Backers of Ms. Weiss’s company have included the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, who both recently endorsed Donald J.

Pledging to fuse throwback journalistic principles of agenda-free fact-finding with a nonconformity better suited to independent media, Ms. Weiss conjures a world where everyone seems terrified of everything - defying the online mob, stating the obvious, being canceled - with Bari Weiss as the blazing exception.

“She’s just unafraid, and I think that confidence scares a lot of people,” said Jeff Zucker, the former CNN president and avowed Free Press supporter, saluting Ms. Weiss’s antenna for “how a huge swath of this country feels.”

“It is a salon for the privileged laments of the powerful,” said Wajahat Ali, a writer and commentator who has encountered Ms. Weiss socially and debated her on television, “masquerading as the grievances of the oppressed.”

She is a reformed print editor who insists she did not get into this industry for money or stature but took care to acquire both anyway, musing openly in recent years about how much The Free Press might be worth someday, according to people who have heard her do so.

And she is, as she likes to point out, an elite bicoastal lesbian journalist distrusted as a liberal by movement conservatives and as a right-wing zealot by many liberals, invited last November to address the Federalist Society, where she called out the elephants in the Washington ballroom.

“I know that there are some people in this room who don’t believe that my marriage should have been legal,” she said.

“And that’s OK.

Because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes.” (The line killed.)

In no small part because of her personal background, Ms. Weiss can function as something like a gateway drug for the lapsed or wobbly Democrat.

She is schooled in the tone and aesthetics of left-coded institutions and eager to highlight their failings.

Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist behind campaigns opposing D.E.I. and critical race theory, called The Free Press “the most successful media venture in the United States if you’re measuring it on elite influence” and a “beautiful off-ramp” for the kinds of former center-leftists that he envisions pulling all the way to the right.

In interviews, others’ initial impressions of Ms. Weiss seemed to match my own: She is unusually charismatic, effectively overfamiliar, performatively attuned to people’s vanities (“You are so beautiful,” she has told more than one relative stranger) or at least their amenability to pet names.

“She is the only person other than my mother who calls me Howie,” said Howard Wolfson, a former New York City deputy mayor under Michael R.

Bloomberg and an admirer of Ms. Weiss’s.

“And my mother has been dead for more than a decade.”

She revered her parents’ “politically mixed marriage,” she has recalled, learning that “fighting about ideas didn’t mean that you didn’t love someone.”

Saying she was antagonized as an outspoken Zionist - particularly in the classroom of Joseph Massad, whom some students accused of making antisemitic remarks - she co-founded an organization, Columbians for Academic Freedom, on the premise that students should not be punished for expressing views that differed from those of their professors.

Former colleagues also found her to be a talented editor, with an instinct for stories that would pop.

(To this day, Ms. Weiss is known to request more “zhuzh” in articles deemed insufficiently punchy.)

After the 2016 election, Ms. Weiss has said, she sobbed at her desk in horror over Mr. Trump’s victory and realized that The Journal was no longer for her.

(At a TED Talk this year, Ms. Weiss, who calls herself a “radical centrist,” said she had voted for Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton and Mr. Biden in the last three presidential elections.)

She joined The Times’s Opinion section in 2017 as what she has called “an ideological diversity hire,” transitioning (at least in her telling) from being one of the most liberal voices at her former employer to one of the most conservative at her new one.

She published zhuzh-y pieces on the excesses of the #MeToo movement and “renegades of the intellectual dark web” like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson.

But former colleagues have attributed some of the criticism, within The Times and externally, to instances of simple sloppiness or reductive reasoning, cutting against the explanation that Ms. Weiss prefers: that wide swaths of the company were too blindingly progressive to abide her politics.

Among other flare-ups, a 2018 column about left-wing intolerance built part of its case around a Twitter account that Ms. Weiss did not appear to realize was a fake.

“At times it seems that Weiss’s main strategy is to make an argument that’s bad enough to attract criticism, and then to cherry-pick the worst of that criticism into the foundation for another bad argument,” The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino wrote in her 2019 book, “Trick Mirror.” “Her worldview requires the specter of a vast, angry, inferior mob.”

And that mob, friends say, could have a distorting effect on Ms. Weiss, a dynamic that she sometimes seemed to recognize.

In her piece on the “intellectual dark web,” Ms. Weiss dwelled presciently on the notion of “audience capture,” suggesting that stories about “left-wing-outrage culture” were so popular that media figures might not be able to resist overplaying them.

“Having been attacked by the left, I know I run the risk of focusing inordinately on its excesses,” she added, “and providing succor to some people whom I deeply oppose.”

But this time, she began privately articulating a grander vision for herself, people who spoke to her said: Institutions of classical liberalism - across media, publishing, academia - were broken, she explained.

It was a period of transformation in American cultural life, and she wanted to help lead it.

She assembled a small staff and promised to cover stories that others ignored while affording grace to those with whom she clashed.

At an early team retreat, where Ms. Weiss asked the group to share something that informed their values, she chose a clip from “Transparent,” the 2010s television series with a trans protagonist, which she said she found moving despite what she assumed were political differences with the show’s creator.

“Bari said that she’d chosen it because she never wanted to forget the humanity of those with whom she vehemently disagrees,” said an attendee, Megan Phelps-Roper, a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church (and now fierce opponent of its bigoted teachings) who worked with Ms. Weiss.

More recently, life has imitated art: The Free Press has a first-look agreement with Netflix.

Ms. Weiss suggested that Mr. Musk’s version of transparency augured a new media order.

“The fact that Elon Musk decided to come to a bunch of people essentially with newsletters rather than The Washington Post and The New York Times tells you a lot about where real trust in the media these days actually lies,” she said in a 2022 interview with Russell Brand, the conspiracy-theory-minded British comedian and podcaster.

It betrayed much more, of course, about where Mr. Musk laid his trust.

Internally, Ms. Phelps-Roper said, Ms. Weiss still spoke often of “audience capture,” sometimes asking podcast interviewees off-air about how best to avoid it.

“Heterodox” became a favored word among Free Press staff.

The goal, Ms. Weiss suggested, was high-impact, high-quality unpredictability.

“Am I going to be the anti-woke cancel culture girl and feed my audience that kind of political heroin every other day?” she said in late 2022.

“I don’t want to be that.”

“I’m a big fan of The Free Press,” said Mr. Maher, perhaps the most prolific “I’m a liberal but … ” voice in modern media, “and the brand of common sense, nonpartisan reporting that they are championing and delivering on.”

“There’s the populism,” Mr. Kirchick said, “but also the thing that’s going to cause a huge fuss.”

At minimum, Ms. Weiss has made herself the most trusted name in media for a particular kind of media distruster.

Among some who once worked for The Free Press, a private joke took hold: Whenever Ms. Weiss described what “the smartest people I know” thought about an issue, this was essentially shorthand for David Sacks, the venture capitalist.

The site’s reporting about left-wing disorder has been a feeder to Fox News coverage.

But The Free Press appears to see itself as more of an intellectual competitor to The Atlantic, whose majority owner, Emerson Collective, previously weighed an investment in the site, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Occasionally, some pieces seem to directly challenge Ms. Weiss’s worldview, including one by Andrew Sullivan in January titled, “How Many Children Is Israel Willing to Kill?”

Many other features might be categorized principally as entertainment, like a matchmaking service for readers (“email cupid@thefp.com”) and a popular weekly sendup of headlines from Ms. Bowles.

“They’re entitled to have a political slant,” said Cathy Young, a writer who has both praised and criticized The Free Press.

“It’s just that Bari presents it as a site that is dedicated to the pursuit of truth and objectivity and so on.”

“As The Free Press was finding its voice, I started to realize that it wasn’t the best fit for mine,” said Ms. Phelps-Roper, the former Westboro member who hosted the podcast about Ms. Rowling and left The Free Press shortly thereafter, adding that she was grateful for the editorial latitude that Ms. Weiss allowed on that series.

“I tend to be quite cautious around taking strong stances and speaking with moral certainty, for reasons I hope are obvious given my history.

I also prefer for there to be a clear distinction between news and opinion pieces.”

Among other changes, Ms. Weiss has added a chief operating officer, Lars Kahl, with prior experience at Politico and Axel Springer, and a business development hire, Ellie Stein, from the investment firm TCG.

Supporters say The Free Press’s greatest challenge now is building an institution without becoming too much of one.

“Institutions are just people,” she has said, and Ms. Weiss seems to know precisely who she intends to be in the public consciousness.