Bari Weiss | All-In Summit 2024

Barry Weiss's Departure from the New York Times:

• Weiss resigned from his editor role in 2020, citing the newspaper's shift toward enforcing "woke orthodoxy" and requiring "bravery" for basic dissent.
• He describes a new journalistic consensus where stories departing from dominant views are "caveated, edited, tripled, quadrupled."
• He asserts that journalists who viewed themselves as independent now see themselves as part of a political "resistance" against Donald Trump.

Diagnosing American Polarization:

• Weiss identifies two primary frameworks for current political divides:
  • Renegades vs. Establishment: A divide between outsiders (e.g., Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard) and insiders (e.g., Kamala Harris, Dick Cheney), as prophesied by Martin Gurley's The Revolt of the Public.
  • The Three-Way Split: A "woke left," an increasingly "woke right," and a "normal people" majority who feel besieged and crave a return to "basic commonsensical American values."
• He notes a "horseshoe effect" where the identitarian left and the identitarian right have converged, leaving the mainstream in a state of confusion.

The Structural Shift in Journalism:

• Economic Incentives: The business model shifted from fearing advertiser backlash to fearing reader backlash, creating "audience capture" where content is tailored to avoid unsubscription by the 95–98% of NYT readers who identify as liberal.
• Ideological Capture: Feeder institutions (schools, universities) now produce journalists with a "revolutionary" mindset rather than traditional center-left liberalism, shifting the focus from "truth-telling" to "ushering readers toward the correct political position."
• Specific Failures: The NYT's decision to delay running a story about the devastation of minority small business owners during the 2020 riots until after the election exemplifies this ideological prioritization.

Strategies for Institutional Change:

• Weiss argues that reforming institutions from within is ineffective; the solution is to build competing institutions that force incumbents to change.
• The "Go Direct" Movement: A movement encouraging individuals to "give up the heroin needle of prestige" and stop prioritizing attendance at elite institutions like Harvard or Yale over teaching values of family and country.
• Building Trust: Free Press aims to operate as a long-term institution rather than a "one-man band," prioritizing reader trust over short-term monetization by publishing content that may provoke disagreement.

The "Wild West" of New Media:

• Risk of Conspiracies: Weiss warns that leaving mainstream media can lead to falling down a "rabbit hole" of conspiracy theories (e.g., Bill Gates, 5G chips) as individuals overcorrect against perceived lies.
• Russian Interference: He dismisses concerns that independent creators like Tucker Carlson were "bought" by Russians ($10 million slush fund), noting they were "useful idiots" unaware of the source.
• Free Press Positioning: The organization attempts to bridge the gap by maintaining rigorous fact-checking and public corrections (legacy standards) while offering political freedom (new standards).

Examples of Content and Reader Demand:

• Free Press launched a story involving reporter Layton Woodhouse interviewing Minneapolis police and small business owners regarding the 2020 riots and Vice President Tim Walz, content they claim the NYT would ignore.
• The organization turns down the majority of submitted articles, specifically rejecting pieces that lack factual grounding or veer into conspiracy.

Critique of Mainstream Foreign Policy Analysis:

• David Sachs and Barry Weiss jointly criticize the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) as a neocon-funded entity with ties to Victoria Nuland that is consistently wrong on Ukraine (e.g., mispredicting the summer counteroffensive).
• They argue the mainstream media's reliance on such sources constitutes a scale of disinformation far exceeding that of independent podcasters.

Ideological Capture in Medicine and Law:

• Weiss identifies "ideological capture" in institutions where the original purpose (e.g., medicine doing no harm) is subverted by race-based care decisions and the medicalization of gender identity for teenagers.
• He asserts that technology has enabled this by allowing individuals to bypass traditional gatekeepers, allowing Weiss to scale Free Press to 50 employees without prior management or fundraising experience.