Tucker Carlson and Bari Weiss Aren't On Your Side
Serial dishonesty and opportunism are their only values
Over the last few years, right-wing pundits Bari Weiss and Tucker Carlson have been holding themselves up to audiences as anti-elite commentators who are telling tough truths to both sides of the aisle.
For Weiss, that usually comes with serial dishonesty and/or laziness in who she chooses to highlight in her incessant culture war reporting.
“She airdrops into a subject she knows little about, gives it a dramatic title, and then walks away in slow motion, without turning back, like an action movie star, while her entire thesis explodes behind her,” Rafi Schwartz wrote at The Discourse.
You can read the full article below the fold.
In Carlson’s case, he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth; he’s called for the US not to intervene in Ukraine while increasing the drumbeat for war with China and somehow been praised as an anti-interventionist.
As dishonest as this praise is, it’s worth interrogating why Carlson has been able to present himself as an anti-war voice and Fox News as an iconoclastic network. One reason—CNN and MSNBC have been in almost total-lockstep with the national security state over the past decade in an ill-advised attempt to claim the mantle of Serious Patriots.
This evening on Callin, I’ll be discussing Carlson’s opportunism and the media landscape that’s made it possible for him to pretend to be an anti-war voice with AJ+ journalist Sana Saeed.
Join us live at 5pm for what promises to be an invigorating discussion.
Why Does Bari Weiss Keep Falling For This?
This piece originally appeared on Discourse Blog, a collectively owned news and culture site which, like The Flashpoint, is a member of the Discontents media collective. Discourse Blog is offering Flashpoint readers a special 25 percent discount off all annual subscriptions; click here to claim yours.
by Rafi Schwartz
The Bari Weiss Extended Universe notched another blockbuster release this week, publishing an essay by college student Jane Kitchen, that detailed her experience having had a lousy time at at a prestigious liberal arts college, and subsequent decision to transfer to a small conservative Christian school in Michigan.
Kitchen’s story, as she tells it, is fairly straightforward: growing up poor, secular, and liberal in Arizona, she “always dreamed of attending college with liberals like me.” Following a freshman year at Arizona State University, she transferred to Bryn Mawr, one of the fabled “Seven Sisters” liberal arts colleges, where her classes were enriching and her classmates were just rich. Nevertheless, she seems to have had a perfectly fine time until opting for several semesters of self-imposed remote learning rather than acquiesce to the college’s COVID mitigation protocols. “I wanted to be at school, but why would I spend my days 1,600 miles away from my family, with no clubs or activities, eating alone in my dorm room, avoiding all social interaction?” Kitchen writes.
After her grades began to slip, Kitchen once again chose to transfer schools — abandoning her $75,000 Bryn Mawr scholarship to enroll at Hillsdale, a small Christian college in Michigan. There, after just three weeks on campus, she’s concluded that life “is blissfully normal” because no one really wears masks and the still-potent dangers of COVID are “not the organizing principle of anyone’s life.”
All this, to Weiss, makes Kitchen a “woman to watch.” Kitchen isn’t simply a random teen who transferred colleges, but an heroic iconoclast willing to stand against the oppressive heterodoxy of liberal cancel culture (boo, hiss!) and forge her own path toward the warm embrace of conservative religious heterodoxy (yeah, hooray!).
And yet, just minutes after the essay went live on Weiss’ Common Sense Substack, a different story began to emerge, thanks to tweets from Kitchen’s own mother who made it abundantly clear that actually, her daughter’s decision to leave one of the Seven Sisters wasn’t because of cancel culture or class discomfort (in both senses), but was solely the result of her refusal to get a COVID vaccination. The end. Full stop. This “vulnerable essay by a working-class girl raised by a single mom,” as Weiss put it, seems less a clarion call against the dangers of liberal intolerance than an example of self-aggrandizing selfishness.
If this all sounds a bit familiar, that’s probably because these types of *shocking* exposés into the intolerant world of liberal education have become Bari’s stock and trade since she rage-quit the New York Times because no one there tolerated her bullshit anymore (her resignation letter still has its own heading on her personal website). Her brand, such as it is, operates as follows:
Find an extremely isolated, deeply uninteresting example of someone having a bad time at what is nominally considered a “liberal” institution
Do extremely little vetting, if any
Frame their story as a terrifying example of leftist cancel culture run amok
Ignore when you get called out for being wrong
Go on Bill Maher
Repeat
We’ve seen this cycle play out time and time again.
“You have to read this letter,” Weiss trumpeted this past April in regards to a wildly bigoted screed from the father of an elite, $50,000-a-year preparatory student which insisted, among other things, that “we have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960.” She evidently published it after he tweeted at her from the same account he’d used to predict a “civil war” between “free states” and “mask states.” This followed a similarly alarmist investigation by Weiss, detailing the “secret” organizing of “affluent parents, terrified of running afoul of the new orthodoxy in their children’s private schools.” As was quickly pointed out by alumni of Harvard-Westlake, one of the elite schools in question, the “new orthodoxy” in question — specifically, a newly-released plan to become an “anti-racist institution” — was taking place in an environment rife with bigotry, classism, and cartoonish levels of privilege.
Weiss is also the one who championed the cause of a former Smith College librarian, calling her a “whistleblower” and writing that “the hour is very late. It calls for courage. And courage has come in the form of a woman named Jodi Shaw.” But rather than the “atmosphere of racial discrimination” Shaw and Weiss claimed they decrying, the real issue seemed to be that the school hadn’t allowed Shaw to perform a rap she’d composed about the college library. “What is happening is wrong” Weiss declared, after publishing Shaw’s missive to Smith College president Kathleen McCartney in full, eliding the part where Shaw evidently demanded a massive financial settlement to drop the threat of legal action against the school. When Shaw finally did release her Smith College Library Rap (which was unimaginably bad and included a green-screen cameo from “white Holocaust” believer Conceptual James) a few months later, it was less an example of radical truth telling Weiss had promised, and more an awkward attempt to rekindle fleeting public interest in something not particularly interesting to begin with.
In part, this has always been Weiss’ M.O: She airdrops into a subject she knows little about, gives it a dramatic title, and then walks away in slow motion, without turning back, like an action movie star, while her entire thesis explodes behind her. But since freeing herself from the oppressive shackles of “editors” and “the appearance of competency” afforded to her by the Times, the grift has evolved into its current iteration. Whether intentionally, or through sheer overeager ignorance, Weiss keeps promoting the mundane as monumental with little regard for context, or consequence.
A college kid transfers school in the middle of a pandemic; wealthy parents get huffy over their children’s elite educations; a librarian gets mad at her boss for nixing a project — stringing these all together into an overarching narrative of cancel culture and liberal isn’t just bullshit, it’s actively detrimental to whatever modicum of legitimate grievance these people might actually have. The only person who benefits from this is Weiss herself, who will continue to pick cherries at her leisure, for so long as there are enough subscribers out there to make it worth her while.
If you liked this story, please consider a paid subscription.
Find me on Twitter and Facebook
Email me at eoinhiggins@gmail.com
All I see here is a lot of bitter resentment.