Last Friday, Bari Weiss—former New York Times columnist, founder of the website The Free Press, and now, improbably, editor in chief of CBS News—was due to deliver a lecture at UCLA on “the future of journalism.” Weiss is one of the most controversial and polarizing figures in media today, alternately praised as a pro-Israel, anti-woke crusader and attacked for her obvious right-wing tendencies. Many wonder if she’s just a MAGA shill, demonstrating a new way to control the airwaves.

While Weiss claims to be improving “free speech” in the news, she’s also clearly moving CBS in a more conservative direction—whether by delaying a critical 60 Minutes story about the infamous El Salvadoran prison where the Trump administration sends many deportees; commandeering the airwaves for a fawning interview with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika; changing the CBS style guide to replace the term “assigned sex at birth” with “biological sex at birth” when referring to trans people; or turning the network over to an infinite string of pro-war propagandists in the wake of the US-Israeli attack on Iran.

Given all of this, there was considerable interest in what Weiss would say at UCLA—including from me. I had purchased a ticket to the event and was ready to witness the Weiss experience for myself. But—for better or worse—it wasn’t meant to be.

About a week before the event was set to take place, Weiss canceled (or at the very least, postponed) her appearance, citing “security concerns.” It wasn’t clear what those concerns were, though nearly 11,000 people had signed a petition opposing the lecture. University of California president James B. Milliken released a statement affirming his support for Weiss and “free expression on our campuses,” a seemingly coded reference to the platforming of her right-wing agenda. So far, the university has not publicly announced a rescheduled or virtual date, though some seem to think the event may ultimately go forward.

Though Weiss has been uncharacteristically silent about the cancellation, it seems safe to say that she relishes another opportunity to present herself as a martyr for free speech. But Weiss’s history reveals a fundamental tension between the values she claims to possess and the actions she inevitably takes.

As Nation columnist David Klion wrote 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.” Weiss first came to prominence by trying to get Palestinian professors at Columbia fired, after all. So why, one may ask, is purging wokeness not the same kind of censorship that Weiss detests on the left? Meanwhile, she uplifts and spreads the gospel of numerous right-wing pundits, canceled men, and technocrats, from Senator Ted Cruz and Woody Allen to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. In 2022, she interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and she has decisively backed Israel even as it massacred an unprecedented number of journalists during the genocide in Gaza.

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The woman who once said she felt sidelined as a Jewish lesbian Zionist on both the right and the left has also become much warmer toward Trump’s second-term agenda. “I’m the first to admit that I was a sufferer of what conservatives at the time would have called TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Weiss said after Trump was reelected in 2024. She added that he probably enacted “a lot of policies that I agreed with.”

But this sort of slipperiness is par for the course. Weiss frequently reinvents herself, decrying her previous employers as too conservative, too woke, or too censorious, all while claiming that she is the true victim. Yet she’s hardly spent any real amount of time working “outside the establishment.” Her tenures at national newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and the Times attest to that. Now she runs one of the major networks and is regularly profiled by mainstream outlets—the gold standard of which may be Claire Malone’s excellent essay in The New Yorker. One can easily picture the scene Malone reported of Weiss sporting a CBS baseball cap and blurting out: “Let’s do the fucking news!” when she first took control of the network.

Weiss’s move to LA was a big part of her most recent rebranding effort. Now, UCLA—or at least its students—seem poised to reject her. “She was much more cerebral, intellectually curious, and well read than most people in L.A.,” one entertainment executive told New York’s Charlotte Klein. (She’s now moved back to New York.)

Hollywood enjoyed her provocation and anti-left sentiment. She was business-minded, not just a writer. Her prose was never that stirring anyway. It wasn’t just the pro-cultural appropriation, anti-trans, anti-feminist content; it was her inability to land a joke. (A typically thudding conclusion to one of her Times columns: “When I will inevitably get called a racist for cheering cultural miscegenation, I might borrow a line from the director of Taylor Swift’s new video, who wrote: ‘I am down for cultural appropriation. That sounds hot. Appropriate me.’ Feel free to steal it as well.”)

Weiss tries to own both the illiberal left and the illiberal right, but her work frequently fawns over conservative raconteurs. This is how Weiss diagnosed the left in an anti-DEI polemic for Tablet: “People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues.” Her solution? “What we must do is reverse this.” Stunning prose.

In a review of Weiss’s book How to Fight Anti-Semitism for Jewish Currents, Judith Butler pointed out Weiss’s violent hypocrisies. But it may be her banalities (“Lies—maybe harmless for the moment, maybe even noble —create a lying world”) that are the most glaring. Her essays are typically composed of short, fragmentary sentences surrounded by white space.

In a 2017 column on intersectionality, she wrote, “Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.” Yet who is really playing the victim here? Despite the prevalence of Jewish anti-Zionists, Weiss refuses to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza. Why would she? It’s her brand. She would rather call Jewish leftists “ideologues” or self-haters. She seems to think that pro-Palestinian sentiment on college campuses is the result of institutional brainwashing, rather than perhaps entertaining the idea that encampments are simply political activity based on moral courage.

Time will tell if Weiss writes about the UCLA lecture in some form. The statements about “security concerns” are perhaps vague references to the possibility of protests occurring. Certainly, it seems like an easy way for her to argue that the left is trying to silence the right. But it’s also a sign of shifting political sands. A year ago, during the beginning of Trump’s second term, it would be unlikely for such an event to be canceled or postponed at all. Now, perhaps liberal dissent has teeth.

Margaret Peters, UCLA Department of Political Science’s vice chair for graduate studies, resigned from her position at the Burkle Center for International Relations, the organization that hosts the lecture series Weiss was set to be a part of, over Weiss’s invitation. She will remain a professor at UCLA.

“The more I heard about what was going on at CBS, the more it disturbed me that we would invite her for this honor. Frankly, for these kinds of lectures, we bring out the same kind of people that everybody else is. This is a kind of boring choice,” Peters told me on the phone. “On the one hand, I’m supportive of free speech, but on the other hand, I had this nagging feeling in the back of my head. This was an invited lecture, basically conferring an honor upon her. After Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were killed in Minneapolis, I just felt I couldn’t be a part of an organization that was tilling the line of an administration that’s killing our citizens who are engaging in free speech.” Peters compared inviting Weiss to speak on journalism to inviting an anti-vaxxer to speak about public health. It’s certainly an apt comparison.

Certainly, the left can repress controversial ideas at times. Nobody is blameless when it comes to dealing with people or opinions they find repellent. But most leftists have neither the institutional nor the economic power that Weiss has. If anyone truly has the ability to suppress speech, it’s her.

People are tired of Weiss’s conservative shtick that masquerades as free speech while bulldozing those she doesn’t agree with. “It’s about redrawing the lines of what falls in…acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture. I don’t mean that in a censorious, gatekeeping way. I mean that about having people who are clearly on the center-left and on the center-right in conversation with each other,” Weiss said of her plans for CBS. “Intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at the Times,” she wrote after resigning from the Times.

But whom is she willing to platform now at CBS News? Not trans people. Not people of color. I imagine she won’t be inviting anyone who leans too much to the left. Her preferred journalistic range is a limited set of prima facie conservatives. Weiss feels that anything else is a form of “political heroin” that poisons the cultural debate.

But there’s unrest internally at CBS. Many worry that Weiss is not doing such a great job running the network’s news division. Not just because of her views but also her ineptitude as a boss who takes a “dim” view of her staff. Apparently, despite this, she can be quite charming. That’s how she rose to the top. She knew how to turn working on a kibbutz into a story about hard work and life lessons. Her impassioned narratives of victimization gain traction for their totemic calls for justice—even though Weiss wants justice only for a certain segment of the population.

In synagogue last week, I witnessed a bar mitzvah. A young boy delivered a drash on Terumah considering the need for a space away from the mundane world, a temple for peace and meditation. He said we needed a form of Judaism without dogma, without the need for a rigid hierarchy, an open space where all are welcome.

Bari Weiss once professed to argue the same, believing we need an open “tent.” But no longer. She wants to shrink the discourse to include only those who can comfortably justify a conservative regime. It’s an all too familiar DARVO-like refrain: deny, attack, reverse victim, offend. If we want to actually push forward political dialogue, we’ll have to find different tactics from the ones Weiss favors—suppressing the kinds of political stories we don’t like, or that may hinder our careers. Sucking up rarely pays off if one takes the long view of history.