The Megyn Kelly Show - Bari Weiss on the State of the Media, Cancel Culture, and Anti-Semitism | Ep. 54

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Bari Weiss, journalist, editor of a new Substack publication, and author of "How To Fight Anti-Semitism," to talk about her time at the New York Times and her decision to leave, the leftward "woke" drift of the media and where the legacy media stands now, our cancel culture society, self-censorship, fighting anti-Semitism and the place of Jews in the cultural hierarchy, her move to Substack, and her recent engagement.Find Bari Weiss' Substack here: https://bariweiss.substack.com/Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today, we've got Barry Weiss. So excited. She has spoken to precious few people since she resigned from the New York Times in an act of defiance against their small mindedness, their unwillingness to open up the op ed pages and the Times in general to divergent points of view. She's on the center left or at least was I'm going to ask her where she is right now and really just want to debate. And as you know, that newspaper isn't interested in that. And so we'll get an inside look at the New York Times from somebody who hasn't really spoken much about this at all. Very excited for that. So stand by for one second, because before we get to her, let's talk about

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Norton.com slash MK to save 25% off and secure your online world. Check it out. And now Barry Weiss, journalist, author of How to Fight Antisemitism and editor, thankfully, yay, of a new Substack publication. What an honor to have you here. I'm excited for this conversation. I'm so excited to be here, Megan. I was teasing this interview the other day and I was saying you walked out of the New York Times like Daenerys Targaryen walked out of that hut where the men were trying to abuse her and setting it on fire and walking out gorgeous. She was nude. I think you had your

clothes on when you left the Times. And but you were you were unmasked. I was very sweaty, much sweatier, less less hair for sure. But it was one of those moments. And I felt it. Listen, having worked places before, which shall remain nameless, where I have definitely been the target of bullies, intolerant bullies. I was like, oh, my God, I love this woman. And I, of course, had been your fan prior to that. And a lot of the stuff you've been doing, you've been making great headlines.

But let's just start with that feeling. And I, of course, had been your fan prior to that on a lot of the stuff you've been doing. You've been making great headlines. But let's just start with that feeling. The day you wrote your scathing resignation letter, which we'll get to, and left what I'm sure started off as your dream job, editing these op-eds of The Times and bringing in new and diverse voices to the paper of record. When you wrote that and you sent it and then you walked out. How did that feel? Well, to be clear, I didn't walk out of the building because we were already in COVID. So I guess I didn't have the cinematic moment. COVID ruins everything. With Margot Robbie packing up her box and everyone cheers. It was less cinematic, less glamorous, and more,

frankly, a long time coming. I'd been working on that letter since, you know, for a good few weeks, really, since the Tom Cotton debacle, which I'm sure we'll get into. I wish I could tell you, Megan, that I was as strong as the Mother of dragons and that the feeling that I had was the way that a lot of people perceived it, which is, you know, my favorite tweet was that Barry Weiss walked out of the New York Times, the flamethrower on her back. And I certainly aspire to be that kind of person. But oftentimes I, you know, I'm the kind of person that when I wanted to run the New York City Marathon, I told like 100 people about it so that I would be obligated to do it. And I'm a little bit like that in general.

Like I sometimes take a leap before I'm even before I even sort of emotionally understood what it will mean, meaning I knew it was the right thing to leave. I knew that I did not come into journalism to tell a half version of the truth or to become a half version of myself. I knew that there were things for me, and I was always really clear about this, that were way more important than professional prestige or being popular. And it wasn't a question in my mind that the time had come for me to leave. But it was only sort of in the weeks and months following that I had the sort of emotional satisfaction that maybe you had while reading it. The feeling I had while writing it was tremendous clarity, but also fear. Because when you leap out of a place like the New York Times and, you know, for better or worse, it's still the kind of place, at least in the cohorts, the places where I live

and eat and hang out that, you know, it inspires a kind of like, you know, people are impressed when you say that you work there. And so I would be lying if I didn't say that I had a lot of fear in what would come next for me. Yeah, of course. That's totally natural. But I think you did the world such a service in making that letter public. You know, I can relate a little bit on, you know, we pulled our kids. Our boys have been pulled. Our daughter's going to go soon. She's going to finish up the school year. And it's not to say we didn't love

our schools. We did love our schools a lot and the people there, but they went so hard left. They were no longer a place for us. And we absolutely could have pulled them and said nothing about it, you know, and I think which is what most parents who would pull their kids in this situation would do for understandable reasons. And the reason I went public with it in an interview with Glenn Lowry and Coleman Hughes was I didn't want to be I didn't want to make it only good for me. You know, I didn't want to just save us. I wanted to help save other parents who are stuck there right now. And I feel like that's what you did. You helped the reporters who are still at the Times, who are on your side. I realize they're all liberal, but they're not all wokesters who don't want to hear anybody's

opposing view. And just the media in general deserves to be shamed for doing more and more of this. One of the reasons I think that this letter and my departure was so resonant with people is because it's not just, as you just said, it's not just about the New York Times. The New York Times is a very important part of the story because we need a free press. We need a press that holds up the mirror to society rather than just a shard so that people can make rational decisions about where to live and where to work and where to invest their money and who to vote for. But really, this is a story about, and I think this is perhaps the most undercovered story of our era, in part because the people that would cover it are implicated in it.

And that is the story of ideological succession. It's the story of the way that institutions that sure leaned left, had a liberal bias, but fundamentally were sort of speaking the truth when they claim to speak for most Americans have shifted radically. And that's the story, not just of the press, it's the story of our universities, it's the story, as you know, increasingly of our K through 12 educational system. It's the story of our publishing houses, it's the story of Hollywood, and increasingly, it's the story of corporate America. And that is a story that I wanted to tell, and it was impossible to tell it when I remained in a place that was enthralled to it, if that makes sense. helps the rest of us feel somewhat soothed when we hear somebody who's got that talent write it. And just to frame it for the audience, the resignation letter was dated July 14th, 2020. It was about a month after the whole Tom Cotton debacle, which we will get into where he wrote

this op-ed about how we should control the unrest in the streets. And then the editor who allowed that op-ed was forced to resign three days later. So you write in part, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper, that truth isn't a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job it is to inform everyone else. Twitter's 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. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences. And it goes on from there. I love that because it is a performance space, right? The purpose has changed from enlightenment to performance in a way.

I mean, a really strong example of this that I kind of couldn't believe until I saw it. There was a story that briefly went viral on Twitter. I think it was two weeks ago, but I've sort of lost track of time in COVID. And it was about the sin of the cultural appropriation of tiki bars. This was a story that was on the cover of the business section of the New York Times in a year in which by lots of estimates, one in five small American businesses will be closed by the end of this pandemic. And here I am supposed to care about, you know, about tiki bars? I mean, it sort of boggles the mind. And just the assumptions, right, that are, so it. But you also see it in the stories that are not told, the ones that are overlooked and the ones that are emphasized. And I just think that that's obvious to me about, you know, pretty, pretty early on. But it became markedly worse in the time that I was there. And yeah, I mean, there's so much to say,

but I'll let you lead me because I want to know what you're most curious about. Sure, sure. I mean, well, I know you were you worked at the journal. So just so our audience knows, you went to Columbia. You worked for a while at Tablet, which is really good. Tablet is an online magazine that focuses on- It's the best magazine in the country, honestly. I really do. The writing is so good. It focuses on Jewish news, politics, and culture, but just really American news, politics, and culture. And man, do they have a good ability to find good writers. In fact, the one that you tweeted out, I want to talk to you about because it really was beautifully done not long ago. But anyway, so you're a senior editor

at Tablet in 2011. Then you move on to the journal op-ed editor. And then you go for like Brett Stevens, kind of you go from the Wall Street Journal to The New York Times because post Trump's election, to their credit, they decided to try to broaden the ideological range of their opinion staff. Right. Like we missed it. We didn't see it coming. We don't understand half the country. Let's let's try to get people with. And of course, you are about as right as they were willing to go. You're a liberal, but you're center left. Well, I think what's so strange about this is, in a way, I've sort of lived out the tribalization in the country, meaning at the Wall Street Journal, I was always the squish. I was always the leftmost flank of a conservative editorial page. And it's funny, I think I might like that position more ultimately now that

I've experienced both. But when I left the journal and went to the times, all of a sudden, you know, I'd been used to being sort of the leftmost flank. And all of a sudden I was considered something like, you know, a fascist, which if you know me and know anything about my life and my views is kind of hilarious. Um, but that was already the atmosphere, the atmosphere when I walked in the door. And that was well before I had weighed in on Me Too and on lots of other hot button issues. Right. You know, on Me Too in a way that was defensive of some of its more prominent targets, which I do want to talk to you about too. So I just had to

tell you, I can relate to this so much. I used to say that I felt like the Rachel Maddow of Fox News and the Sean Hannity of NBC. Yes, exactly. You know, I think I guess the one comfort in that is I feel like I still am, you know, in the kind of, you know, I'm center right on certain positions, center left on others. I feel like I, you know, I'm friends with people who voted for Trump. I'm friends with people who voted for Biden. I think I'm where a lot of Americans are. It's just that the news media has become so polarized that you watch one, you know, you watch one network if you think the other half of America is evil and you watch the other if you think the opposite. Again, and that sort of goes back to one of the reasons I wanted to leave. I didn't want to be part, not to sound too high-minded about it, but I honestly felt like a lot of what we were doing was contributing and stoking the polarization of the country. Right. Hashtag part of the problem.

And I'm honestly really, really worried about that. And that's not why I became a journalist. And I wanted and still want to be part of projects that are helping us understand one another. The question remains of if there's a way to monetize that kind of project, but, but that's definitely what I'm most interested in doing. Now, I think there were two lanes for you there. One, the one you just pointed out, this is not good for society. And it's, it's contrary to my life's mission as a journalist. And, and what I, what I believe is important about being a journalist. And the second lane is the internal bullying that you suffered. Again, like,

let's like looking in the mirror, Barry. But there was bullying there. And you weren't like, I mentioned Brett Stevens, I will say to the Times' credit, he's an actual conservative that they did hire, but he's been, you know, he's been excoriated there too. But how did that manifest? Was that a slow burn where you just realized, oh, wow, they don't like me here? Or were there a couple of incidents where it became clear? I'll start with the general and then get to the specific. It is directly tied to the narrowing of what political scientists call the Overton window, the spectrum of what is considered an acceptable opinion or perspective. As that narrowed, and for those of us who didn't sort of go along with every aspect of the woke orthodoxy,

and there were constantly new items being added to that list, you became something like a heretic or traitorous or accused of sort of not being on the right side of history. And I'm really not exaggerating there. So, you know, for anyone who's listening, who's ever been in a deeply religious environment knows, you know, if you're in a atmosphere of people that, you know, are true believers, um, there's not a lot of room for skepticism. And going back to, I, I, I've been in this place before in my life, you know, you mentioned Columbia. And when I was a student at Columbia University, I took a lot of classes in the Middle East Studies Department, which is sort of

famously radical, especially on the issue of Israel. And, you know, in lots of classrooms in the Middle East Studies Department at Columbia, there was an assumption, you know, to, you know, in keeping with the Soviet propaganda line that Zionism was racism. Well, if that was the case and if Zionism was racism, then to be a Zionist was to be a racist. And everyone knows in American society how we should treat racists. And so, you know, there was kind of like, I had already experienced that sort of thing before. It was just shocking for me to experience it at the place that prides itself on being the paper of record that prides itself on telling the truth, excuse me, the truth, even when it's inconvenient and in holding up a mirror to society. So from the moment I walked in, I would say like,

it was a little mean girlsy. Like I was never, I was never going to be invited to sit at the cool kids table. I had already, you know, published not a lot, but enough that was out there that if you Googled me, you could find, you know, like hit pieces about my college activism that had been written in the intercept. So I would say that I was sort of walking in and people were a little suspicious of me. But it got more and more heated, I would say, as the Trump administration sort of sat in. People started to really like not lose their minds about it. I might be overstating it, but saw anything that was not pushing the line of orange man evil

and everything orange man touches is bad as being something like traitorous. And so, you know, it was strange because this is the kind of environment where, you know, inclusion and diversity are the watchwords and bullying is wrong. But like bullying the right people is not just OK there. It's kind of like a virtue. And, you know, one of the ways this played out was had the right perspective, you could basically you'd be unscrutinized and you could act totally unprofessionally, for example, on Twitter and nothing would happen to you. maybe like February 2018, I tweeted a video of an Olympic figure skater whose name was Mirai Nagasu. Parents, she's a Japanese American. Parents were born in Japan. She was born here. And I tweeted

a line from Hamilton that was immigrants, they get the job done. And there was an absolute, and obviously, not obviously, but for those who know my work, I am extremely pro-immigrant. And I meant the tweet as nothing other than praise of this incredible feat. It was a video of her hitting a triple axel, I think. But there was an absolute outcry in the Slack channels at the New York Times. They compared my tweet to Japanese internment camps. Seriously, there were town hall meetings that were held about the tweet. I had to meet with the heads of like the communications department. And ultimately, I, you know, I was on real time with Bill Maher like a week later, and I found a way, you know, per their request to apologize for the tweet. And then if you kind of take a look at the things that other people at the New York Times regularly tweet, not just about other Americans, but about their own colleagues, you know, I've

been called a liar by my colleagues. I've been subtweeted by a coworker sitting two desks away, accusing me of, you know, bigotry and racism and nothing ever happened to those people. So, you know, it's hard to run a newsroom where there's one set of rules for one people and another set of rules for another. And by the way, we should point out to our audience, you are diverse. You are diverse. That doesn't save you. I don't even know what diverse means anymore. I mean, because I mean, I don't know. You're LGBT. Well, I'm L. Yeah. You're L. And you're a Jewish woman who's engaged to another woman. I don't know. I think some of us outside of that category would think it would save you or it would help you with the New York times. Nope.

You has to be full submission to their orthodoxy or you're out. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, that's the most concise way of saying it. I could gild the lily there, but I won't. So did you ever have like in-person arguments with people or was it more just the frosty feeling? It wasn't just a feeling. I mean, this was, I mean, by the end, you know, there were Slack channels with, this was following the Tom Cotton op-ed, there were Slack channels with more than 2,000 employees of the New York Times, including every member of the masthead of the paper going up to the very top. And people were saying, you know, if this company is going to be an inclusive and diverse company, how, you know, we need to talk about how Barry Weiss still works here.

Or people were putting next to my name. They put guillotine emojis next to the name of my, the boss who hired me, who was pushed out of the paper, James Bennett. Um, I don't think anyone was punished or fired for any, I know that they weren't fired for any of those things. Um, so it was very explicit by the end. But there were certain things like there was a, you know, there was another editor who, you know, my editor, one of my editors was sort of checking a piece by me. And she said, is Barry Weiss writing about the Jews again? Now, of course, you know, he laughed that off because what else are you going to do? But like, just imagine that being said about any other minority group.

It would be unfathomable. I could go on, but the point is really that this closure and narrowing of what is acceptable inevitably leads to the bullying of people that don't comply. And that is the story at the New York Times, but it's the story all over the place. And my inbox is like an incredible microcosm of this. And I'm actually thinking about doing this series called The Closet. And I'm not talking about, obviously, The Closet, you know, with regards to people's sexual orientation or gender identity. I'm talking about people like normal liberals, not, you know, not MAGA supporters, not even conservatives, although, of course, there are conservatives among this group, but normal liberals working inside publishing houses, inside the legacy media, teaching at elite private schools, people working in law firms. I've even heard from doctors who are closeting their most basic and I think commonsensical political views because they know that if they are out about them, that they can see what awaits them. Because we've had enough examples of it. We've seen people, you know, lose their jobs for bad tweets. We've seen adults cheer on as teenagers, you know, essentially act like Stasi against other teenagers. You know,

canceling has become a normal part of American life and you don't need that many examples of it to get the message. And the effect, the sort of downstream effects of those very public examples are extremely, extremely real. And one of the things that's really alarming to me is that, you know, we live in a democracy. Our First Amendment is most important. It's the right to speech, the right to a free press. And yet people are double thinking in our democracy. And, you know, it's not like the threat is being, you know, shipped off to the gulag as it was in the Soviet Union. And yet people are increasingly acting as if that is the case. And I think that's, you know, I think that is just such an important

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so you can understand the consequences of spending too much while they boost your credit. You can enroll in minutes and see how many points you can add to your credit score and how fast. Visit scoremaster.com slash MK. That's scoremaster.com slash MK. One of those cases where you say, That's scoremaster.com slash MK. who when she was, I think, 15 and had just gotten her learner's permit, tweeted out, or didn't she? She didn't tweet out. She direct messaged somebody a four-second video of her singing along, singing a verse from, I guess, a rap song where she said, I can drive N-word. She sang, I can drive N-word, sent it as a direct message. You know, stupid move, 15-year-old

celebrating her permit in a way that was not appropriate, which she would be the first to admit. And that person showed it to another student at the school who was he was a minor. He was black and he saved it. He videotaped it and he saved it and he lay in wait for Mimi. And he decided to spring it on her, not when she found herself in a racial controversy or where, you know, she did something that evidenced a prejudice against people of color. He sprung it on her when she had gotten admitted, I think, to University of Tennessee as a cheerleader. She was, you know, one of those top notch cheerleaders, like actual kick ass athletes, and was about to go off to college and said something over the summer in support of Black Lives Matter. She did.

She was horrified by George Floyd, the video. She tweeted in support of Black Lives Matter, and that is when he decided to ruin her life and make it public, to go public with it, which he knew very well, given the climate, what would happen to her. And the New York Times finally wrote a story about this, which celebrated him, painted him as a hero for hurting her. She got kicked off the cheer squad and the university promptly gave her one of the very nice daughter you have there. Be ashamed something happened to her here at our college. You might want to really consider whether you want to send her Mimi's parents, all of which they got proof of.

And Mimi wasn't allowed to go there. She couldn't go to college and her life was ruined over a four second stupid moment when she was 15. And the New York Times published that article gleefully and had exactly the wrong hero in it. I just it was so irresponsible and it was so cruel what they did and not to mention what the kid did, which shouldn't be celebrated because it's going to encourage more kids to turn state's evidence on one another. But that's them, right? That's the same paper that was asking. She's not writing about the Jews again, is she? I mean, that's those are the people who are lecturing us on morality and how we need to be better people. Yeah. I mean, I just think it's there's dozens of examples like that. That was one that really broke through and I'm glad it broke through.

But, you know, we're living in just a merciless age. And I don't think that people have reckoned with what it means. Like we talk a lot about the internet and Twitter and social, but it's like, do people understand that we're living in an era in which you cannot make a mistake? You cannot make a mistake. And everything is captured for all eternity. And there's just so little incentive. You know, I spent a lot of time talking to teenagers and college students who want to get into public life or want to be journalists or want to be op-ed writers or maybe want to run for office one day. And these kids rightly see no incentive to do so. And if

they do want to, why would they ever take any kind of strong opinion? Why would they stand up for something unpopular? That's exactly it. That's what you wrote in your resignation letter saying there are, it's very clear to the young people there are rules. One, speak your mind to your own peril. Two, never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. Three, never believe an editor or a publisher who urges you to go against the grain. Oh, I mean, don't you think it's true? I do. And it scares me because as I always say, the bullies have really won when, when they're, when they're in your head, changing your behavior, right? Like it's never good to be bullied, but it's really scary when the bullies turn you into a bully of yourself.

Right. And that's what's happening. I want to read you two really short things that summarize the moment I think we're in with regard to this. I get emails every single day from people like this young journalist who wrote me, I never thought I'd practice the kind of self-censorship I now do when pitching editors, but I have no power to do otherwise. For woke, skeptical young writers, banishment and rejection awaits you if you attempt to depart even in minor ways from the sacred

ideology. I used to live in China where I worked as a foreign correspondent, and these dynamics are eerily similar to aspects of the cultural revolution. I had a student from Harvard write me the other day from his personal email because he was too scared to write it from his college email to explain. And he wrote to me and explained that he self-censors even when he's talking to some of his best friends for fear of word getting around, and that he, you know, projects what he thinks professors want to hear in his papers and tries to write answers and write papers with the perspective that mirrors their worldview rather than what he thinks are the best arguments. Like, they sound like missives, like smuggled out of a totalitarian society. I think one thing I'm hoping, given that, you know, the era of Trump, hopefully with him out of the picture and the clownishness and the, you know, just the grossness of a lot of what that meant, that we will be able to see this other threat with more clarity.

Maybe that's Pollyanna-ish, but that's what I'm hoping for. You know, I hope you're right. I mean, I certainly hope that there are more people coming over to our side, but they're so smart, the way these sort of radical leftists have seized control of so many aspects of our culture and our debate, because the less people speak up and offer differing views, the more people who haven't said anything yet think they're in the minority and that they can't speak up. You know, one of the reasons I've been so vocal about this and I try to talk about the third rail stuff, you know, trans, race, sexism and misogyny so bluntly is because I think it's American. I think it's uniquely American. I've never been

one to be ginger with my language, but I think people need to be reminded it's not East Germany. It's the United States of America. You're allowed to talk about issues. Don't be shamed out of having the opinions that you have. Debate is the answer. Silence is the devil. And don't listen to the people who tell you your views are not OK and they're not shared. Because the truth is, I forget that 75 million people who voted for Trump. You're you're of the left. Most I think most people on the left are with us. They're they're just freaking terrified. Yeah. And you know what? They're right to be terrified to some extent, because how much time and effort does it cost for me to go on Twitter and call someone an ism? It takes two seconds and nothing, nothing. You don't need a mass group of people to sort of

ruin your reputation and take away your career and hurt your family. You just need a dedicated group of like 25 people because I'm watching it happen to a friend right now. And that scares people. And it's not just, you know, the fact that you could get, you know, kicked off of Twitter for saying, you know, for misgendering someone. Meantime, the Ayatollah Khomeini talks about genociding the Jews, but okay. No problem. So it's not that. It's that it's not that far-fetched, and a lot of people in Silicon Valley have been talking about this over the past two weeks, to imagine this sort of censoriousness coming to your email or to the browser that you use, or maybe even to the bank. And so I think what's going on right now is not just people protecting themselves for whatever

the mores are in the current moment, they're projecting out to what they could be a year or two years or three years from now. And the other thing that I'm, but there's this sort of paradox because people are silencing themselves and closeting themselves in order to protect themselves and maybe they will in the short term. What they don't realize is that in doing that, they're sacrificing not just themselves in the long term, but the whole thing that makes this country exceptional. Like speak out now. If you get one thing from this conversation or one thing from my letter, my story, like speak out now because it's not just about you and your mortgage or, you know, your professional advancement. It's about our ability to protect the things that have made this country, you know, the last best hope on Earth.

That's what's at stake here. And I really hope people understand that. You've written so beautifully about this. I mean, it's been a pleasure preparing for this interview because I got to read so much Barry Weiss. And one of the things you pointed out in the same vein is what we're losing is liberal America. And that is not used in the political sense, not conservative versus liberal, but liberal ideals. I just want to read this to the audience because there's so much. It's so hard to choose which ones I wanted to read because they're all so beautiful. Megan, thank you. Oh, no, there's amazing. All right, so you're writing about how we've lost that. America used

to be liberal. Then you write, not liberal in the narrow partisan sense, but liberal in the most capacious and distinctly American sense of the word. The belief that everyone is equal because everyone is created in the image of God. The belief in the sacredness of the individual over the group or the tribe. The belief that the rule of law and equality under that law is the foundation of a free society. The belief that due process and the presumption of innocence are good and that mob violence is bad. The belief that pluralism is a source of our strength, that tolerance is a reason for pride, and that liberty of thought, faith, and speech are the bedrocks of democracy. The liberal worldview was one that

recognized that there were things, indeed the most important things in life, that were located outside of the realm of politics. Friendships, art, music, family, love. This was a world in which Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg could be close friends because, as Scalia once said, some things are more important than votes. You don't even realize you've lost it until it's been chipped away and chipped away and you have to ask yourself, why do I feel so bad? Why do I feel so sad? I know something's gone that I once loved. And this is it. This is what's happening. It's not about, I mean, listen, it's a little bit about critical race theory and that stuff, which needs to be stopped in my view, but it's much

bigger than that. Yeah. I mean, I think that I grew up, I write in my book that I feel like I grew up on a holiday from history and maybe other people listening felt that way, too. That's certain that it's like my my friend likes to joke that Americans are people that think history happens to other people. Like it seemed like we were inoculated from some of the worst things that were going on in other times, of course, and in other places. And I think what we've learned over the past few years really, really clearly is that the veneer of civilization and the things that we maybe assumed were as natural as gravity, like the things you just read off in that paragraph, they're not. They need to be protected and defended and sacrificed for. And the things that make this country exceptional, you know, it's not bloodline. It's not, you know, soil. It's our ideas. It's our ideas. And when those ideas are under siege, and they are very

much under siege now from lots of different directions, then America gets pulled back into the mean of history. And I think that's what we're living through right now. I think that, you know, nothing less than those ideals that make us exceptional are under attack. And, you know, I think back to this summer and, you know, lots of statues were pulled down like Confederate generals. But among them were people like our first founding fathers, like Abraham Lincoln, our second founding fathers, like Frederick Douglass. And you didn't hear a lot of people that are supposed to be our intellectual and moral betters, you know, our elites offering a full throated condemnation of that. And that's a problem. Like I see a direct connection between the vandals that pulled down Lincoln and the vandals that stormed the Capitol. Like both groups of those people do not love what is good about America. And I'm worried about, I mean, obviously, I'm really worried about where we are. And I just think that, you know, we've seen other countries sort of torn apart by the dislocations of the 21st century. And it's hard to imagine that we would be one of them.

And yet, you know, anyone that studies history sees that, you know, nothing lasts. And we're so young. And of course, it's possible for things to come apart. That's why I think it is, you know, all of us that love what this country is at its very best, even with its flaws, are obligated to defend the things that, you know, the vandals are trying to tear down. Right. The vandals beyond the statues. They're trying to tear down a lot of things that we care about. You try to, you toy around with the name, you know, because I do think some of us have been struggling to define, forgive the rhetoric, but the enemy, you know, like, what, what is this force against

which we're fighting? You know, I'll get out there and I'll talk about some of these absurdities that are being done to us. And I don't have a name for it. And you, you've written, and I quote again here that American liberalism is under siege. There's a new ideology vying to replace it. No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it's social justice. The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as the successor ideology, as in the successor to liberalism. At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly describes its mixture of postmodernism,

post-colonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality. Until then, it's up to each of us to see it plainly, look past the hashtags and the slogans and the jargon to assess it honestly, and then explain it to others. And that's the challenge, right? To get our arms around what are, because it's like, if you, I can't stand critical race theory. I can't believe that this thing is making its way into corporate America and into the schools of America and that the shaming of people based on pigmentation has now become acceptable. And if you think it's okay, just because the people who are being shamed are whites, you haven't studied history to see how that pendulum swings back.

Right. Like this is not going to end well if we continue going down this route. It's creating more racism, which is what I hate so much about. It's totally anti the MLK dream, which they're open about. I mean, people pushing this stuff don't believe in the MLK theory. They don't believe they think if you're after content of character instead of color of skin, that's your racism talking. But if you focus in on that, right, the response from the sort of the radical left is you're a racist. What you're trying to avoid is an education on the history of racism in America and how to combat it. You know say, you're insane. Robin DiAngelo's book is racist. Her theory is racist. I'm fighting against racism. I don't believe we have the same goal. Get rid of racism if we can, or at least eliminate it in the pockets in which it still exists or work toward it. But we have a very different approach and very different, very deep disagreement on the methods. That kind of talk, that kind of language is not available to most people. They don't even understand that that's the argument we're having. That's what's been so genius about this movement, is that it frames itself as social justice, as the new civil rights movement, as anti-racism. Who wouldn't want to sign up for those things? But in reality, it is cynical. It is intolerant.

It is neo-racist. It is neo-racist. The idea that some people are born into original sin or collective guilt because of their skin color and that other people have more claim to morality and truth because of theirs. I don't want to live in a world that believes that. I don't want to live in a country that accepts that as normal. And one of the things that I think is so important is, you know, we've lived through the past few years, you know, we've seen just such a degradation of language and such a coarsening of language. And I think one of the things that's very important is for us to reclaim the language. And that's certainly the case when it comes to critical race theory. Again, do you believe in equality under the law? Do you believe that we should strive to live in a world where color doesn't matter? Do you believe that, you know, the world is complicated and people should not be slotted into, you know, two categories, you know, victim a better job of explaining it. And while there are people out there that are, you know, again, like it is hard to explain it because these are ideas that, you know, are quite, can be quite jargony come from, um, the fringes of the academy. Um, you know, it's post-structural is like, we don't have to go into all of it, but I know why it's hard for people to explain it, even though they're trying to do a good job. And I think, frankly, it's the job of people like me and you to sound the alarm on it, even more than we already are.

No, we have to take it a step larger because it's it's so much bigger than just media, than just K through 12, than just college. It's it's cultural and it's institutional and it's growing. And it's my biggest concern about Joe Biden's presidency and control now by the Democrats of the House and the Senate, because while I do think he's probably more moderate in his policies than we could have gotten, he's already shown a willingness to tip the hat to this. We heard some of it in his inaugural address. And unless people find their spine and find the courage to speak out against what is neo-racism, we're going to get a whole lot more of it. Back to Barry in just one second. But first, sticking to your New Year's resolution is a matter of making one right decision at a time. You know, I always have trouble with my New Year's resolutions, don't you?

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I sent out a tweet moments after it happened, and I watched it, saying, There will be time for analyzing tomorrow. Today I feel deep love for our country, and I'm praying for President Biden, Vice President Harris, and for all of us as we navigate what comes next. And that really is how I felt. I always feel very patriotic when I watch the inaugurations, whether I voted for the guy or the gal or not. And that's how I felt when I watched Biden and Harris take the oaths of office.

I just, it makes you love America. It makes you grateful to live here. And it was a peaceful transition of power. I just, it makes you love America. It makes you grateful to live here. And it was a peaceful transition of power. I realized Trump didn't go, but it was utterly peaceful. In fact, I mean, of course it was locked down. You know, it felt peaceful and there was not this widespread outbreak of violence from city to city and state capitals as some had feared and predicted. It was a lovely day. And also, I do think it's amazing that, you know, seeing a woman of color assume the vice presidency was very cool. We've never had a woman in the White House in the top or second job yet, never mind a woman of color. So it's great. Those

barriers are good. They're good for little girls to see, little boys and girls of all colors and backgrounds. You know, they do say if you can see it, you can be it. So there's something to it. Anyway, the bottom line is Biden's speech was very good. It was also a little what's the word hypocritical is as he called for unity in the best terms he possibly could. He was stoking some of the race wars again. And, you know, his team is behind the scenes making lists of who they're going to punish from the trump administration as they proceed with an impeachment against the guys even though he's left office it's not the most uniting plan it's a little bit more divisive and i actually think that um unity is not possible it's not we can lower the temperature we can be a little

kinder to each other but we're gonna fight uh the two sides don't agree and i'm not even talking about things like granting a path to citizenship for 11 million people who are here and undocumented. I'm talking about this culture war that we've been talking about on this show today and on other days. We're talking about the very heart of how we live, how we can talk to each other. Do we shame one another and our children day after day in schools and elsewhere? Must everyone bend the knee to one small group or another who tells us how we must feel, how we must talk, how we must be? No, we mustn't.

That's not a requirement. And the more you try to shame half the country for not doing exactly what you want them to do and being exactly who you want them to be, the more divided we're going to get. So until Biden starts talking about that and living that, it's not going to be a united country. I do have hopes for lowered temperature, less incendiary rhetoric, less personal attacks. The thin skinned nature of President Trump was not good for the country. And so it's nice to have somebody who has proven an ability to keep quiet and stay out of the fray, you know, from time to time. I think that might come as a refreshing change. We'll see. Let's stay open minded. But unity on the things that matter. Don't count on it. Back to Barry. One of the things that seems to rise with

this, you know, triple down on what they call anti-racism for some reason seems to be anti-Semitism. Like why, why has discrimination bias toward even hatred toward Jewish people, risen to the extent I feel it has, I think you feel it has, in the past, let's say, 10 years. You see it everywhere, and it's given an open pass. Yeah. Oh, my God. This is, I could talk about this for hours. Look, I think that any caste system, so let me put it this way. I'll kind of do a 10,000 foot view and then I'll try and drill down to your question. In the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and that is what it is,

it is a conspiracy theory. The Jews or Jews or the Jewish state comes to stand for whatever a given culture or civilization defines as its most loathsome or disgusting qualities. Okay. And that's how under, that's how the Jews can be so many things at once. It's how under Nazism, the Jews become the race contaminators, how under communism, we're the bourgeois arch capitalists. I could go on through history, but you get the drift. Right now, Jews are in a very precarious and strange position because you have the accusation that comes from the far right, from people like the killer who stormed into my synagogue in Pittsburgh two years ago. And he said, you know, all Jews must die. And he killed 11 of my neighbors. And he was driven by, I think,

what is just very archetypal view of Jews from the far right. And it goes like this. Jews, at least American Jews, are overwhelmingly of Eastern European descent. They're Ashkenazi. They appear to be white. And yet they're in fact, and this is the language of this disgusting view, not mine. In fact, they are loyal, slavishly loyal to black people and brown people and Muslims and immigrants. And so in a way, they're the greatest trick the devil has ever played. So the Jews are sort of fake white people. So when you hear in Charlottesville, Jews will not replace us, what they mean is not, you know, Jews are going to take my place in the corner office. They mean

the Jews are the secret hand opening the borders to all of these people who will replace white America. So that's the knock against us on the far right. And on the far left, it's kind of a mirror image. What the far left says is the Jews claim to be a minority. They say that they're oppressed. And by every measure, the greatest number of hate crimes every year in this country are carried out against Jews, even though we're less than 2% of the population. So they claim to be a minority. They say they're oppressed, but hold on, they're white. They're white passing. They're white adjacent. More than that, they support Israel, which is the last standing bastion of white colonialism in the Middle East. So in fact, not only are they not a minority and not oppressed, they're handmaidens to white supremacy. Does that make sense? So that's what's happening on both scores. To drill down a little

bit more on what's happening on the left, the left, the far left, not the liberal left, the far left, the left that talks a lot about intersectionality and critical race theory, they're suggesting essentially that we flip the caste system that has existed in Western civilization up until five minutes ago, rather than fight to get rid of the caste system. So if the old caste system had Brad Pitt and John Hamm at the top, and at the very bottom, a Black woman who had some kind of disability, let's say, they're saying, let's flip that. So now let's put the Brad Pitt's of the world at the very bottom and those with the most sort of victim status at the very top. Well, in that new rubric, American Jews who have, you know, outsized success compared to our numbers, they're something like, you know, just above the Brad Pitt

of the world. And so if you look at the world that way, our oppression, our, the physical attacks that are taking place almost every single day against visible Jews in neighborhoods of Brooklyn, like Crown Heights and Borough Park, they don't rank. And so that's one of the things that is so dangerous about this moment is that, you know, if you see the entire world only in terms of one lens, and that lens is black and white, that lens is color, well, you're going to overlook hatred against Jews. They don't rank. That's so well said. I get it now. It's Jews don't count, right? If someone said to another editor at the New York Times, are you writing about the blacks again? Are you writing about the trans again? Are you writing

about the gays again? Think about how that sounds to your ear. It's disgusting. And yet some people to say about Jews. And the same thing goes with, you know, you know, I find it just unbelievably striking that we ran an op ed by Tom Cotton that essentially the paper, you know, basically rescinded. They ran like an 800 word editor's note at the top apologizing for running it. And yet the paper ran not one, but two puff pieces about Alice Walker, who is a vile anti-Semite who writes poems about the blood libel. Neither puff piece mentioned anything about her Jew hatred. And when I complained internally over the course, you know, more and more passionate notes, I was told that, you know, she was a literary elder and we had already run the piece and, you know, they wouldn't be appending any correction or editor's note. I actually didn't know that myself about Alice Walker, who, you know, our audience probably knows that she wrote The Color Purple among other books. She did one of those,

like I've done one of these for the times where they do like, I don't know, your 10 favorite books or 20 questions on books. And, and can you just explain, cause I had to look it up. I wasn't familiar with the author or the, or the poem that she was praising and she doubled down on it. Well, even when it was pointed out to her, Hey, you know, do you want to back off of this? And she was like, Nope. Can you just tell our audience what we're talking about? Yeah. So Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple, which a lot of people love. But she is she is an acolyte of David Icke, who is, you know, a conspiracy theorist that I think has been banned from YouTube. He's an anti-vaxxer. He lives in England and he believes in the lizard Illuminati.

I'm not exaggerating. He believes that there's like a secret cabal of lizard people that control the world. And by the way, a lot of good people, a lot of good people believe in that. What the hell? Most of the lizard surnames are like Rosenberg and Rothschild. And so this is what Alice Walker believes. And a lot of

people don't know this. Now, you would think that a place like the New York Times would take the time to look into it, but they didn't. And when it was raised, they decided not to do anything about it. And people can go, I don't want to quote it because it's really despicable, but people can go on Alice Walker's website and read her poetry about, you know, the rabbis of the Talmud drinking blood. I mean, it's, it's, it's as out there as you can possibly get. Actually, maybe I will quote it. This is it. Are the going, meaning the non-jews us meant to be slaves of jews and not only that but to enjoy it um follow the i mean whatever it's it's crazy i did look up some of i looked up some of it and i i was like there's no way no come on this is oprah's alice walker this is oprah's you know this is her north star um no but so that's fine. That's fine by the times. And the

Tom Cotton thing. I mean, let's just round back to that before we continue, because I think our viewers probably our listeners probably know what we're talking about. But over the summer and the unrest, Tom Cotton wrote an op ed, the title of it by the times was send in the troops. And he was talking about should we have the military in the streets, advocating that we should in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the rioting and so on and so forth. And there were complaints inside the Times that this put, the quote was on June 3rd, 2020, running this, this is a tweet by a Times employee, running this puts black at NYT staff in danger. Now, this is the same magazine that earlier had run an op-ed from a member of the

Taliban, okay, from the member of the Taliban who they didn't even highlight or disclose the history of involvement in terrorist activities by the guy. But nobody had a problem with that at the Times. But Tom Cotton, you know, sending out the, sending the troops, troops right to maintain order was a problem today. You know, in leading up to the inauguration, we're seeing that same paper calling for the troops to be out there to protect America in response to the threat of right wing violence. And it's just another example of their hypocrisy and just how thin skinned they are in their their total absence of commitment to principle. Like, why shouldn't Tom Cotton be able to say that?

Why did your editor, James Bennett, have to resign three days after he allowed it to be published? I think and there's been so many examples of this happening that it's like a it's like a moral panic. It's like a moral panic. It's like a frenzy. And there needs to be some kind of scapegoat for the people that are in the frenzy in order to quell it. Now, of course, that the scapegoat doesn't actually quell it. It just staves it off for the next time, as we've seen in case after case after case. But I felt like, you know, in a normal non-upside-down world, I felt like the response on the part of any publisher in the case of journalists claiming that an op-ed by a senator put their lives in danger would be, you know, I respect that you

have this position. Perhaps working in a newspaper is not the right career path for you. But instead, it was, I mean, what happened in the wake of that was like really unbelievable. I mean, it was like a struggle session with people crying with, you know, the people that tweet about being praised by the masthead for their moral clarity and their courage. It was quite a spectacle. At some point, probably I will write about it. But I think, you know, now that people are less, now that people have sobered up, I think increasing numbers of people are seeing how ridiculous that all was, how unjust. And I mean, it wasn't just James Bennett. I mean, one of the editors of the piece, a 25-year-old, was thrown under the bus and named by his colleagues and his name ran in the news side of the paper. Again, to go back to the double standard, listeners might recall when the New York Times ran a deeply anti-Semitic cartoon

featuring the Israeli prime minister as a dog with a Jewish star around his collar, leading a blind Donald Trump wearing a yarmulke or a kippah on his head. Now, I know who chose that op-ed, or sorry, who chose that cartoon, but it would be totally unprofessional and uncollegial and wrong for someone to leak that name. And of course, it's never been leaked, and I hope it never will. And yet it took a day for them to throw a 25-year-old, very junior editor, who was only one of the people that had a hand in running the Tom Cotton op-ed under the bus, and he's no longer at the paper. Adam Rubenstein. Exactly. 25 years old. He's recently out as well.

But again, there's no amount of wokeness for the woke. It's like, that's not good enough. I think the thing to emphasize for people is, you know, this is now like, what I like to say to people is like, the New York Times is not the New York Times. Harvard is not Harvard. You know, go down the list. Like it still has the same, Harvard still has the same slogan and same crest. The New York Times still has, you know, the font and, you know, the claim to be the paper

of record. But what it actually is has changed and it's changed dramatically. And try and look beyond the font to see that. The New York Times is now a place where people are fired for running an op ed by a conservative Republican. And yet pieces that are out and out, you know, propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party are acceptable. Picking up on our antisemitism discussion, I mean, this is the same people who, you know, Vogue put one of the heads of the March for Women's Lives, Tamika Mallory, on the pages of Vogue magazine,

even though she's an open antisemite. Yes, that's right. Not to mention Chelsea Handler, right? Chelsea Handler's tweeting out Louis Farrakhan soundbites without apology. She doesn't care. It was called to her attention. Hey, you know, he said some really bad things like Jews are termites. He said a good thing in this soundbite.

Right. I think what it is, is that all of us, there's a consensus about what is unacceptable when it comes to, and again, these categories don't mean that much anymore, but what are the limits, let's say, of reason, acceptability when it comes to the right? You can't find a person other than a cult member who would possibly defend the storming of the Capitol by rioters. Like everyone sees that with perfect clarity. And yet there seems to be almost no limit on the left. You know, you had Puff Daddy or P. Diddy hosting Louis Farrakhan to give a July 4th day address on Revolt TV, which is the TV station he owns.

I mean, talk about transphobic, homophobic Jew hating, and not to mention anti-vaxxer. That's Louis Farrakhan. And yet somehow like that doesn't justify outrage. That doesn't justify headlines. And I think we need to ask ourselves why. Now, what do you make of like the I actually I must I should have been paying more attention because I didn't know that Glenn Greenwald has been one of your critics. I was like, Glenn and Barry, I love them. But he's been he's he's come after you. And he's basically like, oh, she's a cancel culture person when it comes to he doesn't think it's anti-Semitism. He would say it's more people who are more aligned with

the Palestinian viewpoint or who are going to question the narratives on Israel. Forget, I mean, I don't think he'd defend Louis Barakon's views. But what about that? Like, his charge that you're pushing cancel culture that you have in your past on people who push back on the pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian narrative. Yeah, I guess what I would say to that, and, you know, we're living in a really interesting moment where I find myself, you know, on the same side as someone like Glenn Greenwald on, I think, one of the most important debates of the moment, which is free speech and freedom of the press and the right not to be censored by big tech. And so we've sort of had a bunch of private conversations about that realignment.

So I should say that from the start. I think people can, you know, my record has been poured over, not least by Glenn Greenwald. And I think what people will see is that I'm not someone that argues that there aren't limits, that there aren't a real Semite because you have green eyes or that, you know, the skeletal vertebrae of Israeli Jews has been, I could find the exact quote, have been maimed because of their oppression of Palestinians. Like those are things that are unexpected. And so that's what I was calling out as a student. And by the way, I wasn't saying fire the professor. I was saying like in the same way that we would expect if a college had a professor that was saying, I miss the Jim Crow South, like that should be cause for outrage. And again, to me, it kind of goes back to the Jews don't count thing. You know, there ought to be certain taboos.

I've never someone that's argued for there being none of them. And if you look at my record and you look at the kinds of things that I was criticizing, I don't think any sane person could look at them and say that they were within the realm of reasonable debate. Now, Len and I differ passionately on the question of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. And I would simply say to that question that, you know, to be an anti-Zionist, which is, you know, to not believe in the right of the Jewish people to have a state like any other state, to have that debate, you know, in 1910 Poland, where Jews were horrifically oppressed, the Holocaust, you know, had not yet come, but there were pogroms constantly. And there was a debate inside the Jewish world about how could we solve the Jewish question? How could we live freely without being oppressed? And there

were lots of different answers to that question. Some people answered assimilation. Some people answered a worldwide workers of the world unite. Some people answered socialism. Some people answered Zionism. Now, to be an anti-Zionist in that context, before the state of Israel came into existence, before it became, as it is today, the place of the largest Jewish community on planet Earth, surrounded by hostile neighbors, that is one thing. That's in a totally different moral universe. To argue today against a state that exists and to suggest that it should simply go away. And again, I would ask people to really drill down into what that means. I think that that is anti-Jewish in effect, if not an intent. And I think that, you know, maybe Glenn and I

can have a longer conversation about that, but that's absolutely where I fall on that question. That's well explained. I feel like it's my brother and my sister arguing. I don't like it. So I'm glad you're at a place where you're talking. Yeah. Let's talk about something else you just mentioned, which is big tech. What was the name? Forgive me for not knowing. And I hope you know it off the top of your head. No worries. If not, what is the name of the writer who wrote the beautiful tablet magazine piece about flatness? You tweeted it out. What is her name? Her name, and I'm so excited to talk about this, is Alana Newhouse. She's, I call her, you know, there's a few people that I call my senseis.

One is Caitlin Flanagan and one is Alana Newhouse. She was my boss when I was at Tablet. She hired me away from the Wall Street Journal. And she's been the editor of Tablet. She rarely writes. And so it was a big deal that she wrote that piece. And it's called, for those who haven't read it, Everything is Broken. Holy shit, was that amazing. That piece, it's rare that I'll like print it out, sit and read it. And then as soon as I read it, I gave it to Doug. I'm like, you have to read this, read the whole thing. And of course, my copy was underlined and highlighted. She writes in the piece, Flatness Broke Everything.

And she is essentially, she's talking about a lot about some of the stuff we're discussing about big tech. And that's kind of where I want to go with this. She talks about how the internet tycoons used flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry. And that no one seems to care. And, you know, that there was a heist, that there was a heist pulled off without any pushback, which she says is tied to what we're talking about. That it enabled progressive activists, she says, to pull off a heist of their own. They seized on the fact that the whole world had adapted to a world of practical flatness

in order to push their political flatness, what they call social justice, but which has historically, quoting, meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few. So much in there. And I want to go over more in this piece too, but that they're related. The behemoth of big tech taking over our lives, disconnecting us, ironically, and enabling this takeover of the social justice warriors to change the power structure, but not in a way that leads to, quote, equality. And in fact, what they want is power and wealth to a select few.

I think what's brilliant about this essay and a connection I had never made is the line she draws between the aesthetics of sort of the world that we live in now, the world of, you know, Uber and Seamless and DoorDash and Airbnb and a coffee shop that's in the cool part of Amsterdam looks exactly the same as a coffee shop in the cool part of San Francisco, that aesthetic of sameness that she connects to a politics of sameness and a purity, I think it's an unbelievable insight that I had never thought of before. And it really tracks, like when you think about what this movement demands, which is conformity, which suggests that anything less than total equality of outcome is evidence of nefariousness or of systemic oppression or discrimination. I think she nailed it with that. I really do. She talks about, I want to read just a couple of excerpts, but here's the first one talking about the killing of spirit that all of this has led to. Academic institutions have now

been repurposed to instill and enforce the narrow and rigid agenda of one cohort of people, forbidding exploration or deviation, a regime that has ironically left homeless many, if not most of the country's best thinkers and creators. Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid, with creating something unique or beautiful, a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes,

will hit a wall. If they're young and remotely ambitious, they'll simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they've ever had the chance to really hear it sing. She's the most amazing. It brings a tear to my eye. That's what's happening. It is snuffing out voices before they've ever had the chance to really hear them sing. And it's starting in, I'm trying to swear less because a lot of my viewers want, but I'm sorry, it's starting in fucking kindergarten. It makes me angry. This is the work of our lifetimes. Like I say that both to emphasize how serious the work is, but also I hope what's coming through

and I hope people understand that my leaving the paper is a sign of hope. In other words, I left because I really believe that fighting this and building spaces and institutions and new media and new publishing houses, new studios, new things, like is the work of our lifetime. And if we've lived, if we've sort of living now at what I think a lot of us now see as a kind of great unraveling, which is the phrase

that Commentary Magazine has used a few times that I think is really, really apt. What lies ahead of us, I think is the great building, the great rebuilding. And I think what's scary for people is to see that a lot of the institutions that we thought of as tankers have really been rotted out. And

that's really scary. And I get people that are scared, but I would emphasize, like, don't let that paralyze you. People came here from the old world and built everything anew, including the Constitution itself. If you're telling me that we can't build new newspapers and new universities and new school systems, I would simply say to you, you're not dreaming big enough. And that's what I'm about. And present company, myself, I would say excluded. I do think that Alana is right, that so many of the most interesting heterodox voices, the voices that the people with jagged edges, and I mean that as a compliment, the people that refuse to kind of be smoothed down to become a widget, they're the people that have either been expelled from the legacy institutions or have sort of preemptively self-deported, which is how I think of myself, because we didn't want to become that and nothing was worth that price. Yes. I love my jagged edges. I love the way you put it. I love them. I don't want them smoothed out. No, thank you. Yeah. I just, I think like, you know,

that was, that's, what's so special about, um, what's possible in this country at its best. I mean, and I think that's, that's the work that lies ahead. And I think it's really intimidating to a lot of people. But I think that that is what it is. And seeing it with clarity and seeing the old world and the way that it's rotted out with clarity is really important. I think the moment that we're in right now, and I talk to a lot of people that are sort of living in this liminal space, is that they see that the old world, the old institutions are hollowed out almost entirely.

They want to step out of the old world, but the new world doesn't yet exist. It hasn't yet been built. And what exists right now, and we're talking on the pirate radio, what exists right now is kind of like Wild West situation. There's some newsletters. There's some podcasts. There's a lot of private signal groups where people share their actual views. But there isn't a whole world where you can live and work and meet your spouse and build a life. There's pockets. There's things that are emerging. There's things that are emerging.

There's places that are emerging. But I think that, you know, that's certainly what I want to be focused on being a part of is building that new world. I love that. And it's a great way of thinking about it because we can draw our swords, rhetorically speaking, and fight, fight in the old world, fight to preserve what's there already, the America that we knew that people are going to have to live in for the foreseeable future, push back against some of the nonsense being shoved down our throats while creating this new world, while creating something better, the place to which we want to go. And that's, I hadn't even really thought about it that way. I mean, I think people have been thinking about it a little bit more in the wake of Twitter, you know, canceling Trump and Parler being pulled off the internet.

We need whole new lanes of travel in many different departments. But she, Alana, gets to this too. And this is the last thing I'm going to read from her because it really is beautiful. You have to introduce me to this woman. I will. Right? She's amazing. She writes, the vast majority of Americans are not ideologues.

They are people who wish to live in a free country and get along with their neighbors while engaging in profitable work, getting married, and other cultural products. Every time Americans are given the option to ratify progressive dictates through their consumer choices, they vote in the opposite direction. When HBO removed Gone with the Wind from its on-demand library last year, it became the number one bestselling movie on Amazon. Meanwhile, endless numbers of Hollywood right-think movies, you know, quote unquote, right, the right, not conservative, right? And supposed literary masterworks about oppression are dismal failures for these studios and publishing houses

that would rather sink into debt than face a social justice firing squad on Twitter. This is the last part. All of this has created a generational opportunity. Build new things, create great art, Understand and accept that sensory information is the brain's food and that Silicon Valley is systemically starving us of it. Avoid going entirely tree blind. Make a friend and don't talk politics with them. Do things that generate love and attention from three people you actually know instead of hundreds you don't. Abandon the blighted Ivy League, please. I beg of you. Start a publishing house that puts out books

that anger, surprise, and delight people and which make them want to read. Be brave enough to make film and TV that appeals to actual audiences and not 14 people on Twitter. Oh, don't you love it? Yes. Preach. It's just on the money.

I mean, there are tens of millions of Americans who feel that the world has gone mad, or at least, you know, the gatekeeping institutional world. You know, they see that identity trumps ideas. They see that science is at the mercy of politics. They see that obvious truths are dangerous to say out loud. And what is shocking is the amount of money that is being left on the table by condescending or ignoring or or preaching to those people. Meaning, I think Joe Rogan gets an average of like 6 million viewers an episode. And the average nightly viewership of CNN is like maybe less than 2 million. We have to check my numbers, but I remember that from a few months ago. No, that's about right. Right now they're surging because of Biden, but they'll go back down. Right. And so isn't that an indicator for people?

Like people are interested in, first of all, Americans are smart. They're interested in deep, long, sophisticated conversations about all kinds of things. They're hungry for it and they're seeking it out. And if the legacy institutions don't want to provide it for people, great. I want to be part of it. Yeah. Like I think that there's, as Alana says, there's, there's a huge, huge opportunity there. Well, can I tell you like a part of this is that I actually didn't know that about when HBO removed Gone with the Wind for the online library, it became number one. You know what another great example is, Megan, is Andy Ngo's book was last. I haven't read his book, but his book was number one on all of Amazon. He's an expert on Antifa and has been writing a lot about it.

And not surprisingly, that group hates him and tried to get his book banned. And it had the opposite effect. Right. But, you know, that book will never be reviewed by The New York Times. Abigail Schreier's book, I know you she's a friend. I know you had her on the podcast recently. Another excellent example of this. People are seeking it out. I think one of the things though, like if we're living right now in the initial stage of sort of the challenger to the mainstream, which is little independent, influential people like you, or, you know, there's like Glenn, like Matt Taibbi. It's wonderful. It's a great first step. But if we really look at what changes the culture, it's institutions. And bringing together, you know, I think it's unreasonable to ask,

you know, the dentist in Cleveland or the accountant in Pittsburgh to spend $150 subscribing to 15 newsletters and podcasts. We need to find a way to consolidate the people that are trustworthy, that are of no party or clique. Well, look at Fox News. Look at Roger Ailes' idea that people scoffed at him. Fox News on the walls, they used to have the articles framed of all the predictions of doom for the channel when he launched it. And whatever you think of Fox News, it's a behemoth. I mean that they net a couple billion dollars a year in profit. They net that. So he saw a niche that wasn't being served and he exploited it to the great benefit of the Murdochs. And I do think overall the country, people have their criticisms and I get that and I have my own. But overall, Fox News, I think, has been an enormously good force because half the country felt totally unrepresented.

At least they have Fox. But now the battle's moving to a new front. It doesn't have to be harshly partisan one way or the other. And it's really not even about partisanship. This is something that's going to unite people on both sides of the political aisle, platforms, places to go and get information, places to be educated, to find open-minded people. All of the things we discussed in your article that you wrote about, about liberalism, that sort of small L liberalism that was always characteristic of America. And it's going to take money, but we have a lot of people on our side. I mean, I know you do too. Like you get contacted by people with a bunch of money who want to help fund some group to fight back. Me too. And so like, that's where it begins. I agree. I think one of the things that is, that I've been thinking pretty deeply about is that it feels to me right now in the country,

like there are two very, very powerful magnets. And one magnet is sort of the populist right. And if you build something, let's say in the space of center right to anything to the right of that, it gets pulled by that magnet. Likewise, on the left, it feels like the magnet of whatever we want to call it, let's call it wokeness or exclusionary identity politics is so powerful that anything that gets built in the center left or the liberal space gets pulled by that. And so I think the question that stands before anyone that wants to be making new things and building new institutions is, is it possible to build something that is anchored by something that is different. It doesn't get yanked to one of those extremes. I think the person or the group of people that can figure that out will build something hugely successful and will draw, you know, tens of millions of Americans that are thirsty for the truth. Right. And that adhere to the original American ideals. I mean, they believe what this country was founded on. And as Glenn Beck was

pointing out recently on our show, the goal was never to have a perfect union. It was a more perfect. We can get there and we don't have to change all of our ideals in our history to do it. We can actually just embrace them and double and triple down. Um, and just a quick word, because one of the, one of the dangers in going this route, right. Pushing back against all this stuff is you get called names, right? You are racist, a sexist or whatever it is. We pointed out earlier, you, you defended for example, Aziz Ansari, who'd been accused of having like a very bizarre exchange with a woman. She claimed it was a Me Too situation and you took a risk and defended him.

OK, so you're you're against Me Too. You're against women. You have to take risks to go out there and push back where you think it's appropriate. And just hearing that thing about gone with the wind, I tweeted out against that decision as soon as it happened. So this is absurd. You know, Americans for generations have been able to understand that slavery is terrible, notwithstanding the way it's portrayed in Gone with the Wind. And by the way, if we're going to go clean all of our records to get rid of bad behavior, let's try sexism. How's that going to go, HBO? Go back and take a look, scrub every movie or do a warning in front of every movie that has women portrayed in a sexist way.

Good luck. We'll wait. But, but it's, it's a reminder because when I tweeted that out, Sonny Hostin of The View attacked me as racist. Sort of like the cabal of people she tweets with, like, what is racist about saying it's absurd to pull this movie? Right. Then when I tweeted out that there were reports, Jacob Blake was in fact armed in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Soledad O'Brien attacked me as racist. And when I said at NBC that doing blackface wasn't always as controversial as it is now, people said that's racist. And then we saw Justin Trudeau and we saw all these celebrities and we saw the full shows on NBC had been airing blackface characters as recently as a couple of years prior to my statement. OK, so the point is, you may have to take some rhetorical risks. You may have to just, you know, call it like it is and brace for impact, but you're not alone.

And the people trying to shame you after out of saying what you know is true, what you know is true, not unnecessarily cruel comments meant intentionally to invite to divide, but what you know is true. In fact, reality based, you got to stand strong and know you're not alone. Yeah, well put. I completely, utterly agree, utterly agree. And I just I mean, it sounds cheesy, maybe, but like people need to come out with common sense and not like you'll live one life, you know, like this is it. So like, do you want to be someone that, you know, only shares your

actual views in a secret signal chat or, you know, at dinner with your spouse or even some, you know, I had a woman call me the other day who was like, called me crying because her children are in a school like yours or yours were that was indoctrinating them and she was alarmed and she felt like she couldn't even talk about it with her own husband. Like, it's enough already. It's enough. of us who are paid to take risks and say unpopular things when we believe them to be true. Like, that's our job. Now, we have to end it on a personal note, because speaking of coming out, you're getting married. You told me this privately, and then you outed your pending nuptials in your very first substack column, which is where people can find you right now, which is amazing. I mean, like you wouldn't believe the number of people who sent me your opening Substack column because they didn't know I loved you.

They didn't know. They just knew that I'd love what you what you had written. And they were right. But you're getting married. So what's the story? And by the way, to a New York Times reporter. Oh, I love it. I mean, I will always be grateful to the fifth floor coffee room of the New York Times where I met Billy Bowles. And, you know, you and, you know, pretty much everyone I've ever met that I liked is going to be invited to the wedding because I cannot wait for this lockdown to end and have a, we like parties and have a giant party. So she's great. She's been just an incredible anchor for me. And, you know, we, before, before the pandemic, we were long distance for a while. She's a, mostly writes

about tech, although increasingly a larger range of topics. And she was based in San Francisco. I was in New York. We were constantly flying back and forth. Then I was on book tour and I was on, I lived out of a suitcase the past few years. And, you know, if there's a silver lining to the pandemic and the lockdowns, it's been, you know, really starting a home life and insanely we got a second dog. So things are, I'm very, very, very lucky on that front. And I would say also, like for anyone in public life, I think having a supportive family and a supportive partner is is essential to be able to take risks in the arena. I'm sure that you find that too, Megan. Oh, 100%. Back to Alana's piece.

Do things that generate love and attention from the three people you actually know. And in your Substack piece, you were calling attention to the same thing. Like the people who matter in your life are generally within 25 feet of you, right? Like it's not the people on Twitter, although it is the people who listen to the show.

They do matter to me. I think they're part of our team. But when you can find a true love relationship that is honest and challenging and with somebody ideally who's smart and challenges you intellectually. Boom. That's the nirvana. That's as close as you're going to get. I agree. And I would say that, I mean, I wrote this in my book when I was sort of advising people about how to stand up to anti-Semitism, but I didn't really appreciate it until I had to use the advice. And that advice was, you know, finding the voice of a few people that you trust and that will, you know, call out your bullshit, but also praise you when you do something right, that those voices really can drown out the whole mob. And that has been so true in my life, especially as the outside world and the late chief rabbi of England, Jonathan Sachs, or a call from, you know, the former Soviet dissident, one of my personal heroes, one of the great men of the 20th century, Natan Sharansky, telling me that they admired what I did and I was doing the right thing. Like when people ask me, how do you deal with all the people that are cruel to you? That's the answer. That and Nellie and my family. And having those kind of North Star people or like

lighthouse people in your life, and this is often advice that I give to young people who want to get into the arena, that is really essential for maintaining sanity, for staying grounded, and for knowing that you're really pursuing your mission. Yeah, what matters? Now, am I allowed to ask you a quick question about Kate McKinnon? Because I actually didn't know that you and she had dated. You can ask me. Was she, because obviously politically, you're not exactly on the same page. world through her characters. And there's no one better, I would say, in the world at doing that. So I would, you know, I don't want to betray her privacy in that way. But I'll just say that I think she's revitalized SNL and I remain a fan and she remains a friend. Ah, well handled. I'll take it. I interviewed her when I was at NBC and found her really charming and hilarious. Of course, needless to say, very talented. Her Hillary Clinton impressions were amazing. All right. So on we go. Substack, that's where people can find you. They have to subscribe, right? You go to Substack.com, search for Barry Weiss. Is that? Yeah. So if you go to Barry Weiss dot substack dot com,

you hit subscribe. And for now you get everything that I write for free. My goal now is just to build up an audience. And for right now, I think this is a this was an important shingle for me to hang up. And it's a good it's a good position. But I don't think I'm, you know, kind of going along with everything we've said in this conversation. I'm interested in seeing what can be built in a bigger way beyond one-off newsletters and beyond podcasts, even though so far this is going really great for me. So yes, I would love if people would subscribe. I should have a post coming out either today or tomorrow. You got to subscribe. We need to help people. And when you have to pay, please pay. It won't be something exorbitant. I'm sure Substack usually is not. But we have to support people

who are trying to create this new lane. These are the seeds. These are the seeds being planted for what we hope will be a verdant garden. There you go. That's my attempt at wordsmithing. It's not exactly chewing rubies in the mouth like what you write, Barry, but thank God we have you and the Alanas of the world to help us through. So, so fun talking to you. So much luck and love. Thanks for being here. Total pleasure, Megan. I love listening to you. Today's episode was brought to you in part by Superbeet Soft Chews. Take two delicious chews a day for the health support and energy you need. Get yours now at superbeets.com slash MK.

Now, listen, before you leave me, don't miss Monday's episode. I've been waiting pretty much my whole life. But no, seriously, I have really been looking forward to this interview. Douglas Murray will be here. If you don't know who he is, you're going to thank me or you're going to be so grateful. I think he might be the most brilliant person alive at this moment. When he talks, you just want to sit back and listen and let him talk more and more, which is exactly what I did. Not only can he diagnose the problems in our society right now, but he has real solutions. He's the first person I've spoken to in a long time who has very

practical solutions, language, and ways forward for those of us who want to stop this cultural nonsense. Anyway, please don't miss it. I promise you, you're going to love this interview. If I don't live up to that promise, you can unsubscribe and never download the show again. That's how confident I am that you're going to love it. So subscribe now so you can make sure you don't miss it. Download the show, rate it five stars, review if you feel so inclined. We'd love to hear from you. And we'll talk to you on Monday. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production

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