Dark Phoenix: The Rise, Fall, and Re-emergence of Danielle Smith by Jeremy Appel (Dundurn Press Limited, Canada 2026). Excerpt reproduced with the permission of Dundurn Press Limited.
On July 14, 2020, New York Times columnist Bari Weiss publicly announced her departure from the newspaper in a fifteen-hundred-word open letter to publisher A.G. Sulzberger, decrying of a “culture of self-censorship” that was stifling journalistic inquiry. Weiss complained of co-workers who “publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action,” claiming that the microblogging platform had become The Times’s “ultimate editor.” The result was an “illiberal environment,” in which “standing for principles … puts a target on your back.”
In the wake of mass protests across the U.S. responding to the Minneapolis police’s murder of George Floyd, The Times ran a June 3, 2020, op-ed from Senator Tom Cotton headlined “Send in the troops,” which called for “an overwhelming show of force” from the National Guard to quell instances of rioting that he baselessly attributed to organized “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa.” Editorial page editor James Bennet conceded that he hadn’t read Cotton’s column before publishing it and resigned; a clarification was affixed to the article two days later acknowledging a “rushed and flawed” editorial process that resulted in an article that shouldn’t have been published.1 For Weiss, this was an unacceptable abridgement of Senator Cotton’s free speech rights.
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Despite proclaiming herself a “centrist” in her departing letter, Weiss had been brought onto The Times masthead in 2017 specifically to bring more conservative perspectives into the paper in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise electoral victory. A married lesbian, opponent of transgender rights, and aggressive supporter of Israel, Weiss has long branded herself as a progressive liberal disillusioned with the excesses of left-wing campus activists, but the sum of her views amount to boilerplate New Right fusionism. “I know that there are some people in this room who don’t believe that my marriage should have been legal,” she said in a November 2023 speech to the conservative Federalist Society, a powerful judicial activist organization. “And that’s OK. Because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes.”2 With assistance from venture capitalists and tech oligarchs, Weiss launched The Free Press, a wildly successful newsletter on Substack, which amassed well over a million subscribers.
Danielle Smith had undoubtedly been paying close attention to Weiss’s departure from The Times in the months leading up to her announcement that she was quitting her radio show. “Unfortunately over the last few years far too many topics have become unchallengeable and the mob of political correctness thinks nothing of destroying a person’s career and reputation over some perceived slight, real or imagined,” Smith wrote on her Global News blog on January 11, 2021. In a National Post op-ed published a few days later, Smith explicitly cited Bennett’s resignation from The Times as proof that the “mob has become so powerful, it can dictate editorial policy to one of the oldest and most respected ‘newspapers of record’ on the planet.”This mob mentality was enabled by a “cabal of Tech Giants — Twitter, Facebook, Google and now Apple — [who] have colluded to deprive the public of balanced coverage on a whole range of issues.”3
Smith first announced her departure on the January 10, 2021, episode of the Danielle Smith Show. Within thirty seconds, she proclaimed herself a “genuine centrist” before acknowledging that she’s a “conservative activist.” “I make sure that I don’t succumb to my biases, so that I can change my mind on things, because I don’t have a problem having half my views be aligned with the left and half my views be aligned with the right,” said Smith.
In a podcast interview with right-wing activist Angelo Isidorou, Smith recounted how her decision to leave mainstream radio was directly tied to institutional pushback from her Covid commentary. “I just had way too many guests and topics that were kiboshed, probably three dozen topics that I wasn’t allowed to talk about,” she said, referring to an “overt suppression campaign of any discussion” of scientifically unproven, alternative Covid remedies. Her Covid contrarianism set her on a collision course with Corus advertisers, leading to management writing her two letters of reprimand throughout 2020 warning her of tarnishing their brand.4 In Smith’s mind, she was providing a range of opinions on matters of great public importance; it was the public’s responsibility, not hers, to decide who is right or wrong.
This mentality, conservative journalist Jen Gerson told me, speaks to Smith’s lack of “standards and boundaries” for whom to take seriously, contributing to her infamously “terrible information hygiene.” Without the guardrails, however minimal, of mainstream media, Smith would fall further down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole while maintaining mainstream legitimacy through her affiliations with the Calgary Herald, Fraser Institute, Alberta Enterprise Group, and the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy.
When she announced her departure from mainstream broadcast and social media, Smith announced that she was establishing a private social media account on Locals that was accessible only to paid subscribers, shielding her commentary from public scrutiny. The platform she chose as her new home was founded by failed liberal comedian turned right-wing influencer Dave Rubin, who was the opening act for right-wing self-help guru Jordan Peterson on the tour for his wildly successful 12 Rules for Life book. Rubin and Peterson were hailed by Bari Weiss in The New York Times as “renegades of the intellectual dark web”5 — a loose collection of reactionary public figures including podcaster Joe Rogan, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, and anti-Muslim polemicist Sam Harris, united in their contempt for the politics of equity and inclusion.
Smith and Weiss share a talent for making the project of clinging to tradition sound edgy and subversive, branding themselves as courageous dissenters standing up to a censorious elite who are trying to prevent them from saying what everyone else is thinking. But rather than targeting economic elites, who are their biggest patrons, they speak of a cultural elite that is attempting to suppress their profound truths, whether it’s the purported immutability of biological sex or the supposed dangers of mRNA vaccines. Dr. Carmen Celestini, a University of Waterloo academic whose work focuses on conspiracy theories and the far-right, told me that this rhetoric puts figures like Smith and Weiss “in a position of both being a political victim, but also a political hero” to their followers. While Weiss’s dramatic exit from The New York Times set in motion events that would lead to her assuming the editor-in-chief role at CBS News in 2025, Smith parlayed her departure from Corus into becoming premier of Alberta in 2022.
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Tom Cotton, “Send in the Troops,” The New York Times, June 3, 2020.
Bari Weiss, “You Are the Last Line of the Defense,” 22nd Annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture, 2023 National Lawyers Convention, November 10, 2023, posted by The Federalist Society.
Danielle Smith, “I’m Leaving Twitter and Radio Because I’ve Had Enough of the Mob,” National Post, January 14, 2021.
Smith, quoted in Angelo Isidorou, host, Cancel This, “Danielle Smith on Cancel Culture in Canadian Media,” May 4, 2021.
Bari Weiss, “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” The New York Times, May 8, 2018.