Weiss’s ascent reveals the extent to which Hollywood, once a Democratic stronghold, has defected for a politics that puts the concerns and egos of wealthy people first.
Rob Reiner in 2018 in Studio City, California.
(Rich Polk / Getty Images for IMDb)
It felt wonderful back when it seemed like the Democratic Party had conquered Hollywood. I mean, it basically had, a while back. After the blacklist, of course.
When I was leading Salon.com in the early years of this century, I went to parties at Arianna Huffington’s house and met celebrities and, to be honest, many were to my left. I once got into a public debate with the late, beloved actor Ed Asner (Lou Grant! Santa!) over whether, in 2003, after the midterm debacle of 2002, progressives should try to find common ground with Democratic Leadership Council types. I said yes—we needed more voters!—he and most of the room said no. (Still not sure I was right.)
But Asner did come up at the end of the night to tell my boss he liked my “spunk.” I’m old enough to remember Lou Grant telling Mary Richards, “I hate spunk.” I appreciated him nonetheless. He was a mensch, and I was lucky to meet a lot of those Hollywood mensches, first among them the late Norman Lear, and his beloved friend and protégé, the late Rob Reiner. A little more on Rob in a minute.
This week we got to see the other side of Hollywood, the anti-menschs, wealthy, successful dudes who got tired of being “woke,” after about a year of it. A chilling New York magazine story explains how the ultra-mediocrity Bari Weiss, now in charge of CBS News, had the good timing to brand herself a martyr to “wokeness,” just as wealthy white men and some women were getting sick of it. She went to Hollywood and won over celebrities and industry insiders who were just so tired of having to pretend to respect the talent of anyone who isn’t white.
It is a fucking unbearable read.
The story begins in the summer of 2021, the year after Black Lives Matter and the height of Covid restrictions. Weiss had made herself famous for having a very public “you can’t fire me, I quit” spat with The New York Times in the middle of all that madness in 2020. Her resignation letter, which still lives on its own page at BariWeiss.com, went viral, and not in a totally good way. It was a whine for the ages, going into detail about how she’d been the target of “constant bullying” by her woke coworkers. (She was apparently deeply wounded when a Black Times writer would not deign to have coffee with her.)
Current Issue
Weiss’s hiring by the Times, it must be noted, came as part of a ludicrous course-correction on the part of then–executive editor Dean Baquet, who thought his paper’s big political blunder in 2016 was not seeing the voters who made Donald Trump president. In fact, the Times’ blunder was not seeing the danger of Donald Trump, instead obsessing about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and her other real and imagined failings, which the paper had covered obsessively going back to the Whitewater non-scandal of the early 1990s. Baquet and other leaders tapped writers and editors like Weiss to “diversify” their coverage.
But as hard as she tried, Weiss told publisher A.G. Sulzberger in her wailing “I quit” letter, she could not get past the paper’s “illiberal environment.” She mocked the Times’ penchant for describing Trump as “a unique danger to the country and the world,” which in fact he was, and is again. She flounced off to Los Angeles and had the great good luck to find like-minded billionaires who, it turns out, were also feeling bullied, by having to care about anyone but themselves.
“She struck me as someone with moneymaking DNA,” retired gaming mogul Bobby Kotick told New York. The magazine failed to note that the same year he met Weiss, Kotick was under a California Civil Rights Department investigation into workplace discrimination, which was settled for $54 million in 2023, when Kotick stepped down. Another privileged white person persecuted by wokeness.
Weiss’s “moneymaking DNA” and status as wokeness martyr got her new friends, including Kotick, to fund her Substack publication, The Free Press, whose “unifying ideology,” one New York source says, “is all things a rich person would agree with.” As writer Charlotte Klein puts it:
While the kings of Hollywood were struggling to understand the activist energy and eat-the-rich mentality infiltrating their studio lots and workplaces, Weiss—a Columbia-educated, Times-credentialed gay woman who cried when Donald Trump was first elected—validated their concerns that this had all gone too far. People wanted her at their dinners and events. “She kind of became this party trick for wealthy Westside executives who wanted to have a certain kind of conversation that they thought they couldn’t have in public,” said one media executive.
(Just one non sequitur here: I think Olivia Nuzzi, whose own Southern California sojourn/exile from journalism ended in merely 1,200 books sold in her first week, must be seething.)
Weiss attracted the titans of Hollywood as well as Silicon Valley, who had moved right in the alleged age of cancel culture—venture capitalist Marc Andreeson and crypto-magnate David Sacks, along with Kotick. Elon Musk tasked her and Matt Taibbi with publishing “The Twitter Files,” which were supposed to reveal government meddling with free speech but did not. “Her intended appeal was to not just be a mouthpiece for the elites of the East and West Coast but, at the end of the day, the Masters of the Universe—that’s whose support actually spreads things,” a former Free Press adviser told New York.
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →
This year, of course, she sold Free Press to David Ellison of Paramount Skydance for $150 million, and became editor in chief of CBS News. It’s an only-in-Hollywood fairytale.
What has she done with it? Weiss just hosted a “town hall” with the widow of Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, Erika, that went viral the way Weiss’s resignation letter did—not in a good way. I extend my condolences to Erika Kirk, but she did not look like she needed them in that icky conversation. “What do you say to the people who justified his death?” Weiss asked, while ignoring that nobody of any significance in the world actually did that.
Ratings utterly tanked, down by almost half from the normal (lackluster) Saturday night CBS viewership in the most-valued demographics. Lucrative advertising was down too. “During the hour, commercial breaks were largely filled with spots from direct-response advertisers, including the dietary supplement SuperBeets; the home-repair service HomeServe.com; and CarFax, a supplier of auto ownership data,” Variety reported. Also: Chia Pets.
The same night, or the next morning, Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were murdered, allegedly by their troubled son Nick. Rob and Michele represented all that was real and thoughtful and true of the commitment to racial and economic justice that got branded “woke.” They’d lived it, thought it all through—they weren’t fronting. Over at least four decades, they supported countless progressive causes and candidates, creating a legacy that, if there is any justice in the world, will outlast Trump’s.
I’m not going to quote Donald Trump’s attack on the Reiners. I think, like their son Nick, that Trump is suffering from insufficiently diagnosed and/or poorly treated mental illness. I just want to say what I know. I have been lucky to only meet my heroes who are wonderful people, like Ed Asner and Norman Lear and Reiner. Rob reached out to me through MSNBC because he loved something I said (and I’m sorry I can’t remember what it was). In my last text with him, I told him I loved him as Albert Schur, mentor of Ebri, in one of my all-time favorite shows, The Bear.
“Thanks so much,” he replied. “Yeah, some really great writing.”
Thanking the writers is the ultimate mensch move.
I don’t think that conquering Hollywood is either good or bad. Conquering insecure rich people is dangerous. That’s what we’re dealing with right now, with the Trump administration and with the Bari Weiss media reign. I actually don’t think Weiss is going to make it. I’m not sure who or what will bring her down, but being talent-free seldom ends well. I hope we all bring Donald Trump down, soon. I believe Rob Reiner will ultimately prevail.
Over the past year you’ve read Nation writers like Elie Mystal, Kaveh Akbar, John Nichols, Joan Walsh, Bryce Covert, Dave Zirin, Jeet Heer, Michael T. Klare, Katha Pollitt, Amy Littlefield, Gregg Gonsalves, and Sasha Abramsky take on the Trump family’s corruption, set the record straight about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s catastrophic Make America Healthy Again movement, survey the fallout and human cost of the DOGE wrecking ball, anticipate the Supreme Court’s dangerous antidemocratic rulings, and amplify successful tactics of resistance on the streets and in Congress.
We publish these stories because when members of our communities are being abducted, household debt is climbing, and AI data centers are causing water and electricity shortages, we have a duty as journalists to do all we can to inform the public.
In 2026, our aim is to do more than ever before—but we need your support to make that happen.
Through December 31, a generous donor will match all donations up to $75,000. That means that your contribution will be doubled, dollar for dollar. If we hit the full match, we’ll be starting 2026 with $150,000 to invest in the stories that impact real people’s lives—the kinds of stories that billionaire-owned, corporate-backed outlets aren’t covering.
With your support, our team will publish major stories that the president and his allies won’t want you to read. We’ll cover the emerging military-tech industrial complex and matters of war, peace, and surveillance, as well as the affordability crisis, hunger, housing, healthcare, the environment, attacks on reproductive rights, and much more. At the same time, we’ll imagine alternatives to Trumpian rule and uplift efforts to create a better world, here and now.
While your gift has twice the impact, I’m asking you to support The Nation with a donation today. You’ll empower the journalists, editors, and fact-checkers best equipped to hold this authoritarian administration to account.
I hope you won’t miss this moment—donate to The Nation today.
Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and publisher, The Nation
More from The Nation
In 1994, the writer Leslie Marmon Silko wrote a piece for The Nation warning of a frightening new immigration regime.
The Trump administration wants to destroy our health infrastructure. These warriors aren’t letting that happen without a fight.
With the death of Norman Podhoretz at 95, the transition from New York’s intellectual golden age to the age of grievance and provocation is complete.
The passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act is a big step—but its champions are keeping the pressure on.
Twenty years after Katrina, the cultural workers who kept New Orleans alive are demanding not to be pushed aside.
