If someone keeps advancing despite demonstrable incompetence at public‑reason journalism, perhaps they are doing a different job than advancing public reason—effectively, and deliberately…
Dan Drezner says that Bari Weiss’s claims, and her allies claims, that she had valid editorial objections to the “60 Minutes” El Salvadorian GULAG Trumpist deportations story are horseshit:
Dan Drezner: The Amateurism of Bari Weiss <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-amateurism-of-bari-weiss>: ‘Weiss fails to comprehend the difference between reading about the abuse of prisoners in CECOT and watching video demonstrating the same. This is the kind of story where video packs a much bigger wallop…. The segment would have been stronger with an on-the-record interview with Miller or Homan…. But—and this is a very important but—it’s not obvious to me how Weiss or 60 Minutes producers could have secured such interviews…. Third… damning… is… Weiss[’s], “but what about all the violent criminals Trump did deport?” schtick[. It] puts the lie to her faux-balance horseshit and convenient hypocrisies. The CECOT story is not about any deportations of violent criminals. It is about the Trump administration disregarding proper evidentiary standards and the rule of law…
He notes the possibility that it was a political decision, writing “at worst she’s ham-handedly trying to help appease Trump in the interest of promoting her boss’ business empire”. Because:
Paramount’s [has a] hostile bid [in] to buy Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD)…. [Frida Ghitis:] “Trump sent a message that he was unhappy with ‘60 Minutes’ since the Ellisons bought CBS…. Paramount clearly understood: ‘60 Minutes’ would have to treat him better. It’s reasonable to conclude that this is the reason CBS did not broadcast the story…. Shelving a ‘60 Minutes’ story critical of the administration only moments before it’s about to air, in the middle of a battle for the president’s approval of a merger, is not routine. And the timeline here… is damning…
But then he backs off, a bit. And so Drezner concludes:
At best, Bari Weiss is unserious and unschooled about her job…. In either case, she is not very good at her job…
But I have a different view: Suppose that people do succeed, even though you think they are not good at doing their job. What should your response be? Perhaps the right response is one of Bayesian humility, of stepping back and asking what the job that they are doing really is. Quite probably it is a different job entirely. And perhaps they are doing it well.
What is the job?
In my view, much of our discussion of what is going on with respect to the sphere of public reason these days would be improved if people had 1984 on their bedside table, and committed themselves to read daily from it:
George Orwell [Eric Blair] (1948): Nineteen Eighty-Four <https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021h.html>: ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats…
What happens if we combine a sensitivity to Nineteen Eighty-Four with Bari Weiss’s actions and the maxim that “the purpose of a system is what it does”?
Then we are led to this conclusion: Stop asking whether Weiss is good at journalism. She is good at the job she’s actually doing: performing submission to power and recruiting others to the ritual. In today’s media oligopoly, that job pays. The big tell is her “I am eager and available to help. I tracked down cell numbers for Homan and Miller and sent those along. Please let me know how I can support you…” As if she does not know that the “60 Minutes” staff has a bigger contacts rolodex database than she does.
Let me explain my thinking:
Bari Weiss has, we agree, been manifestly incompetent as a columnist and as an editor.
I search my memory for her New York Times columns, and I come up with “Canada in a Thong”:
Bari Weiss (2019): Australians Have More Fun <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/opinion/australians-have-more-fun.html>: ‘What we can learn from “Canada in a thong”…. I imagined an exotic menagerie: animals that begin with the letter K frolicking next to shirtless Hemsworths, mostly. Instead, I found… a place where things just work. The politics are moderate. The economy is roaring (at least for now). The strangers are helpful. Everyone has health care. Mass shootings are almost unheard-of. And I’d feel comfortable following the five-second rule on a random subway platform. So far, so Canada. But you don’t get on a flight across the world just to admire a $19 minimum wage. You come for the thongs. Australians have more fun. They just do. I guess I should not be surprised by this fact given that this is the place that birthed both Hugh Jackman and Kylie Minogue…. In the States, time with friends can feel a bit like those PETA videos of chickens on factory farms: slotted and squeezed into tight compartments. On New Year’s Day in Sydney I spent seven hours at the beach. Doing what, I can’t quite tell you. But seven hours spent in a shady spot by the sea with friends and food went by in the blink of an eye. I haven’t had a hangout like that since college. Here, that is typical on any given Sunday…
And with The Free Press, as I wrote earlier this month:
Brad DeLong: A $140,000/Year Poverty Line? I: Stewarding & Utilizing Resources <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/a-140000year-poverty-line-i-stewarding>: ‘It continues to be the case that, every time something from the Free Press <http://thefp.com> brushes past my awareness, it almost invariably turns out to be wrong—usually deeply, often ignorantly, and also frequently making a choice to be stupidly wrong. . This time, it is Mike Green. And so we have clean-up on aisle #5 from Noah Smith…. “There’s a much bigger market for the idea that $140,000 is poor than there is for the idea that $400,000 is middle-class. But… Green… is wrong…. He means that people can’t afford what he calls a ‘participation ticket’… to… a level of material luxury never before experienced by any middle class in any nation at any point in the history of the world…
As I said: if interesting enough to break through the background noise, and in The Free Press, than simply wrong.
And, yet, Bari Weiss manifestly succeeds.
She found a paying audience on her SubStack.
And she has now parlayed it to running a TV news operation.
She is succeeding at a job, even if it is not the one of writer advancing public reason or editor herding a posse of intellectual cats doing same.
So now let us turn to 1984.
Today’s reading:
O’Brien’s manner grew stern again…. “I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else…. “Do you remember”, he went on, “writing in your diary, ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four’?” “Yes”, said Winston. O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended. “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?” “Four.” “And if the party says that it is not four but five—then how many?” “Four.” “The word ended in a gasp of pain…. “How many fingers, Winston?” “Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!”… ‘How many fingers, Winston?’… “Five! Five! Five!” “No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?”… “How many fingers, Winston?” “Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.” “Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?” “Really to see them.”…
In 1984, it is not fully clear to me whether O’Brien and the Inner Party really want to make Winston Smith believe he sees five, or just want to make him desperately eager to make every effort to see five. The end of the book suggests the first, as Winston Smith experiences:
the final, indispensable, healing change had [that] never happened, until this moment…. Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention as his glass was filled up…. He was walking… with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain…. It was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother…
and blissfully fantasizes about being rightfully executed by the régime.
Totalitarian régimes, I think, aim for the first among those who do not focus on the sphere of public reason, and are happy with the second among those who do focus, but who do not want to doom themselves to the Sisyphean labors of opposition. The extent to which they ever accomplish this is debateable.
The Trumpists, however, seek a somewhat different aim. They are mere authoritarians. They are perfectly happy if you know damned well that there are four fingers, but dare not say anything other than that there are five. And the more plain it is to outsiders that you know there are four fingers, the more convincing is their power and your humiliation when you say that there are five.
That, I think, is the function that Bari Weiss is performing in her real job: that of demonstrating that she is—absurdly—willing to say that she sees five fingers because she is in the business of bowing to Trump’s power, and the day-of cancellation serves to underscore just how absurd her willingness to bow is.
The icing on the cake is Weiss’s <https://www.axios.com/2025/12/22/60-minutes-bari-weiss-cecot>:
I am eager and available to help. I tracked down cell numbers for Homan and Miller and sent those along. Please let me know how I can support you…
There is no way that Bari Weiss does not know that “60 Minutes” has a bigger contacts rolodex database than she does.
Is there a stronger way she could have sent the signal: “I am in the tank. Get in here with me!”?
I do not think so.
Well, perhaps by having The Free Press’s reaction to the DOJ’s Epstein-file bowdlerizations
be to send out crack reporter Eli Lake:
Eli Lake: Bill Clinton Has an Epstein Problem, & So Does America <https://www.thefp.com/p/bill-clinton-has-an-epstein-problem>: ‘The former president will have to explain his relationship to the sex criminal as the country descends into a new stage of the scandal…
Perhaps that would do it.