“The World Has Gone Mad”; Journalist Bari Weiss Has Tense Exchange With CNN’s Brian Stelter

It was reported earlier today that… former New York Times editor Bari Weiss warned that narrow media coverage and rampant self-censorship have created a world gone mad, CNN’s Brian Stelter interrupted her to ask, ”Who’s the people stopping the conversation?”

“You write there are tens of millions of Americans who aren’t on the hard-Left or the hard-Right, who feel the world has gone mad. So, in what ways has the world gone mad?” Stelter asked, airing a part of a pre-recorded interview he conducted with Weiss for Sunday’s episode of “Reliable Sources.” 

Weiss replied at length:

When you have the chief reporter on the beat of COVID for The New York Times talking about how questioning or pursuing the question of the lab leak is racist, the world has gone mad.

When you’re not able to say out loud and in public that there are differences between men and women, the world has gone mad.

When we’re not allowed to acknowledge that rioting is rioting, and it is bad — and that silence is not violence, but violence is violence — the world has gone mad.

When we’re not able to say that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a story worth pursuing, the world has gone mad. When, in the name of progress, young school children as young as kindergarten are being separated in public schools because of their race, and that is called “progress” rather than “segregation,” the world has gone mad.

There are dozens of examples that I could share with you and with your viewers, but — and of course, cue the obligatory interruption followed by a degree of iron when Stelter asked ”Who’s the people stopping the conversation?”

Fox News further reported that

“People who work at networks, frankly, like the one I’m speaking on right now, to say it was racist to investigate the lab leak theory,” Weiss said. 

It was unclear who Weiss was referring to with her remark, although the narrative that the coronavirus may have leaked from a Wuhan lab was widely ridiculed by CNN and other media outlets before gaining mainstream credence this year. CNN medical contributor Dr. Leana Wen remarked in June that any investigation of the lab theory shouldn’t lead to anti-Asian discrimination.

After Stelter, in typical tone-deaf fashion asked Weiss who at CNN said that, Weiss fired back, “But you and I both know that it would be delusional to claim otherwise that touching your finger to an increasing number of subjects that have been deemed third rail by the mainstream institutions and increasingly by some of the tech companies will lead to reputational damage, perhaps you losing your job, your children sometimes being demonized as well, so what happens is a kind of internal self-censorship.”