Archive | Bill Kristol RSS feed for this section

Stephen Bannon and the Media Meltdown

18 Nov

This was published earlier today at The Daily Caller.

As Democrats – or at least people hired by groups funded by George Soros – break windows, burn cars, and assault suspected Trump supporters in liberal cities around the country, neither President Barack Obama or Presidential-wannabe Hillary Clinton have admonished their violent followers to return to peaceful protests.

Only Senator Bernie Sanders has.

But there is another danger to public safety President Obama and Presidential-wannabe Clinton have not addressed.

That’s the imminent danger to those who work in, or near, America’s newsrooms.

The American media, now exposed as frauds, liars, and incompetent pollsters – in the case of the New York Times, which has belatedly apologized, admittedly so – are doubling down, and are so much in denial of reality they are on the edge of a psychotic break.

It’s only a matter of time before one of them goes postal, and comes to work with a gun, shooting the innocent receptionists, secretaries, advertising sales reps, and cleaning crews who are unfortunate enough to be working when the final wires snap.

So far they are concentrating their ire on one individual, former Breitbart publisher Stephen K. Bannon.  President-elect Donald Trump has chosen him to be the chief strategist  for the White House, a position for which associates say he is better suited than the chief of staff position that went to former RNC chair Reince Preibus, because Bannon is said to favor casual dress and a looser schedule than the chief of staff position would require.

But casual dressing is not what the establishment media is attacking Bannon for.  They claim – with no evidence – that Bannon is a “white nationalist”…or maybe encouraged or mainstreamed “white nationalists”…or maybe supported something they call the “alt right” which they then associate with white nationalists.  Or something.  Anyway, the party that earns about half of its campaign donations, after Wall Street of course, by kidnapping poor black children and selling them to National Education Association and American Federation for Teachers bureaucrats in exchange for candidate support, is as usual screaming that the people who beat them at the ballot box are racists.

Bannon doesn’t really need me to defend him.  Bernard Marcus, of the Republican Jewish Committee has already publicly said he knows Bannon and he is no anti-semite.  I’m a lowly gay libertarian writer at Breitbart and have barely met Bannon, though I have been to an event at his home.

If you check any of the TV or print stories denouncing Stephen Bannon and Breitbart, you will mainly see the headlines of two articles cited over and over.  You won’t see the articles quoted.  You won’t find a link to them so you can read them.  You won’t learn who the authors are.  You will just be told the headlines, and be expected to conclude from that that Breitbart is an oceanic cesspool of bigotry with Stephen Bannon as its slimy Poseidon.

The first article is entitled “Bill Kristol – Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew”.  I’m personally not a fan of headlines that discuss people’s religion, but what the smear merchants aren’t telling you is that the author of this piece, David Horowitz, is himself a Jew and a constant critic of anti-Semitism.  He simply thinks Kristol inserts himself into elections in ways – helping recruit independent conservative Evan McMullin to run for President, for example – that are rarely helpful for Republicans.  But the smear merchants on TV or newspapers want you to assume that this article was anti-semitic.


The second article was headlined “Gay Rights Have Made Us Dumber It’s Time to Get Back in the Closet” and the author is one of Breitbart’s gay contributors (I am among them), its most famous gay editor and contributor, the satirist and provocateur Milo Yiannopolous.  One can easily not like all of Milo’s shtick, though he’s very clever and very funny and almost exclusively targets the intellectually dishonest academic and media types conducting the smear merchantry against Stephen Bannon.  But what none of the smear merchants will tell you is that this inflammatory headline is to an article written by a very openly gay man criticizing parts of the gay establishment.

The media have few tools.  Mainly all they know how to do is scream “racism” (or in the monotone hectoring of Presidential wannabe Hillary Clinton “racist… sexist… homophobic… xenophobic… Islamaphobic…”  What they actually fear is that a “paradigm shift” is happening, to use the academic jargon of the 70s, or we are at a “tipping point,” to use the jargon of a few years ago.  They have been the American Pravda for decades, the well remunerated propaganda class of the ruling political elite.

It is projection that journalist’s journalist Jack Shafer labels Breitbart to be Pravda in the pages of the DNC house organ Politico.

Now a populist politician has beaten their elite candidate.  And he has his own media allies.  They are shut out.  Trump is already tweeting rebukes at them when they lie.

They have no idea what to do.

So the only thing they can do is to slime and decry as a racist the person they most fear, their media rival, Stephen Bannon, who helped Andrew Breitbart build an alternative to the mainstream media, who then beat them in an election they were sure they would win, and who is now a chief strategist in the enemy administration-elect.

Trump and the Libertarians

6 May

This was published yesterday at Breitbart.  Since it was published, Mary Matalin joined the Libertarian Party and rumors surfaced that Trump might select Rand Paul as his Veep.

Bill Kristol appeared on WMAL’s morning conservative talk radio show, “Mornings on the Mall,” Thursday morning, breaking news that he is trying to find donors for a conservative third party run against Donald Trump if he is nominated as the Republian candidate for president.

Among the liberal Republicans there is also splintering.
Breitbart broke the story earlier this week that Donald Trump’s impending success in winning the GOP nomination was causing fractures in Republican Party delegations, as one DC GOP delegate, Rina Shah, was decertified as a delegate to the GOP nominating convention for saying publicly that she planned to vote for Hillary if Trump was nominated.
The DC Republican Party is something of an outlier.  It’s national committee man and woman, lawyer Bob Kabel and real estate developer Jill Homan, are both (openly) gay, as is its chairman, financial manager Jose Cunningham.  It’s executive director, Patrick Mara, though a happily married heterosexual and new dad, was the first DC candidate some years back to endorse gay marriage over civil unions, and the DC Republican Party supports gay marriage in its platform, and did so before the DC Democratic party did.  (Only the DC and Delaware GOP affiliates supported gay marriage in their platforms before the Supreme Court enacted it).
Perhaps coincidentally, Homan and Mara both fall into another faction of the current GOP:  Homan, a former campaigner for Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich, the Republican precursor to Larry Hogan, says she describes herself as “trending libertarian,” and Mara has been known to use the “L” word (lower case) to describe his brand of socially liberal, fiscally conservative Republicanism.
The “libertarian wing” of the Republican Party has been having spasms this week over Trump, and google searches for “Libertarian Party” shot up after Trump’s latest win.  Membership applications and donations to the Libertarian Party have doubled since Trump won the Indiana primary, with 100 people joining daily.
Congressman Justin Amash, PACster Matt Kibbe, and former Congressman Ron Paul are libertarian Republicans on the list of those pledged to never support  Trump. Senator Rand Paul doesn’t have any plans to endorse Trump, though Senator Paul has had no difficulty in the past endorsing Mitt Romney or campaigning pointedly for Republican gubernatorial candidates like Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia in 2013, when unusually successful Libertarian Party candidates like Robert Sarvis started polling over 5%.  George Will, who has evolved into a libertarian fellow traveler, blurbing CATO Institute books and speaking to libertarianish groups (as I write this he is introducing transsexual Christian libertarian economic historian Dierdre McCloskey tonight at the American Enterprise Institute), wrote an editorial predicting Trump will cause the GOP to lose both the House and Senate.  Dave Nalle, the former national chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus, a group of libertarians inside the GOP, has switched parties at least temporarily, and will be a delegate to the Libertarian Party nominating convention in Orlando, May 26-30, where he hopes to help nominate former Republican Governor Gary Johnson, who has been appealing to GOP voters in the #NeverTrump movement.  Asked why he was switching parties, Nalle answered: ““Nominating Johnson gives Republicans who cannot stomach Trump an acceptable option other than Hillary. I blame the party leadership for its failure to support a reasonable alternative to Trump. They would rather let the party die at the hands of bigoted yahoos who do not believe in Republican values than accept the need for serious internal reform and platform changes which would attract new voters to the party. This completes a process of debasement of the party that began when leadership tried to expand the party base by welcoming radical groups which were driven out of the Democratic Party. Trumpism is the price we pay for not realizing that there are principles which are more important than winning elections.”
This week one of the DC GOP’s other 19 delegates (not Ms. Shah), invited me, as a local DC Libertarian, to lunch, to beg me to get Gary Johnson and the Libertarian Party to run an aggressive, but ideologically moderate, campaign to appeal to Republicans who can’t vote for Trump.  This Republican delegate – DC’s delegates are all pledged to Rubio or Kasich  – had also tried to meet with Libertarian Party national director Wes Benedict, but had only managed to get a 15 minute phone pitch, where he made the same points.  When I told my lunch partner I actually thought Libertarian candidates for Congress should appeal to Trump voters (he may not have read my previous “Two Libertarian Cheers for Donald Trump”), he was horrified.  Supporting Donald Trump as a wrecking ball aimed at the political class and as someone who was energizing independents and non-voters is, according to my lunchmate, “anti-intellectual,” because Trump doesn’t always articulate the correct policy proposals.
So the libertarians, in the GOP and in the LP, are of two minds.  Some think Trump will drive many Republican voters to vote for Gary Johnson.  As Zuri Davis, an editorial assistant at the Rand Paulish webzine Rare told her friends, “My vote will be going towards the Libertarian Party in November.”  

But other Libertarians are supporting Trump.  Well known libertarian economist and author Walter Block, started a group of Libertarians for Trump., whose website aggregates pro-Trump articles by libertarianish authors like David Stockman.  The Chief Operating Officer for Libertarians for Trump is Martin Moulton, the 2014 Libertarian Party candidate for D.C. Shadow Representative to Congress, the top Libertarian vote getter in DC’s last election.   Moulton explains his support: “Now that Mr. Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee we seek to support the candidate most likely to win the 2016 presidential election and advance Libertarian policies. If a registered LP candidate does not gain the national attention and votes needed to beat Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trumps’s consistent calls to reevaluate NATO’s relevance, question interventionist disasters and financial losses, and his promise to audit the Federal Reserve in his first 100 days, make him the most likely 2016 candidate to successful enact and realize Libertarian solutions for all Americans.” 

At this date there are no known delegates to the Libertarian nominating convention supporting Trump.  So unlike the GOP, the LP may not have to take moves to decertify any delegates.