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Thursday, September 4, 2025

CBS News staffers ‘apoplectic’ over Bari Weiss’ apparent imminent arrival

CBS News staffers are “apoplectic” over reports that Bari Weiss — an avowedly pro-Israel journalist — is on the verge of taking a top job at the Tiffany Network, according to a report.

Weiss, the former New York Times opinion editor who quit in 2020 after blasting the paper’s “illiberal environment,” is reportedly in line for a senior editorial role at CBS as part of Paramount’s pending acquisition of her startup, the Free Press, in a deal valued at up to $200 million.

Paramount boss David Ellison, who seized control of the network in an $8 billion mega-merger with Skydance, has declined to comment on the talks. But the Puck News website reported late Wednesday that the deal is in advanced stages and likely to close soon.

“Not happy AT ALL,” one person familiar with the mood inside CBS told Status News, adding that many journalists are bracing for impact.

Another insider warned that Weiss’ arrival would set off a firestorm, particularly over coverage of Israel and Gaza, saying some employees would be “apoplectic” at the prospect of taking editorial direction from her.

One prominent journalist outside CBS went even further, telling Status they would resign rather than work under Weiss, summing up the situation with a biting line: “Good night, and bad luck.”

“Good night, and bad luck” is a deliberate play on words that riffs on the legendary 1950s CBS News anchor Edward R. Murrow sign-off, “Good night, and good luck,” which became the title of a 2005 George Clooney film about Murrow.

The anti-Weiss backlash shows how rattled CBS staff already are after years of cutbacks and dwindling ratings.

Ellison has tried to calm nerves over anticipated changes at the Tiffany Network. On his victory lap after clinching the Paramount-Skydance deal last month, he said he did not want to “politicize the company.”

Yet his first big splash at CBS News is poised to be Weiss — a sharp-tongued critic of progressive orthodoxy who built the Free Press into a subscriber-driven platform mixing opinion, essays and interviews.

Puck media reporter Dylan Byers pegged Paramount’s offer for Weiss’ outlet at “well above” $100 million while other estimates have gone as high as $200 million — more than 10 times its reported $10 million to $15 million in annual subscription revenue.

The Free Press launched in 2022 and quickly drew attention for high-profile contributors and Weiss’ confrontational voice on hot-button issues. She has hosted interviews with senators and celebrities, and her podcast “Honestly” has booked Republican lawmakers including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

Ellison, 41, inherited CBS News as the centerpiece of Paramount Global after regulators signed off on his merger. The FCC conditioned its approval on major concessions, including eliminating DEI mandates and installing an ombudsman to monitor bias.

Those changes were already viewed inside CBS as a warning shot.

One insider likened the ombudsman’s office to a “hall monitor,” while some former anchors publicly fretted about the network’s tradition of independent reporting.

Now Weiss’ potential arrival has compounded those fears — and revived questions about the fate of current network president Tom Cibrowski, who has not commented.

Weiss has kept quiet publicly, and Paramount has refused to confirm the deal. But with talks described by Puck as “on the one-yard line,” staffers are preparing for a new chapter.

The Post has sought comment from Paramount and Weiss. CBS News declined to comment.

https://nypost.com/2025/09/04/media/not-happy-at-all-cbs-news-staffers-apoplectic-over-bari-weiss/

Hypocritical Dems dangerous game of fantasizing about Trump’s demise, condoning political violence

by Miranda Devine

Over the Labor Day weekend, instead of enjoying the last days of summer with family and friends, Democrats and other Trump-deranged folk had nothing better to do than indulge in sick fantasies about the president’s death.

Hashtags like #trumpisdead and #whereistrump trended on X, with countless TikToks, Google searches and posts saying “TRUMP DIED” garnering millions of likes and views.

This was not a harmless meme or politics as usual. It was seeded by anonymous left-wing social media accounts and amplified by journalists and influencers to create a permission structure to fantasize about Trump’s demise.

Despite photos of Trump golfing with his grandchildren and his numerous long missives on Truth Social — including about the landscapers who ruined the new limestone paving in the Rose Garden — the rumor went viral.

Politifact traced the rumor’s origin to a tweet from a virulently anti-Trump “foreign policy” reporter named Laura Rozen, from Al-Monitor, who shared a screenshot of the White House presidential schedule and faux-innocently noted that Trump hadn’t been seen in two whole days!

Her post was viewed 34 million times and gave rise to countless copycats who dreamed up a White House cover-up and all manner of ailments that might have felled the president.

Hearing of own ‘death’

“How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?” Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked Trump at an Oval Office press conference Tuesday.

“1.3 million user engagements as of Saturday morning about your demise.”

In the style of Mark Twain, who once famously said, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” Trump made light of the rumor, and dismissed it as “fake news.”

He pointed out that he had a “very active” weekend.

“Last week I did numerous news conferences … and then I didn’t do any for two days, and they said, ‘There must be something wrong with him.’ Biden wouldn’t do them for months. You wouldn’t see him. And nobody ever said there was ever anything wrong with him.”

Exactly.

Joe Biden was AWOL almost his entire presidency and on the few occasions he was encountered by the press, he alternately whispered, yelled, fell over or shuffled about like a cadaver. Yet all the same people who turned a blind eye to Biden’s infirmities and routinely castigated the rest of us — “He’s sharp as a tack! Stop being ageist! Cheap Fakes!” — are now questioning Trump’s health.

In a 2,000-word piece written by three reporters Tuesday, the New York Times revisited the bruises on Trump’s hand that they keep pretending are sinister but just come from vigorous handshaking with large numbers of people, something Biden was never at risk of doing.

“His ankles are swollen. He is the oldest person to be elected president,” they wrote, while acknowledging a “wishful-thinking industry around Trump’s health [and] legal woes.”

At 79, the president demonstrates an enormous capacity for vigorous action, morning, noon and night. What drives his opponents mad is they can’t keep up.

That’s why the entire Democratic Party apparatus is keyed in to the elimination of Trump.

No answer to victories

He has shown them up badly, and they have no answer to his victories, whether on illegal migration, big-city crime, cutting taxes, ending wars, boosting the economy, kicking biological boys out of girls’ sports, canceling vaccine mandates, Making America Healthy Again and all the other common-sense prescriptions he is energetically putting into place.

They can’t seem to counter him or change course and have no leader other than a snake oil salesman named Gavin with slicked-back hair and bizarre hand gestures who tries unsuccessfully to imitate Trump.

So they have retreated into the delusion that, if only Trump were gone, all their problems would vanish.

Their constant framing of Trump as “Hitler,” an “authoritarian fascist” and an “existential threat” who must be stopped at all costs, fosters a climate in which death threats against the president are normalized.

This week, Washington, DC, grand juries let off two nutjobs charged with repeatedly threatening to assassinate the president.

One was a New York woman who posted on Facebook that she wanted to “sacrificially kill this POTUS by disemboweling him and cutting out his trachea” and was arrested by the Secret Service at a “No Fascist Takeover of DC” rally outside the White House.

After Trump survived two assassination attempts during the 2024 election campaign, liberal feeds lit up with regret.

One-third of Democratic voters surveyed by a British politics professor in a small snap poll published in UnHerd in July 2024 agreed with the statement, “I wish Trump’s assassin hadn’t missed.”

Former FBI Director James Comey typified the casual malice when he posted an Instagram photo of seashells that spelled out the numbers “8647,” which he captioned: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”

The number 86 is a slang term meaning “to get rid of” or “kill,” and Trump is the 47th president.

So Comey’s message was a pretty clear incitement to violence, for which he was investigated by the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security.

Of course, he pretended he had no idea what the numbers meant: “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.”

As if a guy with decades in law enforcement, who rose to the top of an intelligence agency that specializes in national security threats, wasn’t adept at interpreting coded assassination threats.

Trump knew better: “That meant assassination, and it says it loud and clear. Now, he wasn’t very competent, but he was competent enough to know what that meant.”

Chi-town incitement

Then there is Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has no solution to the violence that claimed eight lives in his city over the weekend.

On Monday at a protest rally, he bordered on inciting violence against federal troops whom Trump has threatened to send in to clean up crime.

“Are you prepared to defend this land that was built by slaves?” he shouted.

“Are you prepared to defend this land?”

Earlier he told MSNBC: “The people of this city are accustomed to rising up against tyranny and if that’s necessary, I believe the people of Chicago will stand firm.”

Rise up or stand firm.

The message is clear.

Violence is encouraged, or at least condoned, by Democrats with nothing to offer, just as it was in 2020 when luminaries from Kamala Harris to Minnesota first lady Gwen “I want to smell burning tires” Walz welcomed the mayhem of the George Floyd anti-cop riots.

This is not normal.

A collapsing political party is as dangerous as an animal in its death throes.

https://nypost.com/2025/09/03/opinion/the-dems-have-nothing-better-to-do-than-to-portray-a-fantasy-of-trumps-demise/

MN school shooter’s ‘furry’ girlfriend ID’d after killer described past tie as ‘root of my suffering’

Deranged transgender Minnesota shooter Robin Westman had recently dumped his longtime girlfriend, who was reportedly a “furry” — describing the ex as the “root of my suffering” in a twisted manifesto.

The 23-year-old maniac, who slaughtered two children and injured 18 other people at a Minneapolis Catholic school, had only recently called it quits with his partner of several years before last week’s bloodshed, his dad previously revealed.

The ex has been identified by the Daily Mail as 22-year-old Abigail Bodick, who was previously pictured on social media wearing cat ears and whiskers at an anime convention earlier this year.

In the series of sick documents linked to Westman after the shooting, Westman had repeatedly referred to a person named “Aby” and “Abbey” — calling them a “catalyst” for his deranged behavior and the “root of my suffering.”

He also wrote about being fascinated by “furries,” people who enjoy dressing up as cartoonish animals.

“I like feeling sexy and cute, but my face never matches how I feel. I hate my face… maybe that’s why I like furries so much,” he wrote. “You can give yourself a new body and face.”

Several social media photos obtained by the Mail — dating back to at least 2022 — showed the couple posing together in happier times.

The smiling couple was pictured selling items at a craft event, dressing up for a local Renaissance fair and visiting an aquarium together.

It wasn’t exactly clear when they ended things. However, Westman’s father told investigators after the shooting that his son recently “broke up with a significant and/or romantic partner.”

Westman penned a slew of unhinged entries before the shooting, saying he wished he’d never met his ex.

“Aby is such a baby. I should have never started dating them,” Westman wrote.

“I am NOT spending my life with a ‘blue hair and pronouns’ having a– b—h. You are lucky I have bigger plans than you,” the gunman said in another.

In addition to describing the girlfriend as a “catalyst” and the “root of my suffering,” Westman also admitted in one entry that he’d pointed a gun at the back of his ex’s head in the weeks before the shooting.

“I just pointed my pistol at the back of Abbey’s head to see if I would feel anything,” he reportedly wrote.

“No, the only thing I felt was fear of them turning around and catching me. I felt no remorse or fear of killing them, I was only concerned about how murdering Abbey would really f–k up my plans,” he continued.

“It felt good, actually, to point it right at their stupid head. Abbey is so f–king stupid, I have been handling and walking with it holstered, exposed, all day, and they still think it’s airsoft.

“Dumbass b—h! It’s a real gun! I bought it to kill kids!”

The twisted gunman also, at one point, mused about how his ex would react to the horror he had planned.

“I want to kill so many people. I will do it. All I want to think about is guns and killing. Abbey keeps me from that with their annoying voice and stupid s–t they say,” he reportedly wrote.

“Let’s see how much you love me after I complete my mission!”

The Post was unable to reach Bodick or her relatives for comment.

The sickening details emerged as investigators continue to probe a motive for last week’s bloodshed that saw Westman fire 116 rifle rounds through stained-glass windows while children celebrated Mass during the first week of classes at the Annunciation Catholic School.

Youngsters Fletcher Merkel, 8, and Harper Moyski, 10, were killed in the attack before Westman took his own life.

Sixteen other children, as well as three parishioners in their 80s, were injured.

https://nypost.com/2025/09/04/us-news/minneapolis-shooter-robin-westmans-furry-girlfriend-idd/