Bari Weiss Torches Tucker Carlson and the Far-Right for ‘Erasing the Line Between Good and Evil’

LEFT: Tucker Carlson (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) RIGHT: Bari Weiss (Gilberto Tadday/TED)

Bari Weiss, the former New York Times editor and founder of The Free Press, fired a shot across the bow of Tucker Carlson and the far-right more generally on Monday.

Weiss, who began her career on the center-left but have moved to the right in recent years as came to view the Democratic Party as increasingly illiberal, argued that the far-right is “erasing the line between good and evil,” and likened this cohort to their counterparts on the far-left in an speech before the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.

After observing that Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election should not have been as surprising as it was to some, she asked “So what can we learn from this recent history?” before answering that “one big takeaway is that if a political movement does not police its ranks, does not draw lines, if it neglects to protect its borders, if it does not defend its sacred values, it cannot long endure.”

She continued:

What are those values? They include the rule of the law. The belief in the inalienable rights of each individual. That we are all created in the image of God and it is that—and not our ethnicity or our IQ score—that gives us our worth and that makes us all equal. It is a rejection of mob violence. It is the view that the West is good and that America is good, and that we deserve our heroes along with our whole complex history.

These values are not left or right. They are foundational. They are civilizational. And they have always required constant vigilance to preserve.

But that’s not the sense you get online these days—and some places offline, too—where power is celebrated instead of principle. Where power is quickly becoming the only principle.

If that continues without being challenged, we may wind up spending the next few years watching the same story we just lived through on the other side, as the far right (not the one defined by cable news, which includes most of us here today) devours what remains of the center-right.

If you aren’t aware of the dangers that come with apparent victory, if you think, it’s impossible, I believe you are as naive as the professors at Harvard who still email me to say, “Can you believe what’s happening?!” And yes I can.

So what does this group, which differs from the rest of the right in its open embrace of illiberalism, sound like? Well, it sounds an awful lot like the far left.

This group says that we are in a war—a war here at home—and that because we’re at war, because the stakes are life and death, the normal rules of the game need to be suspended.

They say those who don’t go along  with that are squishes or traitors or they were secret leftists all along. Or they accuse them of being conservative or Republican in name only, which is a version of the “false consciousness” that Marxists were so fond of telling people they suffer from.

They say that it’s not enough to return to normal or renew our old values — because that’s not an option. Instead what they say is it’s time to give the other side a taste of their own medicine.

They say we were treated cruelly, and so cruelty is the only response.

They say the thing we are trying to conserve has already been destroyed—and perhaps was an allusion to begin with.

They say that reform is a losers’ strategy, and that the whole thing needs to be burned down.

Like the far left, this group has no use for history. They judge people living or dead in the ideological light of presentism, or they simply reimagine them entirely from scratch. Just as the left defaced and desecrated statues of [Winston] Churchill, the vandals on the right desecrate his name and his memory.

Again here, it’s a question of borders. In this case, they actively erase them by erasing the line between good and evil, and between past and present—looking backward to a place where “things went wrong,” as if it’s ever possible to turn back the clock.

While the left, long sympathetic with Stalin, today sympathizes with modern-day Nazis in the form of Hamas—this new right eulogizes the original ones. And in rehabilitating Hitler they are not merely demonizing Jews, but demonizing America, Britain, and the millions who fought and died to preserve our freedoms.

All of this seems as obvious to me as the notion that a girl cannot become a boy. But a lot of people seem to have a hard time saying these things out loud right now.

The line about desecrating Churchill’s name and memory is a thinly-veiled reference to Carlson, who infamously indulged internet personality Darryl Cooper’s claim that Churchill was the “chief villain” of World War II.

During an episode of Carlson’s show last fall, the former Fox News host identified Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” shortly before Cooper trashed Churchill and whitewashed the Holocaust.

More recently, Carlson mused “So people want to tell me Churchill’s an incredible guy. Really? Well, why didn’t he save Western Civilization?”

Carlson also criticized Weiss last month, submitting that “It’s pretty obvious that the whole purpose of her organization, the Free Press and her career in journalism is to kind of soften up the right for war with Iran.” Weiss is a staunch supporter of Israel, while Carlson has been extremely critical of the world’s only Jewish-majority state, and even amplifying smears against it.