David Weigel

David Weigel (born September 26, 1981) is an American journalist.

He works for Semafor.

Weigel previously covered politics for The Washington Post, Slate, and Bloomberg Politics and is a contributing editor for Reason magazine.

Weigel was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware.

After moving to England in 1998, he graduated from the American Community School in Cobham, Surrey, in "the high Tory London suburbs" of the London commuter belt, in 2000.

He moved to Evanston, Illinois in 2000 and received a Bachelor of Science degree in 2004 from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, with a double major in journalism and political science and a minor in history.

While at college, Weigel wrote for The Daily Northwestern and was editor-in-chief of the campus's conservative newspaper Northwestern Chronicle.

In the 2000 U.S. presidential election, Weigel voted for Ralph Nader, and served as a Delaware college elector for Nader.

In the summer of 2001, he also had a "fun" internship at the libertarian Center for Individual Rights.

In May 2002, then-The Daily Northwestern writer and current Bloomberg News reporter Dan Murtaugh noted how "in two years Dave Weigel has gone from being a Ralph Nader-voting uber-liberal to the scorn of the leftist movement at Northwestern" and how Weigel underwent a "180-degree political turn" "after he was turned away from The Daily" and started working for The Chronicle.

In February 2003, while enrolled as a junior and working as editor-in-chief of Northwestern Chronicle, Weigel supported the Iraq War and crashed an anti-war protest at Northwestern University.

In the 2004 election, Weigel voted for John Kerry.

Weigel later wrote that "[he regrets] the Nader vote, but not the Kerry vote, as a weak Democratic president with a conservative Congress would have been pretty tolerable in retrospect".

He voted for Jack Ryan in the Illinois United States Senate election, 2004 Republican primary.

Weigel is a contributing editor of the libertarian Reason magazine and was one of its staff political writers from 2006 to 2008.

In early 2007, Weigel became a registered Republican in the Washington, D.C. area, in order to vote for Ron Paul at the Republican primary stage of the 2008 presidential election.

JournoList had been started in 2007 by Ezra Klein as an invitation-only discussion and debate forum for left-of-center bloggers and reporters.

The excerpts of Weigel's archived emails contained negative remarks about various public figures associated with American conservatism such as Pat Buchanan, Matt Drudge, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh.

Weigel said all of the emails were sent before he joined The Washington Post.

He apologized online before the second round of email excerpts was published on the Tucker Carlson site, explaining that he had thought the off-the-record listserv environment was a place where he could "talk bluntly to friends".

However, The Washington Post responded that the apology could not save his job because "the damage was too severe."

In November 2008, Weigel voted for Barack Obama, explaining "I really don't think McCain has the temperament to be President or the interest in standing up to a Democratic Congress....I've got the luxury of a guilt-free, zero-impact vote in the District of Columbia, which I would cast for Bob Barr if he was on the ballot".

He wrote for the liberal Washington Independent from November 2008 until early 2010 and was one of the "best sourced" reporters there, according to Michael Calderone of Politico.

After working for the Washington Independent, Weigel took a job writing the "Right Now" column on the Washington Post website, focusing on the conservative movement.

Weigel told Politico that "If readers get a deeper understanding of these people, their strategy, and their ideas, then I'm doing my job."

The national editor of The Washington Post said Weigel was hired to add a voice to the paper's online politics coverage.

Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post said the online columns were supposed to contain a mixture of reporting and opinion.

Weigel was criticized by conservatives for tweets that he made on May 2, 2010, that disparaged news editor Matt Drudge, and that called opponents of same-sex marriage "bigots".

Penny Nance of conservative group Concerned Women for America responded that Weigel's "arrogance disqualifies him as a serious journalist assigned to covering conservatives."

Politics Daily noted that The Washington Post's guidelines require Post journalists to "refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything ... that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility."

Weigel apologized on May 3.

In late June 2010, excerpts of several of Weigel's private emails from JournoList were posted online by the website Fishbowl DC and later by Tucker Carlson's conservative news site, The Daily Caller.

In January 2011, Weigel stated that he had voted for Republican Patrick Mara in elections to the Council of the District of Columbia, and that he had voted for Mara "every time he's been on the ballot".

In the Republican Party presidential primaries 2012, Weigel voted for Jon Huntsman, despite his having withdrawn from the race, because "If you looked past his whiff of a tax plan (Huntsman recommended using the flat rates that Simpson and Bowles recommended not using), the guy had a few good ideas."

In the 2012 general election, Weigel voted for Gary Johnson.

Weigel began his professional career as an editorial assistant and researcher for the USA Today editorial page and as a reporter for Campaigns & Elections.

He has contributed articles to Slate, The Daily Beast, Time, The Guardian, The American Prospect, The American Spectator, The Washington Monthly, The American Conservative, Politico, and The Nation.

He has appeared on NPR's Fresh Air and MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show.

Weigel has also blogged for The Economist's "Democracy in America" blog, and guest-blogged for Andrew Sullivan's "Daily Dish" blog at The Atlantic.

His book The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock was published in June 2017.