At this point, it shouldn’t be surprising.
Just weeks after the ADL defended Elon Musk’s Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration, Steve Bannon throws up what looks like a Nazi salute at CPAC. And then, right on cue, here comes The Free Press—the fearless, supposed bastion of “free thinking” launched by Bari Weiss—publishing an article telling us not to worry about it. Nothing to see here, folks!
The piece, penned by Richard Hanania, a Project 2025 contributor who has written in favor of forcibly sterilizing “low IQ” people and in opposition to “race-mixing,” claims these stiff-armed salutes aren’t actually about Nazis. No, no. They’re just symbols of an “oppositional culture,” a little rebellious energy from right-wingers who don’t realize they’ve already won.
It’s not subtle. It’s not even a new tactic. The far right loves playing this game—flirting with explicit fascism, then hiding behind irony, provocation, or, as Hanania suggests, some sort of weird rebel cosplay. But what’s really interesting isn’t just the right-wing attempts to mainstream Nazism. It’s that Bari Weiss is the one making space for it.
This is the same Bari Weiss who built her career on decrying antisemitism and warning that the real threat to Jews comes not from the ascendent far-right, but from progressives on college campuses and BDS activists. Her 2019 book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, reads like a manifesto for a certain kind of center-right Zionist: the type who believes that leftist critiques of Israel from professors and student organizers are a greater danger to world Jewry than actual white supremacists. The sort of person who thinks of themself as a liberal, but who can’t seem to understand how they keep ending up allied with the right.
We can’t ignore the fact that Bari Weiss used to write for this very magazine. And we won’t pretend that it doesn’t make us uncomfortable. She’s published in a print edition from the spring of 2006, her portrait tucked between other college correspondents who would grow up to be perfectly decent individuals. Whatever she might have represented back then, she has since chosen to use her platform to excuse, downplay, and ultimately enable the right’s slide into explicit fascism. Small as we are, the team at New Voices firmly and unequivocally rejects any association with her or her poisonous legacy. If Weiss once claimed to be a defender against antisemitism, she has now become a key figure in its normalization.
And she’s not alone. Just look at Jonathan Greenblatt’s ADL, an organization that was once a watchdog against hate but has increasingly become a PR machine for right-wing power players. Greenblatt, who has been more concerned with attacking progressive activists than addressing the actual resurgence of fascism, was quick to downplay Elon Musk’s Nazi salute. Rather than unequivocally condemning one of the richest men in the world for flashing fascist imagery at a presidential inauguration, the ADL twisted itself into knots defending him. While progressive Jewish organizations were quick to call them out for this absurdism, a vast majority of American Jews still look to the ADL to gauge their level of safety. Greenblatt’s refusal to name this show of terror will keep the wool over the eyes of the liberal American Jew until it’s far too late.
This is the logical conclusion of Weiss’s and Greenblatt’s political project. They, and others like them, have always framed their brand of anti-antisemitism around defending Zionism rather than fighting actual fascism. And because of that, they’ve found themselves more and more aligned with the very people who throw up Nazi salutes at political rallies (which is to say, Nazis.) In their ideological calculus, white nationalism is a lesser evil compared to the scary, anti-Zionist left. And if that means laundering fascist symbolism as “oppositional culture,” so be it.
There’s a reason why so many on the right have come to see Jewish public figures like Weiss and Greenblatt as allies. They’ve given them a blueprint for excusing their own creeping fascism—one where supporting Israel serves as a kind of moral absolution.
This is why you have people like Hanania writing for The Free Press, despite his history of open racism. It’s why Weiss and the ADL would rather publish excuses for Nazis than reckon with the fact that the movement they’ve chosen to align themselves with is riddled with people who hate Jews, even as they drape themselves in the language of “Judeo-Christian values.”
Bari Weiss didn’t start out as a defender of Nazi salutes. Neither did Jonathan Greenblatt. But when you choose Zionism over progressivism, when you make a career out of arguing that the left is a greater threat than the right, and when you decide that student protesters are more dangerous than white nationalists—well, this is where you end up.
Making excuses for fascists.
Again.
