Charles Manson famously said, “You can’t kill me. I’m already dead.” I thought about that quote as the 60 Minutes scandal erupted, with a conversation between reporter Scott Pelley and newly hired producer Nick Bilton. From the NYT:
“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” [Scott Pelley] said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”
Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”
Mr. Bilton responded: “Well, I will show you. That’s what I have to say. That is my plan over the next two weeks. I’ll be meeting with everyone. I’m very excited to meet with everyone, yourself included.”
Needless to say, it didn’t exactly go as planned. Several sanctimonious “don’t you know who I am” statements later, Pelley was out.
60 Minutes isn’t quite dead, but it is a relic of the past. In the 1990s, it was pulling in 20-30 million viewers. That dropped to 14-16 million in the 2000s. By the 2010s, it was down to 10-12 million. Now, just 9 million people tune in every week in a country of 340 million. Much of that is due to the changes in technology, but still.
There is no doubt that 60 Minutes, like all of legacy media, is trapped inside the same bubble that thinks Jimmy Kimmel’s nightly monologue is still relevant, believes the Oscars still represent the majority of moviegoers, and that the New York Times has its finger on the pulse of everyday America.
Like so much of what we might call “resistance era culture,” there doesn’t seem to be a place for 60 Minutes in our culture now, beyond being a propaganda tool for the Democrats, which explains why so many of them feel a profound sense of loss now that Bari Weiss was brought in to give them a refresh.
Pelley’s statement to call out the new management at 60 Minutes was the hissy fit heard round the world. The irony is that his statement is itself bad journalism. He throws around serious allegations without offering any concrete examples:
Pelley has since talked to the New York Times to explain what he means by some of this, but even still, these are all examples of his own bias, one he can’t see and refuses to admit even exists. Instead, he insists that 60 Minutes is now showing bias simply by representing the other point of view.
In the interview, he explains how Bari Weiss wanted him to portray the other side of the story in the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. He says he did not think she drove her car into the officer or that Pretti was in any way violent. While that doesn’t mean they should have lost their lives, there is no question that they were at war with federal officers in a way we’ve never seen since the last Civil War.
His bias was front and center at a speech in 2025, where his mass delusions about what this country has become were laid bare. This guy was willing to give Bari Weiss a chance, come on.
Already a legend in his own mind, Pelley is writing his own legacy now as a self-made hero who stood up to the fascist regime.
Here is Michael Moynihan:
A Woketopia, if You Can Keep It
Some say 60 Minutes never recovered from its biggest scandal, when CBS Corporate forced the show to censor an interview with Big Tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, as depicted in Michael Mann’s brilliant film The Insider.
The Hollywood of today would never make a movie like that unless it somehow blamed Trump and the Republicans. Not only wouldn’t they make it, but they couldn’t make it, no one inside the empire would allow it because, contrary to their own mass delusions, the fascism was always coming from inside the house — all sticks of wood bound together as one, where no dissent is allowed.
I look around now, and I see relics of the old empire. They’re frantic and wild-eyed. They’re terrified that it all came crashing down. They don’t know why America turned away. But I do.
We never set out to build an empire. For us, it was riding the wave of new technology, new social media, a new computer in our pockets, and a brand new president to bring us into the promised land.
It was not Donald Trump's fault that our empire collapsed. It was the old cliche about how power corrupts. We acquired too much of it. Every company, institution, celebrity, movie studio, publishing house, and ordinary person has a social media platform. If you controlled social media, you could control them. Our public humiliation factory kept everyone in line, lest they be “it” on social media.
That was true even before Trump won, but the tweak to the algorithm in 2017, Donald Trump becoming president and ruling over Twitter at the same time, sent those of us inside the empire into waves of uncontrollable mass hysteria.
Many of them would never come out of it and are still locked in the spell of the mass delusion that a “fascist dictator, racist, rapist, criminal, pedophile” won the election in America not once, but twice. Somebody had to be lying. Pelley simply can’t tell the story the other way because he can’t see it. He’s still inside of it.
I see them now, those who bought the dream like I did, befuddled as to what to do next. They just want their power back, their empire, their utopia. Use fear, that always works to drive lazy voters to the polls. Fear of what? Tax cuts for the rich? Fox News? No, fear of the big things, the existential things, like “fascism” and “democracy.”
How do you even come back from that and make a pitch to the people that you should be put back in power to rule over a country you believe is under a Nazi occupation? How does Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro, Barbra Streisand, Katie Couric, Ellen DeGeneres, not to mention every single Democrat politician, come back from that?
Maybe it’s the effect of the internet on our brains, but the so-called “resistance” seems to have lost touch with the tangible reality of history, of what it looks like to fight real fascism. What Nazis really were. When you can make any reality you want, why wouldn’t you?
They are fine with the guy who has a Nazi tattoo because to them, that isn’t real.
Of course, leave it to Salena Zito to do the job of a real journalist and remind us:
70-80 million people died in World War II fighting to save the world from a fascist dictator, a real one. How can these people live with themselves by spreading the lie that we are living through anything like that now?
And that, more than anything, is why the empire collapsed. It was built on a foundation of delusions and lies.
Bari Weiss and the Fourth Turning
I have Bari Weiss to thank for starting this Substack. Very few people had the courage or the moxie to stand up to the Twitter mob back in 2020, but she did. I was on Twitter the night the mob came for her.
The screeching scolds had already been nipping at her heels at the New York Times after she was brought in to shake up the ideological chokehold the Left had on the paper (and still does).
They hated her, gossiped about her, shunned her, and yet, there she was, showing up anyway. She is built of stronger stuff than the kind of person who would ever crumple under the weight of the mob.
Tom Cotton's essay, Send in the Troops, reflected the views of most Americans, that if the riots over the Summer could not be controlled, the military should be brought in. Their opinions did not matter to the mob or, apparently, to the New York Times.
While 60 Minutes spent many stories on January 6th, they barely touched the riots in the Summer of 2020. They didn’t talk about the false narrative of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. That was left to local reporters.
They never told the other side of the story because no one did until Bari Weiss tried and was smacked down in a way that woke me up. It was like the lantern dropping out of the sky in The Truman Show.
It punctured the delusion at long last, and I realized that I was not getting the truth from the legacy media. They were lying to us and gaslighting us because Trump had to lose the election, and nothing else could matter.
But the truth still mattered to me. And it mattered to Bari Weiss. Eventually, she would launch a Substack revolution with The Free Press and urge others to follow her. And so I did.
Weiss is a millennial, the generation that’s to take the baton from the Baby Boomers, per the book, The Fourth Turning. You can see this unfolding everywhere, but perhaps nowhere as profoundly as with what happened at the Times and now at 60 Minutes.
Here is how the Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s interview with Pelley went on how he came to know Bari Weiss:
Um, yeah, sure pal. That sounds like padding for an upcoming lawsuit, not the truth. There is no way the Scott Pelley, who gave that speech at Wake Forest, is going to give someone hired by David Ellison “the benefit of the doubt.” That he had never even heard of Bari Weiss or had no idea any scandal had erupted at the Times over the Tom Cotton op-ed says it all.
The Fourth Turning is like winter. The old must die to make way for the new. Trump didn’t collapse the empire on his own, but he’s a “Gray Champion” all the same. The one Baby Boomer who could tear it all down to make way for the millennials, like Bari Weiss, to reshape the future for the generations to come.
MAGA
In 2020, I escaped the Doomsday Cult our empire had become and was searching for signs of life, for truth, for something that felt real. I began driving across the country and saw an America that people like me had forgotten even existed.
It wasn’t a virtual world where we make our own reality. It was a tangible place, with things people built with their own hands. It was farms, churches, town squares, neighborhoods, highways, and factories. What we built online had no place for this America. If you never understand that, you’ll never understand MAGA.
From the hills, the backyards, and the fields, one name called out from this forgotten America: Trump.
Even now, in 2026, these signs still stand. Not just in one state, in nearly every state.
Trump is not in power because he’s a fascist. He’s in power because we, the people, put him there to fight for us against the mighty empire that was like a black hole, sucking all of American society into it.
Anyone who thinks Bari Weiss would do Donald Trump's bidding at CBS News is living in a fantasy. They don’t know her, they don’t know him, and they most certainly do not know this country anymore.
It doesn’t seem like it’s asking too much for guys like Scott Pelley to snap out of it at long last and to realize this is a big country with lots of different kinds of people in it. And all of them have the same right to representation. If the culture stopped speaking to them and the government stopped representing them, well, it’s all over but the shouting.
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