, Eric’s grimacing brother Bret and his wife Heather Heying both of whom were professors at Evergreen State College, but quit their jobs because of woke. And now they host an anti-woke podcast. Conveniently, Bret being bullied by woke had been the subject of another Weiss column months prior. There was also Jordan Peterson, frail uncle of the Manosphere. He’s written extensively about the threat of anti-Semitism after the attacks of October 7th, 2023. And in the immediate aftermath of the attack, he posted to X, Give him hell Netanyahu, enough is enough. And he added, Benjamin Netanyahu. Now to the ladies. There’s Claire Lehmann of Quillette, who, you guessed it, is also a Zionist with such a virulent distaste for Islam. The critics have described her as white supremacist adjacent. She’s also defended Israel’s slaughter of mostly civilians in Gaza. But don’t worry, the dark web isn’t all white. There’s also Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born critic of Islam who had been a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, which is one of America’s most prominent right-wing tanks. It’s hardly the Wild West of renegade ideas, as Bari had characterized the IDW. In 2023, Ali converted to Christianity in preparation for what she called a civilization war that is coming for the West. Sounds cool and normal. Finally, Dave Rubin, a comedian who wasn’t afraid to tell it like it is, but who also happened to coincidentally be an avowed self-proclaimed Zionist and apologist for Israeli military actions, especially in the wake of October 7th. In September, 2024, six years after his marquee debut in the pantheon of Bari Weiss’s IDW, a DOJ indictment alleged that Tenet Media, where Rubin worked, was actually covertly funded by Russian state media, which had been paying influencers, including Rubin to push pro-Russia, pro-Trump and anti-LGBTQ talking points. Rubin claimed he had no idea. Guitar riff! Earlier this year, Piers Morgan banned Rubin from his program after Rubin sided with Ben Shapiro on coverage of Israel. Morgan called Rubin a treasonous little weasel. And speaking of little weasels, Ben Shapiro is also one of the main dorks of Bari’s Dangerous Brains Club. Ben hated the Barbie movie so much that he lit a Barbie on fire and threw it in the trash. Ben is, say it with me now, a self-proclaimed Zionist who has defended the actions of Israel. Not all the ascendant alt-right adjacent figures were given equal credulity in Weiss’s feature. Well, she called Candace Owens sharp. She seemed to draw a distinction between her and the people she considered a part of the IDW. Same thing for Kanye West and Mike Cernovich. Weird that these are the figures in the clique least likely to be supportive of Israel, and each of them tends to be flat-out anti-Semitic. Looking back now, it seems like the piece was just a vehicle by which to cleave the Zionist alt-right into its own free-thought collective far away from the Israel skeptics who use words like globalists. The only people who got to be in Bari’s club were people who were pro-Zionist or anti-Islam enough to match Bari’s worldview. That’s it. It makes sense that the first two letters of IDW are also ID. Now I’m sounding like Candace Owens. Reflecting on what the members of the group had to do with her, Bari wrote, Like many in this group, I’m a classical liberal who has run afoul of the left, often for voicing my convictions and sometimes simply by accident. This is when we praise from libertarians and conservatives and having been attacked by the left I know I run the risk of focusing inordinately on its excesses and providing succor to some people whom I deeply oppose.

[AD BREAK]

Erin Ryan: Weiss was one of the most popular columnists at the Times during her stint there, because everybody loves a hate read, and of course her prominence caused her detractors to visit her cancel culture queen past. Bari Weiss has attempted for years to finesse her multiple campaigns against insufficiently Zionist academics at her school into something morally consistent with her self-declared free speech advocacy. She tweeted in response to Glenn Greenwald’s 2018 takedown of her quote “When I was an undergraduate student at Columbia, I advocated for the rights of students to express their viewpoints in the classroom.” But Megan Greenwell, who had been on the staff of Columbia’s campus newspaper at the time, jumped into the fray tweeting, “Bari, I have no desire to be involved here, but your synopsis of the events of 2004-2005 is unfair. You weren’t simply advocating for students’ rights. You were calling professors racist. I know because I wrote or edited most of the stories about it.” Greenwald then linked to a story wherein Bari Weiss claimed that professors were racists. Glenn Greenwald noted, quote, “That’s what makes this whole spectacle so amazing. The New York Times is allowing one of its columnists to masquerade as a stalwart defender of campus-free speech and academic pluralism while utterly ignoring and allowing her to falsely deny her own long history in trying to stigmatize and punish professors who criticized Israel to the point where the NYCLU stepped in and denounced her campaign as a dangerous threat to academic freedom.” Even Greenwald’s spicy anti-Weiss rants aren’t enough to embarrass Bari, though. In 2019, Weiss stuck her nose into a campus fight at Stanford University. This one was over the Jewish cartoonist Eli Valley, whose work had caricatured right-wing Jewish figures. Weiss retweeted a student op-ed comparing Valley’s work to Nazi propaganda. So the campus talk from a guy who draws silly pictures was forced to be relocated to a secure facility off campus due to concerns about safety. People love to hate on Bari because in addition to being smug and wrong, she was also a dork. It was easy to dunk on her. One of Bari’s cringiest moments came in 2018. It was the Winter Olympics, women’s figure skating, the big show. Japanese-American skater Mirai Nagasu landed a triple axel in a swell of patriotic pride. Weiss tweeted a video of the skill with the caption, Immigrants, they get the job done. God, I wish Alyssa were here to roll her eyes with me, but since she’s not, I’ll do it. Ugh. This is a bastardization of the line from the Broadway musical, Hamilton, which in 2018 was already considered to be a little cheugy. But to make matters worse, the line isn’t immigrants, they get the job done. It’s immigrants, we get the jobs done. Plus, Nagasu was born in the U.S. She’s not an immigrant. She’s just Asian. People on Twitter were quick to correct Weiss, but Bari decided to just tweet through it. Yes, yes, I realize, felt the poetic license was kosher. A lot of people who already hated Bari Weiss got mad online about it, which actually turned out to be great for Bari Weis since it helped her meet her daily minimum value of vitamin V for victim. Woke had done it again. Cancel culture, run amok. By now, we’ve probably established the Bari Weist MO. Act like an asshole. When called out on it, cry about how you’re actually the victim. People who have talked about bad relationships and therapy probably know this as DARVO, Deny, Attack, Reverse, Victim, and Offender. Bari’s inability to tell the difference between real life and Twitter was starting to annoy her co-workers. She’d use her Twitter account to attack and belittle her New York Times colleagues’ work. As an opinion writer, she was subject to more lax social media policing than those who were actually reporting and editing stories. By the summer of 2020, it appeared that Bari was frustrated by the fact that no matter how big of an asshole she was at work, she couldn’t manage to get herself fired. After all, what better evidence that cancel culture is a thing than to get canceled yourself? She almost got there when she involved herself in the newsroom fight over Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed, urging the president to send troops to liberal cities that were sites of protests of the murder of George Floyd. Cotton’s column, Send in the Troops, prompted hundreds of Times employees to sign onto a letter condemning its publication, and for editorial page editor James Bennett to resign. Weiss was a huge dick about the whole thing, breathlessly describing an intra-newsroom fight between the mostly young wokes and the mostly 40 plus liberals. But a month later, when Bari herself resigned, she accused the paper and her colleagues of bullying her. In her resignation flounce, which she posted to her own website, she wrote, quote, “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, not 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.” It’s hard to take Bari’s claims of being a free speech martyr seriously when she had a regular column at one of the most widely read newspapers in the world and had the ability to commission pieces from other writers of her choosing, and was featured regularly alongside her new television bestie Bill Maher on his TV show for Boomer Uncles. In fact, earlier in the very letter in which she accused the Times of marginalizing conservatives and centrist voices, she’d bragged about how many centrist and conservative voices she’d brought to the paper. No matter whether this characteristic Weissian display of curated victimhood was part of a long-planned move into independent journalism, or truly the result of Weiss being the victim of woke Bari was well on her way to her next chapter, Substack. Weiss’s publication was first known as Common Sense and then The Free Press. Its mission statement was a regurgitated version of Weiss’ resignation letter from The Times, and people fucking loved it, partly because it reflected a general unease vast swaths of America’s normies had with the power they perceived the left had over culture. But it did so in such a way that it enabled its readers to assure themselves that they were still superior to Fox News viewers, even though they believed pretty much exactly with the Fox viewers believed for the same reasons. It was MAGA, but pH-balanced for people who drink red wine and downhill ski. Even before it attracted subscribers, it attracted the attention and money of billionaires who needed Americans to be mad at woke so they wouldn’t turn their anger at them. It’s a tried and true diversion tactic, but hey, it works. Weiss turned on the charm she’s famous for in person and mainstays on the pantheon of Silicon Valley douchebags like Marc Andreessen opened their wallets to her. She raked in gobs of seed money, but Bari didn’t know what she was doing. Here are some ringing endorsements of Weiss’s prowess as an editor-in-chief from her former employees, from Clare Maloney’s reporting at the New Yorker. Quote, Bari had no idea how newsrooms worked, but she knew that she needed to call her operation a newsroom. I don’t think if you sat her down and said, can you explain the difference between a news story, an investigative story, and an enterprise story, she could tell you what it means. And she wasn’t going to let that slow her down. Here’s another. She was so brilliant and charismatic. And if she started a church, we all would have joined. And within a couple of months, we all wanted to jump out a window. She was completely stubborn and couldn’t take guidance. The Free Press promised its readers that it would tell the truth and let its readers make up their own minds. But critics took note of how far short they fell of this. One critical post on The UnPopulist noted a few low notes, like the Time columnist, Eli Lake, compared the actions of 20-something fuckboys tasked with slashing the federal budget under Elon Musk’s Doge program to the founding fathers, James Madison. Big balls, basically the same guy. In another post that aged poorly, a Free Press writer prematurely thanked Doge for successfully rooting out waste from the federal budget. Subsequent analysis has found that the program actually cost the government money and achieved nothing but sowing disarray. But hey, at least it got rid of DEI hires, whatever those are. Speaking of DEI hires the Free Press’ co-founder was none other than Bari Weiss’ kid sister, Suzy Weiss. Suzy Weiss is a self satisfied little shit who made her debut eight years prior when in 2013 she’d written a column for the Wall Street Journal where her big sister worked, weird, bemoaning the fact that she hadn’t gotten into any of the Ivy League colleges she’d applied to. She mused that maybe if she wasn’t a boring white girl, if she’d, say, worn a headdress to school or had two moms, she’d have gotten into Penn. Here, I’ll let little Suzy Weiss explain it on the Today Show.

[clip of Suzy Weiss]: Well, it’s a funny story actually. The piece was written, I got rejected from a bunch of schools in one day and like any teenager, I’m sure like millions of teenagers that day, I was crying to my mom and she said, I cannot hear about this anymore. Just go talk to someone else. So I called my sister and I was crying but she was hysterically laughing and she says, go write this down. So I did and this is what came out of it. Oh, let’s see. I make fun of two moms having killer SAT scores the diversity, it’s a satire. That’s the point. Just like 30 Rock is a satire which pokes fun at things that are politically correct. That’s what I was trying to do. [laughter] Diversity, I think is a wonderful thing. I think it’s great I think all colleges should have a holistic approach to every college applicant I do however think that in this day and age we’re being judged on things that we cannot control.

Erin Ryan: [laughter] Oh, the irony of a high schooler who got published in the Wall Street Journal because of who her sister was and whose entire professional career is because her sister keeps giving her things, complaining about unfair advantages. Meritocracy at work, am I right? But back to Bari’s publication. If there were a museum of bad opinions, this free press article from April 2025 would get its own gallery wall. It was by Batya Ungar-Sargon and headlined, I Used to Hate Trump, Now I’m a MAGA Lefty. The deck was… The president is giving the working class its best shot at the American dream in 60 years. That’s why I support him. The piece also claimed that Trump’s tariff scheme would fix America’s masculinity crisis and restart American manufacturing. Did that happen? Anybody? Did that happen? It’s rare that an opinion turns this bad this quickly. Like Bari’s writing, the free press relied on cheap tactics that were tough to refute. The UnPopulist put it this way, quote, the Free Press uses subjective first person reporting to render judgments on institutions that are hard to falsify. Unlike ordinary reporters, these authors don’t have to obtain corroboration from different sources, seek comment from the institutions being investigated, and then adjust the article’s framing if they’re offered valid evidence that casts doubt on their working thesis. This genre of journalism can be done well, but the free press uses it to convey its twin conceits—that establishment voices are not to be trusted, and that the free press alone is a trustworthy source that speaks uncomfortable truths that others suppress.” That’s a banger. Meanwhile, Bari was out to smoke out woke where it slept. College campuses in 2021, she and a handful of other insufferables, including one of the co-founders of Palantir, founded the University of Austin. Not to be confused with the University of Texas at Austin, which is a real school. UATX, as it was known, touted itself as a merit-first institution of higher learning. Everybody who met the academic requirements for admission and wasn’t an obvious red flag got in. Its faculty consists of professors who were canceled at other institutions. It is unaccredited, it doesn’t charge tuition, and it only offers one degree. Curiously, it’s absent from Bari Weiss’ Wikipedia page, but you know what the University of Austin does have? A bust of Bari Weis on display in the library. It was made by an AI 3D printer. And judging by how little that thing looks like, Bari Weiss… I think we can rest assured that AI will not be replacing sculptors anytime soon. In October 2025, Paramount Skydance purchased the Free Press for $150 million because what is money? That move was made by David Ellison, weird little son of Larry Ellison a billionaire MAGA acolyte. The younger Ellison appointed Bari Weiss to be editor-in-chief of CBS News. Now, Bari had no relevant TV experience and in fact had never done any real news gathering herself before beyond cherry picking tweets that helped her build her straw leftist. And the free press had about 60 employees while CBS News had about 1200. Weiss would soon prove to be exactly the idiot that people feared she’d be. She appointed as her deputy Adam Rubenstein who had edited that atrocious Tom Cotton New York Times piece that urged Trump to send troops into American cities to attack protesters after the death of George Floyd. Bari ended her first meeting with the entire newsroom with the cheer, Let’s do the fucking news! So funny. Words that would have sounded natural emerging from the mouth of Succession’s Kendall Roy in a scene meant to make Kendall look and sound like an entitled doofus who was in over his head. Bari traveled everywhere with bodyguards, which her colleagues made fun of behind her back. She urged colleagues to turn in more coverage of protests in Iran after seeing some videos that turned out to be from protests from three years ago. Which her colleagues also made fun of behind her back. Then the layoffs started. Eight on-air personalities got the ax. All were women. CBS News employees also noted that staffers of color tended to lose their jobs while white employees got moved to other positions. So how did Bari do the fucking news? Well, Weiss has a thwarted theater kid’s desire to be cast in the leading role, despite having the on-camera charisma of instant mashed potatoes. She moved into the office once occupied by CBS head anchor, Scott Pelley. Overlooking the entire newsroom, when her network landed a coveted interview with Erica Kirk, whose husband Charlie had been publicly assassinated months prior, Bari volunteered to handle the town hall style event herself rather than tapping a more seasoned actual journalist to handle it.

[clip of Bari Weiss]: One of the things that has happened over the three months since Charlie was murdered is that people have gone through the thousands, maybe tens of thousands of hours of words he produced. And I want to read a few that have captured the most attention, especially on the political left, okay?

[clip of Erica Kirk]: Okay, yeah.

[clip of Bari Weiss]: Some gun deaths were, quote, “Unfortunately worth it to preserve the Second Amendment,” he said. Acknowledging that he wishes he didn’t feel this way, he said, “I’m sorry, if I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.” He said “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a mistake.” Now, I realize that all of those quotes come from longer conversations that he had on his show, but he did say those things. And Charlie is being memorialized by many people. As a person who promoted civil discourse, as a person who said, come to the front of the line, let’s have a civil conversation. How do you square that with the statements I just read?

[clip of Erica Kirk]: I would love for everyone to be able to watch the full and entire clip of what he said. Charlie didn’t care what skin color you were, he didn’t what religion you were. His favorite word was earn. [laughter] He loved knowing that people worked hard to earn what they got.

Erin Ryan: He just died and his favorite word was earn?

[clip of Erica Kirk]: He worked so hard to build Turning Point USA. My husband is not to be deteriorated to two sentences. He’s not. He is a thought leader, and he was a brilliant man.

Erin Ryan: This whole thing was so confusing. They were both acting, and they were both bad at acting. Erica acted possessed. Bari did her best impression of somebody that knew what she was doing. Why was it a town hall? What was the purpose of the event? Who was the event for? Unfortunately, none of those questions were answered prior to its execution. The piece, which aired on a Saturday night, was a ratings bust, even with the alley-oop assist of the Army-Navy game as a lead-in. Turns out that Weiss and David Ellison overestimated how many American conservatives would turn away from the leg cams and bottle blondes of Fox News to watch a frumpy bisexual interview an unsettling widow. Glenn Greenwald, perhaps the winner of the biggest Bari Weiss hater award, which no hate for me, congrats Glenn Greenwald, pointed out in the aftermath of that event that despite the fact that CBS News has 7 million YouTube subscribers, the town hall had only racked up 72,000 YouTube views in two days. Then there was the Dokoupil debacle. Hey, that almost rhymes. Weiss took her hatchet to the CBS morning and evening shows at once by moving Tony Dokoupil from the former to the latter, alienating viewers of both in the process. Why Tony Dokoupil? It could have been that back in 2024, CBS News had spiked an interview that Dokoupil had conducted with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates was promoting a book he’d written that was sympathetic to the suffering of Palestinians. Dokoupil, whose ex-wife and two kids live in Israel, compared Coates to a terrorist. Somebody leaked audio of the meeting killing the piece to the Free Press, and Weiss published it. I’m sure it was a coincidence that Dokoupil was the one who got the nod for the evening news, based entirely on merit. On Dokoupil’s first broadcast anchoring the evening news, Weiss fucked with his teleprompter copy before broadcast, leading to this embarrassing on-air moment.

[clip of Tony Dokoupil]: All right, to other news, as you just heard from Jill. Well, to another news now, to Governor Walz. No, we’re going to do Mark Kelly. First day, first day, big problems here. Are we going to Kelly here, or are we going to go to Jonah Kaplan? We’re doing Mark Kelly, possibly demoted from his retired rank of captain in the Navy.

Erin Ryan: I’m Ron Burgundy? This is why you don’t hire bloggers to run TV shows. In January, Zeteo’s Prem Thakker posted a photo to Bluesky of a CBS news set surrounded by Jack Daniel’s branding with the word Whiskey Fridays with Tony Dokoupil positioned in the center. According to Thakker, quote, “some staff were only first made aware of it as they encountered CBS testing out set designs of a faux stocked bar in the newsroom featuring a large sponsor banner for Jack Daniels.” Thankfully, that never materialized, although it could have been, I don’t know, maybe interesting. In the ensuing months, Dokoupil grimaced and mugged as he logged more embarrassing moments, like the time he glazed Marco Rubio as the ultimate Florida man. Another time he did an awkward man on the street style interview where he asked randos in Grand Central Station to pronounce his last name, which I get the conceit behind as for months I was calling him Tony Dracula. But Weiss wasn’t done sucking ass. Her meddling has nearly tanked the credibility of CBS News’ flagship show, 60 Minutes. In January, Weiss swooped in at the last minute to spike a segment on CECOT using the flimsy excuse that they hadn’t gotten a response from the Trump White House. The end result was a textbook example of the Streisand effect, trying to conceal something from the public, but the effort to conceal it only draws more attention to the thing you’re attempting to conceal. The segment aired in Canada, was ripped and uploaded to social media, and was viewed millions of times. Bari looked like an idiot. In February, CBS News announced that it was bringing longevity author and health influencer Peter Attia on as a contributor. But soon his name appeared in the Jeffrey Epstein files. His name appeared on the Jeffrey Epstein files 1,700 times. Turns out not only was Attia quack adjacent, he was also pedophile adjacent. In one email, Attia assured Epstein that pussy is indeed low carb. In another, he told Epstein the biggest problem with being his friend was that quote, “The life you lead is so outrageous. And that I can’t tell a soul.” In another email, Epstein informed Attia that he’d gotten a fresh shipment. God, why do these guys always sound like they’re flirting with each other? Attia had provided referrals to Epstein, said he could help him extend his life by five years, if only to have more sex, and stayed in an apartment owned by Epstein. Well, the grossest detail of this already very gross story is that in his book, Attia has recalled staying in New York when his infant son had a heart attack, remaining there for work. But the Epstein files revealed that the day after his son was rushed to the hospital via ambulance in San Diego, Peter Attia was meeting with Jeffrey Epstein. Now, a sensible person would think this person is toxic. Get this trash out of my newsroom, get them off my network. But not Bari. Bari dug in. An internal struggle ensued. Finally, after weeks of back and forth, Attia resigned. In early April, Zeteo reported that Bari was at it again with the newsroom meddling, this time on a piece that aired on CBS News Sunday morning. The piece, which had been in the works for months, focused on Israeli archeological digs in occupied West Bank territory. Sources who spoke with Zeteo say that Bari jumped in and messed with the script and deceptively edited some interviews in a way that upset one of the interview subjects, a Palestinian cultural heritage researcher named Zaid Azhari. One CBS News staffer referred to Bari’s move as pulling a CECOT. I guess we can call it that now instead of the Streisand effect, right? Pulling a CECOT? I don’t know. I like Streisand effect. Perhaps if she’d been doing the fucking news rather than fighting the insidious forces of woke or behaving like a Netanyahu propagandist, she’d have noticed CBS News hemorrhaging viewers. In April, CBS Evening News boasted its second lowest overall viewership ever for the month. And in the 25-54 demographic, well, lowest ratings ever. Just for comparison, the number one nightly news broadcast, ABC World News Tonight with David Muir. Averaged 8.537 million total viewers and 1.56 million demo viewers during that time. Bari and Tony’s CBS Evening News averaged 3.771 million total views and 467,000 viewers in the adults 25-54 demographic for the week of April 20th. Now, there were people who said when Bari Weiss took over CBS News perennially, the third place nightly news broadcast, that the only direction to go was up. Bari showed them all, and in true contrarian fashion, has taken the venerated journalism outlet straight down. If past is prologue, this means Bari Weiss is about to be promoted to an even bigger job for which she’s even less qualified. So there you have it folks, Bari Weis, the woman who has boldly gone where many, many, many, white guys in golf carts have gone before. And because it’s just me this time, I’m going to make the unilateral decision about where she lies on a matrix of fucking guys. Hmm, where do I think she is? I think that she is a true believing zealot. And I think she’s a scheming sociopath. I will not be answering any follow-up questions. I’ve been talking for over an hour, guys. This is too much talking. That about wraps up the time we have for this episode of This F*cking Guy. If you like what you see and hit the like button, share with your friends, and leave us a comment if you’ve got an idea for a future F*cking Guy. Subject. This episode was written and researched by me, Erin Ryan. Claire Fogarty did our fact-checking, all the rest of the credits, as well as links to our sources like Clare Malone’s work with The New Yorker and Glenn Greenwald’s work for The Intercept can be found in our show notes. Trust me, guys, the bibliography is always a fun read. Take care, be well, stay woke, and fuck that guy.