Liberal speaks to conservatives about working together to save America

Throughout her 38-minute speech, Weiss proved eloquent, poignant, and self-deprecating. She used humor to disarm and challenge the primarily conservative audience to look past the reality of her same-sex marriage and support for abortion to the stark truth that she, and millions like her, are allies with them in the more profound and deeper fight to save Western civilization as we know it.

She opened by noting that the attacks of Oct. 7 were not like “previous wars or battles Israel has fought in its 75-year history.†It was a “genocidal pogrom,†akin to the Nazi Holocaust, the European pogroms, or the Farhud, the 1941 massacre of Jews in Baghdad.

Comparisons between the 9/11 and Oct. 7 attacks are apt because, as she noted, “the spectacle and savagery were the point.†Yet while the West responded with due horror to 9/11, Weiss lamented the West’s response to Oct. 7 as a “moral and spiritual catastrophe, revealing the rot permeating our civilization.

A Speech for the Ages: Bari Weiss’ Battle Cry to Save the West