Leaving the Mainstream to Build Media Without Fear
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This is Honestly, and today we're doing something a little different. Instead of a story or an interview for me and my team here, we're going to republish someone interviewing me. A few weeks ago, I was a guest on Peter Robinson's show. It's called Uncommon Knowledge, and it's put out by the Hoover Institute. His previous guests have included people like Henry Kissinger, Rupert Murdoch, Christopher Hitchens, Condi Rice, George Shultz, and somehow yours truly. Mr. Gorbachev.

Open this gate. Peter Robinson, in his previous life, was a speechwriter. He wrote for Ronald Reagan, and he was the guy that wrote The Lie, Reagan's probably most famous line ever. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wallop.

I'm a fan of Peter's podcast, and I really admire the way that he gets beyond the headlines of the day to talk more deeply with people about the way that they see the world. Today, we talk about social movements shaping our culture. We talk about how the personal has become political. We talk about anti-Semitism. And we talk especially about the media, both what's come of the legacy press and also what people like me are trying to build next. Stay with us.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Barry Weiss grew up in Pittsburgh, studied at Columbia University, and then became a journalist. First, she served for four years as an op-ed and book review editor at the Wall Street Journal, which is where we got to know each other. Then for three years as a columnist and editor at the New York Times.

I should say, in case the tone of my voice doesn't convey it adequately, the revered New York Times for a kid journalist. In 2020, Barry Weiss left the New York Times writing in a resignation letter that, quote, Twitter is not on the masthead, but Twitter has become the ultimate editor.

"This newspaper has become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences." Since then, Barry Weiss has founded a site on Substack, Common Sense, and a weekly podcast, Honestly. Barry, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Okay. We'll come to The New York Times in a moment. But first, a question so big,

that if I don't put it first, we might forget about it altogether. I'm going to quote you writing last September, the changes in my own life, your life, over the past year reflected a country transforming at a velocity so fast it's difficult to capture. It will be up to historians to give it a proper name, but I think of it as a great unraveling. Close quote. What happened? What unraveled? And why now? It's hard to give that a short answer, but I'll try.

What has unraveled is the holiday from history that I think maybe all Americans were on in the post-war years. Post-Cold War years? I would say post-World War II, really. Oh, really? All right. And the consensus that sort of developed about America, about our role in the world, about our fundamental goodness.

about whether or not American power was fundamentally a source for good or ill in the world, about America as a place of expanding opportunity and expanding freedom. You yourself have had a hand in writing some of the lines that I'm thinking of as I say this. Right, right. We could have used you in the speech writing shop 40 years ago, had you been born. That whole worldview, I think, is under siege and maybe has even collapsed. And...

The question about when that began to collapse is not one that I can answer, because I think we're, as I said there, we're in the midst of the unraveling. What I will say is that the elite

that sort of controls the sense-making institutions in this country, you know, from which lots of things sort of trickle down. I'm talking about our newspapers, our Hollywood studios, our publishing houses, our universities. They no longer uphold that broad view of the world. Instead, they have a very, very different view of the world. That's one aspect of the unraveling, which sort of is the story of an elite turning against America

America. The second part of it is the Internet and the absolutely transformational nature of this technology that on the one hand is, you know, incredible. It allows for Haagen Dazs to be delivered to us in 30 minutes from now if we went on DoorDash or Caviar or whatever startup some Stanford kid has developing right now that gets it here in 20 minutes. But also ice cream is delivered in 30 minutes.

And the sort of addiction to that comfort, the way that we've sort of traded in, perhaps even unthinkingly, our freedoms, our privacy, maybe even our humanity for the sake of that comfort, I think is some is a story that's just beginning to be told. So I think that technology is a big part of it. What about COVID? Here's what I'm hoping you say. Oh, right, right, right. COVID had something to do with it because.

cause and effect difficult to unravel that piece of the unraveling. But if COVID had something to do with it, then as the lockdowns end and people go back to schools and we take our masks off,

somehow or other, we'll get back to normal politically. No, you're shaking your head. Oh, come on. Give me a little something. No, COVID exposed and catalyzed what was already there. The gap between the Amazon coalition, the Zoom class that you and I are a part of, and those that actually deliver the products, the fact that you and I can go into a restaurant, do the sort of

security theater of showing our vaccine card, wearing a mask only until we sit down at the table and then enjoy a four-hour meal while the people that serve us are sometimes even in gloves but certainly in masks, that is what COVID has revealed. And I think that we are just beginning to see the unbelievable backlash

to that, to the chasm that's opened between the center and the periphery, what Martin Goury calls the center and the periphery, or between, you know, the elite and the public, as Christopher Lash described it. Elite and public, I guess. Center and periphery, how does that work? The center are the legacy institutions that used to have a monopoly on what we knew. And one of the things that the Internet has done is exposed...

other ways of telling stories or other parts of stories that get left out. So I can read in The New York Times that the truckers in Canada are fascists, but then I can go on Twitter and I can see videos of Sikhs in turbans and Black Canadians and people of every stripe waving the maple leaf and saying, you know, and singing, you know, "We are the world."

And it's that disconnect that I think has been brought into unbelievably sharp relief over the past few decades and especially over the past two years. It's the gap between the rule, let's say in California, of lockdowns and mask mandates and Nancy Pelosi going to get her hair done or Gavin Newsom going to the French laundry or the mayor of Los Angeles posing for a photograph with an NBA player saying he held his breath. I mean, so that's what I think is.

also one of the things that's collapsing. And it's really scary, I think, because it means that there's no longer a monopoly on information and a monopoly on truth. On the other hand, it's opening up incredible new opportunities. Anybody gets to talk back, including Barry Weiss. Sure. We'll come to that. But before we leave this question of this wokeness, this moment, as you well know, there's been ideological, I don't want to call it ferment, but

ideological, a kind of ideological, ideological corrosion underway at universities for a long, long time. And here are the arguments that I, a year or two older than you, have heard over the years. Yes. And honestly, I have to say that at various points, I swallowed both of them. Argument number one, don't worry. The trouble arises from the faculty that's the 60s generation. They too, time will, time and chance will happen to them too. They'll retire.

Things will write themselves as their replacements. That didn't happen. It didn't happen. Here's the other argument. The other argument is, don't worry. All right, we've lost the universities, but the kids only go through the universities for four years at a time. And then they move out and they get jobs and they start paying taxes and they want to have families and they take out more...

reality hits them and that will reground them and marginalize all the ideological woke nonsense that they learned in universities. And that didn't happen either. Both of those arguments, honestly, they still strike me as completely plausible. Why were they just all wrong? Well, they weren't all wrong. I think if you go to a

doctor or you drive over a bridge, you're going to want to make sure that the person that is diagnosing you with or without cancer or the bridge that you drive over hoping it doesn't collapse, that can't be built on an ideology that literally runs headlong into reality, which is wokeness. Two plus two still equals four, despite what anyone says. And so I do think that there is going to be a sort of confrontation between the actual reality of the world and a

and the magical thinking that imbues this ideology. The reason that the sort of theory that

conservatives and liberals believed-- I forget if this is argument one or argument two-- that essentially the excesses of campus are going to be left behind has to do with what Yuval Levin explains as institutions sort of being transformed into platforms. It's no longer that you're a timesman, right? You go there for 50 years, and that's your identity, and you sort of subsume your identity to the brand. Now you're the brand. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. And you take that brand with you when you go, and you use these institutions sort of as platforms.

The reasons for that are because of the technological chains, of course. But so as a result, it's, you know, that's one aspect of this. The other thing I would say, so in other words, let me say it again. Rather than the institutions forming 22, 23, 24-year-olds, it's that those people have formed the institutions. Right. And the reason that's happened, and I think this is a really critical point,

thing to emphasize is because the people at the top of those institutions are willing to sort of bend the knee to the mid-level people inside the corporation who hold the people at the top of the institution or the company hostage.

And they hold them hostage with a very powerful weapon, which is moral condemnation and smearing of their character. And that, I have learned, is far more powerful than lots of other things, including money. Okay. This brings us to The New York Times. But first, you and I got to know each other when you were at The Wall Street Journal. Let's go a kind of fast trip through your own story. You leave The Journal for The New York Times for what reason? Donald Trump.

Running away from him. Running away from him because the journal decided it was going to play Donald Trump a certain way. They weren't going to denounce. The journal was not going to permit the editorial page to become an anti-Trump page, correct? That's right. And in retrospect, maybe that was wise. At the time, I felt like the journal had a...

was sort of missing an opportunity to come down harder against him. I mean, the brief way of putting it is that the sort of civil war that played out inside the conservative movement and inside the Republican Party played out almost exactly like that inside the Wall Street Journal.

But I'm kind of fast forward because because decisions had to be made very quickly. That's right. Presidency. Yeah. Yeah. And so following his win, there was a lot of shuffling around, some of which got attention, others of which did not. And the the players you know about are me and Brett Stevens going to The New York Times. The New York Times went through a very brief, important moment of soul searching where anyone will remember the night of the election. The infamous needle had Hillary Clinton winning by 99 percent.

Why? Why did my mother, you know, it's fixed by that needle. I couldn't leave. Yes. But I was going to say that, you know, this is a newspaper that's claiming to be the paper of record that's claiming to hold up a mirror to the world as it actually is to represent the country. And how did it miss something that my mom told me was going to happen?

She, for her job, has to drive outside of Pittsburgh. So like two hours in Trump country. And she would call me and say, I just drove past this barn. I mean, it must have taken these people a week to paint his name on it. It was so enormous. You can't imagine the amount of support for him. How did she see what they missed? Right. She was driving around Western Pennsylvania. Right. But that's what the New York Times is supposed to do. Right. And so I was brought in, frankly, as an intellectual diversity hire. You know, I'm

in the context of the New York Times editorial page to the right, but it's in the context of the New York Times editorial page. In the Wall Street Journal, I was considered very much to the left in a total squish. I'm somewhere in the center. But my job was to write the kind of pieces that wouldn't necessarily appear in the paper and commission other people to write op-eds too. Okay. Dream job. So let's talk then about two different Salzburgers. Punch Salzburger, when I was a speechwriter in the Reagan White House,

the grandfather of your Sulzberger, to whom we're going to come. Punch Sulzberger knew people in the White House, including my boss, Tony Dolan, the chief speechwriter, and they'd talk not infrequently, at least once a week, a couple times a week. Your coverage of the speech the president just gave was terrible, and Punch Sulzberger would take it and push back and ask what's happening. It was an open channel of communication

And the feeling I always had, Bill Sapphire, it was the great columnist for the New York Times. Yeah. And as best I could tell, Sapphire had great affection for Punch Salzberger. And the feeling I always had was that somehow or other, the New York Times, right through the 80s, although it would slam Reagan, and you knew what their politics were, you didn't expect Punch Salzberger to say, you know what, I think I'll vote for Reagan this time. Yeah. Okay. But somehow or other, there was a sense of,

We're all in this together. This is a shared enterprise and the enterprise is the country. And everybody meant it. Everybody felt it. Now we come to his grandson, who was your boss, was publishing. I don't know that that was his title, but was the boss of the New York Times. Yeah, that's right. And you write to him. I mentioned Twitter's not on the masthead, but it's become the ultimate editor. My own forays. This is Barry Weiss writing to a Salzburger. My own forays into wrong think.

have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and racist. This is true? People employed by the New York Times called you a Nazi and a racist? Some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be truly an inclusive one.

I do not understand, you say to A.G. Sulzberger, your Sulzberger, I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper's entire staff and the public. Close quote. All right. There are all kinds of questions to ask about that letter. But one is to establish somehow or other a divide had opened up and you were on one side and A.G. Sulzberger was on another. Is that correct?

It's more complicated than that. All right. But what I'll say is, this is what happens when the personal becomes political. If everything is politicized, right, and the nature of this ideology is that it is all-encompassing, so everything needs to be put to a political litmus test inside of it -- music, art, friendships, relationships, marriages. So that is the -- it's very important to understand how

I don't know what other word to use, totalizing this ideology is. Well, you're avoiding the word totalitarian very nicely. I am. Probably wise to do so. But that really is what it's about. And so even someone like me, okay,

married to a woman, Jewish, lifelong liberal, because I didn't adhere to every single aspect of this ideology, I was viewed as suspect. I was viewed as like a heretic inside a church. And this is not a story that's at all unique to me. The story of

I don't even want to call it a conservative view, but a view that doesn't adhere to this sort of illiberal leftism. It's almost as if by holding that view, you yourself are an HR violation by your very existence.

And you are treated that way. And everything you do is scrutinized. So, you know, we ran a story in my newsletter, Common Sense, by the Levi's brand president. Yes, I saw that. Go ahead. Had a career as an elite gymnast. Very heroically wrote a book about the degradation of children in gymnastics, forced eating disorders and so on. Hailed as a hero. Voted for Elizabeth, supported. I don't know if she voted for supported Elizabeth Warren. Probably did vote for her. Yeah.

Mother happens to be of two black children from her first marriage. Lifelong progressive.

And yet after more than 20 years at this company, she resigned. Why did she resign? Well, because essentially she was pushed out and she was pushed out because she had a view that didn't adhere to the leftist orthodoxy about school shutdowns. She thought from her position as an advocate for children's rights that this was a horrible idea. And I think history is very quickly proving that she is 100 percent right. And, you know, she basically was told by the company that.

You can keep your job. You just have to pipe down. And she said, but I don't understand. This is a company where I've been able to speak my mind about the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. This is a company where I've been able to speak out about, you know, gun control, about gay rights, about all of these other things. And in the meantime, as I'm tweeting about covid, all of my colleagues are tweeting about Trump. They're not getting in trouble. They're getting praised.

So why is that? It's the absolute and total double standard. Right. And so that's really what I was trying to bring out is in an ideology that is so sensitive to the smallest of microaggressions. How was it that I was called a racist and a Nazi or in a slack channel with thousands of employees, including the masthead? Little emojis of like knives were put next to my name.

You know, someone asked about me, oh, she writing about the Jews again. Imagine that happening to any other group. Right. And you have to ask yourself why. And this is the reason why. The reason why is because if you don't adhere to this, if you said if you adhere to this set of ideas, almost everything is granted. If you don't, nothing is. So let's go back to this line. I do not understand. This is you to AG Salisbury. I do not understand how you've allowed this behavior to go on inside your company.

Okay. Here we, you have just been eloquent on the question of the ideology, but here, if I may, I want to... Yes. A little cause and effect here, and that's the technology and the business implications. He's allowing this to go on inside his company because, I don't want to impute this to him, but it's plausible that...

that he's responding to market pressures in the old days, the old journalism business model, where a newspaper made money from classifieds. You know the picture. And all the incentives there were to reach to the biggest audience you could, and that meant you had to hold on to the center. It's gone. The Internet has destroyed it. Advertising is gone.

Out advertising is on Google. It's not on the New York Times website, except in a relatively minor way. Subscriptions are now the name of the game. It's the name of your new game. But it's the name of the game at the New York Times. And what that means is you have to choose an audience and make them feel such an affinity for your outlet that they're willing to pay out of their own pocket. Not write on advertisers, out of their own pocket. And that means the New York Times doesn't.

and the Washington Post and all kinds of other mainstream or legacy media operations have made decisions. They tend by and large to be decisions to go to the left, serve as a very narrow audience. You have, by contrast, Fox News. There are other talk radio, Rush Limbaugh. But now we're a nation of media niches, and that's a component. Huge component. All right. Huge component. What I would say is the problem you're laying out

really perfectly, which is a problem that has been termed audience capture, is true for me as an individual, as a small family business, individual proprietor on Substack. But it's equally true for, you know, it was true for Roger Ailes. I don't know who took over for Roger Ailes. It's true of A.G. Salzberg. It's true of everyone running a media company now. Because exactly as you said, it's not the advertisers you have to fear or please. It's your readers. The question is,

Is there a market, and I believe there is a huge one, for an audience that wants to be told the truth even when it's inconvenient to them? That's my bet.

Right. I see and feel myself when I read the things that I like to read that. Yeah, of course, there's an appetite for political heroin, which is what you're describing. We know what that looks like from Fox. We know what we look that looks like on MSNBC. But is there also an appetite for actually understanding the world as it actually is? Because that's how you make actual decisions about where to move, how to raise your family, what kids where your kids should go to school, what to invest in. I mean,

And understanding reality is an enormously valuable thing. And that's sort of my long-term bet. By the way, are you going to let me stick up for Fox? Do you have a contributorship? No, I don't. But I feel the distinction they draw between their opinion and their news is valid. Their news strikes me as a pretty solid news organization. You're going to let me say that? Oh, sure. But I'll say this.

I think people at Fox equally the New York Times are kidding themselves about the audiences. I think audiences are extremely sophisticated, but I also think things are unclearly marked. There was a huge debate at the times about do we do opinion in a different font bold? Because when you're reading it, you just think they don't. You know, most people who aren't journalists, they're not paying attention to bylines. They're thinking I read it in the New York Times. It's endorsed by the New York Times.

They're not thinking, oh, it's just it's in Sunday Review, which makes it different than in the foreign section. All right. All right. Shift gears now a little bit. We're talking about doom and and gloom. And the. No, I feel optimistic. I know. Well, we'll come to the optimism. But first, a little more. More. More. Do more difficulty. More. Storm. Storm.

Your 2019 book, How to Fight Antisemitism, again, you use this phrase. I want you to explain it a little bit more as it applies to you personally. I had spent much of my life on a holiday from history. Yes. How did that apply to you? Well, I wrote this book in the aftermath of the most lethal attack on Jews in American history, which happened in 2018, October, at the synagogue Tree of Life, where I'd become a bat mitzvah.

Oh, really? Oh, I didn't realize. Okay. Yes, I should have known that. So that attack, which on its surface...

putting the weapon of choice aside looked like something that could have happened in 19th century poland jews at worship getting killed by a neo-nazi um it was really shocking that it had happened in america which has been the best diaspora experience for the jews in history but it was especially shocking that it happened in squirrel hill which is where i was raised which was literally mr rogers neighborhood he lived down the street from the synagogue in other words

I was raised in a Jewish community that was unbelievably secure, unbelievably safe, unbelievably tolerant by surrounding communities.

And I was raised equally, I would say it's like a faith almost as strong as my Judaism on Americanism, on the notion that, you know, someone who believed that, you know, Jews are a nefarious force or Jews are subhuman and therefore I need to go and murder 11 of them, that that was sort of a vestige of uglier times and places and from the old world, not this one. And so it's not to say that, you know, anti-Semitic things didn't happen to me.

It's just that when they did, I remember waiting for the school bus to take me and my sister to Jewish day school and this Catholic school bus drove by and they called us kikes and I had to ask my dad what that was. And there was a really strong sense in my family but in the broader community that like

That didn't threaten my place here at all. That was the anomaly rather than the norm. Yeah, and it was an embarrassing thing for the people. Yes. Not for me. I had nothing to be ashamed of. I was fully American in my Jewish self. And I think the thing that began to change with Pittsburgh was a sense of, you know, is that true anymore? If the guardrails that sort of keep bigotry at bay are dismantled, you know, who's to say that that doesn't become normal?

more normative. Your essay of last September, quote, it is not by chance that the ideas and institutions of the old order, excuse me, of the old order, I'm inserting this here, which you've already discussed based on individual liberty, the old notion of America, nurtured me and millions of other American Jews. As the scholar Dara Horn has noted, now you're quoting Dara Horn, quote, since ancient times in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the prospect of freedom

As long as Jews existed, there was evidence that it wasn't necessary to believe what everyone else believed. I get chills every time I hear that. Explain that, the connection between the Jewish experience and freedom. Well...

It's the reason that you... There's a necessity of the... Sorry, go ahead. There is, because Jews, by our very existence, are proof that difference is not only possible, but can be an incredibly positive thing, not just for us, but for the surrounding civilization. And...

You know, Rabbi, the late great Rabbi Lord, he has a million titles. Jonathan talks a lot about the dignity of difference. And I think that it's not yet exactly. She says it's not by chance that Jews have thrived in a country where difference was not seen as a threat.

You know, and you can hear that in a right-wing way, you know, the idea of pure and impure Americans or white and non-white America. Or you could hear it from the illiberal leftist way of, you know, that difference is somehow threatening because it means that there'll be disparity of outcome, right? So it's... If there's a connection between the Jewish experience and freedom, is there a connection...

Is it a necessary connection between the new wokeness and anti-Semitism? Yes, for a hundred different reasons that I could get into. One of the ways, there's a few things I could say.

Choose any two. Well, one of the strange things about what's happening right now, right? And this is one of the things that's confusing to people about anti-Semitism because it can function as racism, right? As you're not allowed in this neighborhood, your quote is in the Ivy League, you're not allowed in this country club. But it also can function in the very same moment as you think you're better than us. It punches up and it punches down and it punches to the side. In other words...

Anti-Semitism functions as a conspiracy theory, right? It says that, you know, it basically points to the Jew as the scapegoat for whatever's wrong in a given society. That's how, and then I'll get to the wokeness, that's how under communism, right, we're the arch-capitalists because that's the worst thing under communism. But how under Nazism, we're the race contaminators.

How does that function right now in America? Hold on. I just want to make sure I've got that. So I'm thinking of Hitler, I'm sorry to say, because I'd like to think of him as little as possible. But the notion that the Jews are beneath contempt, they're subhuman, and at the same time they're running every bank. Exactly. It makes no sense. Nothing about anti-Semitism does make sense, but that's what you mean by punching down and punching up. Exactly. All right. You said it better than me. And so...

When you understand that this conspiracy, which targets the Jews but actually kills, and this is really important for people to understand, whatever society where it's allowed to thrive, any society where anti-Semitism thrives is a society that's dead or dying. So Jews are the proximate victim, but they are not the ultimate victim. The ultimate victim is everyone. So what do you have right now in America? You have a far right that says...

You know, you are sort of fake white people. You look like you're white.

because most American Jews are of Ashkenazi descent, unlike in Israel, where the majority of our Mizrahi North African Middle Eastern descent, you pass as white. But in fact, you're loyal to the people we think are sullying real America, black people, brown people, Muslims. The reason that Robert Bowers, that neo-Nazi, chose Tree of Life as his synagogue, as the target, was because the previous week, the previous Sabbath, it had participated in Refugee Shabbat,

holding up the idea that because Jews were strangers in the land of Egypt, we can never oppress a stranger. At the very same time, what the far left is saying about us is, hold on, you say you're a minority, but look at the amount of power you've accrued. Look at the amount of success that you've had. You benefit from white supremacy because you're adjacent to it and because in a way you are upholding it.

And so we become guilty of the gravest sin of the left, which is racism or white supremacy. And then they say you're also guilty of another sin, which is that you're loyal to what they view totally a historically and wrongly as the last standing bastion of white colonialism in the Middle East, which is Israel. So we are like being turned into neo-Nazis just as we are being targeted by neo-Nazis.

by neo-Nazis, if that makes sense. Right, right, right. And because, I'll say one last thing. Yes, yes. Because wokeness flattens everything and basically divides us all up into oppressed or oppressor, white and black, you know, basically constrains us to the lane of our birth in any number of ways. Jews do not fit into those contemporary boxes. We are not

We are an ethnicity, but we're not an ethnicity. We are a race, but we're not a race. We've had incredible success in this country. But in the 20th century, we've also lived through not just the 20th century, 2000 years of being a group that has suffered unspeakable oppressions and horrors. So what are we? Where do we fit?

We don't fit into the boxes that this ideology is forcing upon all of us because we predate those categories themselves. And I think that's another way that it is sort of dangerous for Jews because it whitewashes our history. It whitewashes our identity. It forces us to sort of check parts of ourself at the door to be admitted to the sort of community of the righteous. Mm-hmm.

Kent, let's take a moment to look at a 90-second nothing that got turned into a something. Then let's be truthful about it because the Holocaust isn't about race.

No, no, it's not about race, but it's about white supremacy. But these are two white groups of people. Well, they have to black people as white. But you're missing the point. You're missing the point. The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley. Let's talk about it for what it is. It's how people treat each other.

So that's Whoopi Goldberg on The View, January 31st. The host discussed a Tennessee school board decision to drop the graphic novel, The Holocaust Mouse, citing objectionable language. And then we have this discussion. Lots of objections. This 90 seconds, lots of objections. Here's one.

Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, quote, The Holocaust was about the Nazis' systematic annihilation of the Jewish people whom they deemed to be an inferior race. Race. It was about race. And then Whoopi Goldberg, in a matter of hours, issues an apology. I said the Holocaust is not about race but about man's humanity to man. I should have said it is about both. The Jewish people have always had my support and that will never waver. I'm sorry for the hurt that I caused, close quote.

Notwithstanding her apology, ABC suspends her for two weeks. She also went on Colbert that night and dug in. Oh, she did? She did. Oh, that I wasn't aware of. She did. That I wasn't aware of. Oh, so you were paying attention to this? Closely, yes. Okay, so... Because I've always been a huge fan of Whoopi Goldberg. I love Sister Act. Okay, so... And I think she's great. I'll tell you what I think. Yeah. The way it struck me was...

Whoa, the reaction is out of proportion. She got carried away. She said it wasn't about race. That was wrong. And also, it's also always wrong to indicate or to suggest in any way that the Holocaust is not singular. Nothing like it has happened in all of human history. But if they judged her anti-Semitic, you don't dismiss somebody for two weeks.

And if they accepted her apology, she shouldn't have been dismissed. The reaction seemed to me out of proportion. I'm happy to be schooled by you. So what did you make of it all? It was a nothing, but it seemed to say something. One of the things that I thought this did indicate, you are the expert, I am the layman, really and truly, is the mercilessness of the progressive woke world. Jews have Yom Kippur. Catholics have confession. Yeah.

But if you make a woke, if you commit a woke, a sin against wokeness, you have nowhere to go. There's no way to say. You can't redeem yourself. You can't redeem yourself. There's no one to go to be forgiven. It did strike me that there's something raw and ruthless and merciless about it all. Okay. I think there's a few things to be said. The first is that what Whoopi Goldberg said, which was essentially that the Holocaust was white on white crimes.

It was white people fighting each other.

That's just totally a historical. It really didn't know what she was talking about, but it really connects to what I was saying before about this ideology that we're calling woke. We could call it a million things that flattens people that puts that makes the Jews into white people. Right. That makes the Jews into white colonialists that don't have an indigenous connection to the land of Israel. That makes us into sort of part of the category of the oppressed and

Now, slightly exotic Episcopalian. Right. Now, does Whoopi Goldberg have that in mind as she's saying it? Does she, you know, hate choosing her? No.

Of course not. But it's an important instance, I think, of the way that this ideology is getting expressed in the world. Right. I heard a crazy anecdote the other day from someone who is an elite liberal arts school who was in a class about the Holocaust. And someone seriously described Elie Wiesel as having privilege because he was a cisgendered man in the Holocaust in Auschwitz.

So again, it's about taking these really newfangled contemporary ideas and plugging them into history in a way that absolutely makes no sense at all and makes you sound ignorant. As for the mercilessness, I mean, this is something I've been thinking about.

Tremendous amount. It's what I I'm very passionate about it and very moved by it, because I think one of the things that's foundational to liberalism broadly defined is the idea that we can make amends, the idea that we can reinvent ourselves, the idea that we're not held hostage by the worst mistake we've ever said or done.

This is a country of second acts. That's really part of the old-fashioned classical liberal outlook. And I really believe that. Now, what do you do with that outlook when all of a sudden you are living, not even with, more and more inside a technology in which everything you've ever uttered is captured forever? I'll tell you what happens. You start to hear...

seventh and sixth and fifth graders who sound sort of like the Stasi snitching on their friends. And you also hear of kids literally as I'm talking seriously, like I hear from these kids who talk to me about self-censoring even from the age of middle school because they see.

That someone's song that they sang along to in a five second TikTok video gets them stripped of their college admissions. And by the way, it doesn't even necessarily need to be you who did the bad thing. You could just be in proximity to the person that did the bad thing and get punished or ruined forever. In a picture with someone who said something bad once. We do not yet have the tools to sort of figure out how to adapt the ideas that have made this country sort of the most vulnerable.

tolerant, liberal that I think the world has ever known with a technology that is sort of maybe undermining what it means to be human. We haven't updated our software, let's say, politically. We haven't updated our software socially or culturally. That's one of the things that I think I'm trying to write into and think into.

After the break, Peter and I talk about all the reasons we have for optimism. Stay with us. Optimistic ground. Institutions. Yes. Although even as we go through this optimistic ground, one of the underlying questions I have here is the extent to which Barry says this institution can be reformed and recaptured or it can't. And we have to build our own new institutions. I'm the second thing.

Oh, you're just going to make that as a blanket statement? I mean, I want to give you interesting conversations. Not a blanket, but often, yes. Increasingly so. Is Common Sense a new newspaper? What are you inventing? I think I'm inventing... For sure it works. How old is it? A year. Is it a full year? I was going to say it's still months. It's a year. The podcast is like less than a year. Okay, so congratulations on a year of Common Sense. And what do you have there?

I think I have. First of all, could I just be crass? Sure. Does this make money? Yes. It does? Yes. Okay. So you, and I know. Hiring people like crazy. But you're still making your father slave for you for free. I understand. Yeah.

He does a lot of editing. Okay. He likes writing headlines. He's a great headline writer, actually. Oh, he really is working. He's a great headline writer. Okay. So what is this? This is a new business model. I think it's what a modern newspaper looks like. I think it's what a modern media company looks like. And as for what I'm trying to build, it's not a newsletter or a podcast. It's a media company based on the idea and the bet that

Actually, most people don't want to have a choice between what they're seeing on Fox late at night and what they're seeing on MSNBC. Most people are the sort of what I think of as the exhausted, self-silencing majority who don't see themselves reflected in either political extreme, who think that the old categories of Republican and Democrat and what those platforms are don't really represent them.

who want to know about the world, who are curious, who want a better life for them and their kids, and who don't want politics to subsume their whole life. Okay, so let's keep going. That's my audience. Let's keep going on journalism for a minute or two.

The revenue source is subscriptions overwhelmingly, correct? You don't have advertising... I have ads on the podcast at least. Okay, so podcasts separate. If you don't mind, I actually want to treat that as separate. Sure. Because in my mind, it's a separate set of questions. So it's subscriptions. I think of, and when I go to it, this is what I read, and it is for sure what I see going viral on Twitter and so forth, and that's essays, right?

I won't even say opinion, really, because there's a lot of stuff in which people are

Talking about writing about their own experience. It's not up ed in the way Brett Stevens or you. Brett Stevens does it today or you did it yourself with The New York Times. It's kind of experience, but but it's not investigative. It's not reporting. Are you planning to do that? They're actually some of it now. Yeah. I mean, that is expensive, isn't it? I mean, if you look at our huge piece about Hollywood that interviewed probably 50,

30 writers, producers, directors, top Hollywood people. I think it was called Hollywood's New Rules. Your dad probably wrote the headline. No, I wrote that one. If you look at our series on this sort of ideological takeover of medicine by Katie Herzog, that's serious investigative journalism that, you know, the New York Times and others were forced to follow. If you look at Abigail Schreier's story about that, it was about two trans doctors who

themselves transgender women blowing the whistle on trans care for children. That was a story that The Economist had to follow our reporting. We're reporting constantly. Now, it doesn't look like an

A newspaper in the sense of, I mean, my sister's recent story about the revenge of the COVID moms, the people that I believe are going to sway the 2022 election. We have a huge story coming up about what's happening in the realm of the law. I mean, there's tons of reporting we do. It just doesn't look like a newspaper where one section is news and the next section is opinion. And by the way, those categories are collapsing themselves even inside the old institutions. So

The question about, you know, can I set up a news? Can I set up an old fashioned newspaper in which I have foreign bureaus all over the world, the security to support them, the legal staff to make sure we don't get sued out the nose? Of course not. I can't do that right away. Can I do that over time? Maybe you want to. Well, what I want to build is I mean, you just described a boring old legacy thing. No, but I think it's it won't look like it used to look.

But what I'm thinking of is this, you know, ask yourself, why does Joe Rogan get 10 or 11 million downloads an episode and CNN gets about, you'll tell me, half a million viewers in a good night? Why is that? And the reason is that inside the old institutions, the band of what you were allowed to be curious about has shrunk just about that. That leaves the entire rest of the world.

And those are the kind of stories that I'm beginning by pursuing, and that's something that I have found an audience that is unbelievably hungry for it. Fantastic. The University of Austin. This brings us right up, hard up against this question of... New things. New things, as opposed to reforming the old ones. I had a... Speaking of generational, this is a conversation that I had once with Bill Buckley, William F. Buckley, Jr.,

And he had just come from a dinner at which he had seated, found himself seated next to George H.W. Bush. And Bill Buckley had raised some issues about Yale. And George Bush had said, I'm sorry, Bill, I'm just sort of Yaled out. And Bill was astounded by this because by Bill's understanding of the rules of American citizenship, giving up on Yale was forbidden. You didn't do that. And so if those rules apply to you,

You wouldn't be monkeying around with Joe Lonsdale's thing down in Austin. You'd be trying to reform Columbia. You'd be trying to save this great institution up in Morningside Heights with McKim Mead art that is not going to be matched by anything Joe does in anybody's lifetime.

I don't believe that. All right. Why not? Well, first of all, all of those places that you named began as scrappy startups by people that were angry about the status quo. That's one thing that I think people don't remember is the things that we take for granted as being institutions or publications that have been around forever. Are you kidding me? This country is unbelievably young. All those things are relatively new.

Everything great gets built by people that are dissatisfied with the options that they see around them. Go find a parent who is center, center left even, and sees what's going on in these schools that have these magnificent endowments in the buildings you just mentioned and incredible faculty and ask them, do you want your kid to go there? Ask them that.

Ask them if they're panicked and they are begging and hoping that their child gets into the University of Chicago because they see it as sort of like the last great hope.

That's not a good state of affairs, despite the fact that we have something like 4,000 colleges and universities in this country. We have a lot. So what would it look like for us to offer something, A, that actually fulfilled those soaring mottos that the other schools have but do not still live up to by any stretch of the imagination? I could go into all of the numbers, but you already know them. And what would it look like to...

offer kids an incredible education that, A, wouldn't put them in the kind of debt that these schools do, and B, would actually offer them a pathway to real exciting work in companies that are transforming the country. To me, that seems like a really, really thing. That seems like something really worth trying. Okay. So can you...

Now I can't remember. It's the University of Austin. University of Austin. Right. Okay. As opposed to the University of Texas at Austin. This is University of Austin. Sorry. But can you just... I wanted to just call it old school for what it's worth. It's not a great name. I think that actually is a great name. I think that actually is a great name. Did you get that from your dad? Yes. You did? Yes. It is great. He had a list of a million ideas, but I liked old school the best. Okay. Uh,

When this is done, could you just bring him in? Yeah, totally. I'll do an hour. It's way more interesting than me. So where do things stand? What is the promise of the University of Austin right now? It's pretty unbelievable. Four months ago, five months ago, three months ago, three months ago with an essay that Pano Canales are hearing about it for the first time. Give us a brief. Hey, guys, there's a new university. It's going to.

exist in Austin, which is increasingly a hub for technologists and the country's great doers. And it's going to combine, you know, the skills and expertise and connections of those people with some of the country's most incredible teachers, some of whom are pedigreed in the typical way, like Neil Ferguson, some of whom are not, like Dave Mamet, who's going to be teaching a writing course this summer.

This university is up and running as early as this coming summer? There is going to be a summer school this summer for a few weeks. Maybe Dave to you, but David Mamet. Sorry, David Mamet. I think on anybody's short list of the half dozen greatest living playwrights in the English language. All right. He's incredible. Mr. Mamet to me, but go ahead. Yeah. So where are we? We've far exceeded our fundraising goals. I think the school has raised $1.

I don't want to be wrong about the number, but north of $80 million already in under three months. And remember, this is a school with no alumni. We've had applications from more than 3,500. I know I'm really underselling that number.

academics who are saying, "Save me. I hate where I am," or "I'm dissatisfied with where I am." Of course that's right. Some of the people that are going to be teaching this summer are people who, in a normal universe, would be-- remain as star teachers and professors at their schools, people like Peter Boghossian,

pushed out of Portland State University, people like Kathleen Stock, pushed out of the University of Sussex, a lesbian professor, for suggesting that there are such things as differences between men and women, that there are such things as men and women. I could go on and on and on. Ayaan Hirsi Ali will be teaching incredible people, exactly the kind of people that you would want your young person, a young, curious young person in your life to be surrounded by. So, you know, what are we? We're a school that wants to build actual human beings

not zombies, not people that are political, you know, robots, but people that think for themselves. All right. Moving toward the last questions here. Let me name one institution that's old, that's a legacy institution, but that I'm not at all sure. I'm just not sure what you want to do with it. And that is the Constitution of the United States. What do I want to do with it? Well, no, but so the New York Times, I'll start Common Sense.

Radio? I'll start honestly. Columbia University? Who needs it? University of Austin. What about the election, midterm election in 2022? What about presidential politics? Is this of no interest to you? Do you wish it would all just go away? Do you want to found your own new political party? We have this legacy here.

I think I'm pretty stretched thin between the new media company supporting the new university. We left out the new ACLU, which is fair, the foundation against intolerance and racism that I helped co-found that I'm enormously involved in. I mean, I'm trying my best. Other people have got to pick up the slack in other places. I'm going to leave it to Andrew Yang to like start the new third party. You know, I've never been totally disenchanted with both parties. Is that true?

Yeah, I would say so. But that's been true for a while, and I think that's true of most people. All right. Here's the last question. I just got my... Because you and I both live in California, so it takes a while to get hard copies of magazines that are published back in New York. So I just got my copy of the most recent issue of Commentary. Yes. And Abe Greenwald has a cover story, and the headline is, yes, there is a counterrevolution. The woke takeover has...

achieved a great deal, but it is being challenged to great effect. I haven't read it yet either, but I got as far as the cover. Okay. Just arrived. And so I thought, oh, well, this is interesting because all my friends at Commentary have been gnashing their teeth like all of us. And Abe Greenwald says, wait a minute, wait a minute. There are shots of the counter-revolution being fired. There's optimism.

What about it? What about it? The woke revolution has very, very, very far yet to go. This is not a spent force. Not at all. But...

Abe is totally right, and this is where my optimism lies, which is, you know, this America, it's really possible to build new things here. My ancestors came here and built lives from nothing. So did yours, I'm sure, at whatever date. And that is the story of America, is building anew. And...

I view that as deeply in tune. I mean, think of you branching the Constitution. Think about the founders themselves. I mean, that is what this country is all about, rebuilding and reinvention. I think that if the woke counterrevolution is simply anti-woke and simply exists in opposition to whatever this force is that we keep calling wokeness, it might be remembered as something deeper than that. That will be sad and that will be limited.

But if the counterrevolution is actually about like revisiting sort of the first principles that we got to earlier in this conversation and asking ourselves, what is a good democracy? What does it mean to live a good life? What does it mean to have a good newspaper you can trust? What does that look like?

What does it mean to have a university where you'd be proud to send your children? You know, what does it mean to live a good life? Like things that actually go back to those first principles and answer those questions in a satisfying way. If the woke counterrevolution could do that, that's incredible. And that's something I want to be a part of.

Barry Weiss of the Substack Journal Common Sense and the podcast Honestly, and of the University of Austin and of FAR. FAR, you're going to love it. It stands for... The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, fairforall.org. Check it out. Barry Weiss of incandescent and admirable ambition. Thank you. For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution, and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson. ♪

Many thanks to Peter Robinson and to all of the wonderful people at the Hoover Institute who hosted me a few weeks ago at Stanford. If you like this interview, please go follow Uncommon Knowledge. And check out the other podcast I love out of Hoover. It's called Goodfellows. It's hosted by General H.R. McMaster, former Honest Link guest, Neil Ferguson, ditto, and John Cochran, a wonderful economist who's written for Common Sense. And as always, thanks to you for listening.

Please send us your feedback and ideas for future episodes at tips at honestlypod.com. See you soon.