John Oliver Destroys Bari Weiss In Defense Of Transgender People
The right-wing commentator is now the head of CBS.
John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” is combating the Bari Weissification of media this week, starting with Weiss’s sordid history of amplifying anti-trans disinformation.
Weiss is best known these days for running The Free Press—widely cited as one of Substack’s largest publications. Her multi-media enterprise spans across other social media sites as well, like Facebook, X, and TikTok, where she and her staff of professional contrarians ask hard-hitting questions like, “Is Donald Trump really that racist?” in response to the president telling American congresswomen of color to “go back where they came from.”
Now, Weiss has been tapped as the new head of CBS.
“She’s been given editorial control of a massive news organization, even though she’s never run a TV network, has no experience directing television coverage, and as one 60 Minutes producer pointed out, is not even a reporter,” Oliver said. “She didn’t come up through the news side of a newspaper, but through the opinion pages, which are a very different thing.”
Weiss stepped down as a conservative opinion editor/columnist for The New York Times and launched The Free Press in 2021. In trans advocacy circles, Weiss might be best known for birthing the anti-trans activist career of Jamie Reed in 2023. The former case manager at Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital wrote a since-debunked Free Press article that “jumpstarted the legislative push to outlaw gender-affirming care for minors,” as per the Missouri Independent.
The story produced a hotbed of anti-trans antagonism from the right. After the article was published, the Missouri Attorney General used it to wage war on the health care of trans minors in the state. Reed has since traveled around the country evangelizing the anti-trans panic, including in New Hampshire, where she presented supposedly falsified patient data in testimony to the statehouse earlier this year.
The Free Press has also published other anti-trans hits like an essay from Reed’s spouse: “I Spent 13 Years Living as a Man. But After My Spouse’s Exposé, I’m Detransitioning.”
Of course, like all avenues of health care, there may be some people who may be dissatisfied or have a negative experience in their pursuit of gender-affirming care. At least one patient from Reed’s former clinic has since come out and said they have detransitioned and criticized the center’s rollout of care.
But the majority of patients say the opposite. Reed brazenly mischaracterized the experiences of trans kids and their families, revealing personal data about their medical history in their process (although she did not identify patients by name, many were able to identify their cases in Reed’s allegations).
“Some of Reed’s marquee examples just don’t hold up on further inspection,” Oliver said. “For instance, she cited the harrowing story of a patient she claimed suffered liver toxicity from medication she was prescribed at the center and whose mother was so distraught, she sent a message saying they were lucky her family was not the type to sue.”
When reporters tried to further vet these claims, however, the family at the ordeal’s center called this a blatant lie.
“When the Times spoke with that family, they were stunned to read this characterization of their daughter’s case, saying she only experienced liver problems after getting COVID and taking another drug with possible liver side effects,” Oliver said. “As for threatening a lawsuit, they were adamant that never happened to the point they went on local news to refute the whole story.”
In an email to Oliver’s team, the mother of that trans youth said, “I’ve been fighting for the truth about that damn Free Press article for a while.”
After a recent company merger, Paramount Skydance Corporation—which owns CBS—is now eyeing an acquisition of Paramount, the parent company of HBO, which is the streaming service that carries John Oliver’s show. And as the major media conglomerates continue to fuse, Oliver’s segment reads like a warning shot: the Fourth Estate is collapsing under the weight of corporate consolidation and billionaire vanity projects. It’s being slowly bought up by a wealthy, elite few with a political agenda and unchecked editorial power. In an era where legacy journalism is curated by those who it should hold to account, skepticism is essential, especially when the story is about the trans community.
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Props to John Oliver for still being a staunch defender of the community through everything. Its heartening to see him not back down and instead continue to debunk and push back against the transphobic myths and lies his mainstream audience encounter elsewhere.
I hate Bari Weiss so much. She is the ultimate example of someone born on third base and thought she hit a triple. Her reputation as a "heterodox" intellectual is a lie on both counts - she neither intellectualizes in any meaningful sense, nor are her thoughts particularly "heterodox". She has, for her entire career, donned the attire of the brave outsider, all the while enjoying the benefits of being an elite insider with remarkable access to power.
My dream would be to be able to tell her these things, nicely and politely, to her face. Ideally in court.