Lapdogs Of The "Counter-Elite" Authoritarians

Bari Weiss and The Free Press are Neither Heterodox nor Independent

A week after the election, Bari Weiss sat down with Peter Thiel at The Free Press to discuss how he’d been bravely (perhaps prophetically) all-in on Trump since 2016, how relieved he was about the 2024 victory, and how we were witnessing the “triumph of the counter-elites.”

That last phrase is a great example of the mercurial truthiness of The Free Press’ content. On their election night live stream, Weiss nodded along with co-host Batya Ungar-Sargon’s analysis of Trump as the right guy to “take an ax to the institutions” and put out-of-touch woke elite Democrats in their place.

But now Thiel, in one of his awkward, halting, vague-but-grandiose, and often self-contradictory answers, went on a riff about how the Clinton’s and Obama’s were from Ivy League schools, but Biden and Harris represented a real down-turn in the pedigree of Democrat leaders. They’re bad because they aren’t elite enough.

Bari’s rhetoric quickly reconfigured around this new angle—acknowledging that billionaires Thiel and Elon Musk and others from Silicon Valley who’d thrown their financial support to MAGA, like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, are in fact elites.

But, you see, they are the counter-elites!

This didn’t stop Thiel from also still using his favorite Star Wars reference that frames Democrats as The Empire, and his right-leaning uber-wealthy friend-group as the rag-tag rebel alliance.

These maverick tech-savants can see that Trump has the right policies to save America. From what? It’s not clear exactly, but it has something to do with how all institutions have been captured by DEI and woke-ideology. Which policies? Nobody asked.

Weiss gave no push-back or follow-up on Thiel’s assertion that “the institutions” tried to prosecute Trump in order to stop his run. Likewise, his statements that “any shenanigans around the 2020 election” were small potatoes compared to the scandal of how Democrats pushed Kamala through as a replacement for Biden without holding an open convention.

Weiss also indulged in the relentless false equivalency that I criticized in our recent Conspirituality episode about her coverage of the election, which is that both Democrat and Republican claims this would be the last election if the other side won, seemed “totally nuts” to her.

Thiel explained that Elon helped him to see how dangerous the Democrats really are. No reference to any of Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric, the SCOTUS ruling that has rendered his actions above the law, the at-this-point well-documented authoritarian realities of what Project 2025 has in store for America, or the dire global climate crisis which it denies exists.

No reference to Trump’s indictments, convictions, or pending cases regarding election interference and the Capitol riots, or of his intention to release those who’ve been jailed for their violent and seditious crimes in that regard, or his threats to use the DOJ against his enemies, and the military against the “enemies within.”

This is because being “heterodox” in practice often means legitimizing falsehoods and ignoring facts. The take-away: while both GOP and Dem concerns about democracy being at risk were hyperbolic, maybe the Republicans had a point after all.

Despite Thiel saying he had concerns about both populism and democracy, Weiss didn’t take the opportunity to never ask about the infamous statement in his essay, The Straussian Moment, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

I will break down the whole interview elsewhere, but for now let’s notice that she repeated her favorite talking point about how people who were called conspiracy theorists for advancing the lab-leak hypothesis about COVID have a right to be angry, because they were proven to be correct. They weren’t.

She also gave no push-back when Thiel criticized NATO-expansionism (a Putin talking point) as a cause of the invasion of Ukraine, and all-but suggested that appeasing Putin might be the smart way to go, if we had learned anything from previous World Wars.

On Iran, Thiel said the US should just follow suit on whatever Israel was doing.

Having courageous conversations, from an open and neutral non-partisan perspective—that’s the posture. But that's not what is happening. There’s a reason for this.

Weiss’ journey from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, to The Free Press coincided not only with greater fame as a supposedly free thinking truth-teller, but also greater fortune, as the timing of this arc intersected with the political transformation of digital media.

At the Times, she earned a certain notoriety by writing contrarian articles critiquing the peak excesses of woke activist culture between 2017 and 2020. She drew as much flack from the left as she did praise and encouragement from the center and the right.

She would eventually resign with a public open-letter, all courageous free-speech martyr style, in response to a furore at the paper over the infamous Senator Tom Cotton op-ed piece. It called for Trump to send in soldiers to quell the George Floyd protests, which he said had “plunged many American cities into anarchy. “

Weiss characterized 1,000 staffers signing a letter condemning the piece as a “woke civil-war” within the paper. Maybe it was. But the op-ed called for the president to use the military against the country’s own citizens.

So off she went. Told her story to Bill Maher and on podcasts and YouTube channels, and started her own independent endeavors. This led to her own podcast and Substack, all of which has evolved into The Free Press, which right now draws in about $8M a year. In 2021, she also co-founded the University of Austin, or UATX.

It’s on the topic of money that this really get interesting, because when Bari Weiss sits down with Peter Thiel to talk about what just happened in the 2024 election, she is not merely a host and media company boss interviewing a right-wing intellectual tech billionaire.

She’s his lapdog.

It’s all artifice. The posture of being heterodox, presenting all sides, being independent and focused on the truth in the way that legacy media is not, is a lie.

The Free Press is the actual biased, financially-corrupted, pretense at journalism that conspiracists and propagandists on the right falsely project onto legacy media.

They’re as fair and balanced as FOXNews, but the packaging has been updated.

These are bold statements, but I came with receipts. Let’s follow the money.

Marc Andreessen and David Sacks were early funders of The Free Press. They’re from the same group of MAGA-leaning tech-billionaires who’ve supported the campaigns of RFK Jr., JD Vance, and other, more ultra right-wing political candidates, like Blake Masters. David Sacks also co-authored a book with Peter Thiel back in 1995, titled The Diversity Myth.

Sir Paul Marshall is another significant investor behind The Free Press. He owns conservative anti-woke outlets in England, UnHerd and GB News, and recently purchased The Spectator.

But there's more. Beyond The Free Press, Weiss is heavily networked with these right-wing money guys. She co-founded UATX in 2021 along with Joe Lonsdale—who happens to be Peter Thiel's protege. Lonsdale also helped Elon start America PAC, which funded Trump’s ground campaign with tens of millions. VP-elect JD Vance is also a Thiel protege, and good friend of Lonsdale. Peter Thiel financed Vance’s successful Senate campaign in 2022.

UATX has yet to officially open, instead operating for the moment as a conservative think tank. Last month, UATX took in $200M in new donations from people like billionaire GOP donor, Harlan Crow. He’s best known for his role in the SCOTUS corruption scandal as Justice Clarence Thomas’ secret benefactor.

Leonard Leo introduced Crow and Thomas as part of his successful project to reshape the court (he’s had a hand in getting all six of the conservative supermajority appointed), overturn Roe vs Wade, and enact an Opus Dei-style vision of Christian Nationalism.

I am not saying that Bari Weiss inevitably agrees with all of these men on everything, or that they explicitly tell her what to say and write.

I am saying that The Free Press and UATX are bought-and-paid-for as part of a larger reactionary, libertarian and, in some cases, religious project to overturn the last 50 years of social and political progress.

They’re winning, in part because they’ve figured out how to exploit the rise of highly-influential contrarian digital media that calls legacy news “Democrat propaganda,” while dressing up the alternative facts of right-wing talking points as heterodox free speech.