Bari Weiss

Donald Trump’s campaign was shaped in large part by the stories and narratives of the online right. So you’d think that after years spent doggedly proclaiming their heterodoxy and warring against the supposed tyranny of the woke mob, some of our most prominent right-leaning alt-media pundits—like Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Bari Weiss—would be feeling pretty satisfied. After all, they finally have a president who promises to combat the deep state and fight against the liberal elite. What’s not to love?

In the spring of 2020, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Jennifer Sey took a hard-line, controversial position: Schools should stay open.

At the time, Sey was chief marketing officer at Levi Strauss & Co., with 21 years at the company. Later in the year, Sey got promoted to Levi's brand president — on a path to potentially become the next CEO. Instead, she has now resigned.

"Ultimately," Sey told NPR, "just about a month ago, the CEO said to me, 'There's just not a path for you here.' You know, 'It's all too much.' "

Jennifer Sey, former brand president for the U.S. clothing company Levi’s, quit her c-suite position and turned down a $1 million payout so she could continue to speak out against certain COVID-19 restrictions.

Sey, a former Olympic gymnast, announced her resignation on Monday in journalist Bari Weiss’ Substack newsletter “Common Sense.” Sey said she was pushed out of her job by the company she had championed over her 23-year career because she refused to stop speaking out against school closures and other COVID-19 policies.

Jennifer Sey was a rising star at Levi Strauss. The former gymnast spent decades working her way up at the jeans company, eventually even being considered a possible candidate to become CEO. Then COVID-19 happened. In a blog post, she wrote that she decided to leave the apparel maker after it pressured her to stop speaking about her opposition to school closures because of the pandemic. 

Levi’s brand president Jennifer Sey has quit, and she says it’s because the denim company tried to silence her after she publicly spoke out against school closures during the COVID pandemic.

“More than 20 years ago, I joined Levi’s. I quit so I could be free,” Sey tweeted, linking to her essay published on Bari Weiss’s Substack newsletter.

In the essay, she detailed her experience working at Levi’s. After the COVID pandemic shut down schools, Sey became an outspoken advocate for keeping them open. She has four children.

Not only is the political media biased, but it’s sending consumers searching for “news that is accurate, opinions that are vital and debate that is sincere,” according to a new survey that polled on a quote pulled from the resignation letter of the New York Times’s Bari Weiss.

The latest Rasmussen Reports survey found continued dismissal of the media as biased, twice as much by Republicans, 87%, than Democrats, 42%.

If you’re familiar with the navel-gazing internecine squabbles of the US national media, you probably know that Bari Weiss, the millennial conservative writer who for years attracted controversy and online consternation for her opinion columns, recently quit the New York Times, saying that the newspaper was insufficiently supportive of her because of her political views.

Those of us blessed with freedom to learn are all — every one of us — in a bubble of our own making. It can be broad and diverse, created from all kinds of information sources. But there is still a bubble.

Which is why opinion pages and books matter so much. They serve to expand the bubble. Columns can nudge us toward new ideas and broader perspectives, but it is a book that punches out the bubble and really expands the mind.