Jonathan Chait , The Atlantic; Stop Defending Bari Weiss
"Weiss is following a long-standing instinct to turn every Trump abuse into a debate, a generosity she does not afford targets on the left...
Weiss claims that the CECOT story fails to “advance the ball” because many of its central facts have already been reported. This mania for insisting that every new story introduce breaking news was nowhere to be found when she was airing a town hall with Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, whose talking points have not exactly suffered from underexposure.
Liberal democracy is the proposition that democracy requires more than mere voting. It needs a set of neutral rules governing the state and civil society to prevent ruling parties from becoming entrenched in power. Trump’s maneuvers to influence CBS blatantly violate even the most minimal guardrails of liberal democracy. Those blunt abuses of power matter a million times more than the specific content of a particular 60 Minutes segment.
Conservatives would never accept a left-wing government using regulatory favoritism to pressure conservative media into softening their coverage of a Democratic administration. They may delight in the new editorial direction of CBS News, but they cannot defend the process that led to it. So they pretend it didn’t happen; offer narrow, pointillistic defenses of Weiss’s editorial pretext; and deftly dodge the authoritarianism that enabled it."
