Last autumn, former establishment media deviant and founder of The Free Press, Bari Weiss, took the stage at the Jewish Leadership Conference in a rare break from her habitual public isolation. After spending the last half-decade on the frontlines of new media, leaving her mid-tier post at The New York Times over editorial gridlock that nearly consumed its newsroom in the rubble of Black Lives Matter politics to start anew, and having been installed as the editor-in-chief of CBS News the prior month, she seemingly changed her mind. Invoking a new manifesto, Weiss charged herself with resurrecting the stalwart institutions that betrayed “the vast majority of Americans,” the rough-cut “70%” of centrists who’d been sidelined by ascendants like Nick Fuentes, Hasan Piker and Tucker Carlson, promising those flanking the very ends of either political wing a crushing defeat at the hands of an establishment she briefly detested.

Centrism, the timeless potty word of an American politic marked by its ideological ebbs and flows, is now Weiss’s endgame. But she is no longer the sole proprietor of an ideal that — between the President’s 2015 ride down the golden escalator, Biden’s headfirst affair with an ever-colorful, obtuse wokeism and Trump 2.0 — might as well be an anomaly now lost to time. Elite domestic actors are following in her muddied footsteps to rebalance America’s shattering political mosaic. They have concluded our Overton Window, too far widened and culpable to a brewing storm of alleged ‘extremism’ (read: popular sovereignty), should be shuttered for the sake of control.

Longstanding media agenda-setters like The Atlantic have pivoted from a traditionally offensive posture against the........

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