Is Bari Weiss Truly Against Cultural Marxism?

This excerpt comes from False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America, available from Regnery Publishing everywhere books are sold June 18.

Bari Weiss has been waking up for a few years. The liberal columnist famously quit The New York Times in 2020 over its venom against free speech, then started The Free Press, which has 250,000 subscribers. Subscriptions are $8 per month or $80 per year.

Weiss, who attended Columbia University as a “theater kid,” can’t unsee the reality that intersectionalism creates “a caste system” that labels Jews like her “oppressors” on account of their race. Her lifelong positioning among the U.S. ruling class has allowed Weiss to see, earlier than many others, that cultural Marxism’s doctrine of intersectionalism is not only incoherent but totalitarian.

Being targeted as an oppressor for her race prompted Weiss to argue publicly for “ending DEI” and for people from all political persuasions to “fight for the West.” Not only religious and ethnic minorities like Jews but also sexual minorities should do the same, she argues, because cultural Marxism threatens us all.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists entered Israel and beheaded babies, raped women, captured 200 hostages, and murdered 1,400 people. Weeks later, Weiss gave a speech to the Federalist Society, an organization of nonleftist lawyers. Leftists openly joining Islamists in celebrations of terrorism all over the globe motivated a stirring speech. Weiss noted the crude Cultural Marxist calculus that slots people into groups based on sex, sexual behavior, and race, then labels people “oppressed” and “oppressor” based on membership in those categories.

“Their moral calculus is as crude as you can imagine: They see Israelis and Jews as powerful and successful and ‘colonizers,’ so they are bad; Hamas is weak and coded as people of color, so they are good…,” she said. “This is the ideology of vandalism in the true sense of the word — the Vandals sacked Rome. It is the ideology of nihilism. It knows nothing of how to build. It knows only how to tear down and to destroy.”

Referring to her sexual preferences, Weiss recognized that some in the audience “do not believe my marriage should have been legal,” but she brushed that disagreement aside for a greater purpose. “In the fight for the West, I know who my allies are. And my allies are not the people who, looking at facile, external markers of my identity, one might imagine them to be. My allies are people who believe that America is good. That the West is good. That human beings — not cultures — are created equal and that saying so is essential to knowing what we are fighting for. America and our values are worth fighting for — and that is the priority of the day.”

These are stirring and true observations. Weiss’s journey of discovering the truths to guide her actions surely mirrors that of many other Americans, queer and not. Yet, like all of us, she has a lot further to go.

Some aspects of Weiss’s personal life suggest that she doesn’t fully understand what “ending DEI” and “fighting for the West” require. In 2016 she divorced her husband of three years, and in 2021 she obtained a marriage license with a woman. In the Federalist Society speech, Weiss celebrated speaking in a series dedicated to the wife of a man who fought for homosexual licenses at the Supreme Court.

Parallel to libertarian pundits Guy Benson and Dave Rubin, Weiss and her female partner bought reproductive parts to generate a child in 2022. That means she chose to create a fatherless child, although lacking a father is perhaps the chief risk factor for almost every disadvantage in life. That’s not just because fathers provide revenue. It’s because fathers provide a sex-specific form of parenting that every child needs and deserves in order to thrive.

Since bringing a child into existence is impossible without sperm, which only men can generate, it also means that Weiss has made use of a man’s reproductive parts and functions without an intimate relationship with — or acknowledgment of — the person attached to them. She has excluded this man from his child’s life. An outspoken feminist, Weiss might question someone who exploited a woman in exactly the same way that her journey to motherhood exploited a man.

Or she might not. When The Free Press published an article on “the surrogacy boom,” Weiss tweeted it with this quotation: “‘I’m not a handmaid,’ said Ashley Mareko, who has given birth to three surrogate babies and is about to do it again. She’s made $200,000, which has enabled her to pay off student debt, cover a mortgage, and buy a camper. ‘I’m a businesswoman.’”

It was unfair to take baby Weiss’s father away before she was born, and that injustice will matter to her for her entire life. No amount of money can make up for this deliberately inflicted primal loss. The same is true of the motherless children Benson and Rubin acquired to fill the deficit created by their failure to commit to their children’s mothers through marriage.

A father or mother deficit is one of the chief causes of systemic American social problems including crime, addiction, poverty, depression, early sexual activity, low achievement, and susceptibility to predators. Indeed, the decline of marriage and the Marxist denigration of men are chief sources of our culture’s decline. You only have to name any effect of Cultural Marxism to see almost instantly that stronger and better men and women would end or reduce it.

So while she speaks true and admirable words repudiating Marxist politics, in her own life, like other alleged anti-Marxists Rubin and Benson, Weiss enacts those same politics. Despite spending her entire professional life chronicling sexual politics, like most in our society Weiss is still blind to the full implications.

Weiss is clearly open to changing her mind and adopting counter-culture positions. So can others who share her current sexual preferences, and those sympathetic to them. If we truly want to save Western civilization, which protects us all, we must refuse to perpetuate Marxism no matter how much we want a child in our arms.