Bari Weiss, An Opportunist and Possible Spy, Is Certainly Not A Journalist. So What's She Doing With The #TwitterFiles?
Take it from me. I used to work with her
Every so often Bari Weiss trends on Twitter. “Oh, God, what’s she up to now?” I groan, knowing that, in a past life, I could have been her and nearly was. She and I are both combatants in the prodigy child soldier wars.
Bari and I met when I was a glorified intern at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. They call it a “fellowship” and I won two of them — the Robert L. Bartley and Eric Breindel fellowships. Bartley, died of cancer, after libertarianism got his brain — he once claimed that the nation state was “finished” — while Breindel died after being hospitalized for “gastrointestinal bleeding” though some suggested HIV/AIDS. I have no idea either way.
I did find this tidbit interesting, though.
At the age of 27, [Breindel] went to work as Senator Moynihan's aide on the Senate Intelligence Committee. However, shortly into the job, he was arrested for buying heroin from an undercover police officer in Washington, D.C., ending any hope of a career in government or politics.
Huh. Apropos of nothing in particular did you know that journalism is often a cover for espionage?
In those News Corp days I was a dumb true believer, which is, I think somewhat excusable because I was 22-years-old. In those salad days I even admired Rupert Murdoch who I believed did it on his own and not without lavish amounts of Chinese capital. Fear may be the mind killer, but libertarianism will suffice just as well. So young was I that I drank way too much at Bari Weiss’s farewell party, a party oddly hosted at Russia House and where I was encouraged to and drank way too much flavored vodka before being peppered with weird personal questions by my bosses, especially Bari, at the Wall Street Journal. What was that all about?
There is a certain category of person that has proliferated in our social media landscape. We might call them the “person acting as a journalist.” I call them PAJs. The PAJs roam the scene looking for billionaire sugar daddies to fund their journalistic independence. Sometimes the billionaire sugar daddies (who are not at all connected with foreign intelligence services, no sir!) seek out the PAJs and write them checks.
Weiss is one such an example, and it seems, given recent news, that a similar thing undoubtedly happened with Matt Taibbi. Taibbi’s first sugar daddy enterprise was billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s First Look. Taibbi lasted all of seven months at Omidyar’s publication before a female subordinate complained of his behavior and he was gone, gone, gone.
Matt Taibbi has proudly worked with the KGB while living a rather hedonistic lifestyle in the wild days after the fall of the Soviet Union working for The Exile. Sometimes the hedonism went too far and, I suspect, given that their landlord was allegedly tied to the KGB, totally recorded. Talk about a buzzkill.
As if their youthful degeneracy weren’t enough, Taibbi and another editor at the paper, Mark Ames, wrote a book which contains passages detailing disgusting treatment, sexual harassment and even assaults of their female staff. Yikes! Taibbi and his co-author even bragged about raping a young woman. Today they claim the book was satire but there was no such disclosure when the work was published when they were in their thirties.
Now correct if I’m wrong but there’s no statute of limitations for raping in Russia. I suspect that the threat of a Red Notice or public embarrassment or perhaps even ideological sympathy would be enough to keep Taibbi in line. Say, didn’t Elon Musk try to enter a sex club in Germany? I wonder which country owns these sex clubs and why all the Russian-friendly Germans I know frequent them.
Oh, and here’s another Taibbi tidbit for you from Vanity Fair in 2010.
“The honor of being *The Exile’*s most imperiled writer, however, belonged to neither Ames nor Taibbi, but to Edward Limonov, who embodied The Exile before it existed, from the day Ames first picked up his 1990 novel, Memoir of a Russian Punk, while working in a San Francisco bookshop. By the time Ames moved to Russia, Limonov was his literary idol. At that point Limonov, the son of a Stalinist secret-police man, had already lived several lives, as a thief, an exiled dissident writer, a punk icon, a louche sensation in Paris, a fighter with paramilitaries in Serbia (his memoir about that experience is titled Anatomy of a Hero), and, in his most recent incarnation, an anti-Putin activist and chief of the National Bolshevik Party. Limonov was the first writer Ames recruited, and he agreed to join The Exile.”
Think about that. How likely do you think it was that Taibbi, having hired the son of a secret police man, wasn’t recruited? Do you think you could operate a newspaper in post-Soviet Russia without the say so of the Russian secret services? Of course not.
Now onto Bari Weiss who has successfully greased her source — Elon Musk — into giving her access to Twitter. Not bad, not bad. I was told that Weiss was introduced to Musk by David Sacks.
Weiss has had a long, long history of oversexing her stories — and ignoring the obvious conflicts of interests that her publishing of family members and friends presented. This was very trading par excellence. Few stories were fact checked and though I did my best to try to catch some of the errors, quite a few sneaked by. She loved hobnobbing with the very rich or very Jewish/Israeli or both.
The lack of fact checking was once again on display when former New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth tweeted this:
Critics of Musk allowing Weiss access are right to worry about her having access to direct messages. She has shown herself incapable of responsible journalism — first at the Wall Street Journal, where she published an op-ed by Elizabeth O’Bagy, a disgraced academic who tried to lie us into a war in Syria, and later at the New York Times where she published such gems as “Australians Have More Fun” before she was forced out.
Much of Weiss’s notoriety traces back to her time at Columbia where she led a series of protests against Palestinian, Muslim, or Jewish academics who departed from the standard Zionist line.
For all of Weiss’s talk today about “free speech” or a free press she repeatedly shouted down speakers and smeared them with accusations of anti-Semitism. She campaigned to fire Professor Joseph Massad whom she deemed insufficiently pro-Israel when he dared to bring up the treatment of the Palestinians.
Weiss also protested against Professor Norman Finkelstein who has argued that Israeli policies conflate criticism of Israel, especially with its treatment of the Palestinians, with anti-Semitism to maintain financial and political support. Inviting Finkelstein “feels like a real slap in the face,” she said at the time.
From whence did this young lass hail? She comes from Pittsburgh and is the daughter of Lou and Amy Weiss. Lou is a self-described “ardent Zionist.”
On Israel, her parents, ostensibly of different politics, agree, according to a profile of the pair.
Whatever divide might exist between the two, the couple find harmony in their belief that a politician’s views on Israel matter.
“Personally, I’m a conservative but I’ve chosen to support those candidates that are good on the issue [of Israel],” Lou said. “That is my litmus test.”
“I agree, Israel is one of my most important issues,” said Amy, “but we have a different perspective. I feel the people I’ve voted for have been very pro-Israel. Barack Obama was a bit of a disappointment because of the Iran deal,” she conceded, “but his platform was definitely pro-Israel.”
But don’t you dare call them Israel Firsters!
Oh and did I mention that her father toured Israel with Senator Rick Santorum in the 1990s? Or that he is a fellow of an Epstein Patron, Leslie Wexner-funded group? Why, Weiss has known Wexner since at least 1986, according to this article.
Weiss’s late sister — Bari’s aunt — Ellen Weiss Kander was also involved with the Wexner operation. She hosted Israeli film festivals in Pittsburgh and worked hard to bring Hollywood to Pittsburgh.
You remember billionaire Leslie Wexner, don’t you? The man behind Victoria Secret, who was ever so close with organized crime and Jeffrey Epstein? Curiously Lou Weiss seems to have joined the Wexner cohort the very same year that Epstein began working for Wexner. Did they know each other? And what should we make of the assassination of Wexner’s lawyer right around that period? You can read about how amazing a career Wexner was already having in 1986 — where else? — in the New York Times. (See “Rag Trade Revolutionary,” New York Times, June 8th, 1986.)
Bari Weiss herself seems totally uninterested (and well trained) in Epstein and she was very dismissive of some of the stories, telling Joe Rogan that she found Soleimani way more newsworthy than Epstein was back in 2020. Interestingly she also mentions Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt of Google being compromised before she ever met Elon. She seemingly mentions both men totally out of the blue. Odd right? I recommend listening to the whole exchange yourself, around one hour mark. The hasbara is very strong here.
Meanwhile, back in Israel, where they do real journalism, Haaretz’s Abe Silberstein is asking the questions you were too worried about being called anti-Semitic — “What Is Bari Weiss' New Anti-woke 'University' Really For, and Who Will Fund It?”
I’m told there’s a very wealthy Arab country funding the University of Austin. Given the role of foreign actors in funding colleges, this money needs to be assessed.
What if Substack isn’t an investment designed to make money but a means of moving money from foreign actors to operatives in the United States?
What if a certain number of countries was using Substack to control the intellectual discourse?
You might even think that they’d take over Twitter.