Month: October 2025

In the resignation letter announcing her departure from the Grey Lady in July 2020, the opinion journalist Bari Weiss memorably lamented that “Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.”

What Weiss meant was that the extremely progressive sensibilities of elite social media users—leftist activists, educators, journalists, Democratic campaign staffers, etc.—held undue sway over the range of views that could be printed in the opinion pages. This was a constant source of frustration for Weiss, a centrist thinker critical of the left whose mission was to bring some measure of ideological diversity to the paper. (In her letter, she bragged about having published independent and contrarian writers such as Jesse Singal, Glenn Loury, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Reason‘s own Nick Gillespie.) But in the summer of 2020, the collective set of ideologies, habits, and preferences commonly referred to as wokeness still ruled the roost.

Much has changed in the last few years, and they are about to change even more noticeably at another large media company. Weiss is set to become the editor in chief of CBS News, and parent company Paramount has also purchased The Free Press—the media company she built from scratch in the years since leaving The New York Times—for an eye-popping $150 million.

In other words, over the course of just five years, Weiss has gone from an under-appreciated mid-level editor at a hostile (to her) newspaper to the boss of a major television news company, making millions in the process. One doesn’t have to be in sympathy with Weiss’ views in order to appreciate the staggering nature of this achievement: She has pulled off an elaborate Count of Monte Cristo–style revenge, if not over The Times itself, at least over the sort of people who made her experience at The Times so miserable.

And the misery, in Weiss’ telling, was indeed thorough. She claims that her colleagues bullied and badgered her for soliciting opinions that conflicted with their own, even though this was the job The Times had hired her to perform. This tension had culminated, just one month prior to her resignation, in a full-on staff revolt over an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) that called for the National Guard to be deployed to quell post-George Floyd rioting in U.S. cities. Progressive staffers framed their opposition to the op-ed as a matter of workplace safety: They said this op-ed put the lives of black staffers at risk and constituted a form of violence. The argument was not: We question the wisdom of sending the army into cities to conduct law enforcement. The argument was: You should not be allowed to write this. In other words, it wasn’t an argument at all.

Again, back in 2020, this was par for the course. A phenomenon that previously remained confined to elite college campuses had spread throughout social media, infecting workplaces that disproportionately hired young, uber-progressive people. It hit the media industry particularly hard—The Times was hardly alone in having to reckon with junior employees suddenly making unreasonable demands for emotional safety. Twitter may have served as the “ultimate editor,” in Weiss’ telling, but Slack—the online communications platform used by many businesses, particularly media companies—was where the social-media-constructed opinions of woke youngsters took shape as internal enforcement mechanisms for groupthink.

Since at least 2016, when Donald Trump made opposition to political correctness a central aspect of his presidential campaign, many libertarian, contrarian, and otherwise heterodox figures—including Weiss herself—have warned that the thing we now call wokeness would engender massive backlash. Her elevation to the position of editor in chief of CBS News is, in some sense, one of the clearest indicators yet that wokeness in media, like wokeness everywhere else, is a loser. It is losing in the marketplace of ideas, as well as the actual marketplace: Entertainment companies that once fretted about offending activists by platforming un-woke comedians have abandoned this fear. Moreover, with Trump back in charge, companies are more worried about offending a very thin-skinned president and a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that is eager to please him.

Indeed, the recent kerfuffle over Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation is a reminder that backlashes can generate much-needed correction, but they can also go completely off the rails and bring to power a political figure that has no interest in ideological consistency with respect to free speech. Trump proclaims that his will be the most pro-free speech administration in U.S. history, and then he threatens to immediately arrest flag-burners for engaging in one of the most obviously protected forms of First Amendment expression. One can certainly think the various components of wokeness—the cancelations of provocative speakers, haranguing of classmates and coworkers over imprecise use of language, and so on—were extremely annoying and reflective of an illiberal social trend without cosigning the Trump remedy. Patriotic correctness is also annoying.

Some will likely see Weiss’ conquest of CBS, not as some legitimate victory for anti-wokeness, but rather yet another humiliating example of a major media organization sucking up to Trump. Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media required the president’s approval, and Trump had sued 60 Minutes, one of CBS’s flagship news programs, over its Kamala Harris interview.

Viewing this development through a Trump lens is reductive, however. Weiss isn’t Trump or MAGA, and though the mainstream media is already describing CBS News as facing a hostile takeover from a “Trump-friendly” journalist, The Free Press does run plenty of criticism of Trump and his movement, particularly on foreign policy. Their sensibilities are far more neoconservative than MAGA’s, and the publication’s uncompromising support for Israel is out of step with many of the right’s more popular online figures these days: Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, Joe Rogan, and others. (To its credit, The Free Press does regularly feature debates on this subject, including this one between Coleman Hughes and Dave Smith.)

For her part, Weiss has announced no specific plans to radically rebrand or reformat CBS News. In a letter to all employees of the company, she outlined ten “core journalistic values” she thinks the company should exemplify under her leadership. They are all inoffensive and non-ideological. Even so, CBS News veterans are anonymously telling media reporters that they are “encouraging” Weiss not to interfere with 60 Minutes or CBS News Sunday Morning. That seems more than a little delusional on their parts.

The post Bari Weiss Has Won the War on Wokeness in Media appeared first on Reason.com.

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The state of Illinois and the city of Chicago filed suit against the Trump administration on Monday, arguing that the Defense Department’s deployment of both Illinois and Texas National Guard members to Chicago is unlawful and unconstitutional. 

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Illinois, comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth federalized 300 members of the Illinois National Guard on Saturday and an additional 400 troops from the state of Texas on Sunday. Both deployments are believed to be going to Chicago and are opposed by Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

“The Trump Administration’s Department of War gave me an ultimatum: call up your troops, or we will,” Pritzer wrote in a statement after learning of the Illinois guard deployment, calling the action “outrageous and un-American.” “We must now start calling this what it is: [President Donald] Trump’s Invasion,” Pritzker wrote in response to the Texas National Guard’s preparation for deployment to Illinois.

Illinois’ complaint closely resembles Oregon’s lawsuit filed last week, asserting that the Trump administration’s action does not meet the prerequisites necessary—including foreign invasion, domestic rebellion, and inability to execute federal law—to federalize the National Guard, violates the Posse Comitatus Act, and violates the 10th Amendment by “infring[ing] on Illinois’s sovereignty and right to self-governance.” 

Illinois is also hoping for a similar outcome as Oregon’s case. On Saturday, Judge Karin Immergut ruled in favor of the Beaver State, granting a temporary restraining order against the federalization of Oregon National Guard members and holding that plaintiffs were “likely to succeed on their claim that the President’s federalization of the Oregon National Guard exceeded his statutory authority” and “that the President exceeded his constitutional authority and violated the Tenth Amendment.” “Whether we choose to follow what the Constitution mandates,” she continued, “goes to the heart of what it means to live under the rule of law in the United States.”  

Immergut issued an additional temporary restraining order on Sunday, blocking the federalization of any out-of-state National Guard members from deployment to Oregon. 

Now, plaintiffs argue the same rationale articulated by Immergut should apply to circumstances in Illinois, where Trump has signaled interest in sending troops to “crime ridden” Chicago for weeks, despite Pritzker’s insistence that no emergency exists. The animus between Trump and Illinois, Chicago, and its leaders, the complaint points out, has a long history, showing that the decision to deploy troops “was made long before recent events, and Trump’s true plan is impermissibly to use federalized national guard as a crime-fighting force.” 

Just last week, Trump called Pritzker “incompetent” and “stupid” in a speech in front of hundreds of generals and admirals gathered at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, where he proposed using large Democrat-run American cities—like Chicago—as “training grounds” for the military. 

Immergut’s ruling against the deployment of troops provides a check on Trump’s authority over Oregon’s affairs. Hopefully, the Illinois court will also initiate another strong check on the president’s politically motivated power grab. “The brave men and women who serve in our national guards must not be used as political props,” Pritzker wrote in a statement. “This is a moment where every American must speak up and help stop this madness.”

The post Trump Sued—Again—for Unlawful and Unconstitutional Deployment of National Guard appeared first on Reason.com.

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Justice Amy Coney Barrett has been giving lots of interviews summer and fall as she promotes her best-selling book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution. Many of these interviews cover what is now well-trodden ground. Reading them all gets repetitive.

An exception is this recent interview by Jan Crawford of CBS News which digs a little more deeply into Justice Barrett’s perspective about how she approaches her work on the Court (and much else).

Among the topics they discuss is how Justice Barrett feels about being protested, criticized, and potentially threatened. From the interview:

For Barrett, protesters have become routine, another logistical wrinkle in her everyday life, much like the ones who regularly gather at her home outside Washington, D.C., where she lives with her husband and younger children. What surprises her, she told me in a wide-ranging interview in her chambers late last month, is how she can let it roll off her back.

“If I had imagined before I was on the Court, how I would react to knowing that I was being protested, that would have seemed like a big deal, like, ‘oh, my gosh, I’m being protested,'” she says. “But now I have the ability to be like, ‘Oh, okay, well, are the entrances blocked?’ I just feel very businesslike about it. It doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t disrupt my emotions.” . . .

As Crawford notes, criticism of the Court has led to threats on the justices themselves. The individual who sought to kill Justice Kavanaugh was just sentenced (to a paltry eight years), and there appears to have been a threat to several justices at this past weekend’s “Red Mass.”

I asked Barrett if she is ever afraid. Her response was immediate and emphatic: “I’m not afraid.”

“You can’t live your life in fear,” she continued. “And I think people who threaten — the goal is to cause fear. And I’m not afraid. I’m not going to reward threats with their intended reaction.”

That kind of mental discipline and self control, even in the face of threats and extreme criticism, reflects an outlook that has guided the 53-year-old Barrett much of her life.

Given the threats justices face in our current moment, criticism from commentators would seem to be small potatoes.

Her critics aren’t convinced, but Barrett seems unfazed by the attacks on her judgment or her character. In our conversation, and in multiple interviews with those who know her, she comes across as someone with a strong sense of self and an equally clear view on the right way to interpret the Constitution. Unlike some justices, she says she doesn’t monitor what journalists and law professors and politicians say about the Court. She has seen them get it wrong. It doesn’t matter to her.

“If I could have, especially as a 16-year-old, imagined that I would not care or be impervious to being criticized and mocked, I would have been very surprised,” she says. “And so I am glad, because I think this would be a miserable job if you let yourself care, if you let yourself be affected.”

There is lots more in the interview. One other fun tidbit is this discussion of how she came to consider herself an originalist.

In our interview, Barrett said she was drawn to originalism when she read Justice Scalia’s opinions in a constitutional law class during her second year at Notre Dame Law School. She said she was frustrated after a first-year criminal law class, reading liberal decisions of the Warren Court and finding them to be “unmoored.” Scalia’s opinions, with his originalist framework, made sense to her.

“I think I am different in style than Justice Scalia. I don’t think I’m different in substance,” she said. “I think one thing that was important to Justice Scalia is fidelity to his analytical framework, so fidelity to textualism and originalism, even when it led to places that he didn’t want to go.”

The full interview is worth a read. It is available here.

The post Justice Barrett Is "Not Afraid" appeared first on Reason.com.

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The last 40 times or so that I was at the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, some portion of it was being set on fire, pummeled with debris and homemade explosive devices, or both. It was also surrounded by a chain-link fence, which hundreds of people would nightly try to shake off its moorings. This was because President Donald Trump had, in the summer of 2020, federal troops occupying the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse for more than a month.

Five years later, all is quiet on the morning of October 3, with fewer than a dozen protesters outside the newly sleek courthouse, holding small pre-made signs that read, “GUARD: GO HOME!”

Now, Trump is once again sending federal troops to Portland—and locals are still objecting. But whereas Portland’s 2020 summer of rage, which I covered extensively for Reason, was in many ways a lawless place—including the murder in cold blood of a Trump supporter by an antifa activist (himself shot dead by federal officers five days later)—the pretext this time is thin to nonexistent. A few dozen people have been protesting nightly outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility two miles south of downtown—so uneventfully that one reporter (not naming names) nearly resorted to playing Wordle on her phone.

This is not to say there have not been fracases; there have been rocks and sticks thrown at ICE agents and the shining of lasers into officers’ eyes. According to recent reporting in The Oregonian, there have been 29 arrests during ICE protests this year, 18 of them in June. Still, most nights see a few dozen protesters at most. Comparing this to the 2,000-plus nightly protesters in 2020 is not just apples to oranges; it’s apples to an apple-flavored sugar crystal on an Apple Jack.

This clearly doesn’t matter to Trump, who has shown little to no interest in what’s actually happening, instead relying on historical memory of the city’s fiery days to animate the proposition that “war-ravaged” Portland must be made to heel.

“Unless they’re playing false tapes, this looks like World War II. Your place is burning down,” Trump claims to have told Oregon’s Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek when she asked him not to federalize and deploy 200 members of the Oregon National Guard.

It would be easy to find rough images from 2020 and pretend they were taken yesterday. But there are also people willing to provide current images and distort them for dramatic effect. Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin was on the ground last week and zoomed in on a protester lighting a small American flag on fire; the implication being: anarchy reigns in Portland. Melugin went on to show independent journalist and reliable Trump-stan Nick Sortor grabbing that burning flag from the protester and stomping out the flames.

The Portland police arrested Sortor, he claimed for no reason (one might surmise for grabbing someone’s property from them), which was enough for Attorney General Pam Bondi, who somehow immediately knew about Sortor’s arrest, to demand an investigation of the Portland Police Bureau. Dutiful Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon got right on that, posting on X, “Portland: it’s FO time. Buckle up.” Sortor also posted that Bondi “personally called me to deliver this news.” Maybe she made him some milk and cookies, too?

Back to the courthouse, where the Oregon Department of Justice asked federal Judge Karin Immergut (who, strangely, I attended kindergarten with but have not seen since) to temporarily block Trump from federalizing and deploying Oregon National Guard troops. The courtroom and an overflow room were filled with hundreds of spectators as the state argued that sending troops to Oregon violated both the Tenth Amendment and the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids members of the military from conducting domestic law enforcement. 

Trump’s lawyers claimed that the response was “a tailored federalization that is proportionate to the threat here in the Portland area.” Each side debated the meaning of “rebellion” and whether it mattered if it were already happening or if “a danger of a rebellion is enough” to merit sending troops. The State provided data that showed the Portland police did not need assistance and that ICE agents had not requested back-up. Trump’s lawyers mentioned the tragic recent shooting at the ICE field office in Dallas, Texas, and wondered why Oregon was uppity about 200 Guards; it’s not like when Trump sent 4,000 Guards to Los Angeles.

“This case involves one of the most dramatic infringements on state sovereignty in Oregon’s history. And in our view,” the State concluded “it is based largely on a fictional narrative.” Immergut granted the state’s motion for a temporary restraining order for 14 days. 

On Sunday morning, Trump ordered the deployment of the California National Guard to Portland, which California Gov. Gavin Newsom condemned and threatened legal action against. When Trump announced he would also deploy the Texas National Guard, Immergut had had enough, calling the move a “direct contravention” of her ruling and broadening her order to forbid “the relocation, federalization or deployment of members of the National Guard of any state or the District of Columbia in the state of Oregon.” 

I left the courthouse on Friday, thinking about the distinction between fictional narratives and reality, about how far some journalists, including those I’d previously respected, seemed willing to go to distort the narrative, and how eager they were to actively cheer for a side.

“Who are you?” a woman outside the courthouse asked. She’d seen my press pass and wanted to know if I knew what the courthouse looked like five years ago (boy, did I). She talked about how nobody wanted a repeat of 2020, and told me her concern was federal forces returning, which is why she was out there holding a “GUARD: GO HOME!” sign.

She was nevertheless optimistic—cheerful even—and asked if I’d heard about the emergency Naked Bike Ride Portlanders were planning as a form of protest. 

“It’s nice now, isn’t it?” she said of the courthouse. Maybe it was latent PTSD on my part, but I thought I heard a note of wistfulness—as if she were willing it to stay that way.

The post Trump's Troops Return to a City That Moved On: Dispatch From Portland appeared first on Reason.com.

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