Barry Weiss
speaker
976 appearances
13 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Barry Weiss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Here are some headlines from the time, and many of these outlets have actually gone back and changed their headlines because of how right you have been. But... The ones that are still standing, Why I Will Never Be a Tiger Mom, Why Amy Chua is Wrong About Parenting, Amy Chua's Recipe for Disaster, and on and on it went.
And then just as the publicity for this first book began to die down, Amy decided to publish a book called The Triple Package about why some ethnic groups succeed, subtext being why others do not, and you can imagine what the reaction was. She was racist, she was bigoted, she was some kind of ethnic chauvinist.
Then she came out in support of Brett Kavanaugh's court nomination in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Now, crucially, this is before he was accused by Christine Blasey Ford. Still, people accused you of misogyny and grooming, and you were almost forced out of Yale.
To add to that plate, in 2021, she was accused of hosting boozy dinner parties, would have said, during COVID lockdowns, and thus Dinner Party Gate was born. Yale punished Amy by barring her from teaching her small group first-year student contingency. I don't know what that is. It's some Yale thing. Now, let's fast forward to where we are sitting right now in January of 2025.
And everything is coming up Amy. Today, being a strict tiger mom, in. What? Yes. Yes. Yes. Gentle parenting is out, and we will talk about that. No offense to anyone in this room who's doing that, but I will judge you. Free speech, in. Wokeness and hypersensitivity, very much out. COVID lockdowns, definitely out. Vicious character assassinations and mob rule, hopefully those are out.
Simply put, Amy Chua, I believe, has won, or as my colleague Peter Savodnik just wrote in the Free Press, the ideas that Chua was pilloried for are suddenly back in fashion. And here she is now, attending the inauguration of the incoming president and the vice president, one of whom happens to be her former student and mentee. And it's not Trump because he didn't go to Yale Law School.
It's easy to be a weathervane. It's easy to go where the wind blows, which is what a lot of tech titans are doing right now. But it's hard to be you. It's hard to stand up for your beliefs, even when they are not popular, and even when it means personal consequences, all of which is why I am so excited to be talking to you here tonight. Amy Chua, welcome to Honestly.
So in other words, you're at a university which is supposed to have a singular mission, which is the pursuit of truth. And you're at one of the most elite universities in America. And you still feel, in 2025, like you can't be free.
I think from the outside looking in, and Peter's piece really captured that, it looks like you've been vindicated. But what I'm hearing from you, and I know from talking to you privately, There are, I don't want to be too dramatic about it, but there are wounds that come from being pilloried and being outcast and having people say really rough things about you. Yeah, we've both been through it.
Yeah, and you're saying right now, even as from the outside perspective, it looks like the tides have turned, you're saying, I still feel like there's a target on my back. Can you just talk personally in front of a room of people how beginning with your book and then with the other book, then with the Kavanaugh, then with the dinner. How did that change you as a person?
I mean, psychoanalyzing yourself a little bit more. Do you not think that there's something about you, even if you're not thinking consciously to yourself, I want to create the next fire, but that you have maybe a higher level of comfort with either being disliked or being disagreeable than a lot of other people and maybe than a lot of other women?
I mean, it was the most, I was at the journal at the time, and I think it was the most read story of that entire year.
Really? Do you know what it was?
I can't remember. Okay. So... I do think that there's something about you and I'm interested in this quality in general. Some might call it courage, others might call it obstinate or bullheadedness or stubborn. When the mob comes and let's just even say when peer pressure is sort of brought to bear on you, there's something inside of you that seems to be capable of resisting that.
You know, that came out really powerfully in 2018 when your colleagues at Yale asked you to sign an open letter against Brett Kavanaugh, who had been a darling at Yale Law up to that moment, and you said no. Did you have to even consider the no? Did you think about saying yes?
Let's just look back on that episode for a minute. Just a few days ago, a New York Times reporter, David Einrich, said of covering the Kavanaugh story that he would, quote, probably do certain things differently next time. Did you see that? Yeah, I did. What do you think he meant by that? Or what should he mean by that is maybe the better question.
You say that all of this started eight years ago. Would you agree that the summer of 2020, or rather like the 2020 COVID BLM era, was when the water was the hottest?
It was crazy. You told our reporter, Peter Savonnik, that this was a time where you were, quote, literally afraid to walk down the halls of the law school. You were filled with dread and paranoia. At one point, you guys even put your house in New Haven on the market. But in the end, you said, no, I will not be pushed out over my dead body.
Duh, Amy. Sorry.
So on the principle of I will not be pushed out, I 100% am with you. But I guess I want to challenge why it's so important to save what to many people seem like, if not a dead institution, a dying institution that is not worth saving.
Showing 401–420 of 976 · page 21 of 49
← Previous
Next →