Intellectually, is the Democrat Party in terminal decline? Is the GOP any better?
/By Rubashov
As is the case in the aftermath of every electoral disappointment, there are elected and professional members of the Republican Party who are now clammering to move the party into closer agreement with the Democrats. Instead of using their brains to sharpen their arguments, they opt to deny the voters any choice at all.
Knee-bending agreement is the only choice for these so-called "elected leaders", because behaving as an adult is difficult for them. It is always easier to give stuff away, to say yes, to adopt every new fashion, to embrace “progress” even when it comes clothed in a brown shirt.
Fearful, void of ideas or even curiosity, the prescription for many in the GOP establishment is surrender. As their excuse, they point to the presence of competing ideas and to the fear they have of competition. They attack the thought of competition because they lack thought itself.
They forget – or perhaps they never learned – that all healthy societies feature a competition of ideas. That agreement is a kind of death of the mind – a particularly paralytic form of an institutional Alzheimer’s disease. To experience their kind of “nice” – that cleansing of the mind of disagreement – one need only visit a stroke patient.
Fortunately for America, for American society, our culture, and the body politic, a gathering of disagreeable voices is well under way. These people were called “Left” just yesterday. They are not Republicans. They are intellectually curious and wish to maintain the right to ask questions and to find the answers wherever they might find them.
While pandering prosaic politicians are demanding we shut down our collective mind, these lovers of freedom are electrifying the brain cells, keeping the oxygen flowing, staving off brain death, providing the stuff of recovery – even as the politicians mandate we accept the fate of “status quo”. The forerunners of this intellectual sea change were the Glenn Greenwalds and Matt Taibbis and Tulsi Gabbards. They are being joined by more minds each and every day.
One of the more recent minds to reject the corporate Democrat establishment is former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss. Weiss was the op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal (2013–2017) and an op-ed staff editor and writer on culture and politics at The New York Times (2017–2020). She resigned from The New York Times in 2021. Weiss is a regular columnist for the German daily newspaper Die Welt. Weiss hosts the podcast Honestly and is the author of How to Fight Anti-Semitism, a book published in 2019.
Bari Weiss is not a Republican. But she has firmly rejected a corporate and cultural establishment whose political face is the Democrat Party and whose religion is Wokeism. In America, there are only two “legally-recognized” political parties (that is directly from the NJ Department of State). So, there is a chance, just a chance, that the GOP establishment might make some room for these new thinkers… and who they bring with them.
Bari Weiss writes a Substack newsletter called Common Sense. Yesterday, she folded her newsletter into the newly launched The Free Press. Here is her post announcing the launch of The Free Press:
After I blew up my career at The New York Times, I knew I was done with the legacy media—and it was certainly done with me. Six months later, I wrote my first entry for a newsletter that I figured a few people would sign up for, most of them related to me.
Today, that newsletter, Common Sense, has more than 260,000 subscribers.
It’s an amazing number. What’s more meaningful than that number, though, is who you are.
You are from all over the world and in all 50 states and in more than 30 countries. You are of every political persuasion: conservatives, libertarians, old-school liberals, disenchanted progressives. I think of us as the coalition of the sane.
Your support—your hunger for independent journalism—has literally made our work possible.
As we’ve expanded into more investigative journalism and brought in a larger and more ideologically diverse team of writers and journalists, we’ve been outgrowing the “Common Sense with Bari Weiss” title. In truth, with over a quarter-million subscribers and a growing staff across the country, we are already a sizable startup media company.
So today we give that company a name.
Welcome to The Free Press.
The Free Press is built on the ideals that remain the bedrock of American journalism: honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence. You didn’t know it at the time, but you’re one of our many founders. You have read, shared, and commented on our important stories from the past year.
Stories such as: how the ideological takeover of American medicine and the law has endangered our health and our rights; how schools are indoctrinating even our youngest children into a belief that racism is everywhere and that biological sex doesn’t exist; how vulnerable teens are being pushed into experimental gender transition, and how our public health scientists failed to “follow the science.” We brought you shocking accounts from around the world about Canada’s new euthanasia laws; China’s global ambitions and how it is capturing the minds of young Americans; and love in the time of war in Ukraine. We reported on the stories that you thought you knew, but didn’t—like the real story of the Central Park Karen. And every Friday in TGIF, Nellie Bowles summarizes our week with her inimitable wit.
Our scrappy team is growing. In addition to the regular staff writers and editors you’ve come to know and love, including Peter Savodnik (Vanity Fair) Nellie Bowles (New York Times), Suzy Weiss (New York Post), and Emily Yoffe (Slate), we are proud to announce the following new hires and collaborators:
Olivia Reingold, coming to us from Grid, will be a staff writer covering politics and culture. Rupa Subramanya of The National Post will be a staff writer covering the emerging social credit system in the West.
Walter Kirn, Katherine Boyle, Michael Shellenberger, Vinay Prasad, and Coleman Hughes are joining as regular columnists.
Our growing podcast team includes Andy Mills, co-creator of The Daily podcast, Matthew Boll from Spotify/Gimlet and Candace Mittel-Kahn from WBEZ. More audio series will be coming in the new year.
So what does this mean for you? Simple: More of what you signed up for in the first place.
You’ll still receive stories in your inbox, but those will now come from The Free Press. You’ll also be getting more from me, as Common Sense will now be the name of my column in The Free Press.
You’ll find all of this at our shiny new website. Check out thefp.com.
…I started Common Sense because I knew I had something to say that wasn’t being said, about the world around us. Now my colleagues and I have a new home for honest news, lucid opinion, and a community of people who think for themselves. We need one address—one home, one platform you can trust—for the best independent journalism out there. Today, The Free Press becomes that place.
Bari Weiss: "'Twitter Files' expose secret conservative blacklist."
“We must avoid the trap of totalism which lures a man into thinking there is only one way, one answer, one option, and that others must be forced into this One Way, and forced into it Now.”
Lillian Smith
"We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary."
George Orwell
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