To Be An Editor

 Well, Bari Weiss played this well. 

Like many before her, she figured out how to leverage an elite-centered persecution complex about "wokeness" into a grand paranoid narrative, upon which others delighted to project their own inflated sense of victimization. 

She managed to recast a highly idiosyncratic set of sharp-elbowed opinions—founded in prejudice and self-interest—as evidence of her high-minded intellectual independence. 

(She is, for instance, in favor of same sex marriage; but she is a critic of the trans rights movement. She thinks the T in LGBT has gone too far. Would it surprise you to hear that Weiss is a gay cis woman?)

She managed to convince herself and others that the heterogenous collection of extreme opinions she holds amounts to "common sense" that of course everyone secretly believes already, if only they would be honest about it. 

She claimed that her "common sense" opinions positioned her as a populist defender of the "working class"—while in fact they mostly seem to have enabled her to get into the good graces of America's Trump-curious billionaires. 

She claimed that the traditional media was so rigged against her that she had to found her own Substack in order to serve as the last bastion of the "Free Press." 

Yet, in an Orwellian twist, she is now playing a pivotal role in Trump's consolidation of state power over the last vestiges of truly independent media. Far from favoring a "free press," then—Weiss is actively helping to make it unfree. 

After all, she has been appointed editor-in-chief of CBS News as part of David Ellison's policy of shifting the broadcaster's editorial line right-ward, in order to curry favor with Trump (whose FCC recently approved a key merger for CBS parent company Paramount). 

Weiss claims that she criticizes all sides equally, and can't be bought. But she's willing to step into a leadership role at a broadcaster that has positioned itself as the news agency most willing to compromise itself abjectly at Trump's command. 

Like many a member of the "contrarian" and "heterodox" right, she keeps promising she is about to criticize conservatives any day now—but never seems to do so. All her ire is reserved for the Left. 

All her "heterodox" opinions line up with her own biography. They don't display so much an independence of mind as the unerring and unidirectional pull of self-interest. (Speaking to an audience of Fed Soc lawyers, she reportedly told them that they may not agree on same sex marriage; but they can all get behind lowering taxes.)

The extremism of Weiss's various strong opinions, meanwhile, hasn't prevented her from compromising them when it serves her purposes to do so. This, too, she spins as evidence of intellectual independence, when in truth it indicates only opportunism and moral cowardice. 

All her talk of the need for intellectual independence—the freedom of the press—seemingly didn't cause her a moment's hesitation before plumping for a job with a more-or-less openly government-aligned mega-platform. 

"When the heavy artillery of interest, power, and prejudice is brought into the field, the paper pellets of the brain go for nothing"—as William Hazlitt once wrote. 

I was trying to think of whom exactly now-editor-in-chief of CBS Bari Weiss most reminded me of. Late last night, trying to fall asleep, it came to me. Of course! Editor Weiss is nothing but a reincarnation of Editor Whedon—of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology. 

I went back to look up the poem: 

To be able to see every side of every question;

To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;

To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,

To use great feelings and passions of the human family

For base designs, for cunning ends,

To wear a mask like the Greek actors—

Your eight-page paper—behind which you huddle,

Bawling through the megaphone of big type:

“This is I, the giant.” 

In short, Masters continues, to "liv[e] the life of a sneak-thief." That is: "To be an editor."