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Oct. 17, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
59:43
Bari Weiss | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 119
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There's one word that sums up how we've gotten to this insane pass, and it's cowardice.
The number one ingredient that, if it were present, would change the outcome of almost all of these stories, all of the smearing of good people for maybe at worst making a mistake, is courage.
It's a story of cowardice and courage, the moment that we're in.
From 2017 to 2020, she was an opinion writer for the New York Times.
Then, in a very public resignation, she torched the work culture there and revealed the tense, radical environment she was working within.
Before our guest Barry Weiss was at the Times, she was at the Wall Street Journal for five years.
And now, stepping away from the biggest news outlet in the country, she's in the midst of crafting her own media property.
She now releases Common Sense with Barry Weiss, a newsletter on Substack, with the freedom to investigate and pursue stories she simply didn't have before.
She recently launched her own podcast as well, Honestly, with Barry Weiss, featuring unique and captivating conversations and stories rooted in the most fundamental issues the country, and all of us, are up against right now.
Barry wrote about and popularized the intellectual dark web at the New York Times back in 2018.
It was at that time that we connected.
We've been friends since, and in this episode we talk about why she's been avoiding joining my show these past three years.
Plus, in our conversation, Barry talks about how the 2016 election landed her at the New York Times, the first experience she had being virally attacked across the internet and media, and some ideas to preserve the middle, where most Americans are politically.
Hey, hey, and welcome.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
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Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Barry.
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Head on over to dailywire.com, become a member, you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
Barry Weiss, thanks so much for joining the show.
I'm really happy to be here.
Finally left the New York Times so I could come here as a safe space.
Right, just for that, just for that.
So let's talk about how you got involved with the New York Times.
I want to go through kind of your whole evolution here because I first got to know you when you were still writing at the New York Times and you were doing a big story on the so-called intellectual dark web, which has gone through some iterations at this point.
But you were writing for the New York Times and how did you get that gig?
What was the sort of idea going in there?
Yeah, so I had been at the Wall Street Journal editorial page where I was the resident squish.
I was the most sort of left-leaning person in an otherwise, as your audience will know, conservative editorial page.
Then came Trump, and the very same sort of civil war, cold civil war, that happened in the conservative movement, happened in the Republican Party, happened inside the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
I very much found myself on the never-Trump side of things, along with Bret Stephens and a number of my other colleagues.
And after his nomination and his eventual win, a lot of us were sort of looking for a new home.
At the very same time, the New York Times was sort of looking in the mirror.
This lasted only a very brief time, but for a little bit of time, they were engaged in a period of self-reflection.
Everyone will remember the night before Trump's win in 2016 that the infamous needle had Hillary Clinton winning by a margin of 99% or whatever it was.
And then all of a sudden, lo and behold, Donald Trump won.
And the New York Times, which prides itself, or at least ostensibly, on being the paper of record, on being able to hold up a mirror to the country and the world as it actually is, thought to themselves, how did we get it so wrong?
And I was brought in, to be blunt, as an intellectual diversity hire.
My specific, explicit job was to be an op-ed editor that would bring in pieces from people that wouldn't otherwise think of the New York Times As a natural home for them to publish.
So that meant conservatives.
It meant libertarians.
It meant heterodox thinkers.
It meant, and this is a particular passion of mine, dissidents throughout the Arab world, Christians in Hong Kong, people who have English as a second language.
That's the kind of bread and butter work I had always done at the Wall Street Journal.
And so that's how I arrived.
That's how Bret Stephens arrived.
And then things sort of took a turn.
So let's talk about kind of why things went sour because that was something that I observed as well and you could see it kind of throughout the left.
And when Trump won there was a moment of shocking realization that maybe we don't know all the things there are to know because after 2012 there was sort of this impression that Democrats were going to win from now on to forever because Barack Obama had forged this brand new coalition, the kind of coalition of the dispossessed who are now going to overwhelm American politics and so there was no need to worry about those white people out in the sticks anymore and so we're just going to ignore those people.
We're instead going to focus in on this coterie and then Trump wins and so the idea was suddenly it dawned on them that there need to be some investigation of what happened but the way that they seemed to investigate, it was sort of like Steve Irwin going out into the wild.
They would send some guy with like an Australian outfit out to some diner in Ohio and they'd be like, what do the locals think?
And what was so astonishing is one of the only people I personally knew that called the election or that told me she really, really suspected Trump would win was my mom.
Why?
Because I'm from Pittsburgh, and my mom at that time had a flooring business that took her to driving an hour, two hours outside of Pittsburgh into, you know, Pennsylvania, as people call it.
And she would call me and say, Barry, I've never seen anything like this.
It's like the side of barns are made with homemade signs for this guy.
Like, I'm telling you, you guys are crazy.
This guy, you know, the Times is crazy.
This guy has momentum that you just can't, isn't being captured in the mainstream press.
So that was my mom, you know, someone without any expertise, none of the tools that Nate Silver has at his disposal.
I went to the Times Not naive.
I'm from, you know, a Zionist Jewish family.
I had seen the bias that the New York Times had toward Israel for my entire life.
My dad's a political conservative.
My mom's a liberal.
The New York Times and its bias was a topic of incredible and sustained discussion in my house from the time that I was young.
What I didn't expect was the sort of lack of collegiality that was there almost from the beginning and then really, really, really grew.
And also the sense, and this of course, you know, burst into public view with the decision to publish this op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton last June in our sort of fevered summer of COVID and George Floyd's killing and the rest, that people genuinely believed That ideas that they disagreed with were literal violence and harm.
That's what I didn't expect.
Did I expect that, you know, conservative ideas or, you know, non-progressive ideas would be written off as sort of backward and retrograde?
Of course.
Did I expect that there would be biases on any number of issues, not least of which Israel is sort of biased, let's say, against American power?
Of course.
What I did not expect was the idea that that Being exposed to those ideas and exposing our readers to those ideas was actually violence, was actually putting people's literal lives in danger.
That's when I realized, you know, as Andrew Sullivan's put it better than anyone, we all live on campus now.
You know, I was a student at Columbia 15 years ago.
That was sort of my original sort of waking up moment to the excesses of the illiberal left.
Long story short, you know, I found myself sort of being called a conservative and a, you know, a Zion Nazi and a neocon when I was very much a progressive.
And that's when I sort of started to witness the nature of this ideology.
What I didn't expect, and what I think no one fully expected, was the extent to which that ideology would come to swallow all of the sense-making institutions of American life.
All of the institutions that are charged with upholding our liberal order, and I mean that in the most capacious sense of the word.
You know, our publishing houses, our newspapers, our magazines, our universities, our movie studios, as you know, a lot of our tech companies and increasingly corporate America.
That's, I think, what many people didn't expect.
And all of these ideas were treated as a kind of punchline.
And then all of a sudden you're sitting there at the most important newspaper in the world, whether or not you read it, whether or not you subscribe, it is the most important newspaper in the world.
And it's supposed to, you know, it has a job, which is to be the paper of record.
And instead of, you know, instead of abiding by its motto, which is all the news that's fit to print, it's, no, it's all the news that fits the narrative.
It's all the news that advances our political agenda.
So anything that doesn't is either ignored, it's overlooked, it's neutered, it's papered over, and that was something that was obvious to me within the first year that I was there, but it really just got progressively more intense, I would say.
So I guess what I was going to ask is, when was that first moment where you realized that they were going to try and buy this back?
Where there was that moment where they were like, okay, we're going to try and give some sort of credibility or at least try to make sense of these people we don't understand.
And then it went to principal Skinner.
It's not us who are wrong.
It's the children who are wrong.
When did that first kick in for you?
God, there were a few sort of signal moments, signal events.
One of them that I remember really clearly has been, I'm sure you'll, you'll remember that there was Hanukkah.
I think it was Hanukkah of 2019.
That was, there was an attack, a violent attack against Jews almost every single day of that Holiday.
There was the machete attack upstate in Muncie, New York, where a rabbi's home was invaded by a guy with giant machete, tried to kill as many people as he could, ended up murdering a guy named Joseph Newman.
There was the attack on the New Jersey kosher supermarket that was carried out by acolytes of the black Hebrew Israelites, which are not Hebrew Israelites, but are just sort of like a hate group, Nation of Islam, Farrakhan kind of vibe.
And anyway, I wrote a piece at the time, a column called America's Bloody Hanukkah or America's Bloody Pogrom.
And I thought it was a really good column.
It was the, you know, it was really my subject.
I mean, I'd written a book called How to Fight Anti-Semitism.
I was bat mitzvahed at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, Tree of Life, where the most lethal attack against American Jews in all of American history was carried out.
I have some skin in the game and I know a lot about this subject.
And I was basically called into my editor's office and was told, we can't really run this.
And the reason, in the end of the day, why we couldn't really run it is that the people that were carrying out the attacks weren't white supremacists carrying tiki torches.
When the person carrying out the attack against Jews is a white supremacist, is a neo-Nazi, there's incredible moral clarity.
But because of this, the nature of this ideology, when an anti-Semite comes from a group that has been deemed, you know, fundamentally oppressed no matter what, Then all of a sudden it's morally confusing in this ideology when that person also happens to be a victimizer.
And so that was a moment for me where I thought to myself, hold on, this is news.
This is important.
I am an expert in this subject and I'm being told that it doesn't have a place in the times.
And then I found, and this is the really insidious nature of it, Ideas and op-eds and columns that I would write that sort of suited the narrative, those went right into the paper.
The amount of energy and sort of diplomacy and political capital that you needed to sort of smuggle through pieces that didn't suit the ideology, it just took so much work And this was the part that I found, that I was, found myself, this was the trap I found myself falling into, that you thought yourself out of commissioning those pieces to begin with.
And I thought to myself, this is, like, not why I became a journalist.
I became a journalist to pursue my curiosity.
I became a journalist to hear the ideas of people that I don't always agree with.
I became a journalist because I want to expose readers to things that are provocative or surprising or serendipitous.
And it just became deadening.
And it became really boring.
And then, of course, Tom Cotton happened.
So let's talk in just a second about what actually triggered you to leave because that was a bit of a process in and of itself.
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My first experience actually speaking with you was right after that IDW piece, because I think we talked for the IDW piece, and I remember you got an enormous blowback for the IDW piece as well.
And to me, that was kind of my first inkling even then.
I think, what was that, 2018 maybe?
Yeah, and there had been like a viral tweet where I was trying to praise immigrants, and I quoted a line from Hamilton, and I was describing a figure skater.
It's not even worth getting into it.
I remember, I remember.
It's so absurd.
It was ridiculous.
I, you know, and I have a very long history of writing pieces in favor of immigration.
And yet, you know, this caused such consternation at the New York Times that when I went on Bill Maher a week or a week later, the Times pressured me and I was expected to.
And I did explain the tweet and essentially apologize for it.
This is over a tweet.
Yeah.
You know, so if if that amount of risk, you know, generates that kind of stress level, I remember that they were parroting you on SNL, you were trending on Twitter.
Like, basically, you had my record on Twitter.
You were being trended every couple of weeks.
Exactly.
Now I'm used to it.
But at the time, and I think anyone who's sort of emerging as someone in the public square in any way will admit, it flattened me.
It flattened me.
I mean, I was at a family wedding that weekend, and all of a sudden, all of these people who I thought ostensibly were my colleagues, both literal employees of the New York Times, but also broader journalists who I knew, were pouncing on me and were calling me xenophobic.
They were calling me a bigot.
They were calling me everything that I hate.
And it's very painful.
And that's the thing about this trend and this culture and this movement that is so terrible, is that it weaponizes empathy.
One of the things that I think is really important as writers and journalists and You know, intellectuals to the extent that I am one, is being able to change your mind.
And to be able to change your mind, you need to be able to hear criticism.
But when that criticism is coming in such bad faith, it almost makes you want to sort of build a fortress around yourself, which is a terrible thing if you're trying to be able to be someone that is open-minded and hears criticism in good faith, if that makes sense.
No, it makes so much sense.
I mean, I've had this experience personally many, many times, where if you're a good-hearted person, forget about being a journalist, if you're a good-hearted person and you want to make yourself better in any way, you have to have some sort of feedback mechanism where somebody can tell you you're doing something wrong and keep you within the lanes of doing the right thing.
And when that feedback mechanism gets hijacked by people who despise you, and they just start giving you bad feedback that is designed to tearing you down, the natural instinct is to create a bubble and an echo chamber.
And so the question is, how do you create a life where you can receive the feedback that's necessary, but sort of prevent the feedback that is badly motivated from hitting you?
And prevent, and I think that we could both think of examples in mind, but prevent the kind of...
Radicalization and hardening that comes from getting that bad feedback.
And I think I've been able to do it pretty well.
But that's just a risk that comes with sort of being in the public square and getting that kind of, you know, negative and irrational and nonsensical often feedback.
And that was really that tweet was the first time that it happened to me.
And one of the things that was very difficult about it is that I didn't really understand the kind of support structure that I needed yet.
And I also was getting that feedback from people that were sitting two desks away from me.
And that's really, really difficult.
It's hard to work in an environment where you have a conversation.
It's an open newsroom.
And then you hear that the conversation you had on your phone in what's supposed to be a newsroom is getting repeated as, you know, cocktail party fodder.
And that makes you paranoid and it makes you just unable to take the kind of risk that I want to be able to do and that since I've left, I've really been able to do again.
So finally you make the decision that you want to leave and you write this very widely trafficked letter, it's a terrific letter, about the shortcomings of the New York Times.
I think I read it in its entirety on the air.
The letter discusses all the problems with the closing of the mind at the New York Times and it also discusses the fact that the higher ups at the New York Times stood for this.
And that really is the big question to me.
It's not the fact that you have schmucks working at the New York Times.
Cowards.
The leaders at these institutions have become such unbelievable cowards, and this is true at virtually every major institution in the country, that they are allowing the insane to run the asylum.
The people who are in charge of the New York Times are not the heads of the New York Times.
They are the woke wing of the New York Times who get to dictate what the coverage looks like.
There's one word that sums up how we've gotten to this insane pass, and it's cowardice.
There's a million other words that we can use to describe how we've gotten here.
The number one ingredient that, if it were present, would change the outcome of almost all of these stories, all of these cancellations, all of the hijacking of these institutions, all of the smearing of good people for maybe at worst making a mistake, Is courage.
It's a story of cowardice and courage, the moment that we're in.
And what has been astonishing to me is to find, you know, to look around and see, wait, hold on, you're supposed to be the adult in the room.
You're the person that is being charged with upholding the mission of these institutions.
I'm thinking now about the times, but also I could be thinking about any number of universities or any of the other institutions that we mentioned before.
The amount of work that it takes to build up that kind of cultural capital, that kind of trust with your audience or with the public, I mean, that is work that takes decades and centuries.
We have seen in the case of the New York Times that it takes really a couple years to just fundamentally trash it and destroy it.
And the fact that they are sort of making this bad bet where they somehow believe that by acquiescing or negotiating with this illiberal faction, and it's illiberal inside of the institution, that they will somehow be able to preserve the institution is exactly the wrong thing.
When the Times decided to run the Tom Cotton op-ed, there were something like 800 of my colleagues who signed a letter saying that this op-ed, by a sitting United States senator, literally put their lives in danger.
If you're running the New York Times, you know what you need to say to those people?
If you believe that a 900-word op-ed puts your life in danger, then maybe journalism is not the right line of work for you, and certainly not The New York Times, and you should seek employment elsewhere.
Do you know how many unemployed journalists there are in this country right now, with every single almost local newspaper being swallowed up or destroyed?
How many blue-collar journalists there are who would be fantastic in The New York Times?
Because the idea that you need an Ivy League degree or college degree at all to go and ask people questions, which is what journalism is about, you know, you could have filled the newsroom ten times over.
But instead they acquiesce to it because it turns out they're more scared of being called an ism or a phobe or whatever in public than they are of, you know, doing the work of preserving their institution.
And one of the things that obviously has happened here is not only that they're afraid of being called those things, but they're afraid of being associated with anybody who might be called those things.
Correct.
So I was recently at a kind of a hoity-toity event.
I only do a couple of these a year.
And it was a bunch of people with whom I disagree on politics.
And there was a big discussion of political polarization.
And they came to me and I said, if you want to end political polarization... Take a picture of me right now and post it on the Internet.
That's exactly what I said.
I said, if you want to end political polarization, all you have to do, it doesn't have to be me, But what you need to do, because these are all people with big Twitter followings, is go on Twitter, find somebody who didn't vote like you in the last election cycle, say, this is a nice person, I enjoy having dinner with them, and their ideas are worth listening to, even if I disagree.
That's all you have to do, and political polarization will be over.
Not one person did it, obviously.
Of course.
Because the amount of fear out there is just astonishing.
But the fear is justified.
That's what's so sad about where we are.
Meaning, you know, one of the reasons that I've hesitated to come on your show or hesitated to do other shows is like, first of all, is it worth the headache that it's going to take for the next, you know, month of my life that I'm sure I'm going to get online?
But also, you know, what's in the balance for a lot of these people?
Especially the ones who are still working inside of these institutions is, you know, am I going to lose my job?
Am I going to lose my reputation?
Am I going to lose my children's reputation?
Is my kid going to be bullied at school or soccer practice?
Like, crowdsourced McCarthyism actually works!
You know, the recent Cato study had something like 62% of Americans were unwilling to voice their true views out loud.
That's the thing that I think is really fascinating about the moment that we're in.
We believed, or at least I believed, studying history, that this kind of behavior and this kind of fear and this kind of doublespeak was only possible under a Stalin or a Mao.
But it turns out, that's not true.
You can do it in a crowdsourced way, fueled by big tech and big social, and this is where we've ended up.
The astonishing thing, and the thing I think we both realize, is that if a thousand people stood up, A thousand people and did exactly what you're describing, the whole country would be different.
It is an amazing thing.
And the unwillingness of people to do it, as you say, is it is both justified and also amazing.
In a second, I want to ask you about whether you think that there is that sort of stomach and spine in what I think is sort of the classical liberal center to actually save the country.
I actually think that the future of the country does not rest with conservatives or people on the left.
I think it actually rests with the people in the middle and which way they're going to go.
I'll explain in a second.
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So here's my going theory.
So the Harper's Weekly letter comes out sometime last year and it basically suggests cancel culture is bad.
And what I said at the time is I noticed that there wasn't a single person who actually was a signatory to the Harper's Weekly letter who had publicly voted for Trump.
There wasn't a single person who said that they were intending on voting for Trump.
I don't think there was a single person that identified as a conservative.
That's right.
There might have been a couple of people who maybe tangentially were connected with conservatism, but not really so much.
I think I barely made the cut is the point.
I don't think I would qualify as a conservative.
So my big question about the Harper's Weekly letter, and it's my question for sort of the people who consider themselves politically centered but also in favor of individual rights.
is whether the attempt is to open the Overton window just enough so that they themselves can sneak through or is the attempt to open the Overton window broad enough that we can actually have a conversation.
That's an actual real question because it seems to me that there are a lot of people who are, you know, classically liberal encompasses a couple different definitions.
One is the classical liberal economic fair, which I don't know that everybody who we are now categorizing as liberal is in that category.
Then there is the sort of broader liberal rubric of individual rights post-Enlightenment.
And those are the people I think we're talking about.
The question is for those folks who actually agree politically with a lot of the policy agenda of the left, but disagree with their agenda on individual rights.
Are they willing to make the sacrifice of putting off utopia in order to preserve the individual rights?
Or are they just going to say, you know what?
Screw the individual rights for the moment.
We need to be fellow travelers with the people who are going to get us where we need to go in terms of more even redistribution of wealth, or in terms of more redistributive means of racial reparations.
Where do you think that movement is?
Do you think there are enough of people, you know, who are like you or Andrew Sullivan, or do you think that it's going to trend more toward, you know, what we've seen from some outlets like the Atlantic, where if you differ, the Overton window is only open just this far past Hillary Clinton, maybe.
I think the question is, you know, someone joked the other day that a lot of these people have a rule and the rule is no friends to the right of me.
You know, no associations to the right of me.
That's a really good litmus test.
Are you willing to be associated with people who are conservative?
Are you willing to see the truth right now, which is that we're living through this massive political realignment?
One in which, you know, you sometimes sound more liberal than a lot of the people who are like to the right, you know, everything feels like it's sort of thrown up in the air.
And the question is, do you have the intestinal fortitude, you know, to say, you know what, this person is to the right of me, this person right now, you know, like, I'm sure you disapprove of my marriage to a woman.
I know we disagree on abortion.
I know we disagree on any number of things.
And you know what?
I don't care.
And the reason I don't care is because I really feel like we're in a fundamental war to preserve the bedrock of liberalism, to preserve the thing that allows us to sit here and have this conversation without ripping each other's heads off.
That's what's at stake.
And I think for those who are able to see that that's what's at stake, yes, they will have that sort of spine and fortitude and all of the other metaphors that we could come up with.
The question, as you put it, is how many are there, right?
How many are there?
I really, really believe that the self-silencing majority of this country is broadly in the center, wants a different choice other than Laura Ingraham and Rachel Maddow at night.
But because of a million reasons we can point to, including polarization, including the incentives of cable news, including the incentives of, you know, big tech wanting to keep us enraged so we stay online, and on and on and on, and because of cancel culture, these people are quiet.
These are the people that, you know, are dissidents in some of the most liberal institutions in the country, the people that write me.
These are people who say to me, you know, I don't know where to go.
I don't fit in anymore.
I'm homeless.
Those are the people that I am trying to speak to.
Those are the people who I believe are the majority, and those are the people I agree with you, Ben.
Whether or not America is able to preserve itself as a liberal democracy really depends on those people standing up and speaking out right now.
Yeah, I mean, I think the big question that I keep having, and it's to people on the left and to people on the right, is whether we want to share a country anymore.
If the question is whether we want to share a country anymore, I think that as we nationalize every single issue, is every issue, the way we think about politics is not local.
No, it's all flattened.
It's all one big national story and everything is seen through that lens.
Exactly.
No one cares what state governments do anymore unless it becomes a federal issue, but it's all what the federal government does or what you're seeing on national media or what you are seeing in terms of social media where what somebody is doing in New York affects me in Florida because it's on social media.
Because of that great flattening effect that you're talking about, it's actually resulting in not people combining or people actually making connections, it's resulting in precisely the opposite.
You're actually starting to see this massive self-sorting effect Listen, I'm part of it.
I left California because of this.
We moved down to Florida because I didn't want to live in California anymore.
And I think you're going to start to see more and more of that.
And so the question is going to become, if we actually want to share a country together, we are going to have to have a lighter hand when it comes to what happens at the very top level, and then say that we're going to have to leave each other alone closer to the bottom level, or there isn't going to be a country anymore.
I agree with that.
I also think, and I think we're starting to see the seeds of maybe the backlash in a positive way.
There's a scarier backlash we can talk about, but a backlash to the sort of nationalization, flattening effect of everything and the online-ification of everything.
A movement, I think, afoot in this country that wants to say, you know what, it really matters who my neighbors are.
And it really matters that I'm connected to people.
And you know, like, you know, public safety in my neighborhood is the thing that actually matters to me.
And feeling connected to people that you're surrounded by.
The other thing that I've noticed that blew my mind, there was a statistic that came out the other day, something like, you know, 50% of millennials, did you see this, pray to God every day, identify, it's mind-blowing.
And I don't know, I just think that people are sick of the way that we're living.
It's literally making people sick, and I think that a backlash to that is coming.
Now, whether or not that backlash looks like something that's healthy, that's focused on people's communities, that's focused on local life, that's focused on reviving civic and religious organizations, that's one way we can go.
The other really scary way we can go, and this is one of the reasons that I've been so outspoken about woke ideology, is a world in which everything is seen through the lens of race.
Everyone becomes hyper-racialized, and that can lead to a very scary backlash that we were talking about before the show, in which, you know, if you tell ten-year-old boys that your whiteness is the thing that really matters to you, your whiteness gives you a lot of power.
I don't want to live in a country where that is the idea that's given to young children, you know, from the time that they're little kids.
That their race is the thing that matters to them, it's the thing that matters more than anything else, and in fact it gives them tremendous power.
That's very scary to me.
So this is some of the stuff that you've been writing about at your Substack, which is now wildly popular.
And thank God it proves that there's a market for the kind of stuff that you actually want to get out there.
The disintegration of centralized media has had a lot of beneficial side effects.
I think so.
And your Substack is part of that.
Obviously, Daily Wire is part of that.
People can get their news from a bunch of different sources, which is something I highly recommend.
You've been writing a lot about the takeover of particularly lower levels of schooling by sort of woke intersectional ideology and exactly the sort of self-silencing effect that we've been discussing.
And you see it at private schools across the country.
You see it certainly in public schools across the country.
Parents who are afraid of going up against their peers, even though their peers probably agree with them.
The idea is that if you keep enough people silent, they can never actually unionize.
They can never actually get together and say, yeah, what they're doing at school is bad.
You just shut them up and then you never have to worry about it for the administration.
Right.
This is a good moment where people should take lessons from the left about solidarity and collective action.
One of the things that's sort of blown my mind as I've reported on these stories in public schools and private schools and blue states and red, it's everywhere now, is how insulated people are from each other.
So a parent will come to me and say, don't say I say anything.
Another parent will come to me, don't say I said anything.
And then I'll hear from a teacher and I'm like, You guys realize that most of the people agree with you, but they've been so scared to even voice their opposition to this, even behind closed doors, even to other parents, that they really don't know any better.
And one of the main things that I tell parents that are concerned about the direction of their school is collective action, solidarity.
Find other people that agree with you.
You will be so much more effective in standing up to this.
One of the most unbelievable examples of it has played out in Lowndon County, Virginia.
where parents like Asra Noumani and Xi Van Fleet, who survived Mao's Cultural Revolution in China, you know, and on and on and on, mostly minority parents have been standing up to the school board there, and it's been an incredible example to watch.
You know, we were talking before about cowardice and courage.
I think one of the things that's been really inspiring to me and also surprising about the moment that we're living in is that you would think that courage would come from the people that have sort of accrued capital, that have reached the pinnacle of their careers.
But it's the opposite.
Courage is coming from the periphery.
Courage is coming from people like there's this amazing mom, Gabby Clark, in Nevada, whose son, William, was a student at a democracy prep there.
And he was forced, like kids in so many schools these days, to publicly self-identify his race and his gender and his sexual orientation, and then to attach negative labels to them, if they were negative, like white or male.
And William's biracial, and he refused to do it.
And they failed him.
And most parents in that situation would say to their kid, and say in maybe their family meeting, Let's just move on.
Let's get you into good college.
Let's forget about them.
And Gabby Clark decided to sue the school, and to sue based on her child's First Amendment rights and other constitutional rights.
And when I called her to ask her where she got the courage to do it, she was completely baffled by the question.
She said to me, what are you talking about?
This is wrong, and I'm just standing up for what's right, and every single parent should be doing the same for their kid.
That's it.
That's kind of it.
You know, like, now is the moment.
You know, you saw in Peter Boghossian's resignation letter to Portland State University where he'd been trying for the past decade to stand up for liberalism.
And he wrote in the end of his letter, which we published on my Substack, you know, I've been teaching my students for 10 years that one of the things that I am obligated to do and we're all obligated to do as liberals and Americans is to defend liberalism.
Who would I be if I didn't?
Who would I be if I capitulated to this?
And that's the question I think should be ringing in everyone's ears right now.
Think about how hard it is right now for you or for anyone to stand up against this.
Where are we going to be as a country 5, 10, 20 years from now if we don't stand up?
It's only going to get harder.
It's only going to get harder.
It's the easiest that it's going to be is in this very moment.
And I think it's really important for us to do it right now.
So one of the things that you've written a lot about, obviously, and that you had to deal with at the New York Times is the intersectional coalition, this idea of intersectionality as a philosophy, not the sort of game playing where we go back to Kimberly Crenshaw's original legal article and we discuss how if you fit more than one box, maybe you're discriminated against in a variety of ways.
Which is true!
Of course it's true.
Of course it's true.
But the basic idea was then expanded out to essentially suggest that there is a hierarchy of victimization in the United States, and that depending where you are on the hierarchy of victimization, You are no longer capable of causing offense, and also if somebody is less victimized than you, then you are free to do or say about them pretty much whatever you want.
Yeah, it's, I think, therefore I am has been replaced with, you know, I am this identity, therefore I am right.
Or I am, therefore I have a greater claim to truth or morality.
That's what's so, you know, malicious about this idea.
So how did this kind of slay traditional left-wing thought, traditional liberalism?
Because there was a pretty large-scale conflict over this.
I mean, this sort of racial radicalism was tried and found wanting by the Democratic Party in large part in the early 1970s, for example, with George McGovern, who promoted some of this sort of stuff.
You saw it with attempts in the 1980s by some of the Democrats, and then it was pretty much rejected.
I mean, Bill Clinton in 1992 literally had a sister soldier moment in which people who were promoting this sort of ideology were called out on the campaign trail by the leading Democratic contender for the presidency.
And it went away for a while, and then it came back with a vengeance.
And it seems like there's almost no systemic immunity on the left to this sort of ideology.
Why do you think?
So, I mean, frankly, I think that Barack Obama's elevation to the presidency in 2009 and his shift from who he campaigned as in 2008 to what he became in his second term was pretty dramatic.
So in 2008, my theory goes, he campaigned as the guy he was at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
No red states, no blue states, we're all the United States, no white, no black.
We're all just Americans.
And then he won.
And after he won this broad sweeping victory with huge levels of popularity, then he was faced with what all presidents are faced with, a lot of people who didn't like his agenda.
And instead of him saying, okay, well, maybe they don't like my agenda because my agenda is actually pretty radical left for the time.
Instead, there was this move toward, well, perhaps the reason that this is happening is because I'm black.
And the media went right along with this.
The idea was that if you attack Barack Obama in any way, it's because you were racist.
Tea Party was an outgrowth of racism.
This is why there was that whole massive controversy over whether John Lewis had been called an N-word and no tape ever emerged of that.
And there was this, there were article after article, the Tea Party, they're like terrorists, all these people who oppose Barack Obama are really doing this because Barack Obama is the first black president.
And so resistance to anything that he wants to do is really a racially driven resistance.
And then in 2012, you saw that upped with Mitt Romney being, you want to put you all back in chains, our current president said about Mitt Romney, the most milquetoast human being ever to walk the earth.
And the entire campaign of 2012 was basically run along, if not overtly intersectional lines, sort of, I would say, relatively, relatively overt intersectional lines.
There was an attempt to appeal to particular racial groups specifically.
And there were African Americans for Obama and there were Hispanic Americans for Obama.
And the idea was that everybody would sort of get an agenda item and these agenda items would be cobbled together into a coalition.
And you saw a lot of articles around this time when Obama won about how there was this new coalition of the dispossessed who were going to overwhelm American politics.
Ronald Brownstein was writing about how Democrats were never going to lose an election again.
There's this idea among Democrats that if they were able to cobble together an intersectional coalition, they'd never lose again.
And so Obama, because he was so in his own person, such a popular president, And because he campaigned as post-racial, the failure of that ideal in 2008 and the breakdown into polarization post-2008, I think led a lot of Democrats to believe, okay, well, there really is a sort of racial battle that's simmering under the surface here even though Pretty explicitly, the reason that Barack Obama was elected in 2008 is because he was going to be the first black president.
A lot of people voted for Barack Obama in the primaries.
Who never would have voted for a first term junior senator from Illinois with no actual legislative accomplishments on his record if he had not been the first black president.
Super talented politician, yes.
But of course, the nature of who he was led to his immense popularity.
I mean, people taking pictures of themselves at the ballot box voting for the first black president.
supposed to be the culmination of America's victory over our horrific record on race.
And instead, and you can see this in the polls, visions of how race was going in America immediately began to turn. You can see in the polls that on race, America immediately started to hit the downskids about 2009, 2010. Up to 2008, 2009, the polls were really good in terms of how many Americans thought we were getting closer in terms of race, how many Americans thought we were doing well in terms of race. And then both white and black Americans after 2009, 2010, you start to see the polls really start to dip pretty significantly.
Okay. That is a very cogent political explanation. And I do think there's something there about Democratic Party strategy in terms of how it's sort of cobbled together, this coalition.
Yes.
My answer maybe is a little bit more metaphysical.
I believe that the surge of this and the reason especially that so many young people are drawn to it is crisis of meaning and the death of God in this country.
I just really believe that People are searching for some moral purpose to their life, the sense of being part of a coalition of the righteous, sense of being on the right side of history.
All of the things that we used to get from other structures that because of, you know, let's be honest, like many of the Fallouts of things like globalization and tech and the rest, you know, that are so much bigger than we have time for in this conversation have led people sort of grasping for meaning.
I don't think the reason that people are drawn to this ideology in our generation younger is because they're stupid.
I really think it's, you know, I think it's because it sort of lights their soul on fire in a real way.
And it sort of reminds me of just like any religious revival movement at the beginning, which is like, it lights your soul on fire and then you want to go light other people on fire.
I don't think there's a mutually exclusive explanation.
I mean, the explanation I'm giving is sort of why it happened when it happened.
But the explanation that you're giving As to, you know, why it's happening at all, I think is of course the right explanation.
I also think it has something to do with the fact that if you look at when these ideas sort of started taking root in the academy, it's just around the time that, you know, it's sort of us and the kids about five or kids, the people five or ten years younger than us, who have only marinated in this ideology.
When our parents went to college, I don't know if your parents went to college, it was not the political monoculture that it is now.
When I was in Colombia, whatever it was now, 15 years, a million years ago, 15 years ago, this was it, right?
Like Edward Said's Orientalism, you know, the idea that all of the sort of maladies of the Middle East could be blamed on Israel or America, that was the only idea that you encountered in the Middle East Studies Department.
That was it.
And so, look, it turns out that ideas really matter.
And that if you are only marinating in a particular set of ideas, and you don't even have the ability to understand why someone would come to a different set of conclusions because you're literally never encountering it, Well, guess what?
It turns out that you make your way into the world and the things that you learned about in the Gender Studies Department at Oberlin or the Anthropology Department at Vassar, those have shaped your mind in its most important and impressionable years.
And so why should we be surprised that people actually believe them?
And they actually go into these companies and change those companies in their image.
The other thing I would add is, you know, this is Yuval Levin's idea, not mine, but the transformation of these institutions into platforms, platforms on which it's a stage where we all sort of play for our own benefit.
You know, and I'm as guilty of that as anyone.
Those are the incentives right now.
Build your audience, bring your audience with you.
Well, that's just transformationally different, you know, than when, you know, 20 years ago before the Internet was around.
So I think all of those things sort of have combined.
To bring us to this current moment.
OK, so let's talk about the fact you're obviously very openly Jewish, very openly Zionistic.
I'm extremely openly Jewish and openly Zionistic.
The yarmulke says it all.
But what that means is that I think for you, the aspect of the intersectional movement that was pretty obvious from the start was the crossover with anti-Semitism, which is Which is really kind of surprising and shocking if you're on the left.
And it's not quite as shocking if you have studied anything about anti-Semitism in the past, where basically labeling of all sorts of peoples always ends horribly for the Jews.
I mean, first of all, in that sentence you could pretty much supplant everything for the first half of that sentence, blank, and then it ends horribly for the Jews.
That's really the, you just covered all of Jewish history.
You don't need to read Paul Johnson's book, that's it.
We survive, let's eat.
Or fast.
No, they tried to kill us, we survived.
Yeah, exactly.
But the kind of, what you wrote about in your book, How to Fight Antisemitism, which was looked upon very critically by members of the left is the fact that there is an unwillingness to look antisemitism in the face, depending on your political viewpoint.
You and I discussed this before the book came out, because we talked about you coming on the show, and one of the things that I said is, I think that you're gonna find that a lot of people on the left are gonna be angry at you for writing this book, specifically because you point out that there is antisemitism on the left.
And if you want to fight antisemitism, you actually have to look at antisemitism on the right and point it out, and antisemitism on the left and point it out, and you have to fight it wherever you see it, or you can't really claim to be anti-antisemitism.
But that is, that's an unpopular point of view because there is a pretty strong correlation between belief in intersectionality and willingness to countenance antisemitism.
Yeah, I mean, just quick sort of like on one foot explanation is that Jews are getting squeezed from both extremes right now, right?
So you know better than probably anyone, you know, what anti-Semitism from the far right looks like.
It looks like saying, you know, Jews pretend to be white people.
They look like us.
They seem like us.
But in fact, you know, they're they're loyal to black people and brown people and Muslims and immigrants.
And in a sense, they're like the greatest trick the devil has ever played.
And that was certainly the ideology of the man that walked into the synagogue where I became a bat mitzvah and killed as many Jews as he could.
And he specifically selected that synagogue because the previous Shabbat, the previous weekend, it participated in refugee Shabbat, the idea of, you know, welcoming the stranger and a biblical injunction to do so because we ourselves are strangers in the land of Egypt.
That's the right. And everyone knows that because it's explicit. We don't need to have a Talmudic debate about like going on gab.com and saying kill all the Jews. Like we all see what that is.
And because of course of, you know, because of course of Hitler and the long shadow of the Holocaust.
We all recognize it and there's incredible clarity around it.
And the trick with anti-Semitism from the left is that it comes cloaked in the language of sort of justice and progress and social justice.
And people are either willing to be tricked by that or genuinely are.
And what it says is sort of the mirror image of the thing I just expressed to you.
And it all is in the language of race because that's the language of America right now.
And it says, you know, hold on, you know, the Jews say that they're victims.
Jews say that they're a minority.
But look at them.
Look how successful they are.
They benefit from white privilege.
Ralph Lauren could change his name from Ralph Lifshitz to Ralph Lauren and pass.
You know, and not only do they benefit from white privilege, and therefore they're sort of adjacent to white supremacy, sort of holding up the scaffolding for it.
They're also doubly sinful, because they are loyal to the last standing bastion of white colonialism in the Middle East, which is the big lie that the Soviet Union told about Israel, and that has now sort of just made its way into mainstream progressive culture.
And so the Jews then, in their view of the world, become guilty of the two gravest sins, you know, white supremacy, white privilege, etc., and colonialism and imperialism.
And that's what it is right now.
And the thing that I just find so incredible is that you have this movement.
That is, you know, made up of these offense archaeologists who can go searching, you know, for an utterance that happened 20 years ago.
Or for, you know, a taco truck in Portland that's owned by people that aren't actually Hispanic.
You know, and, you know, there'll be dozens of stories written about that.
Online campaign, change.org.
And then Jews will get hacked up by a machete and they'll have nothing to say about it.
So that's what you need to know.
You don't need to understand, you know, all of the ins and outs of this ideology.
This is what they like to do.
They pretend they play these semantic games or they tell you you need to have a law degree or you've had to read these ten books by these theorists to understand it.
No.
You just have to see things with your eyes and ears.
And a movement that has more rage about, you know, Using the word Jedi or saying the phrase pregnant women than they do for Jews getting literally beaten in neighborhoods like Borough Park and Crown Heights, that tells you everything you need to know about its priorities.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party obviously is more political than we've been throughout this conversation.
But it seems as though the Democratic Party has really drunken from a lot of this well.
And we saw, for example, that the Democratic Party, they had to pass a separate bill in order to pass, for example, Iron Dome funding.
Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have only recently, has anybody in the Democratic Party actually had the stones to stand up and say it was Ted Deutch from actually this district.
But it took a year and a half for anybody in the Democratic Party to point out the obvious, which is that Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are not fond of the Jews.
It seems as though...
Yeah, not that that wasn't obvious before.
Yeah, exactly.
But, you know, in the same way that Steve King had to be ridden out of Congress on a rail by the Republican Party.
Correct.
Ilhan Omar is still sitting on the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House right now.
Yeah, although Marjorie Taylor Greene's still in there with her Jewish space laser comments, but yeah.
She is.
I will say that Marjorie Taylor Greene at least had the sense to go to the Holocaust Museum and mouth some words about it, which you really have not gotten from Ilhan Omar at this point.
And believe me, that's no defense of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The point being that if you're looking at where the antisemitism is more mainstream in the parties, It seems as though it's being mainstreamed more into the Democratic Party at this point.
I'm wondering if you think that there's going to be any pushback to that, because it seems like the younger breed of Democrats are much more willing to move along with pretty openly anti-Semitic stuff than the older Democrats.
The older Democrats are still doing what older Democrats have historically done, which is they're more moderate on Israel.
They're still calling for concessions from Israel to the Palestinians.
All that sort of stuff.
But it's the same dynamic that, it's the exact same dynamic we were talking about before with, you know, the publisher of the New York Times, right?
Is he the publisher?
Is he in charge?
Or is Nicole Hannah-Jones actually in charge of the New York Times?
That's the question.
And it's like, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, they're supposed to be in charge of the party.
So why is it that, you know, it seems to most of us watching that the actual people in charge are AOC and Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar?
It's the exact same dynamic playing out everywhere.
So when I saw Ted Deutch, you know, stand up to it, I was like, wow, this is shocking.
Only because you've seen just utter capitulation.
I mean, during the last war with Gaza, I think you saw like, you know, one sentence press release or like the choking out of like the tiniest defense of Israel in a Facebook post by some of these people who are sensibly supposed to be in charge.
I think a lot of the institutionalized anti-Semitism, I think a lot of the anti-Semitism that's, you know, acceptable in, you know, elite, upper crust, intellectual circles, there's no question that's coming from the left.
But the gutter anti-Semitism, you know, the kind of anti-Semitism that, you know, leads people to send me really crazy letters or, you know, in the case of when I used to live in New York, like, call my rabbi and, you know, threaten us, that's often coming from the right.
The physical terror, the physical anti-Semitism, the violence, that's coming from the right.
The anti-Semitism that's sort of socially or politically acceptable, that's coming from the left.
And the whole thing is that you have to be fighting both.
And I think one of the sort of the tests is if you're serious about actually fighting Jew hate and you're on the right, you've got to be calling it out in your own house.
You've got to be calling it out on the right.
And if you're serious about it on the left, you have to be calling it out from the left.
And I think so often what we're seeing is people sort of using, you know, fake care about the Jews as a kind of political cudgel in order to beat the other side over the head.
So, we were talking before the show a little bit about, you know, our kind of great fears for the country, because you and I differ on a lot of policy prescriptions.
In fact, I think that we may differ on more than we agree on in terms of actual, in actual policy.
We may be on the same page on some foreign policy matters, but on domestic policy matters, you're much more of a government should be involved in Spending initiatives, person, you're much more socially liberal than I am on virtually all the issues that you mentioned earlier.
But we definitely agree on sort of the under the iceberg issues, which are, do we get to talk freely to one another?
Should we have conversations about this?
Should there be a level of subsidiarity in the United States?
Should there be due process?
Should people be judged based on the sins of their parents?
I mean, those small issues.
Right, exactly.
And so I guess that my great fear that we were discussing earlier is whether that Center is going to hold, which is sort of the core of the entire conversation.
Because what I'm seeing in politics right now is this reactionary ping-ponging where the left goes really far left and so the right very often will just react by saying, okay, well, you know what?
If you're going to use the ring of power this way, well, when I get the ring of power, I'm definitely not throwing it into Mount Doom.
I'm going to use the ring of power and I'm going to smack you so hard it's going to make your head spin.
And the idea is that if you don't smack them so hard that their head spins, they won't stop.
We're beyond the point of talking.
We're beyond the point of being able to live together in the country.
And I wonder how much of that is very online, but I also wonder how much of that's going to bleed down.
Because there is this feeling, you know, you're on Twitter a lot, I'm on Twitter a lot, and there is this saying that, you know, don't get too into the Twitter bubble, right?
Don't believe that Twitter is real life.
But it is.
But that's kind of the thing, right?
They used to say the same thing about college campuses.
I wrote my very first book, which I wrote in 2003, so I would have been 19.
12.
Yeah, exactly.
I was 19 when I wrote it.
It came out when I was 20.
And that book, which was about bias on college campuses and some of the stuff happening on college campuses, I remember the number one question I got is, who cares why it's happening on college campuses?
And the same thing is happening on Twitter.
As people start to, the two most live wires kind of in politics on Twitter right now are the hard left, the kind of woke squad left, And the nationalist populist right.
And the nationalist populist right.
And it seems like everybody who's sort of in between is being categorized as a squish in some way.
Exactly.
And so I'm wondering how you think, what do you think is the best way to push back against that?
This is the number one thing that I think about.
And, I mean, for me it's pretty simple.
The way that you push back against it is by not succumbing to it.
The way you push back against it is by saying, I refuse to make that choice.
The way you push back against it is by Doing sort of exactly what we're doing right now and what I'm trying to do with my podcast and my newsletter.
It's just calling out the balls and strikes as you see them, telling the truth, being willing, frankly, to piss off your audience.
You know, the problem of audience capture is definitely not something that's been solved.
The New York Times succumbed to it, but everyone succumbs to it.
You know, that's the nature of where we live.
And I knew the other day that, you know, I published this sort of forum on the question of vaccine mandates, and it contained, you know, two lightning rods, Glenn Greenwald and Adrian Vermeule.
And you better believe I lost a lot of paying subscribers that day from both perspectives.
And I thought to myself, you know what, that's okay.
Like, that's kind of what I need to be modeling, is I need to be Showing people in my own life, in the way I conduct myself, in the media company that hopefully I'm building, you know, that it is possible.
And the way to do it starts by modeling it.
I think that's really important.
So you've made a lot of life changes over the past few years.
You moved to the New York Times, you got married, you moved locations, and now you're thinking about moving locations again.
So how are you building?
We talked a little bit about building the kind of Life that you need to build, right?
With the support structure but allowing a sort of feedback loop to change your mind on things.
Yeah.
How are you thinking about constructing that sort of life?
First of all, I always am going to be grateful to the New York Times because that's where I met my wife, who has subsequently also left, although she's much classier than I am.
So she's done it in a much quieter, subtler way.
But she's helping me as we build this company.
And look, I would say that Judaism has been a huge anchor in my life, and increasingly so.
There was a period of my life when I was in college and then afterward where I was pretty religious, you know, keeping Shabbat, keeping kosher and everything, and then I kind of moved away from it.
And now I would say we're definitely moving back in that direction.
I think that, you know, being anchored in community, hosting Shabbat dinner or going to one every single Friday night, trying very hard to get totally offline for 25 hours, Being deeply connected with my incredible family in Pittsburgh, a huge extended family, we'll probably end up there at some point.
These are the things that ultimately make a life.
These are the things that make being in public and being disliked and kind of hearing the noise without letting it penetrate your soul, that's what makes it possible.
And I just don't think that there's a way to do it and get sort of buffeted by it without having that anchoring, without having that mooring.
Definitely want to start a family.
I want to have a balanced, good life, and I feel extremely, extremely, extremely lucky that I feel like I've sort of born into that, continuing to build that, and really being able to be free, genuinely, in what I'm doing with my writing and what I'm doing with the kind of people that I'm trying to elevate.
I really believe that, you know, if Glenn Lowry and John McWhorter were as famous as Ibram Kendi, you know, if Chloe Valdari were as famous as Nicole Hannah-Jones, if, you know, there's lots of young people I'm talking to all the time, but if they had the kind of sway over the culture that some of these other people have, we would be in a really different place.
And so that's what I'm really, really focused on trying to do.
So I actually want to ask you about what you think is the future of what you're doing, because it is a growing enterprise.
You obviously have a big audience and it's going to get bigger.
So I want to talk to you about that in just one second.
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Barry, can't wait to see what you build next.
Everyone, make sure to check out Barry's new podcast, Honestly with Barry Weiss.
It is worth the listen and her sub stack, Common Sense with Barry Weiss.
Barry, thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks, Ben.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Mathis Glover, executive producer Jeremy Boring, and our assistant director is Pavel Lydowsky.
Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
Editing is by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromino.
Hair and makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.
Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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