Bari Weiss warns threat is growing on right as well

The “last thing” pro-Israel conservative stalwart Bari Weiss wanted to have to reckon with “is the extent of profound anti-American and anti-Jewish sentiment on large parts of the American right.”

“I’ve spent the past decade of my life so focused in so many ways on the excesses of the illiberal left,” she said on her Honestly podcast last Thursday. “Over the past several months, I feel like my gaze is now shifting to what’s happening on the right.”

Weiss famously quit a prominent editorial position at the New York Times in 2020 over its anti-Israel bias and later founded The Free Press.

“A lot of the illiberalism on the left … began as a fringe online movement that a lot of Democrats and a lot of liberals waved away because it was just some crazy influencers online,” she recalled. “Woe to the people … [who] believe that the things that Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are saying will not make an impact on the right, because they will.”

While some of the policy priorities voiced by President Trump have generated a whirlwind, there is “a profound unpredictability, not just of Trump but of the world right now,” she said.

“Trump went on Twitter and said there would be ‘hell to pay,’ sent a real-estate guy from the Bronx who seems to have accomplished, arguably, … more than Jake Sullivan and any of these fancy pointy heads over the past few years,” Weiss said. “Looked at another way, Trump is a guy that really likes to make deals,” suggesting a possible compromise with Iran.

“What’s not to love” in the first Trump administration, she asked rhethorically, but “there are other impulses” as well, leading to actions that are “vengeful, unprincipled and do not bode well for anybody because there doesn’t seem to be any underlying principled worldview or framework.'

“Jews do not do well in a political context of tribalism, of extremism, of identity politics, of right or left, of group thinking that demands conformity and orthodoxy and is threatened by difference,” Weiss continued. “They do not do well in an era in which mobs are popular, and they don’t do well in a moment where people, again, of the right and the left, are calling for the burning down and the abolishing and the tearing down of our rules-based law-based order.”

Weiss recalled growing up “in a context where there never seemed to be any tension at all between my Jewishness and my Zionism and my identity as a proud American. None. They were all harmonious. Who can say that today?

“So it’s important to look reality squarely in the face to not delude ourselves … and then to figure out the right ways to protect ourselves, to protect our community, and also to protect the country that allowed for this tiny window that Jews for 2,000 years were never been able to experience.”

Link to the podcast: bit.ly/3ENp4r1