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Bari Weiss was near center of a huge media controversy at Columbia, in which a group of Jewish students organized under "The David Project" and demanded the firing of a Palestinian Professor Joseph Massad. Bari Weiss and Bronze Age Pervert (yes that BAP) were peers and part of the David Project group writing articles to the Columbia Spectator calling for Massad to be fired and reforming the Middle East Studied department against the Palestinian perspective.
After Columbia, Weiss went to Israel where she did an internship under Yoram Hazony at the Shalem Center, a right-wing Zionist think tank in Jerusalem, and she worked for Haaretz and The Jewish Daily Forward. She then wrote for the Wall Street Journal and under Bret Stephens, who is now the inaugural editor-in-chief of SAPIR: A Journal of Jewish Conversations.
When Bret Stephens left for the NYT he took Weiss with him. Then Weiss resigns from NYT in 2020 to start The Free Press, which only in October of this year was acquired by Paramount Sykdance, owned by the Ellison family, for $150 million, and she was named editor-in-chief of CBS News.
The Ellison family has extremely close connections with Israel and Netanyahu personally, as friends and financiers and business partners.
This brings us to the question of how did Weiss become the editor-in-chief of CBS News? Did she win the meritocratic contest for this position owing to her outstanding Jewish verbal IQ? Or is her promotion to this position of power an example of Jews colluding to acquire power over and steer the national narrative in favor of their own interests?
At the risk of consensus-building, from the perspective of anyone aligned with Fuentes on the JQ it is so obviously the latter. And I am very curious what somebody, like you, who opposes Fuente's anti-semitism would say about this? Either you insist Weiss's career was propelled by her merit and IQ, or you acknowledge that her most important credential that earned her station was being a Jew connected to other Jews who was perceived as the best fit for pivoting the network to steer the national narrative in favor of Jews. So it's "meritocratic" in the sense that she was judged to be the best person for this job, "the job" being steer the national narrative in the interest of Jews.
If you insist the former, she has control over CBS news because of her IQ, you are just living in a different world from the "anti-semites" and your critique of their perspective will fall on deaf ears because, from their perspective, you are ignoring plain reality. The idea that Weiss has editorial control over CBS news because of her merit, I don't see how anyone could believe that. But if you admit that the elevation of Bari Weiss is an example of Jews engaging in the behavior that "anti-Semites" accuse them of, then you have a harder task of conceding some ground, which never happens in any mainstream criticism of Nick's Anti-semitism but still explaining why he's wrong.
Saying "Bari Weiss being promoted to this position of power is an example of Jews colluding to steer the national narrative in favor of Jewish interests" will get you called an Anti-Semite, it will get you fired if you say it out loud, but it's also true. That's the strength of Nick's appeal, it's not because of the economy or housing market or dating market. It's because we all see this thing that is happening with Ellison, CBS, Bari Weiss, and our interpretations of what is happening are true. That is the strength of the appeal.
The Weiss question is interesting because, in my view, it's an area where even those who criticize Fuente's anti-semitism should concede some ground and admit there's some truth there. But will they? I don't think so, and giving Nick that sort of monopoly over true and important interpretations of political and cultural developments is what is empowering him most of all.
Funny anecdote reported by WSJ:
I wonder why Nick is so popular when he is the only prominent media figure directly naming the elephant in the room! Acknowledging this stuff isn't just being edgy, or being hateful, it is fundamentally required for understanding ongoing political and cultural conflict in the US.
I have complained myself, as a former Free Press subscriber, about Bari Weiss's editorial direction. You are not wrong that she obviously sees herself as a defender of Jewish and Israeli interests (and she equates the two when it's convenient and differentiates when it's not). That said:
Your problem, as someone more obsessed with Jews than Jews are, is that you seek simple and totalizing answers ("Jews!") to everything.
Certainly when looking for a new CBS editor in chief, Ellison was going to pick someone with pro-Israel credentials, and almost certainly someone Jewish. But he was also looking for someone aligned with the new (Trump) regime yet not in obvious bootlicking way. Weiss's Free Press had over the past few years earned a reputation for delivering good journalism that was critical of liberal orthodoxy and "wokeness" (i.e., had a bit of a following on the right) without being an outright MAGA publication. And putting Weiss in charge after her unceremonious ejection (technically she resigned, but) from the NYT was putting a thumb right in the eye of people both Ellison and Weiss despised.
So the answer is yes, Jews, but that's not the whole story. You would hardly expect Ellison to put a pro-Palestinian leftist in charge, would you? That actually excludes a pretty good chunk of the media elite. Weiss was probably on the short list for a number of reasons, Jewish being just one of them.
That seems to broadly concede the point, doesn't it?
Imagine, say, the NYT was taken over by a Norwegian billionaire who had really strong opinions on what should be done with Norway's national fund. It's kind of a regional issue that most non-Norwegians don't have much of a stake in and he therefore carefully vets his hires for top editorial positions to make sure they have the correct stance and strong ties to his faction. Naturally, this means that they are all Norwegian.
Probably these picks have strengths beyond being Norwegian! They write well, they're bright, they're personable. Some of them have a good reputation and industry awards. You can't get a job in the new NYT just by being Norwegian, and being Norwegian is only one of the reasons they were on the short list.
But when you get right down to it, the editorial team got hired because they were Norwegian.
It seems to me that those of us who are not Norwegian have a right to ask whether this counts as illegal discrimination, and if not why not. We also have a right to ask clearly, in public, what it means for our information ecosystem that one of the main sources of information is now being run largely by and for Norwegians, without getting fired for anti-Norwegianism. Yes, it's more complicated than that, but that doesn't mean you can't draw a pretty clear conclusion.
(Apologies if it turns out we are in heated agreement.)
Right, I don't disagree that rich Jews tend to stick together. I am not surprised Ellison hired a Jew. Obviously if he explicitly stated "I'm not considering any non-Jews" that would be illegal, but--he probably would consider a small handful of non-Jews.
In your Norwegian example, I would find the choice of a Norwegian unsurprising, and while I guess if I were in the industry I'd grumble about it, I wouldn't be overly exercised about it if non-Norwegians weren't being shut out.
Unless, of course, I subscribe to some dark conspiracy theory that, since the cold dark days of å dra på viking, Norwegians have been ever raiding and warring against Europeans and to this day seeking to undermine the purity of Anglo-Saxon stock.
Then maybe I'd be obsessed with posting about Da Noorse.
Isn't there a reasonable spectrum in between? Like, you're really not supposed to act like this, not in the West. If everyone I hired was a white English national I'd get it in the neck for God's sake, we've had decades of trying to root out any in-group preference at this point, with massive collateral damage in the process. You don't have to be a dark conspiracy theorist to object to someone buying a major news organ and stuffing it with their co-ethnics to influence public opinion towards their ethnostate, you just have to be a regular person. And if you're a would-be journalist with all the same talents or better but you're shut out purely because you don't give a shit about the Norse it's even worse!
There's also the issue that this kind of thing is literally what dark conspiracies are. "Norwegians are buying major newspapers to control the coverage of Norwegian issues" is a conspiracy theory in its own right, even if NOG never comes into the story once. Again, there are points on the spectrum in between 'this is ok' and 'Vikings have been ruling over us for a thousand years, ever since Harard secretly conquered Britain in 1065'.
Yes. If a Jew hires only Jews, I would expect him to be sued for discrimination. But the fact that a lot of Jews rise to elite ranks doesn't require more than the usual amount of networking between people who know each other (we talk a lot here about Jews and Indians helping each other network, but I've seen Mormons, Catholics, and evangelicals do the same thing), and Jewish success being disproportionate for reasons we've also discussed.
What I expect is that Ellison was inevitably going to hire some strongly pro-Israel, which made it highly probable it would be someone Jewish.
We do seem to be in furious agreement, right up to the bit where your train of logic ends: 'and therefore it's annoying but basically fine'. I get that you can't make an 'ought' from an 'is' but I don't want to be ruled over and shut out of good positions by a cabal of people who don't like me much, especially when nobody else gets to play the same game.
(Yes, it happens to some degree with other groups too but a) rarely quite with such chutzpah and shamelessness, and b) if you make up a big majority of the local population then at least your news output or whatever is aligned with them and not so many people are getting shut out).
Didn't Trump just roll back disparate impact protections?
Maybe, I didn't follow it. What happened?
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