Dear Bari Weiss, Machiavelli Was Right. It Is Better To Be Feared Than Loved

Especially when your enemies are utter moral frauds

Do you remember the time that 60 Minutes covered the Arkansas ban on pediatric sex lobotomies by interviewing someone from the conservative nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, leaving almost everything they said on the cutting room floor without interviewing any of the parents or clinicians they recommended, instead airing pro-trans advocacy and minimizing regret rates? Pepperidge Farms remembers, and so does Emilie Kao. It was 2021:

Shortly before the “60 Minutes+” interview, the traditional Sunday night version of “60 Minutes” ran a story in which correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewed 30 “detransitioners,” including one who said he became suicidal for the first time after surgery on his genitals.

There was intense backlash from the Human Rights Campaign and other LGBT activists against “60 Minutes” for including the voices of those who have become skeptical about “gender affirmation.”

Activists immediately tried to discredit the ex-trans youth Stahl interviewed. GLAAD called it “fearmongering”. Stahl defended the segment, but worried aloud that “anti-transgender groups” would “weaponize” it. She was under tremendous professional pressure to conform with activist narratives, which she acknowledged. “Stahl told 60 Minutes Overtime that she cannot remember another story she has worked on at 60 Minutes where comments and criticisms began surfacing from advocates before the piece aired.”

Insiders had warned them, so the activists did not wait for the show to air. In fact, three activists appeared in the Overtime segment, for the pro-child sterilization people insisted on filibustering the detransitioners. HRC president Alphonso David worried they “could be “taken out of context [and] could further victimize and marginalize” the “transgender community”. Instead, “we need to also elevate the positive stories of people who successfully transition”. We have to tell the correct story, otherwise the terrorists win.

Dr. Lee Savio Beers of the American Association of Pediatrics, which controversially endorses WPATH guidelines, wanted to “help dispel the myths about what gender-affirming care is and isn’t” but did not do so. Instead, her message was to trust parents who do this to their kids, implying that they know better than the parents who resist it.

Dr. Marci Bowers, a transgender surgeon who has operated on minors, including Jazz Jennings, emphasized “the informed consent model” and “standards of care”, which is the flimsy legalese that WPATH and AAP and the AMA and the Endocrine Society have all used to ‘affirm’ tens of thousands of young people and medicalize their delusion. Stahl could not talk to ex-trans youth without giving time to the propagandists and the monied interests behind them. Name another issue where Big Pharma is somehow the progressive political hero.

To be fair, “60 Minutes got a lot of things right” in their coverage, Mary Laval observed at Genspect. Yet the show was still far from balanced or fair. Stahl and the show’s producers took it for granted that they were covering a “culture war” issue, that “ignorance and prejudice” were the impetus behind political opposition to pediatric gender mutilation (“discrimination”), and let advocate claims about suicide risk and regret rates go unchallenged. They used the language of genderwoo — “transgender youth”, “trans kids” — on the clear assumption that such a class of human being exists.

Instead, as critics have pointed out time and time again, the ‘trans child’ has been invented by adults to serve adults ends. This history, which is objectively true, went unexamined at 60 Minutes. No one ever reassessed the a priori position that some children are really born in the wrong bodies so that a proliferating industry of pediatric sterilization clinics is necessary to fix them. Advocates even got away with minimizing the size of their business sector.

Clinical psychologist Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper of WPATH did express growing concern at the Wild West approach her profession had taken. “It greatly concerns me where the field has been going. I feel like what is happening is unethical and irresponsible in some places”, she said. But Edwards-Leeper does not want politicians telling her to stop doing it, either.

The month after the segment aired, “60 Minutes aired a follow-up which only featured the views of ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, Dr. Michele Hutchinson, and an Arkansas youth. It is not a problem to show these viewpoints – as long as the show also aired the viewpoints of other experts and those who want to take the recent evidence base more into account (for instance, puberty blockers being experimental)”, Laval wrote. “One Genspect parent was in fact interviewed for the piece, but in the end her testimony found its way to the cutting room floor.” Of course it did.

Every single person at CBS News and 60 Minutes now complaining about Bari Weiss is an utter moral hypocrite, a fraud. Weiss, whose website The Free Press has broken the story of whistleblower Jamie Reed, should know as well as anyone how broken, biased, and misinformative their editorial practices and standards are. I submit that Weiss’s willingness to cover Reed can explain the hostility to her on Bluesky all by itself. It remains to be seen whether Weiss understands the truth of Machiavelli’s dictum that the ruled do not always love you, so that it is better to be feared than loved, and that disloyalty must be punished in full public view.

Power alone defines the editorial morality of the #resistance at CBS News, so Weiss will never succeed by appealing to normative standards of journalism. The power structure underneath her will not obey until all the resistance fighters have been walked out the door holding their personal belongings in cardboard boxes with ‘no trespass’ warnings. Nothing has changed since 2021, and nothing will continue to change without a change in personnel. Examples must be made even if whole departments are gutted. Weiss can start by benching Sharyn Alfonsi until her contract runs out. Otherwise, the terrorists will eventually win, just like they did at The New York Times.