Bari Weiss is probably the most successful millennial journalist. She rose rapidly through the ranks over the last decade and landed at the New York Times opinion page, considered widely the commanding heights of opinion pages.

Then, in 2020, she left the Times amid internal and external criticism. Since then, she founded a wildly successful publication, The Free Press, sold it to CBS, and became the top journalist at CBS.

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So why did she leave the Times in 2020?

That’s a really long and possibly boring story that would be litigated with transcripts from Slack, the workplace messaging service. But here’s one quick way to understand her resignation: the Times’ own story on her departure, from July 2020.

Weiss had written a 1,500-word resignation letter describing how she was hated for expressing or even tolerating opinions outside what the young Times staff thought were the bounds of permissible dissent. The Times described her hire “as part of the paper’s effort to broaden the ideological range of its opinion staff.”

So what were these right-wing opinions that got her in so much trouble?

Here’s the key paragraph in the Times piece:

“Ms. Weiss, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, has been known to question aspects of social justice movements that have taken root in recent years. She was critical of a woman who described an uncomfortable encounter with the comedian Aziz Ansari and questioned whether the sexual assault charges leveled against Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh should disqualify him from the post.”

Check out those two links. In both of them, Weiss comes across as thoughtful. In neither of them does she stake out a position even remotely right-wing.

She wrote, sensibly, that it was nuts for Aziz Ansari’s date to characterize an unpleasant and regrettable sexual encounter as “rape.” Read it yourself, and try to explain why this opinion is out of bounds.

The second link is to a video of an MSNBC panel after Christine Blasey Ford accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her. Here’s what Weiss said:

“I believe that she’s completely sincere in what she believes happened. And maybe it did happen exactly as she said 36 years ago — although we all know memory is capricious. But the idea that it’s not a he said/she said: That’s exactly what it is.”

Weiss then went on to point out that unlike with Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby, there were no other accusations against Kavanaugh (those accusations would come later, and would have no more corroboration than Ford’s).

“I believe her. I believe what she’s saying. I’m just saying, at the end of the day, it is one word against another.”

Then she asked, “Let’s say she did this exactly as she said. Should the fact that a seventeen-year-old presumably very drunk kid did this, should that be disqualifying?”

Weiss asked the question, but didn’t answer it. Just asking was the offense, according to the Times piece: “she questioned” whether the accusation should be disqualifying. Watch the clip and you’ll see liberal MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle thought it was a good question. Ruhle repeated it to the other guests.

So (1) an op-ed, arguing that not all gross male behavior is rape, and (2) asking a question on a panel were the top two items to establish why Weiss was considered controversial.

BARI WEISS NAMED EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF CBS NEWS IN $150 MILLION ACQUISITION OF THE FREE PRESS

The Times piece also dinged her — and I am not joking — for praising a child of immigrants with a tweet quoting Hamilton, “Immigrants: They get the job done.”

Before the dispute at the Times over the decision to run an op-ed by Tom Cotton, calling for the National Guard to police riots, these were Weiss’s offenses. This tells you how insane and detached from reality the American press was in 2020.