But one of the biggest eye-openers was her discussion about her previous employer, the Wall Street Journal. After never experiencing much resistance to placing political op-eds on the editorial page, Weiss said, "all of a sudden I was being told that I didn't, you know, have the standing to write about these things, or that they were too anti-Trump." This happened on "several" occasions, she said, with the atmosphere contributing to the exodus not just of her but of a number of prominent #NeverTrump types. "It was heartbreaking for me to see people who I thought that we sort of shared fundamental values making peace with a candidate who, I mean, just from the most basic perspective ran a campaign on denigrating and demonizing the weakest people in our culture," Weiss said.
But the more significant storyan obsession for the Never Trumpersis the rupture within the Journal's editorial pages and the exodus that resulted.
Bret Stephens, who won a Pulitzer in 2013, was the defector with the highest profile. He was deputy editor when he jumped over to the Times, where he was soon joined by his editor at the Journal, Bari Weiss. The Journal's books editor, Robert Messenger, is now at The Weekly Standard. Sohrab Ahmari, a foreign-policy writer, went to Commentary. Mark Lasswell, an editor, was told not to return from a book leave.
Those were heavy losses in pages whose content is managed by fewer than thirty people in total. And the reason, according to several defectors, was the Journal's skidding reversal once Rupert Murdoch realized Trump could win.
