Who is Bari Weiss? Meet the reporter who exposed 'racist' shrink Aruna Khilanani
Former New York Times opinion writer and editor Bari Weiss was lauded for exposing a New York City-based psychiatrist who told an audience she had fantasies of "unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way.”
Dr Aruna Khilanani spewed the racially charged remarks at the Yale School of Medicine's Child Study Center on April 6. She added that she would walk away after shooting white people "with a bounce in my step” because they "make my blood boil" and "are out of their minds and have been for a long time."
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Audio footage of the talk was shared by Weiss on her substack platform Friday, alongside a transcript from an interview of Khilanani conducted by writer and podcaster Katie Herzog. According to the New York Post, Khilanani's lecture was titled, “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind” and included “learning objectives” such as “Set up white people’s absence of empathy towards black rage as a problem” and “Understand how white people are psychologically dependent on black rage.”
Who is Bari Weiss?
Weiss has been described as a left-leaning centrist who grabbed headlines last summer when she quit the Times in spectacular fashion, citing "constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views."
Having joined the newspaper in 2017, Weiss said the media institution was betraying its standards and losing sight of its principles, even accusing them of only publishing stories that "satisfy the narrowest of audiences." In her resignation letter, Weiss claimed that intellectual curiosity and risk-taking were a "liability" at the Times.
She claimed that Twitter opinions had become the newspaper's "ultimate editor." Weiss also accused the paper of creating a "hostile work environment" for those who essentially held anything other than left-of-center views.
It's worth noting that Weiss is not a fan of former President Donald J Trump. However, conservatives and Trump allies rallied behind her after her scathing resignation letter. Republicans have, for the longest time, accused several age-old media institutions of harboring an anti-conservative bias. During his presidential tenure, Trump often derided the Times as "fake news" and a "failing" newspaper.
Prior to her stint at the New York Times, Weiss was an op-ed editor at the Wall Street journal between 2013 to 2017.
In a 2019 interview with Vanity Fair, Weiss said it had dawned upon her at some point that she was among the most left-wing people at the WSJ around the time Trump was elected. She also claimed that she wasn't allowed to write on the apparent "hypocrisy" of former First Lady Melania Trump's "Be Best" anti-bullying campaign.
Weiss told Vanity Fair that Trump's 2016 upset victory had prompted her to leave the WSJ. "I was sobbing, openly, at my desk. I wanted people to see how I felt about this, and what I thought it meant for the country. I realized I had to leave," she told the magazine.
Before WSJ, Weiss was a senior editor at online Jewish magazine, Tablet, from 2011 to 2013, where she covered news and politics. Weiss graduated from Columbia University, and once dated SNL's Kate McKinnon while studying at the Ivy League college.