The End of Intelligent Debate Ft. Bari Weiss

On the Terminal Phase of Political Movements

Pericles Attends the Lectures of Aspasia, Edward Francis Burney

Editor’s note: Two pieces from me this week, I know, it’s a lot. But I have a solution for the frequency, so check out the note at the end.

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The distance between Nathan Birnbaum and Bari Weiss measures more than a century of time. It also maps the intellectual collapse of a political movement from its capacity to produce genuine thinkers who could abandon their own creations when conscience demanded it to its current dependence on propagandists who cannot distinguish between defending an idea and enforcing conformity. Weiss’s appointment to lead CBS News, as Today in Tabs noted with cutting precision about her “failing upward for a decade,” represents not individual achievement but the terminal phase of Zionism’s transformation from a contested answer to the Jewish question into an orthodoxy that can no longer tolerate its own questioning.

When Birnbaum coined the term “Zionism” around 1890, the movement contained multitudes of possibility. Cultural Zionists like Ahad Ha’am argued for spiritual renewal without statehood. Labor Zionists imagined socialist redemption through agricultural work. Birnbaum himself would abandon the movement entirely after serving as secretary-general of the First Zionist Congress, developing instead his concept of Golus-Nationalism that saw diaspora not as exile awaiting redemption but as authentic Jewish civilization deserving cultivation where it already flourished. The movement’s early decades produced genuine intellectuals capable of reconsidering fundamental premises when reality challenged theory.

When it became clear that Israel intended to maintain permanent control while outsourcing population management to Palestinian subcontractors in the 1990s, a major transformation began. Permanent control required different kinds of defenders than earlier phases of the Zionist project. No longer could intellectuals pretend to wrestle with contradictions between democratic values and ethnic domination. The contradiction had been resolved in favor of domination and this required propagandists who could present this resolution as compatible with liberal values through increasingly tortured logic.

Bari Weiss emerged from this historical moment with her Columbia activism in the mid-2000s representing a new model of Zionist advocacy that substituted emotional manipulation for intellectual engagement. The campaign to destroy Professor Joseph Massad’s career at Columbia University demonstrated the shift perfectly while foreshadowing the broader assault on academic freedom that would define the Trump era. Rather than engage with his scholarly analysis of colonialism, Weiss and her allies manufactured melodrama about victimized students to transform academic debate into administrative warfare.

The goal wasn’t winning arguments but shutting down the spaces where such arguments could occur through administrative warfare. Weiss would later brand herself as champion of free speech through The Free Press, apparently without irony or shame about her role in pioneering the very tactics she now claims to oppose.

The Toady Who Couldn’t Define Toady

This substitution of smear for scholarship became her signature move, most embarrassingly exposed during her appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast when she casually denounced Tulsi Gabbard as an “Assad toady” before revealing under the gentlest questioning that she had no idea what the words she deployed actually meant. The fumbling attempt to define “toady” while on air, her confusion about whether it related to toads as animals, the visible panic as she realized she’d been caught trafficking in accusations she’d never bothered to understand, all of this crystallized in a single moment what her entire career represents. She wasn’t analyzing or thinking or even arguing but simply repeating attacks she’d absorbed through the same social networks that would eventually fund her media ventures.

The incident exposed someone who had risen through American journalism’s most prestigious institutions not by developing expertise or analytical capability but by serving as a reliable conduit for predetermined narratives about who deserves destruction and who deserves defense. When asked to perform actual thought rather than recitation, she collapsed entirely, revealing that behind the confident denunciations and theatrical resignations lay an intellectual vacuum so complete that she couldn’t define the very words she used to destroy others’ reputations.

This tactical shift reflects a deeper intellectual exhaustion within Zionism itself, given her position as one of its leading intellectuals. The movement that once generated fierce debates between political and cultural visions, between territorialists and Ugandists, between religious and secular conceptualizations, can no longer produce new ideas. It can only enforce existing ones with increasing vehemence. The self-description as “Zionist fanatic” that Weiss embraces would have embarrassed earlier generations who understood that fanaticism represented thought’s absence rather than its intensity.

The financial architecture supporting ventures like The Free Press reveals how contemporary Zionism sustains itself not through popular conviction or even rigorous thought but through plutocratic subsidy. Silicon Valley’s $150 million valuation for Weiss’s newsletter makes sense only as the price of narrative control during a period when younger Americans increasingly view Israel through the lens of settler colonialism rather than democratic refuge. The investment buys compliance dressed up as journalism. It funds enforcement disguised as investigation.

The historical parallel that illuminates this trajectory comes from other movements that shifted from revolutionary promise to reactionary defense. French colonialism in Algeria produced similar intellectual degradation, moving from sophisticated civilizational arguments in the nineteenth century to crude racism by the 1950s as the project’s contradictions became undeniable. Apartheid South Africa’s final years saw its defenders abandon complex theories about separate development for simple warnings about chaos and barbarism. Each case demonstrated how ideologies approaching terminus require cruder advocates as sophisticated thinkers recognize the moral costs of continued allegiance.

Shamelessness as Career Qualification

What distinguishes Weiss’s particular form of advocacy is its perfect calibration to an era where shamelessness functions as qualification rather than disqualification. The ability to maintain contradictory positions without embarrassment such as championing free speech while excluding Palestinian voices or claiming victimization while enforcing orthodoxy are capacities that make her ideal for a movement that can no longer defend itself through reasoned argument. Her rise through American media institutions demonstrates how effectively she performs this function with each failure upward confirming her utility to those requiring someone who will never experience the crisis of conscience that led complex thinkers like Birnbaum away from his own creation.

A major American news organization will now be led by someone whose entire career consists of shutting down debate rather than fostering it and enforcing conformity rather than investigating truth. The institution that once employed Edward R. Murrow will now be directed by someone who treats journalism as enforcement rather than inquiry. Her philosophy declares certain questions off-limits.

From Birnbaum to Weiss, An Ideology’s Terminal Phase

As Israel’s actions grow more extreme and its justifications more threadbare, the quality of its defenders will continue deteriorating. This isn’t an accident but a necessity. Sophisticated thinkers cannot indefinitely defend what daily evidence contradicts. Only those immune to contradiction’s discomfort, who experience no tension between proclaimed values and actual practice, can perform the ideological labor that late-stage Zionism requires. Weiss exemplifies this immunity and capacity to observe horror while insisting on its necessity.

The distance from Birnbaum to Weiss thus marks not just temporal passage but intellectual collapse. Where once stood thinkers capable of creating and abandoning movements according to conscience, now stand functionaries who cannot distinguish between thought and repetition. This degradation reveals more about Zionism’s current condition than any external critique could accomplish. When a movement can only produce someone like Bari Weiss, it announces its own intellectual death even while its institutional power appears to peak.

The appointment to CBS represents not Israel’s strength but its desperate requirement for ever more shameless advocates as reality diverges ever further from mythology. The Zionist movement that once attracted brilliant minds seeking solutions to genuine dilemmas now attracts mediocrities seeking advancement through conformity. This transformation from intellectual ferment to enforced orthodoxy traces the arc not just of Zionism but of ideologies generally as they approach their historical terminus, requiring not thinkers but functionaries, not critics but propagandists, not Birnbaums but Weisses.

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