The Arc of the Culture War Bends toward...Bari?

An optimistic scenario for a post-Trump, post-woke America

It’s natural to wonder where our country is headed. One thing that seems certain is that we have not yet reached any kind of equilibrium. The Great Awokening, culminating in the madness of the Summer of Floyd, appeared to be taking us down the path of a new kind of totalitarianism, yet here we are just a few years later and Trump has managed to turn the entire federal government into a vehicle for his own corruption, as he claims the right to ship people to foreign prisons without due process and exerts more overt power over universities and media outlets than any other administration in recent American history.

One can imagine things continuing to seesaw like this indefinitely, alternating between left-wing cancel culture and right-wing authoritarianism. Or maybe Vance, or a third-term Trump, will simply consolidate the power that has been accumulated. It’s easy to believe that Trump’s expansion of executive power will never be clawed back, and we’ll continue to have elections but with new presidents behaving more like temporary dictators.

Alternatively, we might just get…Bari? On Monday, Bari Weiss was named the editor-in-chief of CBS News, as Skydance, the company it is now under, purchased The Free Press for $150 million. This is only the latest event in what can be described as a right-wing takeover of much of the press and social media. Jeff Bezos has decided to take a more hands-on role in running The Washington Post and steering it towards libertarianism. Elon Musk bought X, Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for censoring conservatives, and the TikTok algorithm is going to be under the supervision of right-leaning investors. At the local news level, the pro-Trump Sinclair Broadcast Group reaches into a substantial portion of American homes, as we were reminded during its brief refusal to show Jimmy Kimmel’s show after his return. .

This hasn’t been a completely natural process. The news about Weiss and The Free Press broke a mere weeks before the FCC approved the Skydance merger with Paramount, which raises suspicions that executives were trying to get on the good side of Trump officials. This is an administration that openly says that it uses regulatory power in order to shape media coverage in its own direction, as the President personally sues outlets over the way they report on him. He broke the law by refusing to enforce the TikTok ban, and then assured that the platform would continue functioning under the control of an ownership structure that may include Trump allies Rupert Murdoch and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, whose son David is the CEO of Skydance.