Bari Weiss has been making the world worse for a long time.

Twenty years ago, as a student at Columbia, she led a racist smear campaign against Arab professors who had the audacity to criticize Israel. As a New York Times columnist, she constantly hawked right-wing bile while posing as a liberal who was just tired of all the extremism and censorship on the left—a tedious bait-and-switch that nevertheless sent her media profile soaring. And, as founder and editor of The Free Press, she has pushed genocide denial, transphobia, and the freedom to make Nazi salutes.

If we lived in a less terrible time and place, Weiss would be dismissed as a crank and a bigot, and never heard from again. But we live in the waking nightmare that is the United States in 2025. So instead Weiss is being rewarded with a prize that even she must think is kind of wild.

That prize? CBS News.

The person handing this gift to Weiss is David Ellison, the billionaire nepo baby who just merged CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, with his company, Skydance Media. Ellison, Puck’s Dylan Byers reported on Wednesday, is paying somewhere between $100 million and $200 million to buy The Free Press and install Weiss somewhere at the top of the network.