You probably shouldn't judge a publication like The Free Press by its commentors... but. Anytime I click on "read more" comments on a Free Press article, I think "well, this is a mistake," especially if the article is the least bit Anti-Trump, in which case it's a full-blown conniption fit poop-show. This is who The FP has attracted, at least when it comes to those over-sharing their thoughts. Like me. Now.
The FP has, however, been useful to me to be exposed to articulate thoughts I wouldn't have otherwise read and to understand why things are turning out the way they are... insights I don't get from other media like NPR / WaPo. It might not be balanced, but it balances... and even if I don't agree, I understand more.
I used to subscribe to the Free Press. I stopped only because I had too many subscriptions and wanted to drop a few. It mostly suited my sensibilities as an "anti-woke" guy. This was happening when Biden was president - the horror of Trump's second term hadn't happened yet.
While I enjoyed many articles, the comments below were like something out of my worst nightmares. I wouldn't post there if you paid me to. If anyone said something positive about vaccines the next 100 responses would tear this person apart like piranhas descending on a cow carcass.
It's the same with Unherd, though Unherd at least is willing to keep publishing Trump-critical and even sometimes left-leaning articles despite the frothing-at-the-mouth rage they inspire in the comments section.
The Free Press is basically the WSJ editorial on steroids. A few sane pro-free market and rules of law articles then an avalanche of criticism on the left’s excesses and sins. Bari Weiss is nothing but a procuress of stories that satisfies the egos of right winged intellects.
At least the WSJ has some non-MAGA readers. TFP comments are 95% MAGA. They whine and complain about anything anti-Trump and a group of them broke off and left for another site.
Thank you for this! I was with Bari since the beginning, with Common Sense, but cancelled my subscription to The Free Press in August 2024. The constant sucking up to the MAGA hordes that live in its comments became nauseating. Niall Ferguson and Douglas Murray are NatCons, as his Ferguson’s wife, Ayan Hirsi Ali. Several of their other “featured writers” are too. These are people who hang out at the National Conservatism Convention and listen to Viktor Orbán speak about how to achieve a Christian Nationalist country. Ferguson and Ali also belong to the same subset of Catholic Nationalist organizations that JD Vance belongs to. They tend to meet up at The Napa Institute in California once a year. And I read the TFP “interview” with Usha Vance yesterday, and this piece confirms my impression that it was just a superficial fluff where Usha basically didn’t say anything more than how shocked she was that people would boo her at The Kennedy Center. The rest of the “interview” was stuff the writer found out from third parties, plus photos and talk about Usha’s clothes (her Badgely Mishka inauguration dress cost $495 if anyone’s interested).
One reason The Free Press has taken off financially, and has the net worth that it does, is that Bari got VC money from Marc Andreesen and David Sacks. You don’t have to look much further to see where the editorial slant on Trump comes from. Not to mention the audience capture coming from the people who live in their comments sewer. Tout s’explique.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become extremely disappointing. For someone who has read and admired the likes of John Stuart Mills and Alexis De Tocqueville, she practically abandoned all her prior small ‘l’ liberal sensibilities. While I do not want to judge her constant evolution on faith and religion, her journey to Christianity was all about joining a tribe instead of being moved by the teachings of God’s grace. So the whole schtick seems phony.
As a cradle Catholic with a cousin who’s a Jesuit priest and a best friend who’s a diocesan priest (one with a doctorate degree in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian College in Rome - the Jesuit - and the other with a canon law degree from the Pontifical North American College in Rome - the diocesan priest), I very much want to criticize both Ali and Ferguson, and also Vance, for their faith/religion journey. All three of them are part of the Catholic Integralism movement that seeks to create a Catholic state where Catholicism is the government imposed religion. Failing that, a Christian Nationalist state with Christianity as the government imposed religion will have to suffice. And all 3 of them are recent converts, recruited in part by the part of the Church that opposes Pope Francis, hates Vatican II, and wants to return to the Latin Mass. The diocesan priest with the Canon Law degree says these are dangerous people with dangerous ideas and not the devout Catholics they pretend to be. Having read up on them, NatCon, and the Napa Institute, I agree.
Yes, I think read in the NY Times writeup about TFP that only about 15% of their subscribers are paid subscribers. At $5/month which is probably about the average, their revenue is not from their subscriptions but from donors who are very much invested in what Chris Rufo deemed The Free Press as being a "red pill off ramp for disaffected Democrats and moderates". It's purpose is "red pilling" - and I think the Trump 2024 was at least in part thanks to efforts like TFP in converting some votes into thinking it was all about the culture war victories and that there were no policy or institutional downsides to electing Trump and giving his party majorities, in fact only upsides in more tax cuts and economic growth. They spent zero online ink into any actual policy discussions about a second Trump Presidency and have mostly treated the GOP as an abstraction.
I commented before I quit for good in February 2025 that the high point of all this was going to be the period between Trump's Glorious Re-election and Inauguration Day 2025. The rest they will get to repent in leisure over the next 4 years - I was only wrong in how quickly that would happen! ;p
Trump won in 2024 because of non-college educated voters and low-information voters. College educated voters who describe themselves as being high-information voted for Harris by huge margins. Now, could Harris have won by winning a larger margin with college educated and high-information voters? Sure, but inflation is probably what prevented that, and now the explicit authoritarianism/fascism and extreme stupidity of Trump's second administration will probably result in Democrats winning even larger margins among college educated and high-information voters. Point being, this project of creating conservative intellectuals is probably hurt by the fact that Trump and his movement are repellent to high human capital, which is not to say The Free Press and Bari Weiss don't help Trumpism, because they definitely do, but just that there's a limit to it.
Thank you, Matt. I unsubscribed to The Free Press for just these reasons. It’s too bad, in a way, because many of the writers are quite smart and quite good, but choose to play to their preferred audience (only have to read the Comments section a couple of times to figure out who that audience is).
Second this comment. I also subscribed, and I admire some of the folks. And just this week Bari interviewed a friend (John McWhorter) who really is a good guy. Still, Matt raises many troubling points. I'm going to have to be more circumspect, I guess.
John McWhorter (and Jesse Singal, Matt Yglesias, etc and other "heterodox" who have not bitten the right wing horseshoe) is the example of what an anti-woke yet still liberal/Democrat can be. I will never understand why anger at 2020 racial and gender discourse means you have to abandon your support for government subsidized health care and regulated capitalism and progressive taxation and become a Trump supporter.And yet ;p
It's a shame people see anti-wokeness as a MAGA thing, when most of the intelligent opposition has come from liberals. Before "woke" acquired its current meaning I favored "illiberal" as the term to describe this set of beliefs.
It's funny how different people have totally different definitions of woke. Some say woke equates to illiberal attitudes like wanting to shut down speakers, others just use woke to describe ideas they don't like, even if they're not presented in an illiberal way, and others use woke to denote standard liberal and leftist views.
It's not "funny." It's just the way languages evolve. McWhorter's book "Words on he Move" (mentioned in these comments) explains this quite well. The way I use it in 2025, is as a synonym for illiberal left: those still enthralled by the Blank Slate Fallacy and who see the world so inaccurately as partitioned by identity into oppressed and oppressors. I am a free market liberal.
Yeah, again i think it's being able to thread the needle between legitimate critiques of some of the excesses of the left with being proportionate to the problems of it as well as proportionate to the problems of the right while also not tossing aside pretty much all liberal positions while still claiming to be a "liberal". Taibbi and Weiss have gone in the other direction, and perhaps because they have had the most visibility they are the image most have about "anti-woke" - becoming de-facto Republican/Trump apologists (and even supporters).
How much of that was audience capture (anti-woke content is naturally going to attract a large audience of right wingers looking for confirmation bias and partisan entertainment, and which will tightly police the boundaries of acceptable discourse to remain firmly anti-left) or a natural progression of forming a political identity as mostly being in opposition to something versus in support of something is probably a blend of the two things. If The Free Press had started with a more balanced offering of Trump criticism with "anti-woke" stuff they might have attracted a more balanced audience, for one, the hard core MAGA's would have been driven off sooner and more moderate/liberals would have viewed the anti-woke criticism with more credibility if it wasn't so one-sided. I think for sure once they started taking big SV money and Manhattan Institute they became much more partisan goal oriented as well, the last year of barely concealed Trump cheerleading coincided with their funding and expansion...
I don't find anything objectionable about Bari Weiss. I find the Free Press as whole perfectly fine, and there are several writers there I read eagerly.
If Taibbi and Weiss have "gone in the other direction", there's a mighty good chance they were pushed in that direction after being subjected to the same type of sneering condescension and public condemnation on parade in much of the foregoing discussion, likely for making some anodyne observation like, "gee, Joe Biden doesn't seem to know where he is at any given moment", or "it's difficult to trust a group of politicians who lie to your face about something as obvious at [INSERT DEM SCANDAL], it's just that you're not used to column inches devoted to discussing how demonstrably corrupt the Democrats have become. It's like you walk into the conversation with a blank slate, which is intellectually dishonest. It is fitting, however, that Taibbi and Weiss are being attacked, as they were some of the first and most prominent journalists to observe that the emporer had no clothes, and being right on that account is unforgivable in your camp, sadly.
I listened to a podcast of Jonah Goldberg interviewing John McWhorter about the latter’s new book regarding pronouns. Very little about politics. McWhorter was educational and entertaining about pronouns. Had not read/heard him before.
My first McWhorter book was "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English." I enjoyed it immensely. For those who want to believe word meanings are fixed in stone, "Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)," should open your eyes. "The language Hoax" argues against the notion that people’s languages (e.g., English, French, Arabic, Amazonian, etc.) channel the way they think and perceive the world. His writing on "Black English" - demonstrating it's a "real" language will surprise some. "Woke Racism" will inform well meaning souls why he views wokeness as condescending and damaging to Black people like himself and his children. McWhorter appears frequently on Bill Maher's show and of course bi-weekly on Glenn Loury's podcast.
CarlW-Thanks for the mention of John McWhorter. I ordered two of his books after listening to the Goldberg podcast with him (The Power of Babel and his latest, Pronoun Trouble).
Says you, but you don't determine what words mean, and in particular what they mean to me. "Woke," as commonly used and used by me, does not mean what it used to - if that were so you might have a case. It has evolved to describe the ideology that partitions humanity into oppressed (the good) and oppressors (the bad), a thoroughly mistaken and damaging view of the world. A view that sees Hamas rapists, murderers, and kidnappers as the noble good guys. I remain proudly against these noxious ideas. I sympathize if you just awakened from a 30 year comma and have yet to realize how people now use the word.
We agree that mcwhorter is anti-woke. I base that on the original and true meaning of what woke is, so yeah I think that’s a bad thing from mcwhorter. You base it on the propagandized, false claim of what woke is, so you think it’s good from
McWhorter. We agree on what he’s doing, but I reinforce what black liberation tells us and you reinforce what white supremacy has stolen from black liberation. That’s the difference.
McWhorter is a linguist - a widely recognized expert on how word meanings change over time. What is your authority? You are a living example of what is wrong with the woke ideology: heap calumnies and disdain on anyone not echoing your creed verbatim: calling people "white supremist" because they disagree with your notion of what "woke" means. White supremacists disgust me even more than misguided, ignorant people such as yourself.
In 2020 an online mob started a boycott of a deli chain because the owner's daughter posted something racist on twitter when she was a teenager. 80 immigrant workers lost their jobs as a result, and this was in the middle of a pandemic.
But being against this sort of thing is 'anti-American'? Should people who experience this never talk about it fir fear it'll help the right?
You might quibble the term 'woke' and I'm not a fan of how the word is used these days either. But what term should we use when people bully others under the guise of leftwing concern for the poor and marginalised?
This is as good a summary as I've read about the problems with The Free Press.
Right now, as a green card holder is sitting in a prison in Louisiana for having protested against Israel's attacks on Gaza, and a Turkish student has also been shipped south for having coauthored an editorial.
But the FP is completely silent on these stories, which are pretty much right in the heart of the first amendment. The closest I can find is a column by Jed Rubenfeld complaining about Federal judges blocking Trump's illegal actions via injunctions with nationwide scope.
The sheer hypocrisy of Weiss and company ignoring core first amendment issues while writing intellectually vapid columns about trivialities is why I gave up reading it.
I've been noticing the list of things the FP has been silent on, too. I've been reading to hear points of view that don't align with mine, but when editorials are trying to compare 47 to FDR, and you're going to give Sec Rubio air time on a podcast titled "Honestly" -- beginning of an extensive list of omissions. My patience for this has reached its end.
Thank you so much for this. I haven't yet read your piece, so you may have mentioned this, but the problem is even worse at FAIR, another of Bari Weiss' constructions. (Do you understand how she has gotten so much power and credibility?) I was one of the first members of FAIR, which was launched, ostensibly, to oppose extreme ideologies and promote liberal values. Instead, they have recently published a series that blames our transgender "problem" on SSRI's. I know several doctors, some of them psychiatrists, and none is aware of any research that supports such a contention. My feeling about Bari Weiss is that she will write anything that gives her access to powerful people and makes her feel important. Sad, in a way.
Oh, while we are on the subject, I am also very well acquainted with the U of Austin. I have known the president for many years. I think Weiss is on the board along with Ferguson and other "Free Press" people. I'll have to check in with him and see what is going on there.
Yesterday, over at The Bulwark, Tim Miller interviewed Mark Lilla, and Lilla talked at one point about teaching a summer course at The University of Austin at Texas, Bari’s anti-woke university project. Lilla had a class of students he was teaching about French philosophers (he’s written a book on that). The compacted summer semester meant that Lilla had the students from 9 to 3 every day, after which the students spent the afternoon listening to other speakers.
The feedback Lilla got from the students was that they were being subjected to intellectual whiplash. They told him they got solid academic material from him during the day, then received psycho nut job MAGA crap in the afternoon. They were at a loss as to what the school was trying to teach them. Lilla said that he had only agreed to teach the summer course because he knew the university president from his days at St Johns, a well known Great Books curriculum school. When he saw what the University of Austin was actually doing, he decided he would never teach there again. It’s a bit like if Turning Point USA were a college, instead of a college club.
That's extremely disappointing to hear. I had high hopes for UoA when I heard about it - it seems though that western university students are still stuck with stifling orthodontics wherever they happen to end up :(
I have definitely been suspicious of The University of Austin at Texas project as being mostly a pyramid scheme of sorts at worst a la "Trump University", or at best just another Liberty University or Patrick Henry College that is just a factory for producing Republican interns and think tankers, not accredited for anything else...
Not really. My guess is that she got kudos from her NYT resignation letter, which is why I started out with Common Sense (although I am still a NYT subscriber, but cancelled The Free Press last summer). In the beginning Bari and her writers were a refreshing, principled departure from the woke excesses of Ibram X Kendi and the like, but then TFP slowly but steadily changed into its current “MAGA with a veneer of intellectualism”. Maybe having people like Niall Ferguson and his wife hop on the train helped Bari get some form of intellectual street cred. John Conchrane and H R McMaster also write occasionally for TFP. Does give her the Stanford Hoover Institute stamp of approval? Who knows?
Bari Weiss was writing for the WSj and supposedly a principled anti-Trump free thinker. I must admit I was a fan at the time. She then contributed to MSNBC and joined NYT after 2016. She started off as an anti-Trumper so there is some credibility for not bending the knees like others on WSJ. I guess becoming anti-anti gave her a lot more access and influence.
When the election was called for Trump, Bari Weiss immediately went on Fox News to proclaim "This shows that the Democrats need to stop focusing on wokeism"
I'm like... you are the one that focused on wokeism. Kamala Harris never even brought it up! I don't know any Democrats in my group who cared about those issues!
May patience was already getting low with them and Reason magazine, but that was the final straw. These whole "both sides are bad" commentators only write about left-wing radicals that live up the road from them in NYC and Washington and then pretend like they're somehow an equal threat to the country as Trump (i.e., the actual candidate running and winning the election!)
I agree that Kamala should've had a Sister Souljah moment and I hope moderate Dems do more to clean out the clown car that has infested the Dem campaign staffs and think tanks. But I also think real centrists (such as myself) shouldn't be fooled into thinking that Bari Weiss & co. are allies.
Folks like Weiss, frankly, are just airing the dirty laundry they have with their Ivy League peers in journalism and academia. I won't rehash all the points made in the article above, but there were many liberal and moderate commentators (Bill Maher, Matthew Yglesias) that criticized wokeness without acting like, "Gee, both sides are just so equally bad that it doesn't matter who wins."
As for my "group," meaning family and friends, we are upset about the largest tax hike in our lifetimes being implemented and our 401ks dropping. No one ever talks about trans issues, gender pronouns in email signatures, etc. The Democratic Party voters are more moderate than left. I appreciate centrists commentators who advocate centrism and push the Democrats towards it. Weiss, on the other hand, will find a way to magnify the fringes and pretend like "This is what the Democrats stand for," while saying little for the actual radical candidates running for office, like Trump, who now have the power to actually hurt my life.
Please see my other comment here that starts, "Say what one must about the slippery, opportunistic Bari Weiss..." That opening speaks for itself!
However -- in light of the rest of that comment -- I think you're trivializing the "wokeness" problem (on its own merits, and ALSO because this crap won't play in Peoria). Do you have any idea what it's like living in places like Ann Arbor, Park Slope, the Lower East Side, or Oakland? They know out in Peoria, and it's a VERY bad look!
Maybe the people you know "don't care about these issues," but even Gavin Newsom has now been subjected to abuse -- in the San Francisco Chronicle, among other places! -- for ostensibly "throwing trans kids under the bus."
As I've also noted (re Andrew Sullivan, James Carville, Ruy Teixiera, Wesley Yang, etc.), this problem doesn't apply only to Bari Weiss. Meanwhile, for all her shortcomings and vices, Weiss has never been a Republican -- an allegation ("You're as bad as Trump!") that the wokesters are quick to aim at anyone who departs from their orthodoxy.
And that's a big part of how we've ended up with Donald Trump!
"As I've also noted (re Andrew Sullivan, James Carville, Ruy Teixiera, Wesley Yang, etc.), this problem doesn't apply only to Bari Weiss. Meanwhile, for all her shortcomings and vices, Weiss has never been a Republican -- an allegation ("You're as bad as Trump!") that the wokesters are quick to aim at anyone who departs from their orthodoxy."
I would argue this is because TFP specifically advertises itself as "independent" "non-partisan" etc, yet chooses a narrative that is about 99.9% anti-left/liberal/Democratic and actively ignores the existence of the Right and/or downplays it as clownish, at worst. An active donor/supporter of TFP, Chris Rufo, describes the outlet as a "red pilling exit ramp for disaffected Democrats and moderates" - meaning, its job is to produce opposition to Democrats and whip up Republican votes as "anti-Democratic votes" (not so much pro-Republican votes) which is an easier job if you just choose to not discuss any policy propositions and consequences of a Republican majority government, let alone the whole Trump question.
TFP, like some other "heterodox" former liberals like Matt Taibbi have stuck their heads up their asses when it comes to Trump and his supposed persecution and censorship. Willfully downplaying the seriousness and damage he did over 2020 election denialism and Jan 6, and his still unresolved ties to Russian financing (along with Saudi Arabian and more - yet Hunter Biden working for a Ukrainian oil company mostly while his father was not in office was the Crime Of The Century while Trump just does it right in the open while in office lol), the actually explicit government attacks against dissent and speech happening *right now* and which, defending free speech as they claim means they take the same stance they demanded of universities and students against conservatives all these years as the *actual* governing power that the 1st Amendment is very unambiguous about restricting its encroachments over!
Andrew Sullivan, Carville, even Tuxeira have all been very clearly anti-Trump before and now. Sully is still a conservative and makes no bones about it trying to pretend he is not. Carville is still a nakedly Democratic Party partisan who believes in promoting the traditional Democratic agenda. Bari, on the other hand, claims to still be a "liberal Democrat", but which Democratic policies has she advocated for in her media outlet? Has she at any time acknowledged any trade-offs in supporting a Trump/Republican government for culture war victories against any strongly held Democratic policy positions, such as the social safety net, the civil service, etc? Has she criticized Trump/GOP for moving against any strongly held Democratic policy positions she might have? Did she not give a speech in front of the Federalist Society basically stating she's a supporter of tax cut/deregulatory policy (i.e. traditionally Republican positions)? What makes her a Democrat, or liberal, at this point?
I agree with you about "Tankie" Taibbi -- and for that matter, I don't really want to argue about (the slippery, opportunistic) Bari Weiss -- nor even (as I've written elsewhere) to debate whether McCarthyism of the left is as pernicious as the McCarthyism of the right -- except to the degree that they exist (as a mutual -- and mutually self-serving -- protection racket) in a vile symbiosis.
My overriding point involves the role played by woke scolds (and their tendency to claim any heresy is "as bad as Trump") in undermining the Democrats' electoral fortunes (and thereby, liberal democracy itself) -- and to admonish those who'd trivialize and dismiss this phenomenon as inconsequential.
This exchange began when I lamented Kamala Harris's failure to have a "Sister Souljah moment" -- presumably hoping that the problem would simply go away (or that it could be waved away by blaming it on Fox News, or on the supposed "bigotry" of the voters themselves).
And who picked this fight -- a question that concerns and affects me personally as a gay male?
There were no "bathroom bills" in North Carolina until the City of Charlotte decided to make "gender identity" a protected attribute (hence, making "Trans" a protected class). Indeed, the implicitly adversarial notion of "Queer" (or some putative “LGBTQIA+ community”) is a self-marginalizing corral into which we’ve been herded by “The Groups” -- diluting and jeopardizing the hard-won, widespread acceptance (and self-esteem, as individuals) that gay people have otherwise already gained.
Ironically, this entire argument (on my side, as well!) takes for granted -- a priori -- the consummate evil (and threat to democracy) posed by the ascendancy of Donald Trump.
The bottom line is that, as we've picked each other to pieces over "pronouns" and "privilege," the oligarchs (now playing both ends against the middle) have continued laughing all the way to the bank.
In that larger context, focusing the discussion on Bari Weiiss's transgressions (or personality flaws) is merely a decoy.
I think the distinction is pointing out and critiquing aspects of progressivism and Democratic politics with the goal of trying to make the Democratic Party more electable (if the POV is that "wokeness" is the barrier to the Democratic Party's appeal outside of a shrinking core), or if it's done to "red pill" moderates and independents into voting Republican out of disgust and a disproportionate belief of the impact to one's personal life over various "woke policies". If the goal is the former then the content is not going to solely focus on anti-left grievances and will focus on the risks of the Right in proportion, if the goal is the latter, you get, well The Free Press it seems.
Yes I do agree that based on the polling, voters did still perceive Kamala Harris is much further to the left to them ideologically than they perceived Donald Trump as being further to the right of them, and that was despite the Harris campaign keeping a tight lid on her campaign rhetoric to primarily economic points with zero mentions of things like trans rights, it wasn't credible since she was on very recent record as having espoused the standard progressive takes on 2020 issues and filled out a survey indicating her support for the infamous transgender surgical care for illegal immigrants in prisons etc... and the belief that if she didn't discuss those positions in the 3 months leading up to Nov 2024 that would erase voter memories, and yeah, that did not pan out as they hoped. She should have responded to the ad about her ACLU form - either defend her support for that policy (which she could have simply stated she was in agreement with what was the Trump Administration's policy about this treatment at the time of the form, which is true!) on the grounds of her belief that prisoners have a right to access medical care they were receiving prior to their arrests, which would include gender affirming care if they were already in transition at that point, she could have explained that her support for that policy has changed since the form based on x, y, z etc. She couldn't just not address it and hope voters didn't care about the issue.
Her stances on policing also seemed to do an unexplained 180 from the heady days of 2020 "Defund" talk to 2024 Kamala The Prosecutor and was never explained or transitioned between. Her refusal to put any daylight between the Biden policies that were creating the most backlash like the asylum/immigration handling (which now seems the result of Biden's team pressure to not campaign against Biden - a difficult line to walk for sure) also just played into the belief that a President Harris would just continue the same agenda and would have an equally as progressive staff and Administrative policies towards gender and immigration that voters disagreed with - regardless of what she did not say to the contrary - and yet it's hard to say if she did come out with more forceful points of distinction if she would have earned that credibility since it would have only come out in the campaign and only once it was indisputable that Biden's polling was in the hole over. I think no matter what she did she was running an uphill campaign as the stand in for an unpopular Administration against difficult inflationary headwinds that voters held it responsible for, and the perceptions of her ideological distance from the median voter weren't likely going to be undone by any single "Sister Souljah" moment in the short window she had - and may have came off as insincere if she tried. As it was, I think she came closer than Biden would have if stayed in the race, although it's of little consolation now, and I hope whatever benefit voters think they got over the Executive Order on trans athletes and harsher border/migrant policies was worth the potential economic disaster Trump is cooking up!
The fundamental problem here is that it is intellectually inconsistent to support Trump while claiming to support even a modest version of liberalism, which is why the attempt to toe the line doesn’t work. The fact that Trump attempted a coup in 2020 is completely disqualifying on the grounds of democracy/liberalism, and that’s before the horrors of the second term.
In the second term, Trump has attacked law firms and universities with the power of government, a far worse attack on free speech than all college students combined have done in history. And that’s just the free speech part, but attacking law firms is also an attack on due process and the right to a lawyer. Disappearing people without due process to a foreign gulag in defiance of court orders, and then disobeying a Supreme Court order to return someone, is just about the most extreme attack on the US constitution, on due process, on separation of powers, and on the very idea that people have rights against the government, that the US has seen in many decades.
Thank you for this. It seems that some sizable portion of the ex-left, heterodox, "politically homeless" population moved so dramatically away from the far left that they slid right on over to the far right. (I definitely saw this happen in a heterodox community I was briefly part of). Publications like TFP are their reassurance that they remain the critical, nuanced thinkers they fancy themselves as, when they've essentially become indistinguishable from MAGA.
Say what one must about the slippery, opportunistic Bari Weiss -- but this article, itself, is hyper-partisan drivel -- a paean to the polarization of dogma -- of the sort to which The UnPopulist has increasingly devolved.
"Wokeness" is merely "a right-wing bugaboo"?
I write here as a gay male who's fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing “Queer" about same-sex attraction -- who never signed up to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World.
I also write as a Jew who refuses to dismiss 2,000-years'-worth of "Next year in Jerusalem" as merely a slogan concocted to justify a so-called "settler-colonial state."
I'm not here to debate whether McCarthyism of the left is as pernicious as the McCarthyism of the right, but (while duly aware and fearful of Trump's depredations) -- having lived my life in Ann Arbor, Park Slope, the Lower East Side, and now here in Oakland -- it's consistently been the former whose brunt I've had to bear.
So who's the next target? Andrew Sullivan? James Carville? Ruy Teixiera? Wesley Yang?
It's only a matter of time before (eating its own) The UnPopulist goes after Yascha Mounk.
I’ve had a similar experience as you and am happy to read gay and lesbian journalists who have not succumbed to the prevailing LGBTblahblahblah, so that Bari and Nellie along with AndrewSullivan, Ben Appel, Josh Barro, and yes Douglas Murray all align more or less with my views. I agree with others the TFP sometimes bends over backwards to accommodate Trump’s clearly authoritarian, irrational insanity. Ferguson’s interview with Bari today breaks entirely with the Trump tariff agenda. Still I think Johnson’s criticisms are valid and TFP should take note. Surely we don’t have to choose between Trump apologists and deep Wokism. Maybe reading both UnPopulist and TFP is the best way to find the center.
Fantastic writeup.I've been a subscriber to the Free Press since its Common Sense days but quit recently, specifically because of their disgusting "Exclusive! US Mint Hiding DEI Employees" (the second in a series of such). It was neither "exclusive", or even "scandalous" that organizations may have moved existing employees into new job definitions, and horribly Kafkaesque for an outlet that prides itself on its "independence" and "non-partisan" to be doing the Administration's dirty work for them, let alone, just petty. It was like, yeah, your "vibe shift" won, you're in power now, and this is how you choose to spend it, doxxing federal employees and baying for their blood for being employed in a job that about 5 minutes ago was an industry wide position? Being just like, even worse, those who you spent so much ink criticizing over the past years??
Which is really just the years long trajectory they have been on. I was cautiously wary as the content remained stridently "anti-woke" regardless of current events and situations. And the narratives on certain topics, like, my god, the Hunter Biden laptop story they just continue to beat into the ground, yet without any nuance of the actual events around the October 2020 story. The Joe Biden is old and was a media "coverup" - even the Axios people who were fawning of The Free Press on the Honestly podcast had to push back on this. And to harp on that without even any discussion about the conservative media's to the 100000th degree literal worship of Trump, and that TFP pretends that their readers are getting an equal diet of Trump criticism from the mainstream media (that TFP *also* repeatedly tells them is unreliable and hopelessly biased against their readers) so that they don't feel the need to provide any Trump/GOP critique - when the reality is the bulk of their readers are not consuming much of any mainstream media, and consider TFP to be their "liberal media" source. lol. So they are *not* getting any Trump/GOP critical reporting at all, but a distorted lens that no matter that Trump and the GOP control all levers of government right now, that student activists on a campus somewhere are the true oppressors.
The anecdotal stories and one-sided "exposes" - yes interesting reading but never developed into actual journalism. For all the money they have and expanded staff or "real" reporters, they still produce little that is actual journalism versus editorialized and stylized narrative essays. Never once have the institutions under attack in those "exposes" been invited to comment or engaged with at all. It does make you wonder how much of the story is missing, mis-represented, exaggerated, etc. For all their self congratulatory press, they are still little more than a blog site.
The pro-Trump bias became impossible to ignore in the past year of the campaign. There was not a single positive article written about the Democrats, Harris, and not one single article that actually spent any time on the *policy propositions* of a Trump/GOP majority government. It was all culture war and "vibes". I wonder if they even reflect for a moment that if they had maybe spent an article or two on the policy impacts (the few that were consistent and developed happened to be, ya know, the tariffs) or felt they had any responsibility to even spend some time on the Project 2025 aspects of the Trump team and campaign etc. Any "ragrats" yet on the consequences of getting what you want yet Bari and team? But I guess as long as the Administration is prosecuting some war against Columbia University (Bari's nemesis) it's all good?
Then there's the comment section. LOL. I long ago stopped expending much effort in attempting discussion or discourse there. They have developed a hard right MAGA commentary that keeps them locked in place, even if they want to start becoming critical of Trump governing policies *now* they get slammed by their commenters for any deviation from anything that is not anti-woke/left content and/or even mildly critical of Trump/GOP (but especially Trump!). And because of their revealed bias it will become harder for them to take in non-MAGA moderates and liberals. I think, along with a lot of those Trump 2024 kamikazes from Silicon Valley who thought they were getting a culture war victory along with some Reaganomics, TFP is going to be riding the decline of the Trump "vibe". They lashed themselves too close to it and eliminated any pretense of no bias (they literally had an Inauguration Party - another "weird" move for an "independent" outlet!), but are not sufficiently pro-MAGA to play NewsMaxx either to keep the remaining base engaged in what is already becoming an uphill run to defend the Trump policies.
Honestly, I will be conflicted if they fail. It *is* necessary to have an outlet that is safely critical of left excess. But the "heterodox" paradox all along is not becoming just right wing in the process. TFP chose the easy and profitable route, but I think, along with their Silicon Valley angel investors, they're going to get a rude and quick response to that. They may just become a cautionary tale, at best.
I think the one thing missing here is why Bari Weiss and her site went from being adamantly anti-Trump to Trump-curious. The administration has made her website a place for exclusive scoops about their crackdowns on universities. Bari had been waging war against Columbia since she was a teenager. This is her moment. The admin is in her side in a very niche issue close to her heart.
I was so impressed with the Free Press when I first subscribed but they have really turned a corner. They go out of their way to berate “liberals” with a stick in their eye overlooking the worst behavior in “conservatives”.
Thank you for this. I subscribed and unsubscribed to the Free Press in the course of a week or two, after being thoroughly turned off by ridiculous pro-Trump arguments and what-about-ism. I wondered if it was my ideological bias that made me uncomfortable with them. This piece helps me feel confident that my choice was rational.
It’s notable that the audience of the FP seems to go nuts anytime something mildly anti Trump is written. They lost me during election season..a bunch of the smarter, critical of woke left seemed to decide Trump was no biggie all at once. It was simply terrible analysis and judgement to come to that conclusion. If that’s the critical thinking you are bringing to the table, no thanks.
Thank you for writing this. A former boss of mine has been devolving into a Joe Rogan / Elon Musk fan boy - unsurprisingly for a myriad of reasons - and today he just posted that Free Press is the "best news source."
I'd share this with him, but he will proceed to badger for "proof that FP is unbiased." I'm tired.
You probably shouldn't judge a publication like The Free Press by its commentors... but. Anytime I click on "read more" comments on a Free Press article, I think "well, this is a mistake," especially if the article is the least bit Anti-Trump, in which case it's a full-blown conniption fit poop-show. This is who The FP has attracted, at least when it comes to those over-sharing their thoughts. Like me. Now.
The FP has, however, been useful to me to be exposed to articulate thoughts I wouldn't have otherwise read and to understand why things are turning out the way they are... insights I don't get from other media like NPR / WaPo. It might not be balanced, but it balances... and even if I don't agree, I understand more.
I used to subscribe to the Free Press. I stopped only because I had too many subscriptions and wanted to drop a few. It mostly suited my sensibilities as an "anti-woke" guy. This was happening when Biden was president - the horror of Trump's second term hadn't happened yet.
While I enjoyed many articles, the comments below were like something out of my worst nightmares. I wouldn't post there if you paid me to. If anyone said something positive about vaccines the next 100 responses would tear this person apart like piranhas descending on a cow carcass.
It's the same with Unherd, though Unherd at least is willing to keep publishing Trump-critical and even sometimes left-leaning articles despite the frothing-at-the-mouth rage they inspire in the comments section.
The Free Press is basically the WSJ editorial on steroids. A few sane pro-free market and rules of law articles then an avalanche of criticism on the left’s excesses and sins. Bari Weiss is nothing but a procuress of stories that satisfies the egos of right winged intellects.
At least the WSJ has some non-MAGA readers. TFP comments are 95% MAGA. They whine and complain about anything anti-Trump and a group of them broke off and left for another site.
Thank you for this! I was with Bari since the beginning, with Common Sense, but cancelled my subscription to The Free Press in August 2024. The constant sucking up to the MAGA hordes that live in its comments became nauseating. Niall Ferguson and Douglas Murray are NatCons, as his Ferguson’s wife, Ayan Hirsi Ali. Several of their other “featured writers” are too. These are people who hang out at the National Conservatism Convention and listen to Viktor Orbán speak about how to achieve a Christian Nationalist country. Ferguson and Ali also belong to the same subset of Catholic Nationalist organizations that JD Vance belongs to. They tend to meet up at The Napa Institute in California once a year. And I read the TFP “interview” with Usha Vance yesterday, and this piece confirms my impression that it was just a superficial fluff where Usha basically didn’t say anything more than how shocked she was that people would boo her at The Kennedy Center. The rest of the “interview” was stuff the writer found out from third parties, plus photos and talk about Usha’s clothes (her Badgely Mishka inauguration dress cost $495 if anyone’s interested).
One reason The Free Press has taken off financially, and has the net worth that it does, is that Bari got VC money from Marc Andreesen and David Sacks. You don’t have to look much further to see where the editorial slant on Trump comes from. Not to mention the audience capture coming from the people who live in their comments sewer. Tout s’explique.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become extremely disappointing. For someone who has read and admired the likes of John Stuart Mills and Alexis De Tocqueville, she practically abandoned all her prior small ‘l’ liberal sensibilities. While I do not want to judge her constant evolution on faith and religion, her journey to Christianity was all about joining a tribe instead of being moved by the teachings of God’s grace. So the whole schtick seems phony.
As a cradle Catholic with a cousin who’s a Jesuit priest and a best friend who’s a diocesan priest (one with a doctorate degree in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian College in Rome - the Jesuit - and the other with a canon law degree from the Pontifical North American College in Rome - the diocesan priest), I very much want to criticize both Ali and Ferguson, and also Vance, for their faith/religion journey. All three of them are part of the Catholic Integralism movement that seeks to create a Catholic state where Catholicism is the government imposed religion. Failing that, a Christian Nationalist state with Christianity as the government imposed religion will have to suffice. And all 3 of them are recent converts, recruited in part by the part of the Church that opposes Pope Francis, hates Vatican II, and wants to return to the Latin Mass. The diocesan priest with the Canon Law degree says these are dangerous people with dangerous ideas and not the devout Catholics they pretend to be. Having read up on them, NatCon, and the Napa Institute, I agree.
Yes, I think read in the NY Times writeup about TFP that only about 15% of their subscribers are paid subscribers. At $5/month which is probably about the average, their revenue is not from their subscriptions but from donors who are very much invested in what Chris Rufo deemed The Free Press as being a "red pill off ramp for disaffected Democrats and moderates". It's purpose is "red pilling" - and I think the Trump 2024 was at least in part thanks to efforts like TFP in converting some votes into thinking it was all about the culture war victories and that there were no policy or institutional downsides to electing Trump and giving his party majorities, in fact only upsides in more tax cuts and economic growth. They spent zero online ink into any actual policy discussions about a second Trump Presidency and have mostly treated the GOP as an abstraction.
I commented before I quit for good in February 2025 that the high point of all this was going to be the period between Trump's Glorious Re-election and Inauguration Day 2025. The rest they will get to repent in leisure over the next 4 years - I was only wrong in how quickly that would happen! ;p
Sounds like the Free Press is Libs on TikTok with a sprinkle of intellectualism.
haha yeah it's content geared for right wingers who prefer to think of themselves as "independents" ;p
Only paying subscribers are allowed to comment.
Trump won in 2024 because of non-college educated voters and low-information voters. College educated voters who describe themselves as being high-information voted for Harris by huge margins. Now, could Harris have won by winning a larger margin with college educated and high-information voters? Sure, but inflation is probably what prevented that, and now the explicit authoritarianism/fascism and extreme stupidity of Trump's second administration will probably result in Democrats winning even larger margins among college educated and high-information voters. Point being, this project of creating conservative intellectuals is probably hurt by the fact that Trump and his movement are repellent to high human capital, which is not to say The Free Press and Bari Weiss don't help Trumpism, because they definitely do, but just that there's a limit to it.
Thank you, Matt. I unsubscribed to The Free Press for just these reasons. It’s too bad, in a way, because many of the writers are quite smart and quite good, but choose to play to their preferred audience (only have to read the Comments section a couple of times to figure out who that audience is).
Second this comment. I also subscribed, and I admire some of the folks. And just this week Bari interviewed a friend (John McWhorter) who really is a good guy. Still, Matt raises many troubling points. I'm going to have to be more circumspect, I guess.
John McWhorter is great - a fellow anti-Trump, anti-woke American.
John McWhorter (and Jesse Singal, Matt Yglesias, etc and other "heterodox" who have not bitten the right wing horseshoe) is the example of what an anti-woke yet still liberal/Democrat can be. I will never understand why anger at 2020 racial and gender discourse means you have to abandon your support for government subsidized health care and regulated capitalism and progressive taxation and become a Trump supporter.And yet ;p
It's a shame people see anti-wokeness as a MAGA thing, when most of the intelligent opposition has come from liberals. Before "woke" acquired its current meaning I favored "illiberal" as the term to describe this set of beliefs.
It's funny how different people have totally different definitions of woke. Some say woke equates to illiberal attitudes like wanting to shut down speakers, others just use woke to describe ideas they don't like, even if they're not presented in an illiberal way, and others use woke to denote standard liberal and leftist views.
It's not "funny." It's just the way languages evolve. McWhorter's book "Words on he Move" (mentioned in these comments) explains this quite well. The way I use it in 2025, is as a synonym for illiberal left: those still enthralled by the Blank Slate Fallacy and who see the world so inaccurately as partitioned by identity into oppressed and oppressors. I am a free market liberal.
Yeah, again i think it's being able to thread the needle between legitimate critiques of some of the excesses of the left with being proportionate to the problems of it as well as proportionate to the problems of the right while also not tossing aside pretty much all liberal positions while still claiming to be a "liberal". Taibbi and Weiss have gone in the other direction, and perhaps because they have had the most visibility they are the image most have about "anti-woke" - becoming de-facto Republican/Trump apologists (and even supporters).
How much of that was audience capture (anti-woke content is naturally going to attract a large audience of right wingers looking for confirmation bias and partisan entertainment, and which will tightly police the boundaries of acceptable discourse to remain firmly anti-left) or a natural progression of forming a political identity as mostly being in opposition to something versus in support of something is probably a blend of the two things. If The Free Press had started with a more balanced offering of Trump criticism with "anti-woke" stuff they might have attracted a more balanced audience, for one, the hard core MAGA's would have been driven off sooner and more moderate/liberals would have viewed the anti-woke criticism with more credibility if it wasn't so one-sided. I think for sure once they started taking big SV money and Manhattan Institute they became much more partisan goal oriented as well, the last year of barely concealed Trump cheerleading coincided with their funding and expansion...
I don't find anything objectionable about Bari Weiss. I find the Free Press as whole perfectly fine, and there are several writers there I read eagerly.
If Taibbi and Weiss have "gone in the other direction", there's a mighty good chance they were pushed in that direction after being subjected to the same type of sneering condescension and public condemnation on parade in much of the foregoing discussion, likely for making some anodyne observation like, "gee, Joe Biden doesn't seem to know where he is at any given moment", or "it's difficult to trust a group of politicians who lie to your face about something as obvious at [INSERT DEM SCANDAL], it's just that you're not used to column inches devoted to discussing how demonstrably corrupt the Democrats have become. It's like you walk into the conversation with a blank slate, which is intellectually dishonest. It is fitting, however, that Taibbi and Weiss are being attacked, as they were some of the first and most prominent journalists to observe that the emporer had no clothes, and being right on that account is unforgivable in your camp, sadly.
I listened to a podcast of Jonah Goldberg interviewing John McWhorter about the latter’s new book regarding pronouns. Very little about politics. McWhorter was educational and entertaining about pronouns. Had not read/heard him before.
My first McWhorter book was "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English." I enjoyed it immensely. For those who want to believe word meanings are fixed in stone, "Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)," should open your eyes. "The language Hoax" argues against the notion that people’s languages (e.g., English, French, Arabic, Amazonian, etc.) channel the way they think and perceive the world. His writing on "Black English" - demonstrating it's a "real" language will surprise some. "Woke Racism" will inform well meaning souls why he views wokeness as condescending and damaging to Black people like himself and his children. McWhorter appears frequently on Bill Maher's show and of course bi-weekly on Glenn Loury's podcast.
CarlW-Thanks for the mention of John McWhorter. I ordered two of his books after listening to the Goldberg podcast with him (The Power of Babel and his latest, Pronoun Trouble).
“Anti-woke” *is* anti-American. Anti-woke is just another word for bigot, for opponent of our pluralistic democracy.
Says you, but you don't determine what words mean, and in particular what they mean to me. "Woke," as commonly used and used by me, does not mean what it used to - if that were so you might have a case. It has evolved to describe the ideology that partitions humanity into oppressed (the good) and oppressors (the bad), a thoroughly mistaken and damaging view of the world. A view that sees Hamas rapists, murderers, and kidnappers as the noble good guys. I remain proudly against these noxious ideas. I sympathize if you just awakened from a 30 year comma and have yet to realize how people now use the word.
We agree that mcwhorter is anti-woke. I base that on the original and true meaning of what woke is, so yeah I think that’s a bad thing from mcwhorter. You base it on the propagandized, false claim of what woke is, so you think it’s good from
McWhorter. We agree on what he’s doing, but I reinforce what black liberation tells us and you reinforce what white supremacy has stolen from black liberation. That’s the difference.
McWhorter is a linguist - a widely recognized expert on how word meanings change over time. What is your authority? You are a living example of what is wrong with the woke ideology: heap calumnies and disdain on anyone not echoing your creed verbatim: calling people "white supremist" because they disagree with your notion of what "woke" means. White supremacists disgust me even more than misguided, ignorant people such as yourself.
Whoa, slow your roll on those hot takes, buddy. They aren't serving you well.
In 2020 an online mob started a boycott of a deli chain because the owner's daughter posted something racist on twitter when she was a teenager. 80 immigrant workers lost their jobs as a result, and this was in the middle of a pandemic.
But being against this sort of thing is 'anti-American'? Should people who experience this never talk about it fir fear it'll help the right?
You might quibble the term 'woke' and I'm not a fan of how the word is used these days either. But what term should we use when people bully others under the guise of leftwing concern for the poor and marginalised?
“Bullying”
This is as good a summary as I've read about the problems with The Free Press.
Right now, as a green card holder is sitting in a prison in Louisiana for having protested against Israel's attacks on Gaza, and a Turkish student has also been shipped south for having coauthored an editorial.
But the FP is completely silent on these stories, which are pretty much right in the heart of the first amendment. The closest I can find is a column by Jed Rubenfeld complaining about Federal judges blocking Trump's illegal actions via injunctions with nationwide scope.
The sheer hypocrisy of Weiss and company ignoring core first amendment issues while writing intellectually vapid columns about trivialities is why I gave up reading it.
I've been noticing the list of things the FP has been silent on, too. I've been reading to hear points of view that don't align with mine, but when editorials are trying to compare 47 to FDR, and you're going to give Sec Rubio air time on a podcast titled "Honestly" -- beginning of an extensive list of omissions. My patience for this has reached its end.
Thank you so much for this. I haven't yet read your piece, so you may have mentioned this, but the problem is even worse at FAIR, another of Bari Weiss' constructions. (Do you understand how she has gotten so much power and credibility?) I was one of the first members of FAIR, which was launched, ostensibly, to oppose extreme ideologies and promote liberal values. Instead, they have recently published a series that blames our transgender "problem" on SSRI's. I know several doctors, some of them psychiatrists, and none is aware of any research that supports such a contention. My feeling about Bari Weiss is that she will write anything that gives her access to powerful people and makes her feel important. Sad, in a way.
Oh, while we are on the subject, I am also very well acquainted with the U of Austin. I have known the president for many years. I think Weiss is on the board along with Ferguson and other "Free Press" people. I'll have to check in with him and see what is going on there.
You might be interested in this piece from my Substack: https://charles72f.substack.com/p/why-kamela-lost-in-nine-simple-charts
Yesterday, over at The Bulwark, Tim Miller interviewed Mark Lilla, and Lilla talked at one point about teaching a summer course at The University of Austin at Texas, Bari’s anti-woke university project. Lilla had a class of students he was teaching about French philosophers (he’s written a book on that). The compacted summer semester meant that Lilla had the students from 9 to 3 every day, after which the students spent the afternoon listening to other speakers.
The feedback Lilla got from the students was that they were being subjected to intellectual whiplash. They told him they got solid academic material from him during the day, then received psycho nut job MAGA crap in the afternoon. They were at a loss as to what the school was trying to teach them. Lilla said that he had only agreed to teach the summer course because he knew the university president from his days at St Johns, a well known Great Books curriculum school. When he saw what the University of Austin was actually doing, he decided he would never teach there again. It’s a bit like if Turning Point USA were a college, instead of a college club.
That's extremely disappointing to hear. I had high hopes for UoA when I heard about it - it seems though that western university students are still stuck with stifling orthodontics wherever they happen to end up :(
I have definitely been suspicious of The University of Austin at Texas project as being mostly a pyramid scheme of sorts at worst a la "Trump University", or at best just another Liberty University or Patrick Henry College that is just a factory for producing Republican interns and think tankers, not accredited for anything else...
Do you understand why Weiss has any credibility?
Not really. My guess is that she got kudos from her NYT resignation letter, which is why I started out with Common Sense (although I am still a NYT subscriber, but cancelled The Free Press last summer). In the beginning Bari and her writers were a refreshing, principled departure from the woke excesses of Ibram X Kendi and the like, but then TFP slowly but steadily changed into its current “MAGA with a veneer of intellectualism”. Maybe having people like Niall Ferguson and his wife hop on the train helped Bari get some form of intellectual street cred. John Conchrane and H R McMaster also write occasionally for TFP. Does give her the Stanford Hoover Institute stamp of approval? Who knows?
Bari Weiss was writing for the WSj and supposedly a principled anti-Trump free thinker. I must admit I was a fan at the time. She then contributed to MSNBC and joined NYT after 2016. She started off as an anti-Trumper so there is some credibility for not bending the knees like others on WSJ. I guess becoming anti-anti gave her a lot more access and influence.
When the election was called for Trump, Bari Weiss immediately went on Fox News to proclaim "This shows that the Democrats need to stop focusing on wokeism"
I'm like... you are the one that focused on wokeism. Kamala Harris never even brought it up! I don't know any Democrats in my group who cared about those issues!
May patience was already getting low with them and Reason magazine, but that was the final straw. These whole "both sides are bad" commentators only write about left-wing radicals that live up the road from them in NYC and Washington and then pretend like they're somehow an equal threat to the country as Trump (i.e., the actual candidate running and winning the election!)
Re "wokeness": "Kamala Harris never even brought it up!"
That's the problem! There was an elephant in the room! She needed a "Sister Souljah" moment if she was ever gonna play in Peoria.
...or do you (and the Democrats in your group) "care about those issues" in such a way that you'd never willingly let that happen?
I agree that Kamala should've had a Sister Souljah moment and I hope moderate Dems do more to clean out the clown car that has infested the Dem campaign staffs and think tanks. But I also think real centrists (such as myself) shouldn't be fooled into thinking that Bari Weiss & co. are allies.
Folks like Weiss, frankly, are just airing the dirty laundry they have with their Ivy League peers in journalism and academia. I won't rehash all the points made in the article above, but there were many liberal and moderate commentators (Bill Maher, Matthew Yglesias) that criticized wokeness without acting like, "Gee, both sides are just so equally bad that it doesn't matter who wins."
As for my "group," meaning family and friends, we are upset about the largest tax hike in our lifetimes being implemented and our 401ks dropping. No one ever talks about trans issues, gender pronouns in email signatures, etc. The Democratic Party voters are more moderate than left. I appreciate centrists commentators who advocate centrism and push the Democrats towards it. Weiss, on the other hand, will find a way to magnify the fringes and pretend like "This is what the Democrats stand for," while saying little for the actual radical candidates running for office, like Trump, who now have the power to actually hurt my life.
💯
Please see my other comment here that starts, "Say what one must about the slippery, opportunistic Bari Weiss..." That opening speaks for itself!
However -- in light of the rest of that comment -- I think you're trivializing the "wokeness" problem (on its own merits, and ALSO because this crap won't play in Peoria). Do you have any idea what it's like living in places like Ann Arbor, Park Slope, the Lower East Side, or Oakland? They know out in Peoria, and it's a VERY bad look!
Maybe the people you know "don't care about these issues," but even Gavin Newsom has now been subjected to abuse -- in the San Francisco Chronicle, among other places! -- for ostensibly "throwing trans kids under the bus."
As I've also noted (re Andrew Sullivan, James Carville, Ruy Teixiera, Wesley Yang, etc.), this problem doesn't apply only to Bari Weiss. Meanwhile, for all her shortcomings and vices, Weiss has never been a Republican -- an allegation ("You're as bad as Trump!") that the wokesters are quick to aim at anyone who departs from their orthodoxy.
And that's a big part of how we've ended up with Donald Trump!
"As I've also noted (re Andrew Sullivan, James Carville, Ruy Teixiera, Wesley Yang, etc.), this problem doesn't apply only to Bari Weiss. Meanwhile, for all her shortcomings and vices, Weiss has never been a Republican -- an allegation ("You're as bad as Trump!") that the wokesters are quick to aim at anyone who departs from their orthodoxy."
I would argue this is because TFP specifically advertises itself as "independent" "non-partisan" etc, yet chooses a narrative that is about 99.9% anti-left/liberal/Democratic and actively ignores the existence of the Right and/or downplays it as clownish, at worst. An active donor/supporter of TFP, Chris Rufo, describes the outlet as a "red pilling exit ramp for disaffected Democrats and moderates" - meaning, its job is to produce opposition to Democrats and whip up Republican votes as "anti-Democratic votes" (not so much pro-Republican votes) which is an easier job if you just choose to not discuss any policy propositions and consequences of a Republican majority government, let alone the whole Trump question.
TFP, like some other "heterodox" former liberals like Matt Taibbi have stuck their heads up their asses when it comes to Trump and his supposed persecution and censorship. Willfully downplaying the seriousness and damage he did over 2020 election denialism and Jan 6, and his still unresolved ties to Russian financing (along with Saudi Arabian and more - yet Hunter Biden working for a Ukrainian oil company mostly while his father was not in office was the Crime Of The Century while Trump just does it right in the open while in office lol), the actually explicit government attacks against dissent and speech happening *right now* and which, defending free speech as they claim means they take the same stance they demanded of universities and students against conservatives all these years as the *actual* governing power that the 1st Amendment is very unambiguous about restricting its encroachments over!
Andrew Sullivan, Carville, even Tuxeira have all been very clearly anti-Trump before and now. Sully is still a conservative and makes no bones about it trying to pretend he is not. Carville is still a nakedly Democratic Party partisan who believes in promoting the traditional Democratic agenda. Bari, on the other hand, claims to still be a "liberal Democrat", but which Democratic policies has she advocated for in her media outlet? Has she at any time acknowledged any trade-offs in supporting a Trump/Republican government for culture war victories against any strongly held Democratic policy positions, such as the social safety net, the civil service, etc? Has she criticized Trump/GOP for moving against any strongly held Democratic policy positions she might have? Did she not give a speech in front of the Federalist Society basically stating she's a supporter of tax cut/deregulatory policy (i.e. traditionally Republican positions)? What makes her a Democrat, or liberal, at this point?
I agree with you about "Tankie" Taibbi -- and for that matter, I don't really want to argue about (the slippery, opportunistic) Bari Weiss -- nor even (as I've written elsewhere) to debate whether McCarthyism of the left is as pernicious as the McCarthyism of the right -- except to the degree that they exist (as a mutual -- and mutually self-serving -- protection racket) in a vile symbiosis.
My overriding point involves the role played by woke scolds (and their tendency to claim any heresy is "as bad as Trump") in undermining the Democrats' electoral fortunes (and thereby, liberal democracy itself) -- and to admonish those who'd trivialize and dismiss this phenomenon as inconsequential.
This exchange began when I lamented Kamala Harris's failure to have a "Sister Souljah moment" -- presumably hoping that the problem would simply go away (or that it could be waved away by blaming it on Fox News, or on the supposed "bigotry" of the voters themselves).
And who picked this fight -- a question that concerns and affects me personally as a gay male?
There were no "bathroom bills" in North Carolina until the City of Charlotte decided to make "gender identity" a protected attribute (hence, making "Trans" a protected class). Indeed, the implicitly adversarial notion of "Queer" (or some putative “LGBTQIA+ community”) is a self-marginalizing corral into which we’ve been herded by “The Groups” -- diluting and jeopardizing the hard-won, widespread acceptance (and self-esteem, as individuals) that gay people have otherwise already gained.
Ironically, this entire argument (on my side, as well!) takes for granted -- a priori -- the consummate evil (and threat to democracy) posed by the ascendancy of Donald Trump.
The bottom line is that, as we've picked each other to pieces over "pronouns" and "privilege," the oligarchs (now playing both ends against the middle) have continued laughing all the way to the bank.
In that larger context, focusing the discussion on Bari Weiiss's transgressions (or personality flaws) is merely a decoy.
I think the distinction is pointing out and critiquing aspects of progressivism and Democratic politics with the goal of trying to make the Democratic Party more electable (if the POV is that "wokeness" is the barrier to the Democratic Party's appeal outside of a shrinking core), or if it's done to "red pill" moderates and independents into voting Republican out of disgust and a disproportionate belief of the impact to one's personal life over various "woke policies". If the goal is the former then the content is not going to solely focus on anti-left grievances and will focus on the risks of the Right in proportion, if the goal is the latter, you get, well The Free Press it seems.
Yes I do agree that based on the polling, voters did still perceive Kamala Harris is much further to the left to them ideologically than they perceived Donald Trump as being further to the right of them, and that was despite the Harris campaign keeping a tight lid on her campaign rhetoric to primarily economic points with zero mentions of things like trans rights, it wasn't credible since she was on very recent record as having espoused the standard progressive takes on 2020 issues and filled out a survey indicating her support for the infamous transgender surgical care for illegal immigrants in prisons etc... and the belief that if she didn't discuss those positions in the 3 months leading up to Nov 2024 that would erase voter memories, and yeah, that did not pan out as they hoped. She should have responded to the ad about her ACLU form - either defend her support for that policy (which she could have simply stated she was in agreement with what was the Trump Administration's policy about this treatment at the time of the form, which is true!) on the grounds of her belief that prisoners have a right to access medical care they were receiving prior to their arrests, which would include gender affirming care if they were already in transition at that point, she could have explained that her support for that policy has changed since the form based on x, y, z etc. She couldn't just not address it and hope voters didn't care about the issue.
Her stances on policing also seemed to do an unexplained 180 from the heady days of 2020 "Defund" talk to 2024 Kamala The Prosecutor and was never explained or transitioned between. Her refusal to put any daylight between the Biden policies that were creating the most backlash like the asylum/immigration handling (which now seems the result of Biden's team pressure to not campaign against Biden - a difficult line to walk for sure) also just played into the belief that a President Harris would just continue the same agenda and would have an equally as progressive staff and Administrative policies towards gender and immigration that voters disagreed with - regardless of what she did not say to the contrary - and yet it's hard to say if she did come out with more forceful points of distinction if she would have earned that credibility since it would have only come out in the campaign and only once it was indisputable that Biden's polling was in the hole over. I think no matter what she did she was running an uphill campaign as the stand in for an unpopular Administration against difficult inflationary headwinds that voters held it responsible for, and the perceptions of her ideological distance from the median voter weren't likely going to be undone by any single "Sister Souljah" moment in the short window she had - and may have came off as insincere if she tried. As it was, I think she came closer than Biden would have if stayed in the race, although it's of little consolation now, and I hope whatever benefit voters think they got over the Executive Order on trans athletes and harsher border/migrant policies was worth the potential economic disaster Trump is cooking up!
The fundamental problem here is that it is intellectually inconsistent to support Trump while claiming to support even a modest version of liberalism, which is why the attempt to toe the line doesn’t work. The fact that Trump attempted a coup in 2020 is completely disqualifying on the grounds of democracy/liberalism, and that’s before the horrors of the second term.
In the second term, Trump has attacked law firms and universities with the power of government, a far worse attack on free speech than all college students combined have done in history. And that’s just the free speech part, but attacking law firms is also an attack on due process and the right to a lawyer. Disappearing people without due process to a foreign gulag in defiance of court orders, and then disobeying a Supreme Court order to return someone, is just about the most extreme attack on the US constitution, on due process, on separation of powers, and on the very idea that people have rights against the government, that the US has seen in many decades.
Thank you for this. It seems that some sizable portion of the ex-left, heterodox, "politically homeless" population moved so dramatically away from the far left that they slid right on over to the far right. (I definitely saw this happen in a heterodox community I was briefly part of). Publications like TFP are their reassurance that they remain the critical, nuanced thinkers they fancy themselves as, when they've essentially become indistinguishable from MAGA.
Say what one must about the slippery, opportunistic Bari Weiss -- but this article, itself, is hyper-partisan drivel -- a paean to the polarization of dogma -- of the sort to which The UnPopulist has increasingly devolved.
"Wokeness" is merely "a right-wing bugaboo"?
I write here as a gay male who's fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing “Queer" about same-sex attraction -- who never signed up to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World.
I also write as a Jew who refuses to dismiss 2,000-years'-worth of "Next year in Jerusalem" as merely a slogan concocted to justify a so-called "settler-colonial state."
I'm not here to debate whether McCarthyism of the left is as pernicious as the McCarthyism of the right, but (while duly aware and fearful of Trump's depredations) -- having lived my life in Ann Arbor, Park Slope, the Lower East Side, and now here in Oakland -- it's consistently been the former whose brunt I've had to bear.
So who's the next target? Andrew Sullivan? James Carville? Ruy Teixiera? Wesley Yang?
It's only a matter of time before (eating its own) The UnPopulist goes after Yascha Mounk.
I’ve had a similar experience as you and am happy to read gay and lesbian journalists who have not succumbed to the prevailing LGBTblahblahblah, so that Bari and Nellie along with AndrewSullivan, Ben Appel, Josh Barro, and yes Douglas Murray all align more or less with my views. I agree with others the TFP sometimes bends over backwards to accommodate Trump’s clearly authoritarian, irrational insanity. Ferguson’s interview with Bari today breaks entirely with the Trump tariff agenda. Still I think Johnson’s criticisms are valid and TFP should take note. Surely we don’t have to choose between Trump apologists and deep Wokism. Maybe reading both UnPopulist and TFP is the best way to find the center.
Touché!
They both seem to have degenerated, in opposite directions (though occasionally [IMHO], both sites still run some good stuff). ;-)
Fantastic writeup.I've been a subscriber to the Free Press since its Common Sense days but quit recently, specifically because of their disgusting "Exclusive! US Mint Hiding DEI Employees" (the second in a series of such). It was neither "exclusive", or even "scandalous" that organizations may have moved existing employees into new job definitions, and horribly Kafkaesque for an outlet that prides itself on its "independence" and "non-partisan" to be doing the Administration's dirty work for them, let alone, just petty. It was like, yeah, your "vibe shift" won, you're in power now, and this is how you choose to spend it, doxxing federal employees and baying for their blood for being employed in a job that about 5 minutes ago was an industry wide position? Being just like, even worse, those who you spent so much ink criticizing over the past years??
Which is really just the years long trajectory they have been on. I was cautiously wary as the content remained stridently "anti-woke" regardless of current events and situations. And the narratives on certain topics, like, my god, the Hunter Biden laptop story they just continue to beat into the ground, yet without any nuance of the actual events around the October 2020 story. The Joe Biden is old and was a media "coverup" - even the Axios people who were fawning of The Free Press on the Honestly podcast had to push back on this. And to harp on that without even any discussion about the conservative media's to the 100000th degree literal worship of Trump, and that TFP pretends that their readers are getting an equal diet of Trump criticism from the mainstream media (that TFP *also* repeatedly tells them is unreliable and hopelessly biased against their readers) so that they don't feel the need to provide any Trump/GOP critique - when the reality is the bulk of their readers are not consuming much of any mainstream media, and consider TFP to be their "liberal media" source. lol. So they are *not* getting any Trump/GOP critical reporting at all, but a distorted lens that no matter that Trump and the GOP control all levers of government right now, that student activists on a campus somewhere are the true oppressors.
The anecdotal stories and one-sided "exposes" - yes interesting reading but never developed into actual journalism. For all the money they have and expanded staff or "real" reporters, they still produce little that is actual journalism versus editorialized and stylized narrative essays. Never once have the institutions under attack in those "exposes" been invited to comment or engaged with at all. It does make you wonder how much of the story is missing, mis-represented, exaggerated, etc. For all their self congratulatory press, they are still little more than a blog site.
The pro-Trump bias became impossible to ignore in the past year of the campaign. There was not a single positive article written about the Democrats, Harris, and not one single article that actually spent any time on the *policy propositions* of a Trump/GOP majority government. It was all culture war and "vibes". I wonder if they even reflect for a moment that if they had maybe spent an article or two on the policy impacts (the few that were consistent and developed happened to be, ya know, the tariffs) or felt they had any responsibility to even spend some time on the Project 2025 aspects of the Trump team and campaign etc. Any "ragrats" yet on the consequences of getting what you want yet Bari and team? But I guess as long as the Administration is prosecuting some war against Columbia University (Bari's nemesis) it's all good?
Then there's the comment section. LOL. I long ago stopped expending much effort in attempting discussion or discourse there. They have developed a hard right MAGA commentary that keeps them locked in place, even if they want to start becoming critical of Trump governing policies *now* they get slammed by their commenters for any deviation from anything that is not anti-woke/left content and/or even mildly critical of Trump/GOP (but especially Trump!). And because of their revealed bias it will become harder for them to take in non-MAGA moderates and liberals. I think, along with a lot of those Trump 2024 kamikazes from Silicon Valley who thought they were getting a culture war victory along with some Reaganomics, TFP is going to be riding the decline of the Trump "vibe". They lashed themselves too close to it and eliminated any pretense of no bias (they literally had an Inauguration Party - another "weird" move for an "independent" outlet!), but are not sufficiently pro-MAGA to play NewsMaxx either to keep the remaining base engaged in what is already becoming an uphill run to defend the Trump policies.
Honestly, I will be conflicted if they fail. It *is* necessary to have an outlet that is safely critical of left excess. But the "heterodox" paradox all along is not becoming just right wing in the process. TFP chose the easy and profitable route, but I think, along with their Silicon Valley angel investors, they're going to get a rude and quick response to that. They may just become a cautionary tale, at best.
I think the one thing missing here is why Bari Weiss and her site went from being adamantly anti-Trump to Trump-curious. The administration has made her website a place for exclusive scoops about their crackdowns on universities. Bari had been waging war against Columbia since she was a teenager. This is her moment. The admin is in her side in a very niche issue close to her heart.
Thank you.
I was so impressed with the Free Press when I first subscribed but they have really turned a corner. They go out of their way to berate “liberals” with a stick in their eye overlooking the worst behavior in “conservatives”.
Thank you for this. I subscribed and unsubscribed to the Free Press in the course of a week or two, after being thoroughly turned off by ridiculous pro-Trump arguments and what-about-ism. I wondered if it was my ideological bias that made me uncomfortable with them. This piece helps me feel confident that my choice was rational.
Took me a bit longer to get to that same conclusion, but no, it's not you, it's them :)
It’s notable that the audience of the FP seems to go nuts anytime something mildly anti Trump is written. They lost me during election season..a bunch of the smarter, critical of woke left seemed to decide Trump was no biggie all at once. It was simply terrible analysis and judgement to come to that conclusion. If that’s the critical thinking you are bringing to the table, no thanks.
Thank you for writing this. A former boss of mine has been devolving into a Joe Rogan / Elon Musk fan boy - unsurprisingly for a myriad of reasons - and today he just posted that Free Press is the "best news source."
I'd share this with him, but he will proceed to badger for "proof that FP is unbiased." I'm tired.
Excellent article!