Nobody escaped 2020 without hearing of at least a couple of media personalities that became wildly popular amongst conservatives for abandoning the left. They themselves, though, framed things a little differently. “The left left me,” they proclaimed. There is something deeply revealing in this statement. These commentators didn’t move an inch to the right.
Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is Bari Weiss, former op-ed editor at the New York Times and now editor-in-chief at CBS News and at her own publication The Free Press. Weiss earned respect from American conservatives in 2020 when she resigned from the Times, publicly accusing it of left-wing bias.
Weiss’s recent vault into editorial control of CBS News was backed by David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder and world’s third-richest person Larry Ellison. Unsurprisingly, given her lack of qualifications, Weiss has stumbled in her impressive new role.
Weiss’s town hall with Erika Kirk, the widow of assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk, garnered low ratings and drew criticism that it degenerated into “gotcha” moments featuring left-wing activists and Israel supporters in the audience. And the network’s credibility took a hit with progressives after Weiss’s decision to delay a 60 Minutes segment critical of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Despite her adherence to left-wing social policy and hawkish foreign policy, Weiss has found herself a leading gatekeeper of the right. What has she done with this power? The Free Press has made “combatting antisemitism” a major focus. It recently republished a speech by Ben Shapiro, a conservative pro-Israel commentator, that amounts to an effort to excommunicate Tucker Carlson, a critic of Israel, for alleged antisemitism. Other pro-Israel conservatives also grace the pages of the Free Press, including Eli Lake, Matthew Continetti, Niall Ferguson, Abigail Shrier, Douglas Murray, and Nikki Haley.
Bari Weiss and her so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” allies comprise our generation’s band of neoconservatives. Of course, not every hawk is a neoconservative, but the label aids understanding in the case of Weiss and her ilk.
The origins of neoconservatism can be traced back to the Trotskyite and social democratic left. The first generation of neoconservatives included Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Norman Podhoretz. Bell was a former editor of The New Leader, a prominent socialist and labor-affiliated magazine. He edited, alongside his friend Irving Kristol, The Public Interest, the neoconservatives’ publication of choice for many years. Kristol got his start as a member of the Trotskyite wing of the Young People’s Socialist League and then later moved towards hawkish liberalism.
Hellbound and Down 