Bari Weiss: "True courage" is letting rich people decide who's allowed to come to college campuses.

The free-speech crusader is at it again.

In our morally muddled times, it’s hard to recognize true courage. Fortunately, we have Bari Weiss to guide us.

“Cowardice is contagious. So is courage,” she Tweeted. “If this isn't the moment for good people to stand up for the most basic ideals of our civilization, that moment will never, ever come.”

The tweet links to a statement by former diplomat Jon Huntsman saying he’ll cut off financial support to the University of Pennsylvania for failing to battle anti-Semitism. “Silence is antisemitism, antisemitism is hate, the very thing higher ed was built to obviate.”

The letter is addressed to the University’s President, Liz Magill, who’s been called on to resign, with multiple large donors pulling their funding over the school’s alleged antisemitism. The campaign to have large funders to divest from the school was launched by Apollo Management CEO Marc Rowan, who gave Wharton Business school $50 million in 2018.

Weiss had previously celebrated Rowan’s campaign. “This is moral courage. Who will follow Marc Rowan's example?” she tweeted, linking to video of Rowan decrying campus culture. "Microaggressions are condemned with extreme moral outrage and yet violence against Jews seems to have found a place of tolerance on campus," says Marc Rowan, chair of Wharton's board of advisors. "It's unfortunately the environment we live in on campus."

What Weiss does so well, and why I think she’s successful despite no discernible writing or thinking talents, is obfuscate information to manipulate our social-media addled brains.

To whit: I read her Tweets and Huntsman’s statement and I figured that probably some idiot undergrads at U Penn said something insensitive in the wake of the Hamas attack, and that the President of the University had not scuttled quickly enough to condemn them.

Nah. The controversy is over a literary festival featuring Palestinian work that occurred weeks before the Hamas attack. The festival was not sponsored by the University. OK. It’s weird there’s a controversy, much less a huge controversy that’s leading rich people to cut donations to a university. I haven’t followed the money but presumably at least some goes to helping low-income students financially. Gutting an educational institution in support of a military powerhouse currently committing a genocide against 1.2 million people, the majority under 18? You can agree or disagree—personally I’m not down with starving colleges of funds because they were the site of a literary conference about a place you don’t like—but what here is so courageous? Yes, the brave dissident millionaires Huntsman and Rowan are risking their lives by provoking the ire of the all-powerful DSA.

Then you think, well, someone maybe fucked up and invited the former head of Hezbollah or something. Nah. The offending speakers cited are Marc Lamont Hill and Roger Waters. Waters, I’m not a fan of. He’s like the Barbara Streisand of tankies: a guy who knows nothing about politics and probably hurts his causes more than he helps them, but he’s famous so he draws attention and invites to conferences.

But … this???

"It took less than two weeks to go from the Palestine Writes literary festival on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus to the barbaric slaughter and kidnapping of Israelis” Rowan said in a statement. "The polarizing Palestine Writes gathering featured well-known antisemites and fomenters of hate and racism, and it was underwritten, supported and hosted by various UPenn academic departments and affiliates."

OK, as far as causality goes, you can say the same thing about the Taylor Swift Era’s tour or the release of the latest Kardashian SKIMS product. Meaning, there is literally zero relationship between an obscure lit festival and Hamas’s attack.

I’m not the first person to point out that this moment has terrifying echos of post 9/11, when people were screaming at librarians for refusing to give the government reading lists and we started 95 wars and protestors were treated like dim-witted traitors. A lot of people abandoned reason and morality. Now, we have social media to amplify the trend.

P.S. An addendum, I guess we’re eager to relive post-9/11 again, Eric Adams edition. Eric Adams went on MSNBC and straight up lied that the DSA organized protests where people were carrying swastikas.

P.P.S. In addition to obfuscation, Weiss’s superpower is shameless hypocrisy. Over the past 10 years she’s self-styled as a free speech advocate. Her critics, including my friend the Jewish political cartoonist Eli Valley (who she tried to ‘cancel’ when he had an event at Stanford) have long pointed to her anti-Palestinian activism in college—efforts to get professors fired, etc. But we all do stupid stuff in college! This is a full-grown adult somehow justifying a commitment to free speech with “let’s let rich people decide what speech is allowed on campus.”