Actor and comedian Groucho Marx famously said “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” Liberals up in arms that journalist Bari Weiss will be overseeing CBS News are perhaps raging that their exclusive club is no longer that, rendering themselves as much of a joke as Groucho’s witty line.

Fox News reported on October 6th that Weiss, formerly a New York Times writer who started the media company the Free Press after exposing liberal bias at The Gray Lady, will be editor-in-chief of CBS News following Paramount’s purchase of the Free Press. The backlash has been swift against Weiss, known also for speaking up boldly against DEI rigidity. The condemnation after the announcement of her new role was not just strong disagreement but misguided vitriol. Take for example Defector’s Patrick Redford, who described Weiss as having "a cop’s heart and a tadpole’s brain." Or look at Nitish Pahwa at Slate magazine, who wrote that "Weiss has built a career railing against ‘wokeness,’ and her critics fear this could mean a CBS News more sympathetic to her causes… more Crossfire-style 'debates' over common bugbears like Zohran Mamdani and gender-affirming care.”

The off-putting scorn here in references to “debates” and “cops” are also indicative of progressives’ radical positions on both. It is further proof of liberalism’s end stage disease, where speech is not erudite but ended. This is a political movement that its past leaders such as President John F. Kennedy would not recognize. Its decline is a stunning fall for Democrats as a political force, as seen in the 2024 presidential election where all 50 states and the District of Columbia shifted toward the Republican Party in varied amounts compared to 2020. One should perhaps sympathize with those who are having their toys taken away, as the Left has, in many spheres of American society.

The Left’s power has been increasingly dependent on projection, externalizing their fallacious self-grandeur onto the public. Projection of a supposed consensus view on culture that should then be adhered to in professional or associated circles. Projection of a perceived reasonableness as their views were more likely to be propagated from legacy news sources like CNN. Projection of political power in the form of virulent false attacks on conservatives as racists or bigots. And a projection of learning, with a monopoly in academia to try to demonstrate that degrees bestowed some kind of sophisticated progressivism.

Decades of pushback by stout-hearted voices such as Victor Davis Hanson, Newt Gingrich, and Clarence Thomas, not to mention Donald Trump’s two elections, has shattered that projection. President Trump has done something repeatedly well: standing up to radical leftists. It is this courage that the Right pleaded for with many of its more moderate figures over decades (think of McCain, Romney, Susan Collins and the like). Because confident on-the-ground conservatives knew that the Left’s projections were just bullying by another name. Standing up to the bullies, to expose and satirize and politically defeat them, are the ways to end their projections. Bari Weiss triumphed over the old media’s browbeating. Leftist bullies will bitterly fume at this repudiation, in a crybaby club of their own making.

Alan Loncar is an attorney in Macomb County, Michigan.

Image: CBS