Bari Weiss: Toady Queen of Substack

How a cynical operative married a California princess, sucked up to power, and found fame and fortune and love. And how technology won't save us.

I’ve seen a lot of Substack guys around lately (and it is usually guys) extolling the culture-healing potential of the Substack platform. I’m sure you’ve seen them around if you spent any time on Notes, the Twitter clone that Substack launched and which is now starting to blow up. It’s hard to keep track of these guys but they’re constantly popping up in the feed. I’ve seen Ross Barkan, a journalist and budding novelist, doing it. He’s got both a personal Substack and runs a new literary magazine powered by Substack. “I like to think of myself as an original writer and I think that’s because I don’t get devoured by the online discourse,” he recently said in an interview. “If you want to know what’s happening in the culture, subscribe to many, many Substacks.” Then there’s a guy named Ted Gioia that gets pushed on me a lot by the Substack algorithm. He’s a former corporate consultant/Stanford prof and music critic whose newsletters sometimes reads like manic PowerPoint presentation. He’s all about the one-sentence declarative paragraph and is obsessed with the coming elite collapse and a new anti-tech neo-Romantic cultural revolution. His Substack is also filled with lots business self-help stuff about how to supercharge your Substack money making potential. He’s wildly popular on Substack. People love him, and he has now taken to calling everyone who uses Substack a “we.” Because we’re a community, you see. There are other Substack Guys out there, too. Lots of them. But their names are not that important. What is important is that they exist and they’re bullish on Substack to the point of being cultish, and they all have a general message they push out into the world. It goes something like this:

1. Traditional media has been full of gate keepers and elite control. This has suppressed and regimented culture, keeping certain voices out, setting trends, deciding who gets to have a writing career and who doesn’t.

2. Elite control is slipping. Traditional modes of cultural production and distribution are breaking down. But technologies exist to replace this.

3. With Substack, the gates have been flung wide open. Anyone can have a shot at being a writer, building a fan base, and making a living off writing. Full meritocracy is afoot!

4. This democratization will lead to a flourishing, a cultural reawakening. Substack will…Make American Culture Great Again. MACGA, if you will.

Now I agree with some of this sentiment. Traditional media has not always delivered the goods. It’s been full of gatekeeping and elite control and has all the usual power dynamics that don’t have to be explained. And traditional media, journalism especially, has been collapsing. So there are benefits to a having a platform like Substack. It indeed does allow non-establishment types, who otherwise would have trouble making money off their work, to share in some of the bounty. That’s why I’m here. The death of journalism has driven me on this platform and has made me a reluctant political influencer. But Substack is not the only game in town. There are other providers. And hell, it wouldn’t be impossible to custom code a paid newsletter from scratch. But I’m here because it’s the easiest option. I guess you could say I’m lazy. Still, I wince every time I see one of these Substack Guys posting about the Substack Utopian Promise.

I mean, we’ve all been here before. The internet, built by Pentagon during its Vietnam War Ear high-tech counterinsurgency surge, was a product of the military’s desire for technocratic control of the world. And up until the 1980s, everyone saw networks ad computer tech an extension of powerful institutions — the government, giant corporations, the security state. But when it all started to go commercial in the 1980s and 90s, computer tech began to be marketed to us as egalitarian and democratic technology. Apple took the lead with its 1984 smash big brother ad directed by Ridley Scott. But as I write in book Surveillance Valley, these promises had a way of never panning out. In fact, this tech swung society in the opposite direction. No matter what it touched, it ended up centralizing power and control in a massive way. Now we have a handful of corporations that sit as middlemen on our lives, mediating, surveilling, and profiting off our interactions — news, shopping, dating, films, reading books, jerking off, snaking your toilet, booking hotels, taking photos, taking the bus, cooking, gardening, office rentals, the list goes on and on. The technology spawned a new oligarchic class in the process — its sudden accumulation of wealth and power unseen since America’s railroad days. And it’s not just the names we all know — like Zuck or Musk or Bezos. It’s the guys behind the scenes — the Wall Street money but also newer guys like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and the rest of the venture capital syndicate that had provided early funding for these corps and platforms and molded their development into what they are today.

I mention all this because this new Silicon Valley oligarchy is the one that’s funding Substack. They are the force that’s been driving this platform’s evolution from what could have been great little paid newsletter business into an addictive social media app with Palmer Eldritch-like demiurge ambitions, aiming to be the platform that holds all media within itself. If the history of all the other VC-funded companies that make up the Great American Internet are any indication, Substack might not be the magic potion that the Substack Guys hope it is.

I could give a bunch of examples of how Substack has not egalitarianized the media but simply reproduced existing power relationships within itself. I could, for instance, point at Matt Taibbi, who famously tried to fill Hunter S. Thomson’s shoes in Rolling Stone and who adopted Substack early to become an “independent” journalist…and yet quickly turned into half-senile foot solider for the Republican Party he used to mock, sucking up to Elon Musk, hanging out with anti-establishment types like Ted Cruz, and pumping out screeds about the Communist Takeover of America. But I’ve written about Taibbi previously and there’s not much else to say. Who I want to focus on today is Bari Weiss and The Free Press.

For those who don’t know, Bari is a real operator and a genius suck up to power. She came from an affluent suburb, her parents own the upscale Weisshouse furniture store. Bari first came to public attention while a student in Columbia, where she led a campaign to cancel teachers critical of Israel and tried to get Joseph Massad, a Palestinian professor, fired. She then went on to quickly rise through the ranks of zionist activist journalism — first starting out at Jewish outlets like Tablet, then writing op-eds and reviewing books for the Wall Street Journal, where she worked directly under Bret Stephens, the arch-neoconservative now known simply as “bedbug,” and then getting beamed up to the New York Times op-ed department. Her Times job was what you’d call a Trump first term DEI hire. She was picked up to generate controversy and serve up conservative opinion to the libs. While at the Times, she constantly got glowing profiles from her liberal colleagues — and even got dressed for a photoshoot by Vanity Fair. People who know Bari say that she has real charisma — and she’s used that gift to ingratiate herself to power. And she seems to have a special way with billionaires. “She doesn’t just speak to the 1 percent. She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1 percent. And they’ll listen,” Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, explained the Bari Method to the New York Times’ Matt Flegenheimer.

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She might have a lot of charisma and hobnobbing talent and ambition, but she’s not that smart. Late in her New York Times days she became a “toady” meme. On Joe Rogan’s podcast she called Tulsi Gabbard, who was running as a sort of progressive anti-imperialist back then (that was before she did her conservative pivot back to being an imperialist), as an “Assad toady” — and then admitting she didn’t know what “toady” meant when pressed to explain herself by a very friendly Joe Rogan. As it became apparent, Bari had no idea what she was talking about and was simply repeating what was supposed to be obvious to everyone in her elite neocon/zionist circles: that anyone critical of American regime change, including of stuff like America backing ISIS to overthrow Assad, should be mocked and treated like a bozo.

It wasn’t long after this toady incident that she started planning her next move. She saw that all the big names in political influencing were decamping establishment publications and setting up shop with outfits like Substack and Rumble, and she followed suit. To do it, she did a big performance self-cancelling herself from the New York Times because it was too woke and too repressive for an open-minded thinker like her. Among the gripe she listed in her very long resignation letter was that people in the New York Times praised the Soviet Union’s space program for its diversity. This rubbed her the wrong way but it is in fact true. The USSR was the first send a female astronaut into space in 1963 — something that the USA didn’t do until two decades later. Immediately after, she set up a media outfit that would eventually become The Free Press. This new publication positioned itself a a centrist establishment magazine that tried to straddle both the liberal and MAGA worlds — a place for reactionary libs that had fully rebelled against the last little bits of progressive politics still rattling around the Democratic Party. As Bari said at a conference of the Federalist Society,

“I know that there are some people in this room who don’t believe that my marriage should have been legal. And that’s OK. Because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes.”

So in 2020 Bari launched her new Substack. Given her penchant for toadying up to billionaires and neocons and powerful media people, it immediately blew up. The publication attracted hundreds of thousands of subscribers and allowed her to hire a team. Seed capital from a bunch of billionaires came quickly, too. Politically hyperactive Silicon Valley VC guys like Marc Andreessen (who also funds Substack) and David Sacks threw in cash, as did the CEO of Starbucks and the old New York money investment bank Allen & Company. Their investments into The Free Press valued Bari’s company at $100 million. As of six months ago, The Free Press said it had about a million free subscribers and somewhere near 150,000 paid subscribers that pay around $8 a month or $80 a year — which brings its annual revenue to about $12 million. It’s a huge number but is it big enough for a $100 million valuation? Probably not. But who cares? A bunch of billionaires think The Free Press is worth that much to them. And who are we, penniless peasants, to argue?

Bari’s project was so successful and had such immediate elite support that Substack partnered with her to build a side business that would allow Substack to move beyond just hosting newsletters for individuals and offer what are known as “enterprise solutions” — basically customizing subscription platforms for larger media companies. Meanwhile, Bari continued to what do made her career: being a suck up to power, doing propaganda for empire, and acting as a rabid attack dog for Israel…just now at higher at higher levels and with more and more famous people coming to her pod and attending her Los Angeles salons.

I don’t want to get into all the nasty stuff that The Free Press puts out — like getting into the weeds of how Bari is a Netanyahu Toady or how The Free Press is out there convincing its elite audience that there is no famine in Gaza and that shelves there are groaning with food — basically doing the crudest form of genocide denial — or that Bari played a role in Israel’s assassination of beloved Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer and several members of his family. All I want to do is draw your attention to the fact that The Free Press is currently the most popular Substack “newsletter” in U.S. politics. Yes, #1. How’s that anti-elite disruption for you?

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There is another aspect to the Bari Weiss/The Free Press story that is of interest to me. It has to do with the co-founder of The Free Press — Bari’s wife, Nellie Bowles. That’s Nellie in the white dress with her clan at the San Francisco Debutante Ball, where the creme de la creme of elite society showcases their coming-of-age women.

People who have followed my work on the history of California’s farmer-oligarchy (which has been made into a documentary called Pistachio Wars that will hit all streaming platforms later this summer) might recognize the name. Nellie Bowles is a member of one of the oldest oligarch families in California, tracing her lineage directly to Henry Miller, a cattle baron who built his empire during the Gold Rush and who at one time was hailed as the largest land owner in the Golden State. He was a natural born scammer and monopolist who owned so much land that he could brag about driving his cattle from Los Angeles to San Francisco without leaving his own property.

Henry, who came to California from Germany, interbred with the emerging post-Gold Rush anglo ruling elite of Northern California and his kids and grandkids went on to form several branches of the state’s emerging aristocracy, birthing progeny in all sorts of directions. With every generation, their names got longer and longer, as if they were some kind British aristocracy — with names like Constance Crowley Bowles Hart Peabody, a name that belongs to Nellie’s grandma. And why not? They lived and acted like an aristocracy, their mansions and country homes were fit for the aristocracy, and they ruled like an aristocracy.

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One of the big branches of the Miller clan were the Bowles’s. They formed a union with the Crowley’s, another old timey aristocratic family that owned a sprawling maritime shipping and tugboat business out of San Francisco. Crowley is still one of the largest private shipping companies in the world, just in case you were wondering. Anyway, it is this family — the Crowley and Crowley-Bowles union — that ultimately birthed Nellie Bowles, wife of Bari Weiss, and co-founder of The Free Press.

In California, you can’t get any more elite than Nellie. There simply weren’t any anglos in California before her ancestors showed up and finished off the genocide of California Indians and snapped up all the land and water before anyone else got here. The California as we know it was colonized and privatized and “belonged” to her ancestors.

Nellie met Bari when they both worked at the New York Times. Nellie was a top cultural reporter covering Silicon Valley and the tech industry. She met Bari right there in the office and was smitten. Smitten enough to follow her out of the New York Times and co-found The Free Press as a family business…smitten enough to even convert to Judaism and then run a personal Jewish conversion Substack where she did her exotic “I’m a Jew now it’s so cool” cosplay and platformed other convert women who extolled the importance of Israel and complained about how their liberal friends didn’t understand that Jews are under threat. It would be a sweet love story — a romance between an ambitious upstart and a bored princess. It would be sweet, if it wasn’t for these two pumping out so much poison into the world.

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Almost two years ago I was supposed to write a review for The Baffler of a book that Nellie had published about how radical wokism was destroying America — The Morning After the Revolution. The book promised to be “an irreverent romp through the sacred spaces of the New Left…a front row seat to the absurd drama of a political movement gone mad.” I was gonna call the review “In the Bowles of mediocrity,” but I never finished the assignment. I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t that the book was particularly bad or somehow evil, it was worse. It was just like my title said: utterly mediocre…so mediocre that the mediocrity acted as a paralyzing agent, zapping my frontal lobe and sapping my will. Bland, unoriginal, recycling cliches, telling second-hand stories, without a hint of wisdom or insight… To me her book wasn’t really a book. It was more of a cultural artifact signifying something more profound. It was proof that that money, even old money, can’t buy talent. What it can buy is access — access to a top job in media, access to book deals, access to respectable reviews in top publicans for when the book finally comes out. And anyway her book wasn’t a book at all — not in the way most people would see it. It was a signifier with the same function as the debutante ball she waltzed at as a young woman: The book itself was the society event. It signaled her as a serious writer. It was a rite of passage, something to put on her bio that made her look important. It was a necessary ingredient to prestige in her polite society circles: “May I introduce you to my wonderful friend, Nellie. She’s a gifted journalist and wrote the most marvelous book.”

The Baffler assignment didn’t pan out but I did learn one thing from reading her book: I learned that I had a hand in getting Nellie to leave the New York Time — a move which ultimately led her to co-found The Free Press with her future wife. In my own little way I share responsibility for all of this…See, Nellie started getting uncomfortable at the paper after the debutante photo of her became public and her colleagues started passing it around and whispering about her royal lineage tracing back to an ancient cattle baron, a lineage that I guess she took pains to hide from her less blue-blooded peers. As it so happens, I was the one who had originally published the photo as part of a public education campaign. I partially grew up in San Francisco and I had my sources…

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Anyway, I write all this to say that The Free Press’s co-founder Nellie Bowles is about as establishment as you can possibly get. She is the definition of “The Establishment” — and her publication is one of the top on Substacks, drawing in subscriber cash and boosted by doting billionaires. How’s that for Substack being part of an anti-elite cultural shakeup?

Look, Substack might be a place where some anti-establishment types can make a living — some might make more than they ever imagined. That’s a good thing. But Substack is just a social media/blogging platform with a subscription system built in. And this platform exists within America’s political culture and is shaped America’s power dynamics. These power dynamics include an oligarchy that’s roaring to power like it was the 19th century and has been channeling its resources into media projects, flooding the new information space and tweaking their algorithms to make sure their views get heard and become dominant. That’s just how things work. That’s something to contend with. I mean, look, even the most radical anticapitalist Substacker on here is still giving 10 percent of every sub to Silicon Valley — with Wall Street cartels getting another cut with every credit card transaction. So the tech won’t save us, and that’s okay. It was never supposed to save us. That promise was always a marketing pitch from the tech companies themselves.

—Yasha

We all live in the Vampire Castle now

The internet, computers, genocide

Against Nihilism