Poor Bari Weiss! She’s rich, definitely, getting $150 million for the Free Press, which she and her sister Suzi and her wife Nellie Bowles created from nothing, and she’s “powerful”, definitely, now head of CBS news, one of the most storied media powerhouses around, but so what? Just as Bari Weiss grasped the controls of “real power” she was confronted by her ultimate nightmare: An American president who knows not Israel.
The whole “point”, in my opinion, of Bari’s career—at least since she went to work for the New York Times1—has been to guarantee unqualified U.S. support for Likudist Israel, pinning all her hopes on Donald the Unscrupulous, clearly failing to realize just how unscruplous the Donald could be, for, clearly, the Orange Man ain’t listening no more—not to Israel, at least. Instead, he’s listening to Arabs! A lot!
In case anyone hasn’t been listening, or reading, it’s pretty damn clear that Trump, Inc., including both Big Daddy and various assorted sons and sons of law, are intent on turning the family firm into one of the richest dynasties on the planet. We’re not talking billions; we’re not talking tens of billions; we’re talking hundreds of billions. We’re talking Arab money! “The Trump Organization”, as it calls itself with bland menace, is sinking its tentacles deep into the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and, perhaps most precious of all, Qatar.
It was Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s spectacularly ill-judged attack on Doha, Qatar, designed to murder Hamas leaders as they were meeting to work out a ceasefire (Oh that Bibi! Always up to something!) that turned Trump from a Bibi enabler into a Bibi emasculator, turning the one-time Middle East bad boy into a trembling wimp. I mean, seriously! Qatar gave Trump a $400,000,000 jet! What did Bibi ever give Trump? A handshake! I mean, seriously!
Earlier this year, I briefly subscribed to the Free Press, canceling in protest when Bari (remember her!) treated the bunker-bustin’ U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities back in June 2025 as a world-historical event equivalent to the U.S. victories over Japan in World War II and the Soviet Union in the Cold War some 45 years later.
Yet less than six months after Trump seemingly destroyed Israel’s last enemy, that supposedly glorious triumph has all crumbled to dust. For a brief, glorious moment, Israel seemed to bestride the Middle East like a colossus, all her enemies routed in hapless confusion. But Bibi’s compulsive overreaching, his desperate need for a forever war to conceal the emptiness of his policies, has destroyed support for Israel around the world, and most spectacularly in the U.S. itself, so that now everything is reversed. The Orange Man is in charge, not Bibi, because the Arabs can make Donald Trump rich and Israel can’t, and, politically, Trump doesn’t need Israel any more. Bari’s Free Press can run as many How Qatar Bought America articles as it likes. Because they’re true! Well, pretty much! Qatar doesn’t actually own America, but Qatar owns Trump and Trump, for the time being, at least, runs America! And Bari helped, a lot! Thanks, Bari, thanks! Thanks a lot!
Afterwords—How Bari went bad.
Bari, of course, was hired by the Times to be an anti-Trump Likudist (pretty much) but now proudly “admits” that she has overcome her previous Trump Derangement Syndrome. Sure, she’s still bothered by Trump’s seditious attempt to illegally seize control of the U.S. presidency back in January 2021, but (obviously) not enough to bother to oppose him. (And, anyway, it’s all the Democrats’ fault in the first place.) The simple fact is, Bari, along with the rest of the old AIPAC propaganda machine, has lost interest in the whole “democracy” thing. The job of America is not to provide freedom for its citizens; the job of America is to enable Israel to crush the Palestinians into dust and rule over the “Greater Israel” that Yahweh drew up some 3,000 years ago.2 The only problem is, the sun of the American Israel Political Action Committee is setting, and the sun of the American Qatar/Trump Political Action Committee is rising. The Donald giveth, and the Donald taketh away, Bari. You should have seen it coming.
It's “arguable”, a lot, that Bari got the job at CBS especially to protect Israel—the new outfit that now owns CBS is headed by Richard Ellison, son of Larry Ellison, one of the richest men in the world, who has backed Israel to the tune of billions of dollars. Well, unless Larry wants to donate his entire fortune to The Trump Organization, it looks like he may have purchased a pig in a poke. Luke Funk, writing the New York Sun, Paramount Hires Pro-Israel Editor Bari Weiss To Reform CBS News After ‘Biased and Misguided’ ‘60 Minutes’ Gaza Coverage, explains:
Ms. Weiss’s presence is expected to create tension with the staff at “60 Minutes” which has been accused of airing anti-Israeli segments. In January, “60 Minutes” aired a piece on state department dissidents who opposed U.S. support for Israel that the American Jewish Committee called “biased and misguided.” Later in the year, the program was criticized for an interview with a freed Israeli-American hostage during which “60 Minutes” correspondent Leslie Stahl asked him if his captors starved him because they themselves were low on food.
And on October 7, 2024, the anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel, CBS News’s then executive editor reprimanded — during the news division’s morning meeting — “CBS Mornings” host Tony Dokoupil for challenging the virulently anti-Israel writer Ta-Nehisi Coates on air. A recording of that reprimand was leaked to the Free Press, as was internal CBS News standards guidance not to refer to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to be careful about referring to Hamas as a terrorist organization.
Mr. Ellison is the son of Larry Ellison, the world’s first or second richest man, depending on the week. He and his father, who financially backed his acquisition of Paramount, are both strong supporters of Israel, as was Paramount’s previous owner, Shari Redstone, who publicly complained that she couldn’t get CBS News’s anti-Israel bias under control.
And it’s also “arguable”, I guess, that the ground will shift again, and Trump will get tired and lose interest, or whatever, but I doubt it.3 Trump was infuriated by Bibi’s attack on his buddies in Qatar—and so were Trump’s Arab buddies, and they let him know it— but Israel’s problems go well beyond Trump’s greed, monumental though it is. Israel has been hemorrhaging support around the world, including within the American Jewish community itself, ever since Donald’s excellent bunker bustin’, thanks to Bibi’s blatant pursuit of a policy of utter destruction and devastation in Gaza, devastation as an end in itself, devastation without end, for it was and is always guaranteed to create more terrorists than it destroys. Bibi sowed the wind, and now he’s reaping the whirlwind.
Special Chicken Soup Afterwords—Will Bari bring a woman’s touch to CBS? Well, it couldn’t hurt!
One feature of the Free Press that I did find a bit endearing was its “feminine touch”—lots of heart-warming stories about folks finding God or enjoying their “golden” years—stuff that you don’t find in all the “guy” blogs that clot the Internet. I doubt if Bari will be able to do nearly as much for Israel at CBS as she had hoped, but she may be able to make the network more cozy.
1. In a post at the previous incarnation of Literature R Us I opined that Trump’s upset victory in 2016 upset the Times enough to convince them that they needed to expand their opinion page to include conservative anti-Trump Jews, hiring both Bret Stephens and Bari to do the job— both of them describable, I think, as “Likudish” if not actually Likudist. Bari, for all her anti-woke passions, was a clear diversity hire, for she surely wound have not gotten the job if she hadn’t been 1) an excellent journalist, 2) Jewish, 3) conservative, 4) anti-Trump, and 5) a woman. That she was, in addition, a lesbian was, I believe, simply icing on an already bought cake.
2. The fact that a good 90% of the first five books of the Hebrew bible (the “Torah”) is complete myth is, of course, utterly unknown to surely 95% of the U.S. population. Check out Richard Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible if you want “proof”.
3. I doubt, for example, that Bari ever expected to see an American Vice President strutting around Jerusalem and telling the Knesset to watch its damn step. When Bibi’s right-wing pals “welcomed” the loudly Catholic, Nazi toleratin’ Vance upon his arrival in Jerusalem by forcing and winning a vote in the Knesset on a measure calling for Israeli annexation of the West Bank, Vance responded “forcefully”: “If it was a political stunt, it was a very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it. The policy of the Trump administration is that the West Bank will not be annexed by Israel. That will continue to be our policy.” Many observers have pointed out that the Bibi’s compulsive prolongation of the Gaza War, a war he cannot win, has made Israel more dependent upon the U.S. than ever. And now Israel is being abandoned by both the Democrats and Republicans.
