Journalist Bari Weiss: ‘I hate bullies, period’

It is a funny thing, telling people that you’re going to be having lunch with Bari Weiss. The first thing you get is a mixture of bewilderment and excitement. “Barry White?” The next, after you’ve established that you are talking about a living media personality and not a deceased sensual soul maestro, tends to be disappointment, and then disdain. As one friend delicately put it: “She’s a cretin.” 

Weiss, 38, is one of a handful of high-profile journalists who have quit legacy media institutions to set up their own offerings, many on the newsletter platform Substack, and who now command large subscription fee-paying audiences on their own. These are writers — among whom you might also count Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and Andrew Sullivan — who sell themselves as an alternative to elite media orthodoxy, offering an ideological home to those who feel alienated by a media they feel has swung too far to the left and lost its reverence for free speech.

During the peak of the US culture wars in the summer of 2020, Weiss very publicly quit her job as an op-ed editor and writer at The New York Times, unhappy about the “illiberal” and self-censoring direction the newspaper was going in. She claimed she had been bullied by colleagues who disapproved of her politics — she had argued in her columns against the idea we should “believe all women” during the #MeToo era; defended so-called “cultural appropriation”; and criticised a student campaign against a biology professor who had refused to take part in a “day of absence” for white people at his university. “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor,” she wrote, in a now infamous 1,500-word resignation letter.

With her new digital venture The Free Press, which officially launched in December, Weiss tells me she hopes to return to some basic principles: “Honesty and fearlessness, integrity, doggedness — all of the things that old-school journalism was meant to be about.”

But Weiss is also canny: she knows the kind of contentious culture-war issues that raise sensitivities both in newsrooms and on social media will get the most attention. The debate around trans rights is one such example: The Free Press managed to get JK Rowling to give a rare interview for a seven-episode podcast covering Rowling’s transmutation from adored children’s author to, in the view of her critics, “transphobe”.

“I do think it says something very telling about our current cultural moment that we didn’t get scooped on this interview . . . by the legacy press,” Weiss says.

I squint through the midday Los Angeles sunshine and spot Weiss coming in my direction. She immediately gives me a warm hug and compliments me on my jacket. She’s dressed in California casual: tortoise-shell glasses, black leather jacket, an unironed white cotton shirt tucked into loose-fitting blue jeans, and a pair of tan-coloured clogs.

While we are still introducing ourselves, she fires off some texts to her lawyer — “I’m always talking to lawyers,” she says, typing furiously. Since leaving the east coast in September 2020, Weiss has not just become a media entrepreneur; she has also co-founded a university, started a podcast, got married (for the second time, though this time to a woman) and had a baby. She also regularly appears on culture war-oriented podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience and is a frequent guest on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, on which she first appeared in 2018, after Maher read one of her columns, “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader”, when the comedian was accused of sexual misconduct.

“You just can’t even understand how tired I am — no amount of adjectives captures it,” she says, chirpily. “You know that boundary between work life and private life, the ‘work-life balance’? I have no idea what people are talking about when they say that.”

Weiss is therefore “not a lady who lunches”, and sought her friends’ advice on the location for our meeting. “I was, like, I want to take her to In-N-Out . . . My true desire is always a burger and fries . . . But then I texted around a few much chicer friends than me and they were, like, ‘You cannot do that.’” 

I’d say I’m a classical liberal, but all of these labels have been sapped of their meaning . . . we’re living through a tremendous political realignment

Her chicer friends advised her to come instead to Angelini Osteria, a fashionable but down-to-earth Italian restaurant on Beverly Boulevard. The front of the restaurant is lined with lemon trees that look as if they’ve been placed there to shield any dining celebrities from the prying lenses of paparazzi. But the sun is hot and the road is noisy, so we decide to sit in the shadier courtyard at the back, and are shown to a large marble table under an old Brazilian pepper tree.

A waiter brings us a basket of crispy, rosemary-infused flatbread, which I think is rather good. Weiss takes a bite. “No. It’s not worth it. It’s like matzah,” she says, shaking her head vigorously. “We need to get some legit garlic bread.” So we do, along with a glass of Gavi each and some starters to share: a Caesar salad and tuna tartare. “Do we also need the arancini?” she asks. We do.

The eldest of four sisters, Weiss was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her father, a conservative who now sometimes writes op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, where Weiss spent four years working herself, and her mother, a liberal, were “high-school sweethearts” who ended up running a flooring and furniture business together. In the run-up to the 2016 election, her mother was so aghast at the idea that her husband might vote for Donald Trump — which he was considering — that she vowed to withhold sex from him if he did so.

Weiss herself has never voted for Trump, choosing Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. She has voted Republican in the past — in 2012, unhappy with Barack Obama’s foreign policy, she voted for Mitt Romney — but calls herself “politically independent” and is registered as such. “I would say . . . I’m a classical liberal, but all of these labels have been sapped of their meaning. I think we’re just living through a tremendous political realignment.”

Weiss had her bat mitzvah at the Tree of Life, the Pittsburgh synagogue that was attacked in 2018 by a gunman shouting antisemitic slurs, killing 11 people. The massacre motivated her to write her first — and so far only — book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, which was given a scathing review by the Jewish philosopher Judith Butler, who accused Weiss of not engaging with “the issues that make [Jewish history] so vexed for those who oppose both antisemitism and the unjust policies of the Israeli state”. 

Weiss, who describes herself as a Zionist, suspects that one of the reasons so many people seem to hate her is her pro-Israel stance. Her critics, though, say what galls them is that someone who claims to be so opposed to “cancel culture” seems happy to partake in it herself when it suits her. They cite Weiss’s activism as an undergraduate at Columbia University, where she was part of a campaign that accused a group of professors of bias against pro-Israel Jewish students.

She rolls her eyes when I bring this up, and sees me making a note. “Yeah, ‘rolls eyes’,” she says. “First of all, people are entitled to be something at 18 and be something different at 25, as a rule. But I think I’ve been pretty consistent . . . I hate bullies, period. Sometimes bullies are professors, sometimes bullies are students . . . If you look back at everything I wrote and said during that period, the demand was simply that students should not be bullied in the classroom or . . . asked how many Palestinians they’ve killed because they’re Israeli or Jewish . . . That was the environment at Columbia. Now, looking back, I feel much more strongly . . . I cannot believe that that kind of antisemitism was allowed to be so flagrant.”

Our starters have arrived, and Weiss grabs one of the arancini — deep-fried, piping-hot balls of cheesy rice — and dunks it into the accompanying tomato sauce. A large morsel of it lands on her white shirt. “Oh no! ‘She got arancini on her boob,’” she says, mimicking me. She tries some of the tuna tartare, which is piled high on thin crostini and served with lashings of peppery extra virgin olive oil and a sprinkling of pistachios on top. “Oh my God. That’s amazing. That’s — insane.”

Freed from the constraints of a 171-year-old news institution, Weiss is now pursuing a more experimental, guerrilla-style approach to journalism. December saw the initial release of the “Twitter Files”, in which she — at the invitation of the platform’s owner Elon Musk — trawled through Twitter’s internal archives with a group of fellow independent reporters, to investigate content moderation policies before Musk’s takeover. Since then, her Twitter followers have doubled and are now close to a million. (Musk himself is no longer one of them — he unfollowed Weiss after she criticised him for banning the accounts of several journalists.)

The Twitter Files were billed as a series of bombshell revelations about the social media platform’s left-leaning bias and its cosy relationship with powerful institutions, but critics have dismissed them as a big “nothingburger”. I ask whether she was underwhelmed by what she found. She doesn’t exactly say no. “I wish we had had more time and more easy access . . . I think people don’t fully appreciate just the challenge of even getting the information that we did, given the logistical constraints.”

I really don’t want to live in a world where everyone has their little online tribe following around their little guru or influencer

The Free Press, which evolved out of her newsletter, Common Sense, has more than 330,000 subscribers, with the second-highest number of paying subscribers in the politics category on Substack: about 50,000 people pay for it, bringing in more than $3mn annually after fees. She also raised a few million dollars last March, in a “family and friends” round of more than 20 investors, which has allowed her to employ 15 full-time staff.

I ask her whether the reports are true that Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, has invested. “I’m not confirming or denying anything,” she says, smiling coyly.

Weiss says she is trying to move beyond the kind of content she is known for with The Free Press. “All of the incentives if you’re in a position like mine are [towards] doubling down . . . there’s a new cancel-culture story every other day,” she says. “But I don’t want that . . . I don’t want to kill my soul. I don’t want to become a caricature of myself . . . I really care about this country. And I really don’t want to live in a world where everyone has their little online tribe following around their little guru or influencer.”

“Mamma mia, che bello, buon appetito — you made a good choice, eh!” comes the voice of our Italian waiter (this is LA; everyone knows they have a role to play). He has brought us our main course: we’ve both gone for the tagliolini limone, a heap of fresh pasta in a creamy, lemony sauce. Weiss twists some of the strands around her fork and tries it. “You’re gonna freak out. It’s just so good.” She swigs some Gavi, though not too much — when she gets home she’s on baby duty and has a story to edit for tomorrow, and then she’s having dinner with her wife Nellie Bowles and Noah Oppenheim, former president of NBC News.

I’m pretty proud of the way I carry myself. I really try to act online the way I do in real life

Bowles, who is now working with Weiss on The Free Press from their home in central LA, was a colleague at The New York Times. Weiss proposed to her at a little table outside a Manhattan café during the early days of lockdowns. Because of Covid restrictions, they couldn’t have a proper ceremony, so instead got married at a place called “Instant Weddings LA”, on the second floor of a strip mall.

Although Weiss has dated both men and women — including, in college, the Saturday Night Live actress and comedian Kate McKinnon — and was previously married to a man, Weiss describes herself as a lesbian, which she prefers to “gay” as a descriptor, “because it’s kind of a throwback”. “In a historical sense, [bisexual] is an accurate term but . . . I’m in a monogamous marriage with a woman . . . and we have a baby.” 

When Bowles met Weiss in a staff cafeteria at The New York Times, she thought Weiss had “bad politics”. “She was going to set me straight,” Weiss smiles. “I think she was waiting for the secret thing that had given me the bad smell. It just never came because everything I’ve ever done for good or bad — it’s all out there.” 

Weiss has been widely mocked for the “anti-cancel-culture university” she co-founded in 2021, the University of Austin, which has been branded a “fake university”. But Weiss says UATX, as it is known, is expecting to enrol its first year of freshmen students in 2024, and has received $25mn in donations already. To put that figure into perspective, Harvard received $1.4bn in 2019, according to Forbes, and I sound a sceptical note.

“It’s a real thing! It’s a crazy real thing!” she replies. “A whole institution is being built out. There are dozens of people that work for UATX, there are full-time professors that have given up tenure and other places to go work there.” 

We have moved on to coffee, which I am having black and Weiss is having white.

I ask whether any of the accusations of inconsistency when it comes to how she approaches antisemitism and Israel are fair. “Do I have a blind spot? Maybe. I ask myself that . . . [but] most Jews support the State of Israel, and that has nothing to do with the current rightwing government of Israel . . . That is viewed in our strange upside-down cultural moment as controversial or provocative.”

Is there anything she wishes she had done differently? She ponders for a moment. “I’m pretty proud of the way that I carry myself. I really try to act online the way that I do in real life,” she says. “And some things that I’ve written that are now like ‘of course’ . . . When I wrote them they were absolutely heretical and I’m really proud of all that.” 

“But I think if I had to criticise myself for something, I would say that I maybe got too fixated on a particular set of stories, because I was living them out.” I ask what exactly she means by this. “The illiberalism from the left . . . Further away from that environment, the more I’m like: there are other huge stories in the world.”

Jemima Kelly is an FT columnist

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