Bari Weiss Is Supposed to Do the News Now (Half the Answer #87, with Radley Balko)

Why has Bari Weiss, a liberal-presenting Trump sycophant, been handed the reins to CBS News, one of our most prestigious news organizations? What does her time running the Free Press, a website that publishes commentary, tell us about how she thinks about "doing the f--king news," which is to say, journalism? Radley Balko joins Trent and Caitlin to explain what he found when he dug into the work of one Free Press "reporter" who whitewashed Trump's refugee policy and demonized resettlement NGOs.

Bari Weiss Is Supposed to Do the News Now (with Radley Balko)

Podcast Episode · Half the Answer · June 11 · 1h 30m

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Resources

"How Bari Weiss's Free Press Laundered MAGA Talking Points About Refugees" https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/how-bari-weisss-free-press-laundered

"Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces" https://bookshop.org/a/115699/9781541774537

"The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South" https://bookshop.org/a/115699/9781541774056

Last Week Tonight: https://youtube.com/watch?si=azsf62uWi2915K-6&v=gieTx_P6INQ&feature=youtu.be

Academic freedom: https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-falsely-denies-her-years-of-attacks-on-the-academic-freedom-of-arab-scholars-who-criticize-israel/

"Inside Bari Weiss's Hostile Takeover of CBS News" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/01/26/inside-bari-weisss-hostile-takeover-of-cbs-news

In Bed With the Right: https://www.patreon.com/posts/152713931?collection=1409249

Transcript

**Trent R. Nelson [00:00:30]**
Well, happy days, they are here again. The skies above are clear again — but we're still dealing with the President, so that's something to take into consideration as well. Well, you know that understanding the question is half of an answer, and this is, of course, Half the Answer, with your co-hosts Trent R. Nelson and Caitlin M. Green. And well, you know what each of us gets into: historian and philosophy, and making strange jokes about the past. And Caitlin, well, she is a mom. She is an electric harmonica enjoyer. She is a linguist. And Uncle Trent is what the kids call a savage.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:04]**
You monster. That's where my research has been, is on things like cancel culture — what to do with your sort of epistemological heroes when they go rogue and act weird and are mean to you, and then you have to deal with that, right? So Bari Weiss has been very into that, right? She is a millennial queen, just like myself.

You monster. I don't know what Trent did to me. Okay — Trent, he has mailed my children a present, which includes a pretend... it's not... I don't even know how to describe it. It's a harmonica, but it is electronic. You blow into it and the air has nowhere to go — you're simply triggering an electronic device, and it makes a harmonica sound. And it's Bluey branded, so you push a button and it also plays the Bluey theme song. So guess what I've been listening to for the last full 24 hours?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:02:00]**
And certainly the electric harmonica. I saw it, and I said, who doesn't need this as a child? Who doesn't need this? And I went ahead, I threw caution to the wind.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:02:15]**
They're so happy, you're right. It's been an invaluable addition to their lives. They're so pleased with it. Thank you for destroying my peace.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:02:25]**
Well, absolutely — with friends like this, who needs enemies, right? Caitlin, the discussions have been... they have been continuing until morale improves. Morale is still low, so they continue. To be sure, each and every week we are just graced by brilliance and by insight and by lots of information, and this week is no different, except that we've never had this person on before. Caitlin, tell us, who are we chatting with today, and what are we talking about?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:02:50]**
Oh my gosh, so this is somebody whose universe we have been flirting with for quite a while, actually. He first reported the Clay Jackson story, about the secret police showing up at his house and intimidating him after he helped somebody with some immigration questions, and we love his work. We've cited his work. I am, of course, speaking of Radley Balko — journalist and Quattrone Center journalism fellow, author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, co-author of The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist. His podcast is called Collateral Damage. Check that out as soon as you're done with this episode, of course. Radley, how are you?

**Radley Balko [00:03:20]**
I'm great. Thanks for having me on. Sorry it took so long to get this going.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:03:30]**
You know, sometimes schedules and things are hard, and sometimes — I'll be honest — I get starstruck, and I don't reach out when I should to people that I like to read. But here we are. No time like the present, right?

**Radley Balko [00:03:45]**
Yeah, I apologize. I think we've tried to do this a number of times, and yeah, you know how it goes. Just swamped. Well, happy to be here.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:03:55]**
You're a busy fella. Yes.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:04:00]**
Yeah, so you just published a piece on the Free Press and Bari Weiss, and so I thought that would be a good opportunity to bring you on and get a perspective from somebody who's been really in the weeds looking at the content and the messaging of that particular publication. I don't know what to call it — it's essentially a Substack. It's a Substack with a big bank account, basically.

And I've been interested in Bari Weiss as a character for a while because of my involvement in the cancel culture panic discourse. Four years older than me — she was born in 1984 or something. She is a prominent figure in the sort of anti-woke sphere, right? She went to Columbia and got straight to trying to get rid of professors who were a little too pro-Palestine for her tastes, at which point she, of course, formed the ironically named Columbians for Academic Freedom, where she's like, you know what's true peak academic freedom? Attacking professors for their opinions. I think that's where we're at. And it's boring to talk about hypocrisy, because hypocrites don't care, right? But that's who she is, I think, at her core: a hypocrite.

And she went blogging for a while, she did smaller jobs, and then got kind of hooked on to Bret Stephens, where he took her to — where did he take her? Washington Post? I can't even — Wall Street Journal. He took her to the Wall Street Journal. He left the Wall Street Journal for the New York Times, and she came with him. And they just had an illustrious career, I would say, doing opinions for those two publications. Did you get to look into kind of the things that she wrote for those places?

**Radley Balko [00:09:19]**
I haven't, and I should say my kind of intersection with the Free Press over the last couple of years has been limited to where they've written something that's come across my feed because it's on my beat. As somebody who comes from kind of libertarian circles, and who covers policing and civil liberties and the criminal justice system, the last several years have been interesting, because for the first part of my career, my audience was Cato and Reason magazine, and there's a lot of bleed-over with the right. I think I wrote some things for, like, National Review over the years, and I had a column at Fox News. And this was kind of during the era, the Obama years, where there was this consensus building on criminal justice reform — the idea that the system was broken and needed to be fixed. And that all changed under Trump.

And so for me it was sort of interesting watching as people who had followed and supported my work over the years were now being, I would say, manipulated by the MAGA media ecosystem. I remember first seeing it with Breonna Taylor, where the Kentucky Attorney General — Daniel Cameron, I want to say — had a press conference where he pushed back on a lot of what was out there about Breonna Taylor, and it turns out he was lying. He was just flat lying. But I would get all these messages and DMs from people who had supported my work for a long time, being like, you have to answer for this, right? And all of a sudden these issues — the overuse of SWAT teams and police abuse and police accountability — became culture war issues all over again.

And so the first time I really started noticing what the Free Press was doing was when a lot of those types of people were sending me this Coleman Hughes column about Derek Chauvin and this documentary, The Fall of Minneapolis. And so I started picking that apart, and it ended up being an insanely long, like, 25,000-word series — but it was kind of using the Free Press and Hughes's column as a vehicle to pick apart this documentary that was really getting a lot of momentum on the right. And the reaction from Weiss — I personally think that my critique was pretty thorough and devastating, that it demanded some sort of correction, because a lot of it was just flat-out wrong. And instead, Weiss invited me onto a podcast to debate Coleman Hughes. And that was a weird response. I mean, this is the right—

**Caitlin M. Green [00:09:30]**
This is a universal experience, right? I've had this as well, where you try to explain to the world how person A has misrepresented facts, is doing some kind of weird ideological work, is tricking people, whatever it is — and then they come to you, or their advocates come to you, and are like, you guys should really have a discussion. Like, I want to hear you guys debate this out in this contemporaneous discussion that's just raw, recorded, spoken-word stuff. And it's like, what about me made you think that that's the medium in which I would ever want to address something as complicated as a series of false claims? Like, I just laid it out for you.

**Radley Balko [00:10:17]**
Yeah, and that's great, right? He's a debater, and so he's good at muddying the waters. And so it's like, my debate is what I wrote, right? That's my position. And I ended up doing it anyway — but not for her, for Reason. And I shouldn't have done it, because it was exactly what I expected. It turned into just — well, if anything, I actually thought the Reason moderators — I think they were really hostile towards him, and I think they agreed with me, or at least it seemed like that's the way the whole thing went off. But because they came off that way, it looked like a bunch of people ganging up on him, and the optics were kind of strange.

But they made some very, very fundamental mistakes, and instead of correcting it, the Free Press — which positions itself as this truth-teller that's going to hold the legacy media accountable — they turn it into this squishy sort of, well, you know, just two people disagreeing. Not, we got this shit really wrong. And then Coleman wrote a response to me that itself was riddled with errors, and so I pointed out the errors in that, and then at that point I was kind of sick of the whole thing. But again, no correction. And this has kind of been the way they've been handling it — they do run corrections, but they tend to be along the lines of, we misspelled this person's name. And it's always touted as, hey, look at us being accountable. And it's like, well, no — when you get the really fundamental stuff wrong, that's when it's most important to make corrections.

So anyway, that was my first interaction with them. And then in the Trump era, I've basically educated myself on the immigration issue, because it's really how we're seeing policing change and be weaponized more than ever before at the federal level. I've spent a lot of time interviewing lots of people — I visit a lot of offices of immigration attorneys and talk to them in person. And so what happened was, there was a CBS interview with a Free Press reporter that crossed my Facebook feed, and already I was like, okay — Bari Weiss runs the Free Press, she now runs CBS, and I've got a Free Press reporter touting her article on CBS. And I watched it, and it was very similar to what I encountered before with the Derek Chauvin stuff, which is just kind of a laundering of MAGA conspiracy talking points, but in a way that made it more palatable for its intended audience.

So — this is a really long and rambling answer to your question — but I'm not sort of on the Bari Weiss beat. I haven't familiarized myself with her body of work. It's just happened to intersect with my own beat a couple of times, and I was really taken aback at what I saw in their coverage.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:10:43]**
Yeah, but I can see why you would think, like, oh, Reason will be a little more — pardon the phrase — reasonable, right? Right, like it was rigged. I think you and I have adjacent spheres of Bari Weiss knowledge, right? Where you know about her when she comes into the criminal justice area, and I know about her when she comes into the academia, campus, anti-woke area. And so we each know one side of her, at least.

**Radley Balko [00:14:33]**
Yeah — and I have lots of things in common with her, and people who I know who write for the Free Press don't seem at all to be fazed by these pretty egregious journalistic sins on her part, which I'm sort of perplexed by. I'm not going to name names, but people can probably figure it out.

So yeah, it seems pretty clear to me what's happening — that this is basically an attempt to launder MAGA and far-right talking points in a way that makes them more acceptable to a mainstream audience. And the fact that people who should see what's going on don't is pretty frustrating. And they have their sights on CNN now too, right, with the Warner Brothers merger, so it's all going to be put into that ecosystem.

And look, this is again one of those moments in the Trump era where it just reaches out and slaps you in the face and says, how can anybody think this is okay? I mean, Bari Weiss co-founded her anti-woke university with Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir — which is the company whose tech is driving the mass deportations campaign. And Sacks and the other guy — what's his name, the other billionaire tech AI guy — both of them were funders to get the Free Press up and off the ground, right? And they're now both advisors on tech and AI to the Trump administration, and I think recently they both had actual positions within the administration. So you've got this person taking over these massive media companies who has no experience as a reporter — and what experience she does have as a reporter, with the Twitter Files, was kind of a joke in the way that all that was reported out — and has all these clear connections.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:14:58]**
Yeah. I can't believe I forgot she was involved in the Twitter Files. I'm so sorry. I can't believe I forgot — there's so much about Bari, and I just was like, no Twitter Files. That's her too. And another thing where, as soon as you look at it with any kind of magnifying glass, you're like, well, this doesn't make any sense.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:15:00]**
You know, it's interesting how the Free Press sort of operates alongside CBS. It reminds me a lot of how the President and Fox News and these other conservative sites sort of back each other up consistently — the President says something that Fox News reported the President saying, but because it was reported on television, for the followers and for the people interested, there's sort of this validation that is created. And I think the Ellisons would very much like that same sort of atmosphere with CBS eventually, whereby we have the Free Press validating CBS, and then government officials will validate those things because they shine well on them, and then the Free Press might report that, and then CBS picks that up, and it just continues to give itself its own credence.

**Radley Balko [00:17:24]**
What's that?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:17:19]**
Yeah, it's just nonsense, yeah.

**Radley Balko [00:17:40]**
Well, I mean, the Twitter Files is — Elon Musk came to these journalists and handpicked the information that he wanted them to report on, and did not give them access to the wider pool of information. That in itself, as Matt Taibbi himself wrote about ten years ago — when your source comes to you and is giving you hand-selected bits of information without letting you see the entire file, that should immediately be a red flag that this source is not an honest broker of information. And yet they all ran with it anyway.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:18:10]**
I'm telling you, Matt Taibbi's got to read Matt Taibbi, because that's some good advice right there. But what are you gonna do? So, can we jump into this article, into the Substack? Because I found it really, really fascinating, and it sort of bridged — you start with Bari Weiss and Scott Pelley and the firing and sort of set the scene, but I really found the explanation about the asylum system to be really, really fortifying, really, really necessary. Let's just go into it like we're reading it. What can you tell us about all that, sir?

**Radley Balko [00:18:42]**
So some of the articles that jumped out at me were about a program called the Refugee Resettlement Program. This is a program — it does not work with undocumented people who are here. It doesn't work with people who show up at the border to request asylum, with one exception, which would be unaccompanied children, which we can talk about later. What it deals with is people who are overseas who are being persecuted and who apply to the program — usually from a refugee camp in another country, a neighboring country, sometimes from their home country. They're extensively vetted. The vetting process takes over a year, usually. And then they're accepted into this program, and once they are, they are then sponsored by an NGO — there are about ten NGOs that contract with the government on this — and that NGO then arranges for them to come to the US. They meet them when they get here, and they spend about $2,500 to get them up and on their feet. They might buy them clothes, they give them some cash for meals, they give them some sort of housing. And then at that point they're transferred over to a program run out of HHS, which then provides more long-term assistance — things like job training, helping their kids get into school, that sort of thing.

So it's a program that has been in operation since about 1980 — although prior to that, the federal government had been funding nonprofits that work with refugees going back to the end of the Second World War — but it becomes part of federal law in 1980. And it's been an enormous success, and it's been something that we should be proud of. We have taken in refugees from all over the world when various regions have been in crisis. During the Balkans War, we took a lot of people from southern and eastern Europe. We took people from Haiti after the devastating earthquake in the 2010s. We've taken people in from South Asia. We took in a ton of people from Bhutan when there was a genocide going on in Bhutan, people from Nepal, Afghanistan, everywhere.

And what tends to happen is these refugees come over, they get settled — they tend to be settled in cities or suburbs of major cities — and then you get these little enclaves of communities of these refugees. Here in Nashville, for example, where I live, we have the largest Kurdish community in the country — we have Little Kurdistan here. We also have a lot of Sudanese refugees that came over during the Lost Boys episode, which was in the 80s and 90s. And so you get these little enclaves of immigrants all over the country — famously in Springfield, Ohio, you have a group of Haitian immigrants. And study after study after study has shown that these refugees are an enormous boon to these communities, and that they've revitalized a lot of the Rust Belt places — you know, like where JD Vance is from — depressed communities that, when factories and so forth shut down in the 80s and 90s, were hit pretty hard by that. And so these refugee communities have revitalized these towns and cities all across the Rust Belt.

I was doing some research for a book — I was in Twin Falls, Idaho, a couple of years ago, and they've been taking refugees for a long time, and it's been great. They've attracted a lot of jobs in industry, some manufacturing — Chobani, the yogurt company, went there. And then everything came to a screeching halt, because during the first Trump administration, a bunch of MAGA people went there and claimed that Chobani was importing a bunch of Muslims to work at its factories, and that they were trying to impose Sharia law, right? And so — this has happened over and over again in these communities. MAGA people take notice of what's happening, and that's what happened in Springfield, with the eating-the-pets thing, right? And all of a sudden these communities are getting threats, people are coming to protest, they're creating division where there wasn't any before.

But overwhelmingly this program has been an enormous success, and it was for forty years, before Trump and Stephen Miller started villainizing it. And again, it's a way of not just sharing our wealth and showing our humanity to people who are desperate and need it — it's also benefited us in lots of different ways. And not just the cliché of, you know, I really love ethnic food — although that is a benefit. But they've declared war on it, and they hate the idea of us helping out people from developing parts of the world — particularly non-white people from developing parts of the world.

And so there have been these episodes, like the one in Twin Falls. Trump tried to shut this program down during his first term. He was rebuffed by some of the institutionalists, and then also the courts. At one point they even commissioned a study on the economic costs of the resettlement program, and to their chagrin, I'm sure, the study came back and found that these people who are accepted into this program contribute a net of $6 billion a year to the US economy. And so Stephen Miller basically tried to suppress that study and only wanted to release the cost side of it, not the net benefits, and the study was eventually leaked. But that should tell you — if you didn't already know — that we aren't dealing with honest brokers here.

So what inevitably happens is somebody commits a crime — in some cases probably a pretty atrocious crime — but then that gets attributed to the entire population. I mean, the thing in Twin Falls was, they claimed that two Muslim teens had raped a white girl, and it turns out it was not that — but it was sort of close enough to feed the frenzy. But the overwhelming majority of the people who are accepted into this program want to come here and work and build a family and contribute to their community, and those cases are obviously few and far between. And again, these people are extensively vetted before they're allowed into the program.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:24:42]**
Right, yeah, of course. I mean, of course — you have to factor in not just the money that they bring in, but also, you know, the yucky brownness that they bring in, and so that's too costly, really. That's more than any amount of money from their economic contributions. Right? We're like, let's debunk these numbers, and they're like, no, don't you understand — it's disgust.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:25:15]**
That's always our mistake on the liberal left. That's always our mistake, right? We never consider the yucky factor.

**Radley Balko [00:25:45]**
Yeah, I mean, that's what they've done with immigrants since 2016. You just find the few cases — and he wasn't even an immigrant, he was a US citizen, native-born. And then the other example they came up with was in, like, Florida or something. And then Chris Rufo, from the Manhattan Institute, just openly posted on Twitter that he offered a bounty to anyone who could offer proof of immigrants eating pets. And they end up finding some sort of grainy cell phone video of a couple of Congolese immigrants in Ohio — like northern Ohio, by Dayton, I think — grilling some sort of meat, which Rufo claimed could possibly be cats. And that was their proof that this vindicated everything they had been saying all along about Haitian immigrants in Springfield — because they found this grainy video of Congolese immigrants in Dayton who may or may not have been grilling cat meat. I guess, you know, it's just shameless.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:25:59]**
Right. Yeah, I mean, this is a good time to bring in the term salient exemplar, right? When we want to demonize a population, we take one or two examples — it doesn't even have to be a very good example of them doing something bad — and we can use that as our whole reason to be against them. Right? Like, what did they have — they had a picture of a guy holding a dead goose or something? It wasn't even in Springfield, he wasn't Somali, and they were still like, see, told you.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:27:45]**
That's what I was gonna say. This guy literally is like, yeah, I transport bear that I find on the road, no big deal, right? Look inside, right? A little introspection, and you might find the fellow on the poster that you're looking for.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:27:40]**
Right — I mean, they could have been doing an RFK Junior and eating some roadkill, right? It would have been in the mirror, friends. Absolutely wild.

**Radley Balko [00:28:01]**
This trope is as old as time itself, right? I lived for about two years in St. Louis, Missouri, and there's a neighborhood in St. Louis called Dogtown. And this may be apocryphal, I don't know, but the explanation I was always given for why it was called Dogtown is because during the 1903 St. Louis World's Fair, the people who were involved in the Filipino exhibit were allegedly stealing people's dogs and eating them. And so that neighborhood became known as Dogtown for that reason. I don't know if they were actually doing that, or if that's the actual reason it's called Dogtown — my point is, right — there are parts of the world where they do eat dog. There are parts of the world where people eat horse — I mean, France, Russia — but that doesn't mean...

**Caitlin M. Green [00:28:50]**
Yeah, I mean, I think even if the story was a real lie people were telling in 1903 — who knows? Like, the Asians-eating-cats-and-dogs thing has been around forever. It's Haitians now, but it sounds like Asians — it's probably the same thing. And I think Roma people were hit with that in Europe, too — that they were taking people's pets and eating them. It's an easy one, because it's like, oh, you love your pets, right? Well, look at these shifty, scary guys who have no morals — they're gonna mess with your pets.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:29:20]**
Oh, Belgium. Yeah, exactly. Horse is good. I'm not gonna let anyone shame me. When you go to Belgium, and they ask you to go into the fry shop and get a sausage as part of your cultural process of hanging out in Belgium, you get a horse sausage, you try it. They do fine work. No, it's horse — they told me it was horse, I ate it. It tasted like some sort of ground meat put into a fryer, and oh, delicious. But anyway, people are not just stealing cats and dogs everywhere. It's just an easy one, because, of course, it's just like children — it's like, they stole a little peony, right? Like, oh God.

**Radley Balko [00:29:51]**
Man, I had reindeer sausage in Alaska, right? So, you know, I eat. People are willing to believe — where I grew up, Eli Lilly, the drug company, had a big plant in my hometown, and they did animal testing there. And so there was always this rumor going around that if you let your dog out, Lilly will scoop them up and go and do tests on them. And it was nonsense — I mean, if you're doing animal testing, the animals all have to be pedigreed, with names and genealogy and everything. But it's the kind of urban myth that plays to people's core fears, I think.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:30:40]**
It happens, you know. Who among us? You gonna ask what's in there? No — have fun. Yeah, right.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:31:06]**
So we mentioned how the process has generally worked since 1980, and then we spoke about the benefits that it's had, but we also spoke about how brown is yucky, right? And so my question is, why aren't the Afrikaners treated so poorly? Is it perhaps because they're not brown, sir?

**Radley Balko [00:31:45]**
Yeah — so Trump, I mean, Trump and Miller have made no secret of the fact that they want to zero out the number of refugees we take in every year through this program. They want none. And so on his first day in office, after his second inauguration, Trump tried to do that. He tried to cut off all funding to the resettlement program. It became clear that was going to be difficult, that the courts were not going to just sit back and let that happen, and so they did this instead. They said, okay, well, if we have to spend this money, then we're going to spend it exclusively on white middle-class South Africans — based on this widely held myth in white supremacist, white nationalist circles that there's some kind of genocide or persecution of white people going on in South Africa. You had people like Elon Musk basically amplifying these claims.

And, as is often the case, there is a kernel — a nugget, a smidgen — of truth to this, which is that apartheid and colonialism were obviously pretty evil and did a lot of damage to the native population in South Africa. And when it ended, and the Black majority took over much of the government, there were efforts at reparations, there were efforts to reclaim some of the land that had been taken. There was also a lot of anger and animosity at the colonial forces and the remnants of them, and in some cases some of that was directed at white-owned farms. It's still around — there was a law that was passed last year that allowed the government to buy out land that had gone fallow or been undeveloped from white owners and redistribute it to the Black native population. All this was wildly exaggerated and mischaracterized.

South Africa also has a lot of crime, and like here, not a lot of those crimes get solved — a pretty low percentage of them do — and so that gets turned into, well, there's this massive genocide going on against white farmers, and the government's letting it happen, and they're not prosecuting anyone. It turns out, if you look at the numbers — people that have tried to look at the numbers — there are more Black farmers that have been killed than white farmers in South Africa. The number of white farmers killed is very, very, very small. They tend to be more robberies than murders. And even Afrikaner groups in South Africa have pushed back against this idea that it's unsafe. And the BBC, a couple years ago — I think I linked to this — they had posted a report about how a lot of the children and grandchildren of the people who left South Africa after apartheid fell are coming back, because they want to come back home. So a lot of the white people whose parents and grandparents fled because they feared repercussions are now coming back — which generally is probably not something you would see if the Black government was waging a genocide against white people, right?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:34:45]**
Generally, yeah.

**Radley Balko [00:34:48]**
So this was just trolling, basically, by the Trump administration. It was like, if you're gonna make us spend this money on refugees, well, then we're gonna invite these white colonial middle-class South Africans over here. And so basically, since October, every single person that has been accepted to the program has been an Afrikaner — a white middle-class person from South Africa. I think there were three Afghans who were accepted among the many, many thousands, and those three later had their status revoked by Trump. So it is trolling, basically — let's find the group of people that's most going to troll the libs, and let's put them through the program.

And like I said, in most cases it takes more than a year to vet people for this program. The South Africans began arriving within weeks of Trump's announcement, so they clearly weren't vetted. They have to show evidence of persecution — that was waived, so basically anybody could come. And so what happens is a lot of them get here, and because this is a program to resettle refugees — it's a program to resettle people who are living in refugee camps, people living under really pretty horrible conditions — it was not designed to accommodate people who were used to a middle-class lifestyle, right? So the South Africans are getting here, and they're being put in tiny little apartments in a bad part of town, because that's all the money that the federal government allocates to each individual person that these NGOs can spend. And they're not happy with it, and some of them go home, go back to South Africa. They were giving up their cars, and in some cases their homes and their lifestyles, to come here, thinking that they were going to be set up with a ready-to-go middle-class life in the US, and that isn't what was happening.

And so they start complaining, and so this reporter for the Free Press starts talking to them and hears their complaints. And even their version of what was happening — if you had heard it from, say, a Somalian who had been accepted to the program, or somebody from Sudan, the right wing would be going nuts about how unappreciative these people are for what we've done for them, right? They're complaining that they've been put up in cities and they're farmers, and so they can't make a living, because all they know how to do is farm. Some were complaining that they were more than two miles away from a grocery store and they didn't have a car, so they had to walk back and forth — which sounds not great, right? But that's what people deal with when they come here as refugees. They were not treated any worse than anybody else who's been accepted into this program — in fact, most of them were treated quite a bit better. And as David Bier of the Cato Institute pointed out, the very fact that they were complaining about these conditions is a pretty good indication that they weren't really refugees in the sense of the term that we understand, because they were used to much better accommodations.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:33:30]**
Yep, right — or white women, or white teenage girls, right? This Muslim-rape-gang thing that they were doing in England forever is now here as well. We love making that lie sing and just live forever. Yeah, that's usually not how that goes. And at no point are these people animated by concern for South Africans, right? It's just that — oh, you're forcing me to allocate this money? Fine, I'm gonna put it all towards bringing white people here. Yeah, okay. Well, consider me trolled. You can put in the newspaper that I'm mad.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:38:10]**
Right — like, this isn't as nice as what I was expecting, due to my previous experiences. And it's like, well, okay, so you're a refugee from what, exactly?

**Radley Balko [00:38:22]**
Right, yeah — you're not eating Red Cross emergency food kits, you know? When you come to this program and you're put up in an apartment in suburban Denver that's five miles from the nearest Whole Foods, and you're used to eating Red Cross emergency food kits, that's gonna seem pretty nice, right? But if you're used to suburban life outside of Johannesburg, and now you're in this apartment that maybe has some roaches, and you don't have the kind of amenities that you had back in your own country, you're probably going to be pretty regretful of your decision to take advantage of this program.

So she — again, there's a kernel of truth to what she's reporting. She blames the NGOs for this, and says that they're mad that they're having to bring these Afrikaners over, and so they're deliberately being stingy with them. And she points out that they get hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government to participate in this program; some of them have CEOs that make half a million dollars, a million dollars or more a year in salaries. And those are problems. I mean, I talked to people in the resettlement community who aren't happy that the head of one of the largest international NGOs makes over a million dollars a year. They do think that some of the bigger international NGOs are a little bit wasteful. They think the system could benefit from new blood and new ideas, because the same NGOs have been doing this for a long time.

But that's a far cry from the idea that the Afrikaners are getting deliberately shoddy treatment because people are so angry. A lot of these NGOs get money from the federal government, but they also have a lot of private donors. They get money from the governments of other countries — they don't just work in the US, some of them. And they have mission statements, and they have principles that they have to go by. And so if they're now all of a sudden being asked to resettle these people who probably don't really fit the definition of refugees — being asked to do this for reasons that are suspect at best, and at worst pretty explicitly racist — they might not be able to participate in those programs. Maybe it conflicts with their mission, maybe it's not how their other donors, the grants and institutions that fund them, want that money to be spent. And so they had to reconsider. So groups like Catholic Charities and one of the Episcopal groups pulled out of the program because they didn't want to do it.

So there is a kernel of truth to this. But that said, the way she portrays it is, these poor suffering Afrikaners — they've been persecuted at the hands of the South African government, and now they come here and we're persecuting them as well. And this gets the attention of the Trump administration, and so they respond. Somebody from the HHS office who oversees this reaches out to her — a source that, by the way, she quoted in pieces during the Biden administration, when he was just sort of an anti-immigrant activist. But he says, we're gonna fix this, thanks for drawing attention to this problem. And so she then — well, first she writes a piece in the Free Press sort of touting her success in getting the Trump administration to address this problem. "Help is on the way," I think, was in the headline.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:39:07]**
Yeah — so they are correct that things are not ideal in this sort of refugee situation, and so they have something to complain about. And Madeleine Rowley — she's working for the Free Press, and she's so ready to hear all of this stuff. So how successful is she, then, at sort of painting them as victims of, I don't know, an anti-white NGO conspiracy?

**Radley Balko [00:42:27]**
And then she goes on CBS, and this is the interview that I saw that really just jumped out at me. Because the way she portrays this — she portrays it as, the Trump administration discovered these real flaws in the resettlement program, and because of the way these Afrikaners have been treated, they're going to fix those problems, and it's going to benefit all the refugees going forward, right? And she specifically talks about an Afghan refugee — who she didn't even talk to; someone else told her about this Afghan refugee — who didn't have proper furniture and didn't have good living accommodations. And she basically insinuates that that person's going to benefit because the Trump administration rode in on a white horse to fix all these problems. What she doesn't mention is that they've been trying to eliminate the program from day one. She doesn't mention that nobody who isn't a white, middle-class South African is ever going to benefit from this program as long as Trump's in office.

So all of that is left out of this CBS interview. So if you're at home having your coffee, watching CBS, you're hearing that the Trump administration found all these major flaws — waste, abuse, and fraud — in the resettlement program, and they're going to fix it, and yay, right? Isn't that great? We should celebrate them for that. And what you don't hear is that it doesn't apply to anybody other than white people from South Africa.

And the other thing is, the mention of the Afghan refugee just really irritated me. Because I've been following what's happening to Afghan refugees, particularly those who helped US forces during the long Afghan war. A lot of veterans have been advocating for years to bring over the interpreters and the scouts and the security guards and all the people who helped — because Afghanistan is under Taliban rule now, and they're subject to retaliation, as are their families. And so they finally persuaded the Biden administration to bring over all these people that the US Congress had actually promised, in 2008, would be brought over — there was just all this bureaucratic red tape that was holding it all up. And so the Biden administration really kind of juiced up the program with this Operation Allies Welcome program, and started bringing them over by the thousands and resettling them through the resettlement program. And the right wing went nuts. They absolutely hated the idea that we were bringing these Muslim Afghans over and integrating them into US society.

And then we get the incident in DC last summer, where an Afghan immigrant shot and killed a National Guard member and wounded another. Trump immediately suspends that entire program — halts green card reviews, halts resettlement program reviews, halts all the processing. I don't think they've issued a single visa to an Afghan citizen in 2026 so far. And even more obscene is that there's a group of about 1,100 Afghans who were en route, at the US military base in Qatar, and Trump froze it — and so they've been there ever since. They've been there for over a year now, waiting, and they've been promised that they would be brought over here and resettled. And the New York Times reported last month — I guess maybe it was in April — that Trump's trying to deport them to the Congo. Right? This is a country that's at war, that's impoverished, that has one of the worst refugee crises on the globe, and Trump just wants to dump all these Afghan refugees — who were promised that they could come here because they helped out our forces — he wants to dump them into Congo and wash his hands of it all. It's infuriating. I mean, it's absolutely infuriating. But this is, you know, that's this administration, right?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:43:47]**
Yeah, it's also really self-serving for Rowley, right? Where she's like, well, through my intrepid reporting, I found a big problem. The Trump administration heard my voice — my lone voice crying out for justice for these refugees — and that wonderful man, he just took that information and he fixed everything.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:44:15]**
So responsive.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:45:46]**
Yeah, that's right. Right — just what a ridiculous betrayal. Like, if you did it in a movie, it would be like, okay, that villain is too villainous. This is crazy — cartoonish, yeah. They are sort of living down to the worst caricatures anyone ever thought of, right? They're exceeding those expectations in the worst way.

**Radley Balko [00:46:46]**
I mean, you literally have the world's richest man starving children to death by cutting off their emergency food aid. You can't get more cliché Disney villain than these people actually are. Introspection and empathy are for the weak, right?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:47:06]**
Right, right, right. I'm so hurt that you would say that billionaires do not care about people, as I starve millions of people. But I mean, you have to believe Marc Andreessen, right, when he says that he doesn't do any introspection — and we might assume that his comrades believe similarly.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:47:40]**
So there's like a universe — a possible universe somewhere — where Bari Weiss goes down the sort of Cato Institute path, right, where she remains sort of understandable ideologically. But what do you think it is that made her want to bend the Free Press, and also her work at CBS, towards making Trump happy? Is it like some kind of anti-Arab thing? Is it that she made friends with the wrong people? Like, I know I'm asking you to read her mind a little, but what brings somebody to that place?

**Radley Balko [00:48:20]**
There is one moment, I think — and I had this in an earlier draft of this piece — that you can kind of look at that really sends her down this path, which is that she had tweeted about — I can't even remember her name, but there was a US figure skater, I think it was, who had a spectacular performance. And she was US-born, a US citizen, but she was the child of immigrants. And Weiss tweeted something like — she quotes Hamilton and says, you know, "immigrants get the job done." And there's this huge pile-on on Twitter, because this woman was not an immigrant, she's a citizen. And it was kind of this, how dare she — she doesn't know the difference between an immigrant and a child of immigrants, and she's conflating it all. And, I mean, that's a fair enough criticism, I guess. I do think that the pile-on was excessive and unnecessary. But she made a mistake.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:49:29]**
This was Mirai Nagasu, who did a really beautiful job in the Olympics, right, in 20-whatever-it-was — 18. Yeah, it's kind of what Twitter was built to do, right? You say something that's dumb and wrong, and what you would expect in real life is for one to two people to be like, hey, that was pretty wrong — but unfortunately everyone saw it, and everyone felt like, I'm gonna get my jab in, and so then it just piles and piles and piles. It's more like cringe. I feel like she committed the cardinal sin of cringe, right, by quoting Hamilton about somebody.

**Radley Balko [00:49:45]**
Yeah — and I'm not even sure it was really — I mean, it was wrong, but I'm not really sure what's actually offensive about it. It was done in support of immigrants. Right. But then — and she'd always kind of ridden the anti-woke thing, that was always part of her identity — I think a lot of people, I think the New Yorker profile, cited that as a moment of inflection in her arc. But then you start the Free Press. And if you're going to start a publication that's about truth-telling, and you want to be seen as a trusted news source — you know, you found it with the guy who co-founded Palantir... I'm sorry, no, that was the university. But you found it with money from Andreessen and Sacks.

This is the thing — it's part of what I've called the heterodox movement, right? These people who identify themselves as being the corrective voice to our jaded, elite, left-of-center institutions — they're going to be the jolt that those institutions need to help them see reality. But heterodoxism itself becomes its own form of bias, because you start to see the whole world that way. And so all of a sudden it's like, well, Derek Chauvin must be innocent, because all these liberal elites say that he's guilty, right? And there must be something worthy about MAGA and Trumpism, because all these people that I've defined as my enemies all hate it — so there must be something valuable or worthwhile about it.

And then she continues to be validated, it continues to be reinforced, right? As the Free Press goes down this road, she gets more funding from a lot of these tech people. The tech people, like Andreessen and Sacks, go hardcore for Trump in 2024 — that's just more incentive for the Free Press to continue in that direction. And then she gets $150 million from the Ellisons to buy it out, which is an insanely high valuation for that publication.

And, you know, they still do criticize Trump sometimes. I found a number of pro-immigration pieces in my research. But it's overwhelming — even the pro-immigration stuff sort of comes off as, you know, Trump is bad, but these naive leftists are even worse, right? It's always in this context of, like, this is bad, but look what you made us do. And so that's something that — they have enough contributors, and enough people they publish from across the political spectrum, that they can always find things they've published that go against this narrative that I'm advancing here. But overwhelmingly, it's hard to see it as anything other than running interference for the administration.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:51:30]**
Yeah, I think it's entirely possible that she might hate Middle Eastern people a little, but that's a separate thing. It's possible — that's very true. And a totally real and legitimate educational venue, the University of Austin, which she co-founded with a bunch of asses.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:53:12]**
It's alibi work. Those essays are alibi work. Absolutely. It's like having the one liberal come on to Fox News to get crushed by, like, the rest of them, right? It serves the purpose of being like, well, we bring on the feller, right — but he just doesn't have the juice.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:53:12]**
Yeah, right. It does — it functions as cover. Looks like we tried.

**Radley Balko [00:53:31]**
Yeah — if you're running pro-immigration pieces that defend immigration in sort of a very broad sense, but you're also then advancing every single anti-immigrant narrative on any sort of immigration-adjacent issue — like crime, like migrants and sex trafficking — if everything you're doing is advancing all of the arguments against immigration, while you're also occasionally running a piece saying, in principle, immigrants are great and contribute to our society...

**Trent R. Nelson [00:54:07]**
But only in principle, yeah — only in principle. We're not getting past that into functionality. Even though, as you said, $6 billion a year is a sizable chunk, from people who are just coming into our community, just finding work, just getting into the basics of our society — to be so meaningful.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:54:30]**
Yeah — forget, you know, "they're replacing us, and soon we whites are going to be in the minority, we have to consider those things." But this kind of gets into my thing about them showing their butts, right? Where it's like, okay — you can say, I really feel for immigrants, I think that they're people just like anybody else, but we have to look at these hard truths, and we have to consider all of this shady dealing with the NGOs, and the animal-eating apparently, or whatever, or the crime, or whatever it is. Like, actually pointing to the general compassionate, empathetic position, while spending all of our time discussing the details of these conspiracy theories and these negative ideologies about immigrants, really just serves to show how reasonable I am when I bring up all those concerns. Like, oh, of course, I'm a liberal-minded person — I'm politically homeless, after all. I have all of these liberal beliefs — you know, the classical kind, classical liberalism, not your yucky woke liberalism. So just take for granted that I hold those positions, so that you can listen to me when I tell you that actually there are real dangers associated with bringing all these immigrants in, and that it's actually maybe a real problem that Trump is addressing — even if he's doing it sometimes in a way that is uncouth or unkind.

But these guys really want credit for being serious thinkers, and evolved, right — nuanced and intelligent and all that stuff. And you can't get credit for that if you just walk around doing the gutter racism. You have to do this sort of gentler, more concerned version. How balanced are you being, if you had to put in that much legwork just to find a couple small examples?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:56:00]**
It's all so performative. It's so much work. I mean, they have just gone down a rabbit hole. There was a time when the senator from Mississippi — I believe it was Bilbo — would just come out and say the horrifying words, instead of all of this walking around, this rigmarole. They've gotten so far in the weeds to just be like: we don't like Black people, we don't like brown people, we don't like when they come here, we don't like what they did. Doesn't matter that they give us $6 billion and better food, it doesn't matter that they're all nice, it doesn't matter, any of this stuff — they suck, and we don't want them. And it's so tiring. You have to always listen to them explain it, and it's like — you just hate Asian people, bro. You just hate Vietnamese people. Yes.

**Radley Balko [00:57:02]**
Well, and I think, on the one hand, we're unfortunately going back to the just-saying-it-all-out-loud era when it comes to the Trump administration — they're just coming right out and saying it. Where I think people like Weiss, and some of the people that work for the Free Press who have good reputations and came from established fields — what they're doing, whether they realize it or not, is that they are running interference for the people who are just coming right out and saying it. I mean, I don't think Bari Weiss hates Black people, or hates Asian people. But she has chosen to align herself with people who pretty clearly do.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:58:01]**
She just seems to me an opportunist, who continuously finds herself in these spaces with wealthy, powerful, conservative people, and she knows how to play to them — as a professional daughter, in some way, who can get whatever job they'd like done. And she has seen that as, I think, her route to where she is right now. And if it's worked to this point, why stop? It seems a beneficial way of doing business for her.

**Radley Balko [00:58:42]**
Yeah. And from a practical standpoint — over the weekend, we saw this latest dust-up with 60 Minutes come out, and I think there are a lot of instructive lessons in that. So Scott Pelley gives this interview in the New York Times. He talks about how he was preparing this package on the killing of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. And I actually was kind of floored just reading what he had done in his initial report, right? He talks about how he scoured the video archives to find examples of protesters being aggressive with police, because he wanted to present sort of a balanced picture. Well — if you have to scour hours and hours of video to find one example of, like, a protester chest-bumping an officer, and another where they threw a snowball, and you had to look really hard to find that, so that you could counterbalance the hours and hours and hours of video of police just brazenly and egregiously beating people — maybe you want to question the narrative that these two things are the same, right?

And this is where I think the kind of right-wing critique of the media is really mistaken. They constantly talk about how left-wing the media is, how they're ten-to-one Democrat, or whatever. And that's true if you look at the personal politics of people in legacy journalism — I'm sure they are well to the left of the average American. But in terms of how it comes out in their work — journalists also tend to be very pro-institution, and I think that prods them in the direction of defending power a lot of the time, and being very skeptical or dismissive of people who challenge power. I remember, years and years ago, when California was considering legalizing medical marijuana, I think it was maybe Matt Welch — somebody at Reason — had done a survey of all the editorial boards in the country and where they came down on it, and it was insane. I think there were like one or two that were pro-legalization, and every other one was anti, and usually in really dire language, right? So the idea that the media is this cultural-left institution — it's not. It's left of center, sure, but it's very pro-establishment, pro-power, pro-institutions.

And so you see this in this 60 Minutes kerfuffle that we learned about over the weekend, where this longtime broadcaster, Scott Pelley — well respected, I think he does very good reporting — but he's already succumbing to this idea that, for balance, we need to show that the protesters were just as bad as the cops. They weren't, right? And then Weiss comes in — and Weiss was hired to nudge everything sort of to the right. So her immediate response to this, as it was to the CECOT thing where she held the CECOT report, was: more of the narrative needs to come from the right.

**Radley Balko [01:01:34]**
So she's like — according to Pelley — she told him, well, can you make the protesters look even angrier? Right? And the remarkable thing about Minneapolis is how overwhelmingly peaceful the protesters were in the face of pretty egregious violence and violations of civil rights and civil liberties. They held their ground, sort of morally, right? They didn't lash out, and they didn't lash back, because they knew that that's what Trump wanted. So her saying, can you make them look more violent, is just reinforcing this baseless narrative that Pelley was already kind of trying to portray.

And then she says, you need to say that Renée Good was driving at the officer. Well, CBS News did their own analysis of the video, frame by frame, and brought in experts, and they said her wheels were turning away from the officer when he shot. Right? If you wanted true context for what happened to Good, you would point out that for the last 20 years, Border Patrol has had this history — well reported, well documented — of putting themselves in front of moving vehicles to justify shooting into those vehicles. It's well documented. This guy was former Border Patrol — he was ICE at the time, but he was former Border Patrol. You would talk about how he was in front of the car at the time, which is a violation of policy. You could talk about how he had his gun in one hand and his cell phone in the other — another violation of policy. You could talk about how they rushed the car and tried to pull her out. You could talk about how the reason Renée Good probably fled is that she probably saw the videos from Chicago and Los Angeles, where ICE watchers were pulled out of their cars and beaten, despite having violated no law. Right — that would be good context for that report. That would give you some reason to understand the motives of the people involved.

But no — what does Weiss do? She says, we need to say that she was driving at them, and we need to make the protesters angrier. What she's been hired to do is reinforce the already existing myopia of legacy media, which is to create these false narratives, to create false balance. And this is the way that they've been underserving us in the entire Trump era to begin with — because they're used to saying, we need to present both sides of these issues. And when it comes to, like, vaccines, the 2020 election, whether windmills cause cancer — there aren't two sides to these issues, right? You're misleading people.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:03:08]**
Yeah — right, I need both sides of that. Where are the experts that can tell me about windmills causing cancer? I don't understand why you can't find one. Should be easy. Yeah, there's cranks everywhere. And these cowards still won't do my idea, which is to have 99 people who think climate change is real and one person who doesn't, and put them at a table and let them debate — because that would be great television.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:04:12]**
Well, I mean, no, absolutely. And Caitlin, she brought it up episodes ago, deep in the tranche of episodes, that legacy media often does this, where they bring on somebody who represents one one-hundredth of the scientific view of this thing, and they sit them next to somebody who represents 99% of it, right? And they treat these people as though they're equal sparring partners — as opposed to, one is a serious climate scientist and the other is a spider biologist, right?

**Radley Balko [01:05:00]**
I mean, you look at the New York Times op-ed page, right? They gave prominent op-ed space to two legal scholars to write that originalism tells us that birthright citizenship shouldn't exist. Well, how many op-eds would you have to give the other side to accurately reflect the split in the constitutional law community? The next year would all be op-eds from people talking about why birthright citizenship is endemic to the 14th Amendment, right? And, you know, I get it — you want to air a variety of viewpoints. But I do think we in the media have done a terrible job of airing those viewpoints in a way that reflects just how rare and isolated they are. And frankly, when it comes to some of these scholars who are pushing this bullshit on birthright citizenship, they're contradicting themselves. Ilan Wurman, five years ago, I think, was writing the exact opposite of what he's writing now. Seems like opportunism, I don't know.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:05:42]**
I'm telling you — Wurman should read Wurman, yeah.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:06:00]**
Yeah, to be balanced, right, you'd never be able to print anything else — you'd just be busy doing that. Yeah, it feels like he found a niche, and he's moved into it, right? And all of this skewing and the selectiveness — you brought up that she, in the Rowley piece, talked about an Afghan refugee without ever reaching out to them. It feels really starkly contrasted to the reasons that Weiss gave to not run that CECOT story early on, right? Where she was like, well, I just don't feel comfortable, because we didn't get enough quotes from the Trump administration — we didn't get them to weigh in, we didn't talk to them directly. We asked for comment and they said no, or they didn't respond within the time. So this kind of selective application of journalistic standards is also in itself a contradiction. It stands out a lot in examples like that, where, when Trump looks bad, then I can always think of reasons why we haven't done quite enough work — whereas when the protesters look bad: run it. It looks awesome. I love it. Why bother? You know what they're gonna say.

**Radley Balko [01:06:50]**
Yeah, no, absolutely. And the thing is, Rowley did reach out to the administration, like you said. But also, we know that this administration lies like they breathe, right? They lie not just to cover things up — they lie as a projection of their power. To show you that they can get away with lying. Look at CECOT. Look at the people that they sent, and their justification for sending them — the tattoos that they claimed were gang-affiliated, when not only did those tattoos have nothing to do with gangs, the gang that they claimed the tattoos showed they belonged to doesn't have members show their affiliation with tattoos. They don't use tattoos. They just lied about everything.

So why would you — yes, as a journalist, I always reach out to people that I'm criticizing, unless there's no reason to. When you're making those kinds of accusations, of course you reach out to the other side. But they're not going to talk to you — and what's the point in hounding them for an answer that you know is going to be bullshit, and is going to take you three or four paragraphs to explain why it's bullshit anyway? She had interviews with the people who went through it, right? We have Bukele and members of the Salvadoran government explicitly saying that this is the purpose of this prison — nobody leaves alive, right? And you have the administration saying that these people were getting life sentences without any due process. The idea that we should have gotten — what's her name, the former DHS spokesperson who quit recently, Tricia McLaughlin — the idea that we should have given her a platform to tell us something that will take five minutes to refute — I don't see the point of that. So yeah, I never really bought her explanation there, other than I think it was a good way to make a big splash when she first took over CBS, and show the Ellisons that they invested well.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:08:16]**
Right. Yeah — it's hard to read it as anything else. It's either just hamfisted bad planning, or it did what she wanted, right? And if you think of her as somebody who's relatively savvy, then yeah — it has to be a message to the people who put her there, that you made a good choice. But right now she's struggling, right? There's a lot of talk about, you know, she hasn't done a good job, we don't like what's happening, maybe we need to replace her. Where do you think that's coming from?

**Radley Balko [01:09:00]**
I mean, I'm sure it's coming from longtime people there who are upset with her. I don't know — if I were the Ellisons, I don't know what problem they would have at this point. And she's going to be putting her own people in there. Scott Pelley, in that New York Times interview, said his piece ended up running without implementing her suggestions or edits, right? But one — the fact that she made those demands of that piece is bad enough. But also, he's gone now, right? And she's going to replace people like him with her own people, and they're going to be people who know what their boss is looking for, who are going to be much less likely to push back — who don't have the reputation and the institutional stature that Pelley had. And so we're not going to know what happened on the other side of these stories going forward.

I mean, you look at the people that she brought on to CBS News as commentators when she first took over — it was like a rogues' gallery of wellness influencers and people who flirted with anti-vax conspiracy. It was a strange collection of people to add to a news division. And again, not a whole lot of rigorous background in rigorous journalism. I mean, Bilton, the new head of 60 Minutes, does not really have much reporting experience — he was a tech columnist for the New York Times, I guess, for a while. But they all have this kind of story about where woke broke them, right? And that's when they decided that they were going to define themselves on their opposition to wokeism.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:11:00]**
Yeah — so all these new people: what they lack in journalism experience, they make up for in willingness to do whatever the Ellisons want, I guess. So that'll be interesting.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:12:04]**
Yeah, that's right — which just reflects a real lack of personal fortitude. Like, you have a bad experience — okay, this is where you go with it? It seems like a pretty intense choice to be like, well, I got yelled at on the internet, or whatever, so now I'm — you know, I've been yelled at on the internet. It's not fun, but it didn't turn me into an anti-woke crusader.

**Radley Balko [01:12:22]**
Yeah — we've all, I mean, if you're online at all, you've been subject to a pile-on at some point. And I've seen a lot of them that were really unjustified and outrageous, and probably something that really messed up some people's lives, and obviously we should try to rectify those situations and push against them in the future. But I've also seen a lot of right-wing pile-ons of people who didn't deserve it. So it's an internet phenomenon, not necessarily a left or right phenomenon. And yeah, it's a strange thing to define your politics by.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:13:00]**
There are other, more important things than how your time was on the internet. Sometimes it was hard. Yeah. You know, this Nick Bilton guy really made Pelley mad with his email. It seemed like he spent quite a bit of energy on that. And I think it does show something about the attitude that these guys are coming in with — which is to say, you guys here at CBS, you are dinosaurs, you are establishment, you are entrenched, you can't see outside of your own desk, basically. And it just felt so demeaning, I think, to the people who worked there. And you could make some of those criticisms of places like CBS — these are huge legacy media institutions, they have problems — but to walk in there and be like, hey, it's me, a guy with no relevant experience, and I'm going to tell you how to fix everything about your job? Yeah, it feels bad. So Pelley kind of stands up, right, and is like, hey, what makes you think that you're going to be effective here, when you are the way that you are? And now he's out on his ass, basically.

**Radley Balko [01:14:00]**
Yeah, I mean, look — anytime a new person comes in from the outside and tries to impose their will, particularly on an institution that's been around as long as 60 Minutes, there was always going to be pushback. And 60 Minutes has made mistakes over the years — some pretty significant ones at times. But for the most part, it is an institution because it does what it does really well. And the idea that you need to come in and fix things just for the sake of creating a splash, or disrupting — I mean, it appears that that's what it was, right? It was about an immediate impact, and not necessarily fixing whatever problems may have existed there.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:15:30]**
As a former Silicon Valley resident, I still get that shudder down my spine when I hear the phrase "disrupt," because it's such a buzzword, and it's so annoying.

**Radley Balko [01:15:43]**
And they love that word, yeah — they love that word. Because it's this idea that these institutions have always just sort of done their own thing and are not accountable, and have been coasting on their reputations, and it takes somebody like her to come in and shake things up and put things on the right track. And I think what all of that misses is that Weiss has shown that she is just as blinkered by her own kind of media bubble and social bubble as the people that she's trying to fix.

And it's part of this whole ecosystem of tech media types, right? I've written about this publication called Pirate Wires, which is sort of a more intense version of the Free Press. They write these pieces about — the one I saw in particular was about how Trump is just fixing what was broken about the asylum system. And asylum is different from what we've been talking about — asylum is when people come to the border unannounced and request asylum, and those cases get reviewed, and we have an obligation to give them due process. And his take was, oh, everybody's just being silly — we've been letting asylum seekers in and giving them sort of a free hall pass, I think was the term he used, for decades, and Trump's just trying to impose some structure. Well, no. There have been multiple court orders showing that Trump is routinely denying these people. He's firing any immigration judge that actually gives them a fair hearing and doesn't just routinely deny.

And there's just this kind of arrogance — I've used the term "folly math" — these are people in tech who, because of success in one area, think they're experts on everything, and everything looks like common sense. And so they take that approach, and then they get everything wrong. They don't actually understand anything about the system they're critiquing. And that's not to say those systems don't have flaws and don't need fixing — but it is to say they're the last people that need to be fixing it. Like I said, there's always a kernel.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:18:03]**
Folly math is S tier. S tier. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, absolutely.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:18:00]**
That's what it is — and that's part of the strength of how effective they are: they can point to things that are flawed and be like, look, you and I both know that that's flawed. And it's like, okay, so you've started from a true statement — and then they just go off the rails from there, right? But it gets the foot in the door. So where do you think CBS is headed? Do you think it's just gonna keep spiraling like this?

**Radley Balko [01:18:40]**
Yeah, I don't see — I mean, as long as the Ellisons are in charge, and they need the Trump administration to do their bidding for them when it comes to these takeovers and general regulation, I don't really see how it changes. Maybe if the Democrats win overwhelmingly, they'll decide that they need to start greasing the skids of the other party in order to get favorable treatment. But I don't see how it changes until the ownership concludes that they need to change in order to get the kinds of regulatory decisions that they want.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:19:30]**
Yeah, it does seem like kind of the only way out is to extremely disempower people like the Ellisons from being able to do this kind of thing, and just seize the reins of media institutions because they happen to have more money than God.

**Radley Balko [01:19:50]**
Well, it's also just a very common play from the authoritarian playbook, which is that people get mad when the government comes right out and censors people, censors the media — which they're trying to do too. But if you can do this kind of workaround, where you get a friendly person to take over a media company — I mean, that's what Putin did, that's what Orbán did — or you threaten the other business interests of the people who own the media companies — so Bezos, for example — then you can get them to come around and take a more active role.

**Radley Balko [01:20:23]**
I mean, I worked at the Washington Post for — I can't remember when Bezos bought it — probably five or six years while he was there, and I was on the opinion page. I wasn't in the newsroom every day, so I don't know what kind of conversations were happening way above my pay grade, but I never got the sense that there was any pressure from Bezos when it came to who they published, what they published, what editorials they published. It wasn't until it became clear that this was going to be a transactional administration — that was going to put this kind of ancillary or collateral pressure on people like Bezos — that you start to see them take a much more active editorial role in these publications. And I don't know if you can go back from that. Once that firewall has been breached, it's like — okay, maybe we get a Democratic administration in 2028, and maybe they don't put that kind of pressure on media companies, but it's already been established that it works, right? So the next Republican administration comes along — does it? Or a more nefarious Democratic administration does it in the opposite direction. The precedent has been set.

And I think that's true in a lot of the things that we've seen in the last 15 months — these kind of norms, and "norms" isn't even a strong enough word, but these moral and democratic firewalls. Like, we haven't had a law against cops masking themselves in public while carrying out police actions because we haven't had to, right? It's just nothing any of us ever thought would happen — but now they're doing it, and so now we're gonna have to have a law against it, because clearly we need one now.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:22:09]**
Precedent is the word you often hear, but you might substitute it for the word custom, right? Because they have broken many of the customs that we have become accustomed to. And, as you noted, where would there be need for laws where custom has reigned?

**Radley Balko [01:22:40]**
Like the politicization of the DOJ. During the first Bush administration, they fired a bunch of US attorneys because they weren't seeking the death penalty enough, and there were some other cases. And there have been lots of examples where a US attorney has gone after a local governor or politician in what seemed to be a bullshit case that was politically motivated — but there was always plausible deniability, right? The administration was always like, hey, we're just letting them do their thing. You never had an administration say, yeah, you're goddamn right I'm politicizing the DOJ, I'm gonna get retribution on my enemies. And once that's happened, there's nothing to stop future administrations from doing it. I don't know how you stop it. The Supreme Court has basically given it its okay. So unless we can get a constitutional amendment saying that the DOJ has some kind of independence, that norm is gone. And I don't even know, constitutionally, how you would make the DOJ independent, right? It is part of the executive branch — it's just, previously...

**Caitlin M. Green [01:21:25]**
Yeah, right. Yep — it kind of has to be formalized if it's going to happen at all, which means that all kinds of things have to change to put that into place, right? I don't know. Well, we'll ask Madiba — she can tell us what. Well, yeah, they can put their heads together. I'm sure they'll work it out. In the meantime, I guess we can support independent journalism. And so you can, of course, subscribe to The Watch, you can subscribe to The Handbasket, you can subscribe to all of these lovely independent outlets — at least the Ellisons don't own them, right? That's already a win.

Well, Radley, that's good, that's good. I think it would absolutely kill my ability to think of any words if I had that kind of thing in my head, just frozen in front of my computer. Well, let's see — should we try to find some hope? What's our avenue for hope now? Where are we going?

**Radley Balko [01:23:45]**
Yeah — I actually make a mental note not even to know who subscribes, because I don't want to think about an individual person when I'm writing something. But, you know — well, I mean, I think the thing that has most given me hope over the last 16, 17 months is, in the face of wholesale institutional cowardice and capitulation, regular people have stood up, right? It's been the people of Minneapolis and Chicago and Los Angeles and Charlotte and Memphis who have stood up. It's the Little League coach who refused to let the ICE agents come and talk to his players while they were practicing. It's the guy who won the fellowship from CBS, who at the awards ceremony the other night talked about how bothered he was by where CBS is headed. It's those little acts of bravery, I think, from people who frankly have a ton to lose, but have still stood up. It's people like Clay Jackson, who not only continued to give advice to immigrants in his community, but went public with the fact that they tried to intimidate him. So that's, you know—

**Caitlin M. Green [01:25:53]**
He used that to advocate for people on death row — just really admirable choices that he has made. Friend, they messed with the wrong lawyer. Absolutely.

**Radley Balko [01:26:08]**
That's what we need. I mean, watching people look out for their neighbors. During the ICE Border Patrol occupation in Chicago — I have a lot of friends, I grew up in Indiana, so I have a lot of friends who live in Chicago, people who I've known all my life, who have never been political at all, who were on Facebook organizing whistle brigades, organizing to bring groceries to immigrants who were afraid to leave their homes, chaperoning immigrant kids so that they could come home from school without worrying about getting stopped and arrested. I found it really, really inspiring to see. And those people won, right? They got ICE out of Chicago — I mean, they're still there, still doing a lot of damage, but in terms of the massive surge and occupation, they backed down, right? And the law firms that stood up to Trump have won in court — the Trump administration has lost in court. And the people who are not taking plea deals and are fighting assault charges that were clearly bullshit and clearly made up from the start — they're winning in court. The administration, when they've had to produce evidence, they're losing. And so standing up to bullies works. It's always worked. And so watching regular, everyday people stand up for their rights and the rights of their neighbors has been really inspiring.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:27:39]**
Yeah — we are a nation of neighbors, and we look out for our neighbors, and that, I think, is what's really important. That is why I wrote a song about being neighbors. It's about the ICE watchers and all the people, and I've been performing it lately with my band, and it's been really, really nice to see that sentiment really hit people. All of this is about, ultimately: we take care of each other. That's what matters.

So yeah, I think that was a really good — I really put you on the spot there for, like, give us some hope — but that is right. I think, absolutely, we can draw from little acts of bravery, little acts of care, and if everybody is doing them, yeah, we can turn this stuff around. So each act of bravery is revolutionary in the time of the fascist. Absolutely.

**Radley Balko [01:28:33]**
And it certainly matters to the person you're looking out for — sticking up for them. Yeah.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:28:39]**
Well, thank you for being here. Thank you for talking to us about this kind of microcosm of the media hellscape that we're dealing with, and we hope to have you back soon. This has, of course, been Half the Answer. We're understanding the question is half the answer. We love you. Bye.