F**king Mondays: Bari Weiss's Propaganda, Problems in Podcastistan, and Freedom in Europe vs America
Andrew Sullivan hits The Free Press, podcasting is not a replacement for journalism, and why Europe is now the land of the free.
Welcome to another edition of F**king Mondays! In the round up today:
The Free Press grift
I’ve been spouting off about Bari Weiss’s shitty publication for quite some time, so it’s nice to see sane conservatives wake up to the fact that The Free Press is a) not free, and b) not the press. Here was Andrew Sullivan on the outlet’s pathological inability to criticize Trump:
In Weiss’s world, “free” means “anti-woke”—which is fine, but should not be confused with journalism (or freedom). A media outlet that refuses to cover Trump’s egregious abuses of power and anti-democratic actions is, through omission, little more than a tool for Trump’s propaganda. This is the kind of “edgy” nonsense Weiss pushes on her site:
The Free Press has published so many of these contrarian fluff pieces I have a hard time keeping up with them — but the gist is always the same: I used to hate Trump, but then Joe Biden supported gender pronouns/trans bathrooms/identity politics etc, etc so now I am a proud MAGA voter.
As Matt Johnson at The UnPopulist writes, the outlet’s self-congratulatory mission statement that it doesn’t “allow ideology to stand in the way of searching for the truth” is deeply misleading:
….The Free Press’ insistence that ideological considerations don’t affect its journalism is at odds with its track record. In fact, The Free Press embodies the very ideological captivity that Weiss’ open letter railed against—just in the opposite direction. Weiss’ instinct that many American news consumers were looking for something different was correct. But the publication, which was valued at $100 million last September, has found success not because it singularly embodies Weiss’ high-minded description of what once made journalism great. Rather, The Free Press has amassed a huge following by being a more artful and less shrill version of the anti-woke alarmism that permeates the right-wing media ecosystem.
Johnson continues:
The publication has always had a clear editorial slant: opposition to the woke left. No matter how bad the right gets, the site’s editorial stance remains firm: the left is worse. While The Free Press occasionally publishes articles critical of Donald Trump and the right more broadly, its overarching message is that the MAGA movement isn’t as bad as the lying liberal media would have you believe—and that the errors of Trumpism are largely a reaction to the much more serious sins of the left.
Credit to Sullivan for speaking out about this, particularly given he is friendly with Weiss and her wife, Nellie Bowles. That is of course what journalists and responsible commentators are supposed to do: tell uncomfortable truths, no matter the cost.
The problem with podcasts
Speaking of sensible political centrists, the satirist Konstantin Kisin appears to be waking up to the limits of anti-woke grifting. After watching Douglas Murray spar with libertarian bro-historian Dave Smith on The Joe Rogan Experience, Kisin seems to have grasped what many of us have known for a while: the free-for-all podcasting ecosystem is not a substitute for real journalism.
In a recent post, Kisin reflects on the early optimism of the podcast boom:
"Curious, open-minded, inquisitive podcasters, unrestrained by the need to comply with corporate media message discipline and social media censorship, were finally able to speak freely, seek the truth and debate controversial ideas in good faith in front of grateful audiences of millions. So far, so wonderful. After all, what could go wrong with 'democratising information'? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot."
That “quite a lot” is doing some heavy lifting. What Kisin is really acknowledging, if somewhat reluctantly, is that the podcasting space he once celebrated for its freedom has devolved into a credibility minefield. It’s a place where grifters flourish, bad faith arguments are rewarded with clicks, and the demand for intellectual rigor has completely evaporated.
He goes on to make a rare and important point about epistemology—how we know what we know:
Almost everything you believe is based on an argument from authority. Light bulbs, for example, are a fairly unsophisticated and omnipresent part of our lives. Yet the number of people reading this article who are capable of explaining how they work without resorting to arguments from authority will be vanishingly small. I am not just talking about the fact that most people couldn’t explain how electricity works, I am talking about the fact that almost everyone who can will only be able to do so by quoting the work of other people, rather than experiments and research they themselves have conducted.
This is an elegant dismantling of the podcast populist ethos that “doing your own research” somehow trumps expertise. Because it doesn’t.
Kisin’s argument contradicts the anti-establishment dogma so prevalent in Podcastistan, where the mere act of not being part of the mainstream is taken as evidence of credibility. He continues:
"The world of entertainment is not driven by truth-seeking, and the claim that someone’s ideas are false is no longer an effective critique. Podcastistan is a place where people scold the mainstream media for failing to live up to their standards on honesty and accuracy while having none of their own."
This is the core insight and one worth underlining. The anti-woke podcasting universe thrives on railing against media “bias,” but offers little in the way of standards, accountability, or even basic fact-checking. It’s a performance of truth-seeking, not truth-seeking itself.
Europe: Land of the free?
The Economist absolutely nails the myth peddled by the alt-right—that America is the last bastion of liberty while Europe is a socialist hellscape run by woke technocrats. In reality, Europe—not the U.S.— now successfully balances freedom of expression with democratic norms. In a satirical piece in the Charlemagne column, Stanley Pignal writes:
The thing about Europe is that it lacks an absolutist attachment to free speech. See how judges in Romania and France derailed the careers of hard-right politicians, who have convinced themselves (with little evidence) that it was their ideology rather than their lawbreaking that got them in trouble. Yet to many Europeans the idea that free expression is under threat seems odd. Europeans can say almost anything they want, both in theory and in practice. Europe’s universities never became hotbeds of speech-policing by one breed of culture warrior or the other. You can express a controversial view on any European campus (outside Hungary, at least) without fear of losing your tenure or your grant. No detention centres await foreign students who hold the wrong views on Gaza; news outfits are not sued for interviewing opposition politicians. Law firms are not compelled to kow-tow to presidents as penance for having worked for their political foes.
While American right-wingers love to scream about cancel culture and liberal tyranny, they routinely ignore their own very real slide towards authoritarianism. Book bans, laws targeting protest, purges of academic institutions, and loyalty oaths to the Dear Leader are now a feature of the modern right in America. Meanwhile, in much of Europe, academic freedom and journalistic independence remain intact, not because of some romanticized absolutism, but because democratic norms are still taken seriously. And then:
Nobody in Europe has spent the past week looking at their stock portfolio, wondering if they could still afford to send their kids to university. Europeans have no idea what “medical bankruptcy” is. Oh, and no EU leader has ever launched their own cryptocurrency.
Trumpism is authoritarianism marketed as freedom — and sometimes literally sold as cryptocurrency.
Have a great week!
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You have not made the case that Weiss is in error and woke populism is not the greater threat than Trump and MAGA populism, at least to Jews. Quoting from online pundits who agree with you that right populism is the greater threat is not proof, or is insufficient to prove your argument.
Some facts you are aware but have left out.
Andrew Sullivan linked to a NY Magazine Intelligencer column the week he and Times OpEd editor, James Bennet were fired.
Weiss called this a war between woke antisemites and older “institutionalists” at the Times. The Intelligencer made it clear that those the column labeled ” insurrectionists” want to ban speech it disliked and construct news the Times printed to comport with false narratives this tribe asserted were righteous. This distorted, ideological news coverage was confirmed in a Bar Ilan study ( I believe you covered )and can be seen in the Times decisions to print Anti-Jewish op-eds but also in its biased coverage of the Amsterdam pogrom, where it blamed the victims but never once mentioned that the perpetrators were Arabic speaking, ( almost certainly ) Moroccan Muslims.
Is it only the right banning ideas? The documentary October 8 could not find representation. Studios would not support it. The Academy’s documentary division refused to send it to its members. Would you define this as banning ideas? I would.
In book publishing, in main stream magazines and intellectual, non-academic outlets like the NYROB, will not publish essays that are pro-Jewish. No academic journal will print pro-Jewish articles. No citations, no published articles? There goes your academic career before it’s begun. Even established writers will shy away from the Frey for fear of cancelation. The number of congressional staffers, PR associates, foreign relations interns all have heavy anti-Jewish biases. The DSA litmus test on Jews may be closer than you care to admit. The post- modernist, social justice hordes have not yet taken over the Democratic Party but the rise of a Corbyn is not hard to imagine or far away. Fear is so great that self-censorship is a significant issue.
All over social media and in elite academic institutions religious dogma is indoctrinated into students too distracted to read. Not even Adoral can overcome this disinclination. Haidt called this group hyper-tribal and postulated they were desperate to belong to the group while fearful of any idea or fact that called into question their well meaning assumptions about power, race or social justice. Post-colonialism rules and the asserted facts that Jews are imperialist invaders, settler-colonialists, white passing, wealthy, privileged elites with hidden power who should not have the right to speech, assembly or petition their government could cone out or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Indeed, this Czarist work of fiction was dominant in post’67 Soviet anti-Jewish propaganda that gives us these dogmatic perception that Jews are evil.
Jews have the right to die but not to resist that existential determination that they should at the very least have no agency but best if Jews passively accept their fate since they stand in the way of the new Millennium.
Trump is a dangerous actor on whom to place your trust. But might Trump be less dangerous than these post-modern insurrectionists for Jews? Is Weiss exercising editorial judgement as an editor, as a journalist who has observed how irrational and powerful these woke, insurrectionists have become? Is she viewing this as an old fashioned, lesbian liberal who sees this anti-Judaism as the greater threat than, perhaps, you do? Or is she viewing this reality from the lens of a Jew in a post-Holocaust world with Jews denied access to professions, public spaces or news that escapes tribal distortion shaping it into a false, anti-Jewish narrative.
I am certainly sympathetic to Weiss’ view. More importantly, you have not debunked that view and shown her judgement is erroneous. You have asserted it is wrong. You have asserted Trump is the greater threat. You may be right. But for Jews the calculus may be different. For Weiss who watched these “insurrectionists” bully their editors into shaping the Times coverage of Jews that fit an ancient anti-Jewish narrative might be forgive if she thinks these barbarians need to be confronted. It is a return to the 1920s where both political parties are anti-Jewish and antisemetic. What is your political strategy as a Jew when both major parties in a two party system are disinterested in and antithetical to your self-interest and self-preservation? You seek out the lesser of the two evils and you may be very wrong in that tactical judgement. As the old Democratic warriors fade the tactics of slowly devouring institutions gives me pause if the Democratic Party is salvageable home for Jews. Risking that Trump is less bad than these “insurrectionists” may be a rational decision given the open, normalized anti-Jewish hostility from these spoiled, affluent elites growing both in strength and institutional power.
You know what’s actually a grift? Trying to reap engagement and clout by attacking successful publications with spurious accusations full of hyperbolic and inflammatory language.