Bari Weiss Overplayed Her Hand (60 Minutes Update)
Americans didn't want Trump culture. They wanted a better economy. Now the right is force-feeding them unwanted conservatism — and censoring media to protect Trump. And it's pissing Americans off.
This article was originally published on December 19th. A day later, Bari Weiss cancelled 60 Minutes’ highly anticipated episode interviewing CECOT survivors to protect the Trump Administration from bad press. As this is the most egregious and blatant corporate-state censorship in recent memory, this version is updated to detail how Weiss’s sycophantic ‘journalism’ for the rich and powerful risks blowing up what little cultural relevancy the conservative project has left.
Enjoy - Joe
One of the strangest narratives of 2025 was the belief that Donald Trump’s second presidency signalled a conservative triumph over American culture. Bankers celebrated the end of woke, telling the Financial Times they were “Liberated; We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . It’s a new dawn.” The New York Times’s culture podcast predicted that Trump’s cultural legacy would be “an affirmative one,” unlike his first term, which ended in “backlash and protest.” Always scared of their own shadow, Democrats snatched the nearest microphone to denounce progressive causes, showing their constituents that when push comes to shove, they curl into a ball and cry.
But the narrative of a Trump-driven right-wing cultural revolution was just that. A narrative. The top issue for 2024 voters was the economy. Transgender issues, often upheld as proof of conservatism’s cultural dominance, ranked last amongst voters’ concerns. Americans didn’t vote for the Heritage Foundation’s way of life. They were upset with Biden’s economy, so they gave Trump another chance. As idiotic tariffs and standard Republican economic doctrine have worsened the situation, Trump’s economic approval ratings, which were once his strength, have fallen to all-time lows, dragging his overall approval ratings down with them. The president is very unpopular with Latinos, whose Republican swing was frequently cited as proof that conservative culture was here to stay. Anti-transgender ads have floundered in special elections, and though Americans are still concerned about border security, they intensely dislike the Republicans’ nativist culture. 79% of Americans say immigration is good, while only 17% say it’s bad.
Despite clear signs from Americans that they dislike the Trumpist social project, the right has insisted on shoving it down their throats. In my view, this is a miscalculation that gives conservatives the worst political branding possible: being annoying. I found the anti-woke backlash to be purposefully overblown — DEI is a corporate hiring policy, and Critical Race Theory is a college-level course; two things that rarely impact the average American life — but if the anti-woke mob is correct that land acknowledgements and excessively progressive language irritated Americans, then they greatly misunderstood why. Unlike rightists, the typical American doesn’t hate racial and sexual minorities. They just didn’t enjoy being lectured to about how America was racist and problematic. It made them feel icky. As Trump’s draconian immigration program and white nationalist rhetoric are clearly racist and problematic, Americans dislike that too. It makes them feel icky. The woke kids might have gone overboard in pushing for a racial and social reckoning. But the Republicans have doing something worse: they’ve proven the woke kids correct.
There’s no shortage of examples of how the right’s cultural push has backfired. Sports fans groaned during the fawning pre-game memorial honoring Charlie Kirk, and “We Are Charlie Kirk, We Carry the Flame!” is the laughing stock of TikTok. However, no one exemplifies the right’s misunderstanding of their cultural position more than CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss.
If you’re unfamiliar with Bari Weiss, I’m more jealous than you can ever imagine. For the last decade, she’s positioned herself as the anti-woke journalist, writing obsessively about malpractice in clinics providing gender affirming care, overly censorious college kids, and about how Israel is perfect and all those starving Gazan children are faking it. To her credit, Weiss knows her target audience well. Everything written in The Free Press excites aging, wealthy boomers who feel the world is changing too fast for their comfort. I can’t recall who said it first, but Bari Weiss’s role is to cosplay as the daughter conservative-leaning older Americans wish they had. Weiss and her compatriots tell parents who resent their progressive children that, actually, they weren’t just right to vote for Donald Trump, but bright and brave for doing so. Weiss is also gay, giving her audience a permission structure to convince themselves their hatred of trans people is principled critique and not anti-queer paranoia. No matter the outlet, topic, or format, Bari Weiss aims to reassure reactionaries that their emotional outrage to progressive change is logical, rational, and intellectual.
The Free Press served Weiss well in her goal of creating a more conservative America. But, self-isolating in an echo chamber of the reactionary elite, she believed her own hype and mistook her niche for the American population. When David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, purchased The Free Press for $150 million and folded it into CBS News (which the Ellisons also own), he made a shocking announcement that Bari Weiss would become the CBS News Editor in Chief. Suddenly, a woman who had never had a real job nor managed anyone besides her family members was directing the content and production of an iconic American news channel. Weiss wasted no time in shoving her conservative beliefs upon CBS. Eight on-air personalities, all of them women and most people of color, were fired on her orders. One correspondent was supposed to be let go, but he saved his job by telling Weiss how much he loved Israel. Tony Dokoupil, who was rebuked by the network last year for making racist remarks to Ta-Nehisi Coates during an interview, is slated to become the next anchor of the evening news. Sports blogger-turned-Zionist mouthpiece Dave Portnoy was given a glowing Sunday-morning feature. To bring CBS in line with her loose commitment to honesty, Weiss moved against the network’s Standards and Practices team, which ensures editorial standards are upheld across the company. The CBS staff, who, while acknowledging the faults of mainstream media, are actual journalists, have responded with appropriate hatred. Everything Weiss says is leaked, and many criticized her for having CBS pay for a pointless security detail that costs $10,000 a day. But her biggest contribution to the network was last weekend’s town hall with Turning Point U.S.A. CEO Erika Kirk.
The program was initially slated for Sunday night primetime, but was moved to Saturday when advertisers pulled out. Say what you will about corporate America, but they can spot a dud like none other. The town hall aired on Saturday at 8 p.m. with pitiful ratings. Total viewership fell 11% compared to CBS’s year-to-date average for the hour, and there was a shocking 41% decline among viewers aged 25 to 54, the key advertising demographic. It’s not hard to see why. Weiss’s clinical narcissism drives her to be in front of the camera (a rare position for an Editor in Chief). Yet she lacks the charisma to entertain anyone who isn’t looking to have their racist fantasies repeated back to them with a veneer of intellectualism. Erika Kirk, who is spending the first months of her widowhood on a media tour, lacks the skill and intellect of her late husband. When one questioner asked if she would condemn the politically violent rhetoric of Donald Trump, she went on a tirade that ended by accusing mothers of going to pilates instead of parenting.
Evidently, the lesson of “take care of your kids” applies to other women, but not Erika Kirk, who has presumably left her children at home to appear on network television three months after their father was killed. Charlie Kirk was cynical and quick to lie. But he could at least answer a combative question without dissolving into platitudes and self-contradictory women-bashing. And it’s not like Bari Weiss came away looking good, either. Appearing on CBS Mornings to discuss the event further, Weiss claimed to have not known the concept of forgiveness until Erika Kirk told her. The desperate attempt to make a bland hour into an emotional revelation comes across as condescending to anyone who knows what forgiveness is. (Most adults.)
Despite the poor reception, Weiss is continuing with the format. On Thursday, CBS announced a slew of town halls and debates featuring figures such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Ross Douthat. Conflict attracts eyes, so maybe it will work. Though Weiss is already implementing the standard conservative practice of rigging ‘debates’ that ensure the audience only hears a right-wing perspective. For example, she proposed a discussion between hard-right commentator Dana Loesch and Alan Dershowitz, who is currently serving as Trump’s lawyer. Leftist streamer Hasan Piker recently stated Weiss offered him a debate against Ben Shapiro, but cancelled it when Piker insisted he be allowed to talk about Israel. This conservative and Zionist bias will undoubtedly be apparent to viewers, who are likely to feel patronized and disrespected by the empty promise of civil discourse that allows all viewpoints to speak. It’s a classic elitist mistake to believe you can deliberately lie to an audience. As the anti-Israel backlash has shown, the typical American might not have deep political knowledge, but they know when you’re trying to manipulate them and will distrust anyone they think is trying to play them for a fool — as they should.
Another sign of Bari Weiss’s overvalued stock can be seen in the achievements (or rather, lack thereof) of her university, the University of Austin. Launched as a conservative answer to the supposedly “woke” Ivy League, UATX was widely celebrated on the political right. Last fall, the inaugural class was welcomed with a special visit from Texas Governor Gregg Abbott.
But just a little over a year after opening, Fascist Hogwarts is in turmoil. Nearly 60% of the University of Austin’s thirty-four-person staff has left. One staff member was pushed out after she posted the below on LinkedIn, violating the right’s purity test by admitting that some diversity initiatives held merit.
Funny enough, Larry Summers, who continued his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein after he was convicted, left the UATX advisory board, stating he was “uncomfortable” with the direction UATX was headed. Pedophilia wasn’t a deal breaker to Summers, but apparently, whatever Bari Weiss is planning is. The University has also stopped charging tuition, supposedly due to a generous donation. But that could also be due to a need to attract applicants.
While the above developments were flashing warning signs that Weiss’s project was coming off the rails, the inevitable explosion came last weekend when the CBS Editor in Chief cancelled a highly-publicized 60 Minutes segment interviewing survivors from CECOT: the infamous Salvadorian concentration camp where Trump has imprisoned migrants. After days of extensive advertising and social media promotion, Weiss pulled the piece just three hours before airtime; an unusual move for any program, never mind one as sacred to the American mind as 60 Minutes. Among serious commentators, there’s no doubt Bari Weiss spiked the segment to protect the Trump administration. Following an interview with Republican dissident Marjorie Taylor Greene a few weeks ago, Trump fumed at 60 Minutes on Truth Social, prompting Bari Weiss to step in and assert more control over the show’s “political” content.
As shaping the media to help a fledgling Republican Administration is clear censorship, Weiss received immense backlash from within and without. Staff threatened to quit and accused her of turning CBS into a “stenographer for the state,” while long-time 60 Minutes watcher voiced frustration to anyone who would listen. Weiss justified her decision by claiming the CECOT piece needed “additional reporting” to “advance the ball” in the public discourse. Presumably, Weiss wanted the staff of America’s premier new program to reach the high bar of excellence put forth in her coverage of Barstool Sports and Erika Kirk’s mourning/book tour. While the move was cheered on by administration figures, Weiss’s staff isn’t going down without a fight. Sharyn Alfonsi, a veteran correspondent who led the CECOT segment, pulled no punches and called the cancellation a “political” move.
“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision; it is a political one.” - Sharyn Alfonsi, internal 60 Minutes memo
While the ordeal has revealed Weiss’s complete fraudulence as a ‘journalist’ and incompetence as a propagandist, her scramble to save face shows her actual skill and value to the conservative and Zionist movements. Under pressure, Weiss later released a longer explanation, detailing the additional content she sought in the episode, encouraging investigation of what the prisoners “had been charged with,” and requesting an on-camera rebuttal from Stephen Miller and Tom Homan. (According to Alfonis, the government had declined to comment on the original piece.) Conservative allies raced to defend Weiss, calling these requests “reasonable.” Of course, they are “reasonable” to the conservative intelligentsia, which also protects Trump under the guise of respectable professionalism. As mentioned above, Bari Weiss’s single skill is affirming the reactionary impulses of wealthy conservatives as logical and intellectual. Her right-wing champions aren’t reading Weiss’s note and saying, “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” They’re reading it and saying, “Sounds reasonable to me!” Which was Bari Weiss’s exact intention. For all her faults, Bari Weiss is one of the few operatives who recognize what conservatism is: an anti-intellectual movement designed to launder uncivilized, archaic beliefs into the mainstream by dressing them in the language and procedures of earnest political intellectualism. She gave right-wingers the excuse they needed to protect Trump, and they lapped it up. As she knew they would.
Despite exposing herself as a charlatan, disgracing a network's name, and cratering 60 Minutes’s reputation for trustworthiness among its audience, I doubt Ellison will fire Bari Weiss. It would be an admission of his bad judgment, and the family has more than enough money to operate CBS at a loss. I also believe her decision to cancel the CECOT episode is a gift to Trump, so that he will block the attempted Netflix-Warner Bros. merger. The Ellisons have also thrown their hat in the ring to buy Warner Bros., hoping to acquire CNN and HBO to fulfill their goal of turning American media into an even further right-wing, pro-Israel echo-chamber. To do that, they need Netflix’s bid rejected. When 60 Minutes notified viewers of the cancellation, they said the CECOT piece would air “in the future,” giving time for the Ellisons to sabotage the Netflix-WB deal and convince Trump their ownership will be friendlier to him. (Obviously, it will.) When the CECOT episode eventually airs with Weiss’s requested propaganda, conservatives will gleefully boast, “See? Bari Weiss isn’t a censor!” unconcerned or unaware that they have been used as props for the further degradation of American society.
In that regard, Weiss has debased herself but advances the interests of billionaires and Zionists: the very dynamic that has driven her upward-failing career.
However, I’m doubtful that Bari Weiss or any other rightist claiming victory in the culture war is having the effect they think they are. They’re more irritating than persuasive, more condescending than convincing. Millions of 60 Minutes viewers who have never heard the name “Bari Weiss” sat down expecting a detailed account of CECOT on the medium they adore. And she took it away, for the undeniable reason of helping the president. Now they know who she is and despise her for ruining what’s ‘normal.’ If there’s one lesson from the last few years, it’s that the American people are not as gullible as the elites think, especially on Israel. (Just ask Kamala Harris.)
Bari Weiss and other conservative media figures have never had to persuade their audiences, just reaffirm their priors. As the conservative movement attempts to take center stage in American culture, their refusal to change tactics — or rather, their misbelief that Americans voted for Trump to enshrine White Nationalism — is going to drive a counter-culture revolt the likes of which they have not seen.
The last thing you want to do is annoy American voters. As Bari Weiss is the most annoying person on the planet, I hope the Ellisons continue buying every media company on the planet and plaster Bari’s face on everything they make.
This post was originally exclusive to premium readers. After the events of last weekend, I felt it was necessary to update and unlock it for a wider audience. If you appreciated it, please consider supporting my work by subscribing. Your contribution ensures I can continue creating content like this that pushes back against the corporate narrative. If you wouldn’t mind hitting the ❤️ before you go, it really helps me stand out in the Substack algorithm. Thanks in advance!
In Solidarity — Joe
To me, the worst thing about Bari Weiss is that she has the same name as a pretty good beer from my home state (if you like fruit beers--they're not to everyone's taste): https://www.leinie.com/beer/berry-weiss
Excellent analysis of the overreach problem. The point about voters rejecting economic performance rather than embracing culture war stuff gets lost in all the noise. I've watched this play out locally where peopel vote for practical reasons but get interpreted as endorsing some grand ideological shift. The disconnect betwen elite narrative construction and actual voter motivations creates this exact miscalculation.