Bari Weiss, newly enthroned as the head of CBS News, made her career decrying the allegedly unfair practices of DEI and how it supposedly breeds groupthink. It was always a disingenuous act, pure camouflage to obscure Weiss’s deep antipathy to challenges to a status quo that has served her well.
When Weiss launched her own publication, The Free Press, and her own fake university, the University of Austin, she enforced ideological conformity. And there is no issue Weiss is more eager to uphold groupthink on than America’s unconditional support for Israel. That’s why one of her first acts at CBS was to give the evening news anchor chair to the thoroughly untested and unintentionally comic Tony Dokoupil due to his evident pro-Israel bona fides.
Now, Weiss has announced a new roster of CBS News contributors, and if you were looking for ideological diversity — the kind Weiss claims she champions — you’re in for predictable disappointment. The common thread of Weiss’s new hires is staunch support for Israel. Most of the new hires are not even “liberal Zionists,” however hypocritically, but right-wing individuals whose views are aligned with Netanyahu.
Consider the Iranian commentator Masih Alinejad, who has praised Israel’s bombing of Iran in the Free Press, implores Trump to attack Iran, and appears at Zionist forums.
Then there’s Harvard Prof. Arthur Brooks, who called for the police to be used against pro-Palestine campus protesters and has stated that “most of the antisemitism in American academia is the hard left.”
Fellow Harvard man is British historian Niall Ferguson, who first attracted public attention in the early 2000s as an apologist for past British colonialism and an advocate for future American colonialism in his 2004 book “Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.”
Ferguson is a clash-of-civilizations type of Zionist who believes that the Palestinians do not deserve a state. He’s also married to the extreme anti-Islam bigot Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Naturally, Weiss has hosted Ferguson before at the Free Press, where they both reaffirmed their hardline Zionist views.
Roland Fryer is another Harvard professor (so much for Weiss claiming to be the champion of the views of ordinary people over the elites’) who has condemned campus protests as antisemitic.
In our age of branded intellectuals — individuals who want to be seen as intellectuals but do not want to do the real work of scholarship — few are more risibly performative than Coleman Hughes, a self-styled thought leader who opines one day on Iran and the next on Black Lives Matter. But you know Hughes is smart ’cause he looks like such a deep thinker in his Twitter profile photo:
Hughes is a long-term advocate for Israel who has taken umbrage at pro-Palestinian activists’ comparison of the Palestinian struggle to America’s Civil Rights Movement and has a particular (and certainly envious) resentment of the far more successful Black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, due in no small part to Coates’s support for Palestinians.
Former Trump National Security Advisor (first Trump administration), Retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, is another new CBS contributor who repeatedly appeared on air to oppose a ceasefire in Gaza and to encourage Israel to keep fighting. Beyond his support for Israel, McMaster is a hawk who represents the establishment’s endless appetite for war, including fomenting fears of war with nuclear-armed China. (So much for Weiss being an anti-establishment figure.)
Additionally, Weiss has hired a Free Press contributor, Patrick McGee, to do double duty at CBS (many of Weiss’s hires first built their relationships with her at the FP). McGee is a writer most famous for his book on Apple’s industrial relationship with China, but he’s a reliable Zionist who can be counted on to tweet clash-of-civilization articles from the British charlatan and nationalist (and Weiss comrade) Douglas Murray, who has famously based his expertise on Israel and the Middle East on the fact that he took a guided tour with the IDF.
Weiss isn’t all about white men who love Israel; she also has room for brown Muslims who love Israel. One of the very few minorities enlisted as a CBS contributor is the conservative writer Reihan Salam:
The Zionistification of CBS continues. Weiss is enforcing a pro-Israel litmus test at the network, foolishly thinking that her efforts alone could turn public opinion back in Israel’s favor. It would be more honest if they just rebranded as ZBS: Zionist Bullshit.
