TRIGGERnometry - Bari Weiss - Where Did the Media Go Wrong?

Episode Date: June 20, 2021

Bari Weiss is a writer and former New York Times columnist who resigned from the paper last year. Her fantastic podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss is now available. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.PayPal.me/triggerpod https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. A fascinating person we have for you today. She is an American author, journalist, and as a very recently podcaster Barry Weiss, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you guys so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to have you on the show. For anyone who's not familiar with you, your backstory, your background, who you are, just tell us. everybody a little bit about that. How have you managed to end up here talking to us?

I don't know. I'm a Jew from Pittsburgh. That's kind of the long and short of it. I was born in the Jewish community of Squirrel Hill, oldest of four children, four daughters. I'm from a politically mixed marriage. My dad is a Trump-curious conservative. My mom is a liberal. She withheld sex during the 2016 and 2020 elections to make sure that he would vote in the right way, which I think meant writing in Steph Curry the first time around and maybe like Nikki Haley the second time. So it was effective. And, you know, that was my background. I come from a family and I think this is relevant to kind of where I wound up because I never imagined I would be a writer. We're arguing about things and disagreeing about things and talking about big ideas was,

totally natural and normal. And it was also normal to vehemently disagree with people that you love the most in your life and that in the end of the day, you know, you still love them. So I think that's one virtue that my parents gave me that I feel like is in incredibly short supply these days in my country. And I know yours too. So from there, go to Columbia University. Long story short, I was pretty active when I was a college student politically on the subject of Israel, but also wound up being a columnist for the student paper and starting my own publication that's still in existence. And through a serendipitous event, I was debating the college socialists, I believe. This older gentleman was at the debate, very clearly not an undergraduate.

And he told me that his name was Charles Stevens and his son Brett Stevens, worked at the Wall Street Journal. I had never read the Wall Street Journal. I thought it was only an economics newspaper and that I should meet him and I should go be an intern there. And that was really it. That was my first sort of foray into professional journalism. I spent basically the past decade at the Wall Street Journal, tablet magazine, a Jewish magazine that's excellent, and the New York Times. And I think the relevant thing for people who have never heard of me is that I went from being the sort of leftmost flank of a conservative editorial page at the Wall Street Journal, where I was very regularly told that I was a squish and a pushover to the New York Times where I was something

like the right to the right of Attila the Hun. And I think in a way that journey is not in any way unique to me. I think it kind of tells a broader story about where the country's going, maybe even more broadly where the West is going in terms of more extremist polarized politics. And certainly it tells the story about where the mainstream media is, which is increasingly a choice between two increasingly stark options. The last thing I'll say that I think is probably relevant is that I became a bat mitzvah at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, which people may or may not remember was the site of the deadliest attack on Jews in American history.

in October 27th, 2018, where a neo-Nazi walked into the synagogue and killed 11 people. That moment, it's hard to summarize in a quick soundbite, but that moment was pretty impactful on my life. And I wound up sort of putting to the side the book that I was supposed to write about the culture war. I'm hoping to pick that up soon. And I ended up writing a book called How to Fight Antisemitism. So that's also, I would think, in a really important piece of my journey over the past few years. And then the last thing I'll say is that my most recent job was that, you know, I had kind of the plum job in all of journalism. I was an op-ed writer and editor at the New York Times, like I mentioned. And I chose to leave that of my own accord, which my grandma is still sort of scratching her head about. So that's where I am now. I'm a newspaper woman without a newspaper. I have a newsletter. And now increasingly, like lots of

people in this country and all over, I have a podcast like you guys. So that's kind of the big picture. Yeah. And it's called Honestly with Barry Weiss. I'm looking forward to seeing some of the stuff that's coming up because you've only just started it. But listen, the reason we wanted to talk to you most of all, we'll probably come back to the anti-Semitism. But we wouldn't be doing this show if journalism hadn't become what it's become. Yeah. Now, you've been on the inside. Yes, I have. What is happening to journalism and newspapers and the mainstream media? Okay, well, let's start with two things.

The first thing is a radical shift in the economic model of how newspapers, how television stations, how radio makes money. Go back to the age before the Internet. I know it's very hard to do that. But back in the day, some 20 years ago, the constituency that the New York Times had to please, the constituency that they had to worry about pissing off. And I'm talking about the New York Times is a stand-in for all publications, pretty much. In the legacy press, that constituency was advertisers, right? That's who they had to worry about. Well, that's no longer the case. The advertising model, as we know, has collapsed. And the model now is

subscribers. Well, if you go and you look at who are the people that subscribe to the New York Times, it's something like 95% identify as progressive or liberal or, you know, not old school Democrat, but Democrat. So if the goal, right, is to keep your subscribers engaged, to keep them happy, it only makes sense that the thing that you would feed them is their version of political heroin, which in the case of the New York Times meant Donald Trump is a moral monster, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that model, if you go look at the stock price and you look at the subscriber numbers, is working beautifully. But what's good for business may not be good for democracy. So that thing that I just described to you, it's the same model at Fox where obviously it's the diametric opposite in terms of who the audience is.

But that's, again, the goal is to keep people engage, keep people engage. Now, the second thing that comes on top of that is social media. and social media amplifies this trend because what it does is that it gives or maybe not gives a microphone. I was going to say there's a group of people that tend to hog the microphone that tend to be the most extremist part of that base. And that then gives editors and reporters a sense of, oh, wow, that's what they want. And what happens is, and it's much more insidious than a kind of like top down do this, which is I think how people maybe imagine it from the outside. It's much more subtle because we are like, you know, we're animals, right? We respond well to incentives. And if the, if you know that writing

about a certain topic or writing about a certain topic from a particular perspective or telling your readers who feel a certain way that you know because you're getting constant feedback about it, that they feel a certain way about the world, you naturally want to just please them because pleasing them means winning for yourself. It means going viral. It means being most popular inside the paper. It means, you know, getting better assignments and on and on and on. So that's the other thing that's going on. I would say the third thing that's going on that's related to it is what's been talked about is the kind of ideological takeover of 20th century institutions that are meant to uphold the liberal order and are increasingly betraying their mission and betraying their values in order to pursue a very different kind of ideology that's not liberal at all.

And so that is very much what I witnessed when I was at the New York Times. the vast majority I still believe of people at the New York Times still believe in the old school liberal model of journalism. What do I mean by that? Things that we used to take for granted. You know, pursuing the truth, telling it whether or not it's convenient to a particular political constituency, striving for objectivity, even though we all recognize that there's no such thing as the view from nowhere and that we're all incredibly subjective. You know, vying to be the paper of record. all the news that's fit to print. That has given way to something much more morally and politically strident. Some journalists have referred to this without irony as being journalism in the service of moral clarity. Now, whose morals they are and who has the clarity, right, is the whole question. And they believe that they do. And so the way that it's functioning at the times, but I could say the same about publishing houses or Hollywood Studios or big tech.

corporations is that the people at the top are living in tremendous fear of a minority, and I don't mean racial minority or gender minority, but a minority constituency inside the paper who do not believe in the historical mission of the institution. And so rather than, although we have some good examples of this that maybe we'll get to, rather than saying to those people, hey, if you believe that words are violence, hey, if you believe that an op-ed by a sitting United States Senator literally puts people's lives in danger, maybe journalism isn't the right career for you. Instead, they find themselves being struggle-sessioned in full view of thousands of employees, right? Because the whole thing is that people are, I knew this to be true, but I really feel it now in a visceral way now that I've witnessed it over and over and over again.

people generally act in herd. They do not want to stick their necks out. The most painful thing is the idea of being kicked out or ostracized from your community, especially if the way your community is branding itself, especially if the way your community is identifying itself is like the community of the good and the righteous and the right side of history. The worst thing ever would be to be told that you're not on that right side. The worst thing ever would be to be told that you're a bigot or you're an ism or you're a phobe in some kind of way.

And so what you have, and this is really the key, the cowardice at the top of these institutions is what's allowing for all of this to take place. Because if the people that were actually in charge were courageous and said, no, politely, and no, we'll give you severance, but this isn't the right place for you. Or maybe no, we're not going to hire you in the first place. If you don't believe that an op-ed page, in my case, should share a range of views that represents the truth about the country that you live in, the whole thing would be playing out quite differently. This is Euphoria Calvin Klein, the new elixir collection, featuring three perfume intense scents, inspired by a unique orchid accord, paired with vanilla,

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infrastructure and incredible customer support. They're in your corner no matter what the world throws at you, unless it's your ex-girlfriend, in which case you're on your own. You'd know about that. Move your domains and websites over to EasyDNS right now. All you've got to do is head over to EasyDNS right now. All you've got to do is head over to EasyDen's DNS.com forward slash triggered and use our promo code, which is of course triggered as well, and you will get 50% off the initial purchase. Sign up for their newsletter, Access of Easy that tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy and censorship. It's very, very interesting that you said that. And one of the things I kept thinking, Barry, when you were explaining their business models, what was going off in my head is, but you're just creating large.

echo chambers. That's all you do. That's all of us that are creating. And what effect is that having on society? I mean, we're all living in it, right? We're living in different epistemological realities, where if you watch, you know, Laura Ingram and Sean Hannity, I'm not sure what the exact comparison in England would be, but I'm sure we don't have anything quite like that here. It's coming, I'm sure, but not yet, Barry. You know, versus like if you watch Rachel Maddow every night. You just have a totally different perception of what's going on in the country. That's problem number one. Problem number two is like if is, and I think we're all feeling this in our lives, the feeling of like being motivated by fear rather than empathy and understanding

and being increasingly told that we need to be really, really scared of the opposite tribe that somehow wants to fundamentally undo the foundation of the country. I mean, that's ultimately what it's about. And so those fissures are obvious, not just in society at large, but I think sometimes in friend groups and in families and in people's own lives. And I just think that it's extraordinarily dangerous. It betrays my most fundamental values that I believe in. And ultimately, that's why I decided to self-deport.

from, you know, the highest purchase of American journalism because I just didn't want to be part of that machine. And it seemed to me quite clear, and I mean this in a non-judgmental way, that it really does work as a business model. Just like Facebook stoking outrage really does work as a business model. I do not think that someone has yet come up

with the solution to this in terms of, like, economics. Because this clearly works. It's clearly tapping into someone, part of our lizard brain, you know, that wants to keep hitting the pellet and getting the sugar. But I want to be part of trying to see if there's a better way. And you talk about if there's a better way, and you use terms of progressive, liberal, on the left. Now, at one point, these were how I described myself. I was a teacher for many years. Yeah, I look at these labels and I don't feel, and I feel as if I couldn't be more

ostracized from them. Would you be able to explain to our listeners and to our viewers what these terms used to mean, what they mean and what they mean now? So when I identify myself as a liberal, and I think when a lot of people identify themselves as liberals until quite recently, what they mean was this. Liberalism is not a partisan term. Liberalism is a view of the world that holds the following truths, that we're all created in the image of God, whether or not you believe in God, but we act that way, that because of that equality in a cosmic sense, we're all entitled to equal treatment and equality under the law, that no person should be guilty for the sins of their parents, that no person because of their skin color or because of other immutable characteristics

should be held to a standard of collective innocence or collective guilt because of it. The idea that we judge people based on their actions, based on their character and based on their merit, and not based on qualities of their identity, the idea that we're not constrained to the lane of our birth. That's really important. The idea that because we're a particular identity, it doesn't mean that we can't understand or strive to understand someone from a different group. And the idea, perhaps most importantly, that politics is not the only thing in life and that there are things that fall outside of the realm of politics. And those are the most important things in life. Art, music, love, relationships, family, and that not everything

needs to be put to political litmus tests. If you believe that, you believe in the liberal world. view. And you can be a conservative liberal or you could be a liberal liberal liberal, but that by and large is what I think we mean when we're talking about the liberal worldview. That is now being challenged. And it's very obviously being challenged by the far right, right? The blood and soil, ethno-nationalist, people marching in Charlottesville shouting Jews will not replace us. That's the obvious threat to liberalism from the right. We don't need to have a debate about that threat. everyone who's sane sees the evil of that worldview. And frankly, the mainstream media pays an incredible amount of attention to that worldview.

And so I think that it's, you know, it's like when someone marches down the street shouting Jews will not replace us or says Jews need to die or says, you know, some people because of their skin color are less American than others. Like there's no moral debate about what that is. The confusion, I think, and the reason that so many are caught flat-footed by the challenge to liberalism from the far left is it doesn't have a teaky torch. It comes cloaked in the language and in the garments of social justice, of progress, of civil rights, of being on the right side of history, and all the things that liberals want to be a part of. But if you look under the hood, beyond the slogans of what this movement's, these movements, these, movements and this ideology that doesn't really have a name yet. Some call it wokeness. Some call it soft totalitarianism. Some call it critical social justice. The critic Wesley Yang has called it the successor ideology because it's trying to be

the successor to liberalism. I think that's a really effective term. It's really this stew of supremely unenlightened ideas that try and replace, you know, persuasion with public shaming that try and say that no, you know, we're determined by the circumstances of our birth, that we're pitted in a sort of war against all of identity group versus identity group, and it's sort of a zero-sum battle in which we're all vying for the most claims to victimhood because what accrues power to you, what the way that we judge the things that come out of your mouth and the truth claim is not the actual content, but your identity. The more victimhood you can claim, literally the more claim you have to morality and truth.

It claims that we actually do have collective innocence or collective guilt. It claims that we are guilty for the sins of our fathers. In so many ways, if you just look at what these people say, not necessarily the people that are hanging up the sign in the window, right? who are doing it for well-intentioned reasons, but the hardcore of this ideology, it is just deeply, deeply illiberal. And the reason that I feel like it's the battle of our lifetime to resist it

is because it has captured so many of the institutions, including journalism, that we rely on to sort of tell us the truth about the world. Barry, we'll talk about the institutional capture in a second. But first of all, I feel like there is a contradiction in the conversation we're having because on the one hand, we lament the increasing polarization of society where we are all deeply suspicious of quote-unquote the other side,

and instead of seeing them as people we disagree with, we now see them as the people who are, you know, they want to destroy America or destroy the British way of life or whatever. But on the other hand, I also agree with what you've just said, where, you know, the far right, obviously we all understand, that that is not compatible with the world that we want to live in. But this other thing,

I mean, it is about destroying the foundations of the Western world. Well, what, I mean, the thing that both of these ideologies have in common is that they're manichaean and binary and they split the world into good and bad, black and white, oppressed and oppressor. And anything, any ideology that does that

cannot be harmonized with the liberal, project. Yeah, I agree. I agree. My point is we lament the media polarizing us and making us think that the other people who we don't agree with are the enemies of, in our case, Western civilization. But at the same time, I think it's also accurate to say that there are some people who are the enemies of Western civilization. Do you see the contradiction I'm getting at? I do. I do see that contradiction. And I guess I would say that it's the job of anyone that wants to fight for the liberal project, broadly defined, to stand up against both of those things wherever they rear their head. I think the problem in the mainstream is that you have one group of people relentlessly insisting

that it's just this one group. And if you only watch that, you think it's just this one group. But then if you watch the other side, it's the opposite case. And I think what's required right now of those of us who want to still live in a reality-based world, those of us in the reality-based community, that it's our obligation to talk about both. I think one thing that critics sort of hit me with is the idea that I focus inordinately on the threat from the far left. And I do focus more on that. The reason for that is not because I don't take the threat from the far right seriously. Like I said earlier, I mean, I'm from a community where I witnessed the evil of what that ideology is about. So I take it extremely seriously and it's had an impact on my own life.

But I think that like there are giant news organizations focusing all of their time and energy on that threat. And there's very few people that are focusing on the other one. And so that's one of the reasons that I try and put a special emphasis there. Are you tired of using bulky old wallets giving you a bulge where you don't want it to be? My old wallet was massive. So it brought all the to the yard, which was a huge distraction and got in the way of my esteemed work on trigonometry. Ridge wallets have an incredible solution for you. This is mine, sleek, stylish and with an industrial look to it. It can fit 12 cards with cash on the back using a clip like this one or a strap. We've got one for the whole team. I've got one. Francis has one. Even our producer

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It'll be interesting because this is something that we have a bit of an issue with as well, I suppose. We focus a lot on some of the issues to do. We focus on both sides, but particularly the far left, not necessarily because of what you've said, but rather, certainly in my, I don't know whether Francis would agree with this, but my view, while the far right is obviously evil and obviously a threat, I just don't see the same level of public support. I don't see the same level of the willingness to legitimize some of the ideas of the far right in the mainstream discourse. I don't see the numerical support in terms of the number of people who buy into this ideology. I don't see far right narratives being shoved down my throat on radio, on television and newspapers, etc.

So do you feel like these threats are equally dangerous? I think that they, it's always a really hard question to answer because they have like parasitics the wrong word, but they are like, they have a codependent relationship. In this moment, Constantine, I agree with you that I think the threat from the far left has just inordinately more power in the culture. but the problem right is that what the backlash to that is going to be and the way that it's going to empower the kind of ethno-nationalist neo-Nazi right is one of the reasons that I am so scared about what's coming out of the far left because I just like if you just look out into the world you see the way that this dynamic is playing out and it really really worries me if this thing continues to sort of sweep through the culture without resistance, what is going to come in

response to it? So that is one of the reasons that I feel like it's so incredibly urgent. And why do you think, Barry, we don't see the far left as a problem because Constantine's family are from the Soviet Union, I have family from Venezuela, you know, we've seen what the far left has done to our respective countries. But in the UK and, you know, in America, I see kids walking around with Shege Guevara T-shirts, you know, abolished capitalism. Why is that? I've thought about this so much. I think there are two reasons.

One has to do with maybe institutional capture before we called it that, which is to say most people educated in this country, you learn a tremendous amount. I would say because I went to a Jewish day school, it was different. And we had tons of students who were from the former Soviet Union. And so I was aware of what that meant. because it was like in my family. Like that was in our community.

That was something. Oh, why are these people moving here? Okay, let's understand what actually happened there. But were it not for that? And a lot of extremely well-educated people I know who went to some of the best prep schools in the country really don't learn about the evils of Soviet communism, for example, at all. So that's one aspect of it. There's just genuine ignorance. And I think the other thing is like just,

better branding. Like if your thing is about you know lifting up everyone equally doesn't that sound great? You know, if your thing is about like guaranteeing everyone whatever. We all know the promises.

Like I think there's that that still resonates maybe for people who believe it hasn't been tried yet or hasn't been tried yet in the right way. It's amazing to me that that's the reality but I think that for a lot of young Americans, that is just the reality. And frankly, like, just look at popular culture.

Like, other than Mr. Jones, you know, that movie that came out recently or maybe the lives of others. Like, is there anything that gets made that shows the evils of, I'm just thinking now about, like, what, like, Stalinism and the former Soviet, like, is there anything about that? Not really. There's a ton about fascists as there should be. But I think that's a huge part of it. It's just like this tremendous gap in people's education. Yeah, I wish I had a better answer. But I'm constantly running into this from people that I think of as being very sophisticated

and extraordinarily well-educated. And do you think – I think part of it, Barry, is that – capitalism isn't really working for a lot of people, particularly young people. In the UK, you can see it with the housing market. It doesn't matter how much you own. It doesn't matter how good your job is. You're never going to get on the housing ladder unless you've got mum and dad to support you. It just seems the wages are stagnating whilst everything is getting more expensive.

Do you think that might be the problem? People are looking around and going, well, this isn't working? I think that's a huge aspect of it, especially. I don't know how old you guys are, but I imagine we're similar. 23. Me too. So we're similar age. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So we're similar. We're one year older than you. Yeah. Okay, cool. So as elder millennials, I think that we know, like, you know, think about what our generations live through.

Here it's been, you know, the great recession, the crushing student debt crisis, the fact that like basic tenants of what used to be called unironically the American dream are totally out of reach for people in my generation. And so absolutely, I think that capitalism has been, you know, beaten down and has an understandably poor reputation among people of our generation and they're looking for something better. And I just think that the solution is a much more serious social safety net and policies that lift up the poorest people in the country. Obviously not a communism.

But I think that, yeah, the fact that capitalism has failed for so many people has left them understandably casting about for something better. Do you not think also, I mean, Jonathan High obviously, has written quite a lot about the culture of safetyism and all of that. You probably would have seen, while working the New York Times younger, the next generation. We are actually, there's a term for a, for a, for a, us, which I always forget, that generation between millennials and the one before, like, those, something, I can't remember.

Is it senials? Whatever. It's basically the generation that didn't have internet growing up, but did when they got to like 16, 17, 18, I think. But the next generation, who always had the internet, their values are also different. There's something happened there where the focus on culture, being offended about things, all of that stuff started to come through. and performative caring and performative compassion started to,

this is my opinion anyway, started to set in. Did you notice a generational shift in terms of the people coming through into journalism in your experience? Yes, but I think that has maybe less to do with the internet and more to do with ideological capture of elite universities here, right? Because this is an everyone problem. This is mostly an elite problem. The problem is that the elites,

control all of the institutions and the culture. So like the good and the bad news, right, is that ideas really, really matter. And the ideas that you're exposed to or not exposed to during the most formative years of your intellectual development, which is college, like if all you're exposed to is this broad view of the world that we've sort of been circling here. And you think that disagreement is violence. And you think, you know, in the case of Yale University and Nicholas and Erica Christakis that emails about Halloween costumes are literal violence or at Evergreen State College with, you know, two of my heroes, Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying, that, you know, resisting a day of racial segregation is somehow racist. And then all of a sudden, you're going

into these institutions, right? The old view of things was that if you were, you know, an anthro major at Vassar or a gender studies major at Columbia, like you were experiencing. You were exposed to some radical politics, sure, but you would go and get your job at J.P. Morgan or McKinsey at the New York Times or now Netflix or HBO Max or whatever. And like you would leave those ideas behind and the institution would be so strong that it would shape you rather than you shaping it. But as Yuvalovin and others have put much more articulately than me, the opposite has happened. The institutions have become platforms, first of all, rather than institutions. And rather than them shaping the young people coming up into them, no, the young people

coming up into them have shaped them. And one of the reasons they've been able to do that so effectively is that the quivers that they have are so incredibly powerful. They wield, you know, the threat of moral shaming. They wield the threat of cancellation. And they have this incredible thing called Twitter and Facebook to do it. And so, in a weird way, well, I'll sort of leave it at that. But did I see the generational divide? Absolutely. It's not, it's, look, speaking of the Soviet Union, there are double thinkers, okay? And there are dissidents. And those are strange words to use when you're living in America, but that's 100% what's going on. And so it's really hard to figure out exactly who believes what, right? Unless you're in,

like, you know, in your basement reading your Samizdat or your equivalent with the people that you really, you know, that are super high trust inside an institution. There are a lot of people that say one thing in public or say one thing in the Slack channel, but then in a signal text me something totally different. We were talking about this morning, actually, Barry, that we know when a comedian or a journalist or public figure in the UK in this country has decided they don't give a shit about their careers when they follow us on Twitter. That's They're done. They're ready. I know people that have got, I know people, I heard a story about an agent the other day who got fired from her job for following a conservative on Twitter.

I mean, that's the level that we're talking about. So it's understandable that people are scared and not telling the truth. But the reason that I think it's hard to figure out exactly who's true believers or who's just kind of going along because they have children to support and a family. and a mortgage to pay. It's hard to suss that out. But my feeling, I'm pretty confident that it's still very much a minority view that's being supercharged by the younger generation, let's say the under 30 generation. But a lot of older people are going along with it because they're looking and seeing same things going on in the Democratic Party. Like, oh, the prevailing political wins are at their backs. Those people are going to be my bosses one day. And it looks like the

publisher of the paper isn't standing up to them. So it seems like the right thing to do would be to go along with it. And I think that's a lot of what's happening is just this kind of like people going along with something that they know is wrong, thinking though that if they just accommodate in X, Y, Z ways, if they just apologize in the right way, if they just caveat this or that, that it will go away. And that is the delusion. That's the ultimate delusion. But it's like you said, and I love the way that you've used that word delusion, but like all delusions, Barry, it's not sustainable, surely. You can't sustain a delusion, can you?

Well, of course, ultimately you can't sustain a delusion. The question is, how much is it going to burn through before it dies out? And the notion that I think a lot of people who are, who know that this is bad, but are not saying so publicly, somehow believe that it's going to recede on its own without resistance. And I think that's a very dangerous view. And I think that it's incumbent on people right now. Like I think it's people's moral duty to speak out about something that they know is wrong.

And the thing that I think is happening is that it's like almost for the sake of short-term comfort, people are sacrificing like long-term the things that allow us to even be able to speak out in the first place. I don't really think most people understand what we're at threat of losing. And by the way, I hope that someone's going to view this tape 10 years from now and be like, that lady was hysterical and crazy. Like, I hope that I'm overstating it and I hope that I'm wrong. But just watching what I've seen at the New York Times, but just in my reporting in sectors like education,

K through 12 and medicine and the law, I just don't think that I'm overstating the case, at least in this moment. Let's talk about that, Barry. What are you talking about? What do we have to lose? What is happening in education? What is happening in healthcare?

You're an intelligent, experienced journalist. You've seen many things. Why are you concerned about what's happening? And what is it that you're seeing? Well, what I'm seeing is people afraid to tell the truth. I'm seeing people that are acting based on fear, including doctors and lawyers and, like, let's, let me put it this way. It's one thing when a celebrity, you know, says a lie on the internet to protect their brand or because they don't want to lose their sponsorship or because they want China, you know, to pick up their Avengers movie. It is quite another thing when a doctor who literally deals with math.

of life and death is unable to say things like there are differences between males and females or is unable to say that, you know, certain groups of people have more proclivities towards certain diseases and that that doesn't mean anything about anyone's, like, and acknowledging that. So like, that's the kind of thing we've been exposing on my newsletter. In K through 12 education, what does it look like? And it looks like, you know, throwing out classic books, like to kill a mockingbird or Huckleberry Finn or tons of others that I can name, Ketcher in the Rye, and replacing them with Ibram Kendi books rather than reading both as an example. It means teaching children that their skin color really, really, really matters to them and their skin color is an extremely important part of who they are rather than their character. So what I'm talking about is what I articulated before, the liberal project, those ideas, those values that allow us to come on this and disagree in public or agree in

public but have a conversation and not tear each other's throats out, that is what's under threat. like I really believe that and that's ultimately why I feel like that's why I'm doing the work that I'm doing because I want to expose what I feel like a lot of journalists are ignoring or actively lying about because this thing that I'm describing it's not going to be contained you know to high rises in Midtown Manhattan or Harvard University or Yale like this is coming to affect everywhere. and that's why it's so important for us to stand up against it. And you say it's so important to stand up against it, but isn't it a really tough ass to do if someone's got a mortgage, they're reliant on a salary, they've got kids, etc, etc, and knowing that they can be cut at any moment? Yes.

Yes, it is a hard ask. And not everyone can, not everyone can stand up to this or needs to stand up to this in exactly the same way, right? It could be that you support organizations like, you know, the... Trigonometry. Like trigonometry, exactly. Or like my substack. That's the name you were searching for.

That's right. Or like my substack. Or like there's this amazing new organization I'm on the board of Fair, the foundation against intolerance and racism. There's so many things that you could do quietly. But I would also suggest to people, and without sounding like too high-minded about it, there are things worth sacrificing professional advancement and prestige for.

And, you know, like the things that might feel like major sacrifices already in this moment, what is that going to look like a year or two years or five years from now if this thing continues to roll through, well, Western civilization without good people, people of conscience standing up to it? I mean, what do you think it's going to look like, Barry? I really hesitate that question, because I think we're going to go down a pretty depressing alley, but go for it. You love it, mate.

I do. I'm miserable fucker. Well, wait, hold on. You guys are closer to places like, you know, the Soviet Union and Venezuela. What do you think it's going to look like? Oh, if it's going to look like Venezuela, it's going to be great. We're all going to lose weight, Barry.

It's going to be super slim. It's going to be great. It's going to be time on the beach. Yeah, we're going to be very equal. We're going to be equally poor. That's going to be great. So, yeah, there's lots to look forward to. But look, I personally, I agree with you that, I mean, especially when you talk about education,

if you spend enough time teaching the next generation and the one after that to think of themselves primarily through their ethnicity and their skin color, in my opinion, there's only one way that ends. There's only one way that ends. Because this is all, this shit has been tried before again. and again and again. And given particularly that we live in multi-ethnic societies, you know, there's only one way that ends.

Well, right. And you, I hope you guys saw it, but we just exposed this, you know, there was a professor. I did not believe it when I first heard the tape. Maybe we want to include it where, you know, a psychiatrist delivering grand rounds at Yale University openly fantasized about unloading a revolver into the brains of white people.

who talked about how she fantasized about it and walked away guiltless because she was doing a favor to civil... I mean, you have to listen to this to believe it. Now you know how Francis Gauterfell and feels. How has that become normalized? The way that's become normalized is that people are not standing up to things

that very obviously, like, are wrong. Right. You don't need to understand what critical race theory is or have read whatever, like Marcuse or Foucault to know that a psychiatrist at Yale talking about murdering people based on their race is wrong. And like, don't be, if you're listening to this, like, don't be fooled by the jargon. You know, like, it's common sense. You know that that's wrong.

And the thing to do is not wait for the cavalry to come in. Like, we're the cavalry. Like, trigonometry is the cavalry. So, like, you've got to stand. up, you've got to speak out because as hard as it feels now, sorry to repeat myself, but like, as hard as it feels now, if it already feels hard, that's a sign to you that things are already too far gone. It shouldn't be hard to stand up against something like that. You say it shouldn't be hard to stand up against something like that. But we look at,

you know, particularly, you know, the arts, entertainment, publishing. All these industries seems to have been toppled one after another, after another, after another. And now it's infected sport. Well, what's happening right, though, is, and I hope that we're going to look back on it this way. What's going on is the rotting out of 20th century institutions. But what's happening, and that's horrible and deserves, like, I was heart sick about it for a long time. But once you move beyond the grieving process, you're like, wait, hold on. Joe Rogan has, you know, more viewers and listeners on a single episode than all of CNN in a week.

Like, I think the more people can get over. Well, he had like, oh, I mean, if you look at the average ratings of CNN's getting like something per episode per night, something like post-Trump, right? They're in the slump. It's like something like 300,000. It's a very, very low number. And like Joe Rogan with Dave Chappelle had something like 50 million downloads. So it's like it's true that

like what you're saying is totally true. And I'm living in L.A. And so now I'm seeing a whole other side of it out here in Hollywood. But what's also true is that people are building new things. And like that's the whole game as far as I'm concerned. If there are institutions that can be salvaged and shored up, we should do that because it's really fucking hard to build new things.

but otherwise, all of our energy should be going on building new institutions and new projects, new schools, new universities, new publishing houses, new podcast networks, et cetera, et cetera, that uphold the values that we've been talking about during this hour and that are immunized to the ideological takeover. And that's the real challenge. How to prevent yourself from experiencing exactly. what all of these story institutions are right now. Yeah, that's a really good point. And I hope that process is happening,

because the more I look at a lot, not all, but a lot of the mainstream media, the legacy institutions of various kinds, I just think they'll need to burn down to the ground, to be honest, because that's what I'm seeing. But look, let me put a counter argument here. Is there a possibility that we are just a bunch of slightly getting older bigots now and we've just, you know,

we just don't like progress? and we hate gay people and we hate black people and we just hate everyone. No, I'm gay. I know you are. I know. You know, and secretly deep down, you and I hate the Jews and whatever. Do you know what I mean? Like we're just really regressive and we just hate the fact that the world yet again is moving forward.

And finally, it's recognizing yet more minority groups that have been marginalized and we're all really uncomfortable with whatever is going on. What I would say to that is that if you study American history, the thing that has allowed for the American experiment to come to include, you know, it's Pride Months. So we're talking about gay marriage recently, like to come to include more and more groups in its embrace, to come to abolish slavery, to come to, you know, pass the past civil rights law, to. pass gay marriage. And we can go through tons of different examples. The tools that have allowed us to do that are the liberal tools and the tools, whatever you think of the founder's moral hypocrisy, the tools that the founders laid out in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. That's why I know that this ideology is dangerous because it basically says we don't need those tools anymore. That because those tools were invented by bigoted dead white men, we got to,

we got to tear the whole house down. Rather than improving and renewing and rebuilding, we're tearing down. And that's how I know that this is different because it's not saying, let's think about who's been left out. Let's think about who needs to be included. Let's think about who's, you know, yeah, everything I just said. That's not what it's asking. It's asking for a total teardown. And that's why I think that, you know, we're not just cranky, old, becoming middle-aged and graying people. That's why I think we're responding to something quite real. And you say we're responding to something quite real. Do you think that the younger generation are going to wake up or do you think they're going to

carry on as they have been? I have to tell you, I've been like through the company I'm building and and other things. I also have a sister who's 25 and living in Brooklyn and is the antithesis of the kind of Brooklyn stereotype. So I have to say, there's a lot of Gen Ziers, I think that's the name of their generation that I meet that I think are incredible and very much don't buy into this. So I think I'm actually feeling like super optimistic. When I felt pessimistic was when I was in the world of the New York Times. And I was just like this, you know, but since I've left, I feel, first of all, liberated. And I feel like, oh, wow, like, I'm participating to whatever small extent that I am in doing the thing that I really believe is, is it being asked of us in this

moment in history, which is trying to build new things that live up to our values. Barry, I was going to ask you, slightly going back in terms of our conversation, but I think it's valuable. Tell us what it was like. You obviously left the New York Times. What was it like going into work in that sort of environment, day and doubt? The reason I'm asking you this is because I want you to give people a flavor, and I think a lot of people would recognize their own experience in it potentially, and then we can talk about what they can do about it. Sure. Well, as an unhinged Zionist, as my friend Andrew Sullivan wants to be. called me. You know, I was never cool to begin with. I, you know, I had had a career beforehand.

I was never as public facing as I was at the times, but I had written op eds, book reviews, and there was, there was already a long, you know, Google search where you could find everything that you wanted to if you wanted to dislike me. So from the beginning, you know, I was, there were certain people who gave me the cold shoulder. There was, I had a feeling like I had to really overcompensate. Like I brought in Babka like every Friday. I was like, I'm a good person. Trust me.

I bring good office snacks. And also I like bringing in good office snacks. But I felt like there was something I had to overcome. Like I kind of smelled that. Right. And I needed to like show them that I was in good odor. So but you know, I'm also like, I'm also a big girl. And can I say that about myself?

And I like was. so pinching myself that even so okay what so i'm not cool who cares i get to work at the new york times even if you hate it it's still the most powerful platform in the world and so that kind of like social discomfort that kind of rolled off my back to be honest with you like i'm i'm pretty used to that because i'm i'm often like kind of on the edge of one group or another i'm kind of like politically homeless. So I was used to that. What shifted was when that kind of the sense that like my politics were somewhat heretical came to justify open bullying of me, including in Slack channels with thousands of my colleagues. So that by the end of my time there, you know, there were like acts and guillotine

emojis being put up next to my name and next to the name of my boss that was forced out of. of the paper. There were people openly calling for me to be fired, again, in full view of the publisher and the Mastead and everyone else. There were people, you know, it wasn't, and this had gone on for a long time, but like I would kind of be sitting two desks away from someone that was, you know, open. Hold on Barry. Sorry, Tim Trubb. They were calling for you to be fired because what, you were sexually harassing people or like, what were you?

Yeah. Five foot four woman is a real, real threat. That's what I mean? Like, what were you doing that your colleagues are calling for you to be fired? What I was doing was that I was problematic. Like, think about it this way, because this was like when I first encountered this view of the world. At Columbia University in the Middle East Studies Department, they almost to a person, pushed the Soviet propaganda line that Zionism was racism. Okay?

Well, if Zionism is racism, then Zionists are racist. and then it became acceptable to bully Zionists, including in the classroom. And it was exactly the same thing at the New York Times. As this ideology kind of hardened and as the sort of tenants of the new dogma, that laundry list grew ever longer, anyone that didn't ascribe or conform to every single aspect of that dogma was seen as suspicious. And I was suspicious in so many ways. I mean, during the Me Too movement, you know, I wrote this crazy piece that said, you know, we should trust women, but verify their claims. Crazy, I know.

No, you can't, come on. Barry. It was nuts, you know, like radical. You know, during the women, you know, during Evergreen, I had written in support of Brett and Heather. I wrote pieces about it. Pick your topic. Like, you know, I just didn't conform to everything they believed. And so what happened, obviously everything in this country, and I think around the world, heated up in the pandemic and also following the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.

And that led to this intense, what I think will be remembered as a kind of moral panic inside the paper. So that when we ran in early June, God, it's almost like to the day, a year ago, an op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton saying that the National Guard should be, brought in to quell violent rioters, not peaceful protests, but violent rioters. There was just an absolute conflagration at the paper. And 800 people signed this letter, claiming that the peace literally put their lives in danger. And rather than saying to them, maybe go have a drink or maybe consider getting a job that's not in journalism, the response was to praise people for their moral courage. It was to fire and reassign my bosses who had brought me into the paper.

And it was to hang out to dry. And this is a story that still needs to be told, my 25-year-old colleague as a scapegoat, who was one of seven editors that worked on that piece, who ultimately ended up being pushed out and leaving the paper. So like, that to me was a signal event where I knew, wait, if that's how they're going to treat people that tried to do their job and tried to take a risk, I don't even think it's a risk,

but tried to take a risk by running a piece that other colleagues or our readers would be challenged by, how could I possibly think that the same thing won't happen to me? And that was what I, you know, was facing this choice of,

okay, I can stay here and keep, you know, the most powerful name in news, which is Barry Weiss of the New York Times. And a lot of people, you know, really respond when you say that you're calling from the Times. it's a real prestigious thing.

And by stay, I need to avoid writing about an ever-increasing number of topics that I think are the real story in this country. And by the increasing number of topics, give us an example of what you mean by that. Oh, just like, you know, the violence, let's say, of the many of the protests of this past summer, the idea that they weren't all peaceful. The idea, I remember trying to commission complicated pieces about the really hard. hard subject of trans athletes in high school sports. But already it had been so difficult and took so much energy for me to do my job, which was to bring in pieces that wouldn't otherwise appear in the paper. And it just took like the threshold and the bar was so, so high for, you know, pieces from people like, you know, Glenn Lowry or Thomas Chatterton Williams

or just pieces that didn't tow the line were just so much harder. to smuggle through. And by the end of my time, I actually was told not to commission pieces anymore because the new system following the Tom Cotton debacle, and I'm sure it's changed at this point because it's just totally unsustainable, was that every editor needed to sign off on every single piece and that if anyone raised a red flag that this piece made them uncomfortable, it wouldn't run. So of course that meant I couldn't do my job. And I literally had an email from then my then boss saying, like, why don't you just write pieces for a while? I see that, like, I think you should stop commissioning. And then it was like, well, why am I here? Like,

what's my life really about? What's my career really about? Because this isn't it. And that effectively means that journalism is dead because the greatest pieces of journalism are in century. They deal with truth. They deal with dealing with subject matter that we are uncomfortable with. We all remember those groundbreaking pieces of journalism. Yeah. I mean, I don't want to overstate this, guys, because there's still, like, not just reporters, but stories that come out of the times that are unbelievable. Like, I think about Jack Nickas's recent expose of Apple in China. Like, this is one of the things that we have not figured out yet how to do, and hopefully this will be the next decade. Like, podcasts are great, newsletters are great, they can do a certain kind of reporting. But the amount of infrastructure and support legally and security-wise that you need to go report.

in a country like Iran or China, sorry, like Substant can't do that yet. No. So, like, there's still great, great reporters at the Times. The problem is, is that once the Times is so clearly betraying its values in other arenas, you start to be skeptical of those stories, too, which is another one of the dangers. Yeah. That's a very good point, Barry. That's the one thing that nobody in the alternative media yet is able to do.

even very rich people is the investigative journalism that needs thousands of man hours and millions of dollars. Journalism is very expensive and it is a real skill. And the great thing about it, though, is that it's not a skill that requires a college degree. Like, all you need to do to be a great journalist is to learn the skill of dropping into strange places and learning how to talk to people. one of the things I remember suggesting to the publisher of the Times way before all of this was happening years before, I suggested two things because they knew that I was getting bullied

and they were at first very sympathetic about it but ultimately did nothing. One thing I suggested was ban all New York Times reporters from Twitter. Try it for six months. Try it for six months and see how that affects their reporting. The second thing I said was hire, make an explicit policy that you will, will not hire people from any elite institutions or the coasts. Hire people from the middle of

the country that do not have college degrees and see how that changes, you know, your ability to fulfill your mission. You know, I don't think they took me up on. I'm sure those two ideas went down brilliantly, Barry. I can just see it. Yeah, they did. But listen, we got to let you go. It's been really great chatting with you. I've really enjoyed, I'm sure Francis has as well, and I know our audience will have enjoyed it. We've got one final question for you, which we ask all of our guests, which is, what is the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be? Oh, I think we're not talking enough about sex. Speak for yourself.

I don't know if you guys have seen, but there was this crazy chart that came out a few months ago that showed that, and this was before COVID, that the percentage of men in America between the ages of 18 and 24, who hadn't had sex. in the previous year, I think, was 30%. That's wild to me. And that's a story that I feel like has not been told and has incredible cultural and political ramifications. So I'll be looking at it's a story that's very much on my radar because the question of like, are we turning into Japan? I think is, and what are the implications of that?

I think are a really interesting one. The ladies of trigonometry, you've got a job to do. Barry, listen, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you. I'm so looking forward to your new podcast, honestly, with Barry. It's going to be great. Tell people a little bit about, I read the press release, and you just absolutely nailed what I think the moment needs. So tell everybody why you decide to start a podcast

and where else people can find you online. Because the world needs another podcast. Absolutely. I decided to start a podcast because I feel like the most interesting and searching and authentic conversations in our lives no longer happen in public. They happen in private. And I want to take what's happening on my WhatsApp and signal chats and have those conversations out loud.

And I want to tell the stories that the legacy press is overlooking and tell them in a way that promotes empathy and understanding rather than polarization. So the first episode is, I'm incredibly proud of it. It's not an interview with a famous celebrity. It's an interview with a Palestinian business owner in Minneapolis named Majdiwadi and the public shaming and the boycott of his business that he lived through and what his story says about the direction that the country's heading in. And the way that he articulates the kind of foundational values that we've been talking about,

I think will really, really move people. That sounds incredible. I'm going to go and listen to it. And as we're like, Barry, thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to find you on social media, et cetera, et cetera, where is the best place to do that? They can find me Twitter at Barry Weiss. They can subscribe to my newsletter, Barry Weiss.substack.com and go look up honestly with Barry Weiss. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Barry, for your time.

And thank you guys for watching. We will be back very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or Raw Show. All of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time. Take care and see you soon, guys.