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.
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Appearances
Honestly with Bari Weiss · H.R. McMaster on Trump: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly · 16 Jan 2025
podcast
We'll see you next time.
From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss. Trump's inauguration is right around the corner, and there is so much to cover in this new White House. In the coming weeks, we're going to have key figures from the new Trump administration on to talk about what they're planning and what you can expect.
But we all know that if Trump 2.0 is anything like Trump 1.0, there's going to be a lot to cover, a lot of twists, a lot of turns, and certainly controversy. And we wanted to make the space to analyze and break down each development as it unfolds.
So starting today and for the next few months, we're going to bring you weekly panels to break down the politics with some of our favorite guests so you can stay informed about what's happening in Trump's new White House. For today, those two people are Batya Ungar Sargon and Brianna Wu. Batya Ungar Sargon is a free press contributor and the opinion editor at Newsweek.
She is also the author of the essential book, Second Class. Brianna Wu is a Democratic fundraiser and activist, and in her past life, a video game developer. If you've heard them on Honestly Together before, you know that these two come from different sides of the political spectrum. I don't even know if there's a spectrum anymore, just different places on the political map.
But I value both of their perspectives, even or especially when they disagree, and I know you will too. Today, we talk about the L.A. fires that have that city burning and their political implications, not just for Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom, but for the Democratic Party.
We talk about the civil war inside the MAGA movement between nationalist populists like Steve Bannon and free marketeers like Elon Musk. We talk about Mark Zuckerberg's red pill moment and the changes he's making at Meta. And then we end on some predictions for the confirmation hearings that begin this week in Washington. Stay with us. Today's episode was made possible by Ground News.
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Reading the news this way helps you see discrepancies on how certain topics are covered or not covered, so that you can think critically about what you read and make up your own mind. Check it out at groundnews.com slash honestly to get 50% off the Ground News Vantage plan for unlimited access by subscribing, you're supporting transparency in media and our work in the meantime.
Batia and Brianna, welcome to Honestly.
Okay, brunettes, let's dive in. Before we get to the incoming administration, we need to cover a story that I really didn't expect us to be covering, although maybe the people that pay close attention to Nature and rain and incompetency in California governance would not be so surprised.
And of course, I'm talking here about the California fires, since that is the thing on mine and I'm sure yours and everyone's mind. These are the most destructive fires in Los Angeles's history. As we record, 24 people have died. That number is sure to go up. More than 12,000 homes, businesses, and buildings have been damaged or destroyed.
There are whole parts of Los Angeles that seem like a nuclear bomb has been set off. And lots of people are pointing lots of fingers. And I wanted to start by just asking, who's to blame here? And Bhatia, I thought maybe we could start with you.
I'll say here that the piece that you referenced by Leighton Woodhouse has elicited more anger from very thoughtful people than perhaps any story we've run in the past few months. I want to just read part of a letter that we're going to run tomorrow because I think it'll take us a little deeper into this conversation.
Leighton Woodhouse's piece is a revolting example of the defeatism that permeates far too much of civil society today. It's the same philosophy animating low birth rates, climate inevitability, and racial determinism.
Taken to its logical conclusion, Woodhouse's argument is that because Earth is part of a solar system that faces black holes, asteroids, and an eventual implosion on the sun, we should merely hang our heads and mutter goodbye to our lineage as the natural process of destruction takes place. In other words, there's a kind of
determinism and defeatism in the argument that, well, Los Angeles is built to burn. In other words, you could say the same thing. Manhattan is built to flood. We're surrounded by water. The entire idea of building cities and civilization is the idea that we push back against nature.
So, maybe I'm getting too heady for before noon on a Monday, but I got to say, having lived in LA over the past four years, having seen the way that the basic compact between citizens and the government does not work. If you call the LAPD because you see a robbery, or in my case, see a man wildly swinging a machete, it might take them an hour to show up.
Living in New York, New York feels like this utopian paradise in terms of just functionality compared to Los Angeles. So those fires are taking place in that political context, one in which things that should be public are increasingly privatized and in which people have really lost faith in the mayor and in the governor. But I've gone on too long. I'm meant to be the host.
Brianna, what do you think? Who's to blame?
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