Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press and ideological commissar at CBS News, is the purest example imaginable of a free-speech hypocrite. She is quick to resort to the typical language of liberalism in calling for an open marketplace of ideas, touting The Free Press as a forum for robust debate. But she has actually spent her entire career suppressing opposing points of view, especially on the issue closest to her heart, Zionism. 

As an undergraduate at Columbia, Weiss became notorious for trying to get Palestinian professors fired, a precursor to her more recent firing of a half-dozen senior producers and correspondents at 60 Minutes in an effort to make CBS’s flagship news program more Trump-friendly. As Nation columnist David Klion noted last September in The Guardian, “Weiss wrote the playbook on canceling anti-Zionists and ‘woke’ progressives, even as she decried ‘cancel culture’ and claimed to champion free speech.”

On June 11, The Free Press published a disgraceful hit piece that offered another stunning example of Weiss’s two-faced approach to free speech. Written by Jay Solomon and purporting to be a work of reportage, the piece was in fact a barely disguised polemic arguing for the deportation of Trita Parsi, cofounder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

One problem with the article is its author. Solomon is a disgraced former Wall Street Journal reporter who was fired in 2017 because he had been intertwined in business deals with a frequent source of his, Farhad Azima. Azima was euphemistically described by The New York Times as having a “colorful career.” In blunt fact, he was an arms dealer with CIA connections who was a bit player in the Iran/Contra scandal. This history makes Solomon not only dubious in general but especially untrustworthy when he relies on unnamed Iranian-American sources, as he does in his piece for The Free Press.

The article leans heavily on typical McCarthyite techniques of guilt by association, with an intense focus on the activities of Parsi’s brother Rouzbeh Parsi, whom Solomon vaguely accuses of having contacts with Iranian state interests while working at the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI). These charges themselves stink of a witch hunt since they are an attempt to stigmatize any discussions with the Iranian government. This is a familiar tactic used against anyone who pushes for a more peaceful foreign policy. Furthermore, even Solomon acknowledges that he doesn’t have the goods, writing that an investigation by Rouzbeh Pari’s former employer “concluded that Rouzbeh Parsi wasn’t paid by Iran or under its control.”

If the smearing of Rouzbeh Parsi is fishy, the attempt to tarnish Trita Parsi is even more transparently absurd. Solomon writes:

I didn’t see Trita Parsi’s name anywhere in the Foreign Ministry emails as an IEI member. But Iranians in the diaspora who track the regime’s influence networks told me that it seemed inconceivable that he wasn’t aware of his brother’s leadership role in the organization.

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The fact that unnamed sources in the diaspora (perhaps people of the caliber of Farhad Azima?) find something “inconceivable” is not proof of anything. All it shows is that Trita Parsi has critics within the fragmented and factionalized Iranian diaspora—something that is neither criminal nor newsworthy. Parsi has long been the subject of abuse from Monarchists, the very faction that has disgraced itself recently by supporting the US/Israel attack on their native land.

Even though Solomon’s hatchet job is evidence-free, it is still dangerous. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been all too eager to use the power of deportation to target ideological foes, particularly critics of the administration’s foreign policy in both the Middle East and Latin America. Parsi is especially vulnerable to this tactic since he was born in Iran, grew up in Sweden, and is a green-card holder in the United States.

Moreover, the campaign against Parsi seems to be the brainchild of Laura Loomer, the demented Islamophobic bigot who frequently influences administration policy. Loomer has been calling for Parsi’s deportation for several months. The Free Press, which has more mainstream legitimacy than Loomer, is essentially laundering her arguments to make them palatable for Rubio.

Ironically, one reason Parsi is a tempting target for Loomer and The Free Press is that his ideas are gaining traction with the public, including inside the Trump administration. The Quincy Institute was created to form a bipartisan coalition for a restrained foreign policy. With the humiliating US loss in the Iran War, the idea of a restrained foreign policy is gaining strength.

The Iran War is immensely unpopular, with polls showing nearly two-thirds of the US public disapproving of Trump’s handling of the conflict.

Trump himself seems to recognize he’s fomented a disaster and has recently agreed to a ceasefire. The White House has also elevated Vice President JD Vance as the main face of diplomacy. (Presumably, The Free Press also considers Vance an enemy of the state for speaking to the Iranian regime.) In recent public comments, Vance has extolled the economic advantages of Middle Eastern peace while criticizing the Israeli government for its militarism. Speaking to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Vance said that the hawks in Israel’s government need to realize, “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.” When he speaks in those terms, Vance sounds like a fellow at the Quincy Institute.

It makes sense, then, that Solomon’s hit piece against Parsi is explicit in worrying about the increasing popularity of anti-war ideas on both the left and right—including from this publication. Solomon writes:

Since the United States and Israel went to war against Iran, perhaps no one in America has been quoted more often as a critic of the conflict than Trita Parsi, co-founder of the think tank Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

From the far-left Democracy Now! and The Nation to Steve Bannon’s pro-MAGA War Room podcast to television networks CNN, MS NOW, and Al Jazeera, Parsi has said again and again that President Donald Trump faces a quagmire in Iran and that diplomatic accommodation with Tehran’s ayatollahs and generals is the only way out….

In 2024, many Iran hawks and Parsi critics were stunned when J.D. Vance, then a U.S. senator from Ohio, delivered a major foreign policy address at a conference co-hosted by Quincy and The American Conservative. Parsi sat in the front row.

Contributors to Quincy’s online magazine, Responsible Statecraft, have served in national security positions in both Trump administrations.

These passages make clear that the problem The Free Press has with Parsi is not his alleged ties to the Iranian state (which is just a nonsensical conspiracy theory) but rather his real influence in Washington. Bari Weiss knows she is losing in the court of public opinion. Since she can’t effectively debate her ideological opponents, she prefers to deport them.

Fortunately, the push to deport Parsi is meeting with bipartisan resistance. As Parsi notes in a Substack post:

At the Quincy Institute, we heard from sources inside the administration that there never was an investigation, that none of the principals were aware of the issue, and that the alleged source for the Free Press story may have been a “rogue actor.” That, presumably, is why the State Department took the highly unusual step of publicly refuting Solomon’s report.

In opposition to Loomer and The Free Press, a grassroots effort has emerged to oppose the push deportation of Parsi. Tellingly, a petition supporting Parsi has been sponsored by Drop Site News, The American Conservative, and Breaking Points, three organizations that span the political spectrum. The petition is further evidence that Weiss is losing the battle of ideas, but these defeats are likely to push hawks towards ever greater calls for state repression.