Bari Weiss on cancel culture: 'It is about making a person radioactive'

Former New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss, who recently relinquished her position and criticized the outlet in her resignation letter, condemned cancel culture during an appearance on HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher.

"What cancel culture is about is not criticism," she said. "It is about punishment. It is about making a person radioactive. It is about taking away their job."

She added: "If conversation with people that we disagree with becomes impossible, what is the way that we solve conflict? It's conversation or violence."

Weiss said that some people on both sides of the political spectrum treat politics like a sort of religion, and she lamented a lack of people staking out more centrist territory. 

"As politics in this county has come to supplant religion, and I believe it has for many people, politics has come to be people's almost religious identity," Weiss said. "And so you see it on the right with the kind of worship of Trump as a deity who can do nothing wrong. And you see it on the left where to be anything less than defunding the police or abolish the police, to choose the issue of the day, makes you something like a heretic. And that's an enormous problem because what it's meant is the collapse of moderates. It's meant the collapse of the center and the retribalization of this country."