am greatness buskirk
===
cleta
jdv thiel new rt PSEUDO-POP ANDREESON SACKS
bad trinity on j6 false flag
see julie k (lomborg) loomer tim pool ali alex
numinar?
ASPEN 2019
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Elizabeth Dwoskin exposes the tech billionaires pushing right-wing politics and Vance 2028 campaign.
12 25
Elizabeth Dwoskin joins Anthony Davis to discuss the role of tech billionaires in supporting right-wing politics, the creation of the Rockbridge Network, and the strategic planning behind Vance’s 2028 campaign. Plus the socio-economic implications of these alliances, including the impact on the working class with Trump’s economy roOted in A.I. and automation - only on The Weekend Show.
2016 SPOT TECH TALENT AND JDV POL TALENT
quote find a place for him in the network. And in Teal's world, uh it's often referred to by the people in that
5:31
world as the network. So, they knew they were going to find a place for him. And he goes and he works for one of Teal's
5:36
funds. And Teal basically finds Vance a job. And so Tal is um shephering Vance
5:42
through Silicon Valley as sort of this budding investor. And he's he's also started to write his best his book
5:48
Hillbilly Elegy comes out in 2016 just before the 2016 election. And the book
5:54
is about you know it's about the working class. So you have this conversation in America about workingclass alienation...
0
is is a big part of his life, too. Um I don't know if he and Teal if they have
9:45
bonded in that in their relationship about religion, but certainly they bonded about politics. Buzzkirk and
9:52
Vance become good friends. In 2019, you have the seminal moment, which I opened
9:57
up my story with this scene, which is there's this little nothing town in Rock called Rockbridge, Ohio, very rural part
10:04
of Ohio. And basically, Teal, Buzzkerk, JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, the
10:12
economist Orin Cass, um, and a number of Rebecca Mercer, who was a big big donor.
10:18
The Mercers were huge Trump donors. They they rented out these bungalows in this nothing town in 100p person town in
10:26
Rockbridge, Ohio. And they wanted to talk about the future of the MAGA movement after Trump. And this is 2019.
10:34
So we're heading into the 2020 election at this point. And some of these groups, some of these people were avid Trump
10:40
supporters, but some of them were thinking Trump's may not win. You know, some of them were disappointed. like...BLAKE MASTERS
...
:19
know, would have been supporting Ronda Santis. Yes. So, a lot of these figures were actually hoping Dantis would become the standard
16:25
bearer. And JD Vance in 22, he is he's running for the Senate. So, this is he's
16:31
doing his first he's just launching his first political campaign ever. And um a
16:37
friend a friend of his named Omin Malik uh a donor who used to be a Democrat a Wall Street guy basically turns against
16:43
the Democratic party during COVID moves down to Florida buys a place in Palm Beach and decides okay I'm going to host
16:50
a fundraiser for Vance in Palm Beach 2022. So he invites and Omid is good
16:55
friends with Don Jr. So he invites Don Jr. JD Vance is down there. Blake
17:00
Masters is down there. They did a fundraiser for him too. he was running at the same time and BuSkIrk was also backing his super PAC um and Buzzkerk.
17:09
And the way the story was described to me was there was this week in 2022 where they came down both for this Rockbridge
17:14
conference at Mara Lago and for the fundraiser that Omid was throwing and they all became like friends like it was
17:21
this bonding week for them. And what comes out of that week, it's like, okay, it's just a story, but what comes out of 1789 CAPITAL
...
this audience should go after. um he has done this in lectures around the world
50:03
where he actually puts up these pictures of certain people and in this case he was very against the activist Greta
50:08
Thunberg because she's been critical of AI. he was and um against the the activist and writer um Eleazar Uduka
50:16
Udlowski who is um a prominent critic of the tech industry's approach to AI, what
50:22
people might call AI dumerism and um so yeah, it's almost like saying not just
50:29
should the tech industry have a debate about the limits of AI but the people within that debate who are arguing for
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EXTREMISM MOJO
To Understand JD Vance, You Need to Meet the “TheoBros”
These extremely online young Christian men want to end the 19th Amendment, restore public flogging, and make America white again.
Kiera ButlerNovember+December 2024 Issue
*Our November+December issue investigates the Christian nationalist movement that aspires to take over government at all levels, from school boards and state legislatures to Congress and the Supreme Court. Read the series of stories here.
On July 15, when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he brought along two new accessories. One was a large bandage covering his ear, which had been nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet. The other was Ohio’s first-term senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who was about to debut as the GOP vice presidential hopeful.
Two days later, after paying tribute to his wife, Usha—the child of immigrants from India—and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”
Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.
For years, graying, khaki-clad evangelists have faithfully made the rounds at conservative events. However, as Wolfe, a 41-year-old former Princeton postdoc, writes in his book, these “men in wrinkled, short-sleeve golf shirts, sitting plump in their seats” are yesterday’s Christians. Among younger activists, they inspire the rolling of eyes—they are the embodiment of an ineffective boomer approach to taking over the United States for Jesus.
In their place, a group of young pastors hope to spearhead a Christian nationalist glow-up as they eagerly await a “Christian prince” to rule America. These often bearded thirty- and fortysomethings have suits that actually fit. They are extremely online, constantly posting on myriad platforms, broadcasting their YouTube shows from mancaves, and convening an endless stream of conferences for likeminded followers. Let’s call them, as one scholar I spoke with did, the TheoBros.
For all their youthful modishness, this group is actually more conservative than their older counterparts. Many TheoBros, for example, don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth—and even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are obsessed with the US Constitution, many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.
In American Reformer, their unofficial magazine, hagiographies of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco appear alongside full-throated defenses of countries that execute gay people. On podcasts, the TheoBros unpack “the perils of multiculturalism,” expose “Burning Man’s wicked agenda,” and peel back the nefarious feminist plot of Taylor Swift. In Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, one of their seminal texts, he writes that in an ideal Christian nation, heretics could be executed.
The rise of the TheoBros worries more mainstream religious conservatives. Janet Mefferd, a former Christian radio host and journalist who tracks their ascendancy, says her community is alarmed to see an extremist movement gaining traction. “I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism,” she says. “But a lot of us find that terrifying.”
“I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism—but a lot of us find that terrifying.”
The TheoBros’ strategy is bottom-up: They aim to convert small American towns into Christian enclaves. But it is also top-down: Some are working to position themselves close to the locus of federal power. Vance, a Catholic convert married to a Hindu, would seem an unlikely hero for a movement of devout Protestants who believe in a homogeneous America. But over the last few years, his political orbit has increasingly overlapped with that of the TheoBros—so much so that to careful observers, his public echoes of their ideas are beginning to sound less like coincidence and more like dog whistles.
And those dog whistles signal the major themes of this election: hypermasculinity, declining birthrates, ethnonationalism—and no small measure of carefully curated misogyny. If you want to know some of the actors who red-pilled Vance, or at least those who flock to him, you need to meet the TheoBros.
Clockwise from top-left: Douglas Wilson, Joel Webbon, Josh Abbotoy, Andrew Isker, William Wolfe, and Brian SauvéYouTube
With no meetings, website, or an explicit statement of faith that unifies their beliefs, the TheoBros are not an official organization. They identify with 16th-century French theologian John Calvin, who spawned a rigid and deterministic form of Protestantism. Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religion scholar, traces the current movement back to R.J. Rushdoony, an Armenian American philosopher who popularized the idea of Christian nationalism (and homeschooling) in the early 1970s.
Out of Rushdoony’s movement emerged two camps: the charismatic Christians, now known as the New Apostolic Reformation, and the reformed Protestants, which include the TheoBros. They share the goal of creating a Christian nation, says Ingersoll, but differ on a key point of theology: Adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation believe that God is still speaking directly to people through pastors who have declared themselves apostles and prophets. The TheoBros, meanwhile, believe that God said all he needed to say in the Bible.
Many TheoBros are also proponents of postmillennialism, the idea that believers can hasten Jesus’ return by fighting against the satanic forces of liberal excess. TheoBro Aaron Renn, an Accenture consultant turned Christian pundit, has described our current era as a “negative world,” where Christians are persecuted for their beliefs. Andrew Isker, another Bro, calls it “trashworld.”
Like all self-respecting millennials, the TheoBros have little tolerance for boomers, with the exception of their patriarch, Douglas Wilson, a 71-year-old pastor in Moscow, Idaho. When he was younger, Wilson imagined himself going into the family business—Christian bookstores—but after a stint in the military, he moved to Moscow in 1975 to study philosophy at the University of Idaho, where he became involved with the Jesus People, a kind of mashup of evangelical and hippie culture. He helped found Christ Church, the congregation over which he still presides and that regularly draws crowds of 1,300.
Wilson has since turned the college town into his own Christian kingdom. He helped found New Saint Andrews College, the Canon Press publishing house, and Logos School, one of the nation’s first classical Christian schools, where students exclusively study the Western canon. Wilson embraced Calvinism in 1988 and remade his church from the freewheeling Jesus People hub into something far more sober and buttoned-up, where women couldn’t be church leaders and the only music allowed was hymns and psalms. In the early 1990s, Wilson helped launch the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which had 502 member institutions across the United States as of March 2023.
“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”
His influence over Moscow has not been without controversy. In a 2021 Vice exposé, former members of Christ Church alleged that ministers had encouraged them to stay in abusive relationships. That tracks with Wilson’s 1999 book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, in which he wrote, “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, Wilson wrote, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” (Wilson called allegations of the church urging women to stay in abusive relationships “categorically false.”)
Wilson has also promoted another form of dominance. In the 1996 book Southern Slavery: As It Was, Wilson and his co-author argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” and “there has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world” as that of the antebellum South. (In a 2020 blog post, Wilson said he now allows that while “the benevolent master is not a myth, the idea of the horrific taskmaster is no abolitionist myth either.”) When I asked Wilson about his controversial statements, he likened himself to a chef who strategically deploys jalapeno peppers: “Then some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapenos and put them on one Ritz cracker.”
:In July, at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, Wilson shared the stage with Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), as well as Vance, who auditioned his “America is a people” bit a week before his star turn at the GOP convention. Wilson agrees with Vance’s suggestion that children should be allotted votes, managed by their parents. “I would like to see elections where households vote,” he told me. Men, as the heads of households, would actually cast the votes. Though he believes that women’s suffrage was “a mistake,” he would allow a special exception for single mothers.}:
Wilson offered the crowd a few one-liners (“I’m a Presbyterian, not a Lesbyterian”), but mostly, he talked about the persecution of Christians. “It used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kinks hidden away in the closet,” he mused. “Now it is the conservative Christian who needs to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet.” After the National Conservatism Conference, Wilson appeared at the Believers’ Summit, which was headlined by Trump and hosted by the conservative political group Turning Point USA.
But it’s not just conferences and interviews with the likes of
where Wilson promotes his ideas. He has a blog, a podcast, and a YouTube channel, thanks mostly to the urging of his children and younger colleagues. One example is that every year since 2018, Wilson has been celebrating what he calls No Quarter November: “The month where we say out loud what everyone is thinking.” In a, which was the brainchild of one of his sons, Wilson sits at a sumptuously appointed Thanksgiving table, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, and addresses the camera. “If you think of my blog as a shotgun,” he says, “this is the month when I saw off all my typical, careful qualifications and blast away with a double-barreled shorty.” His wife, clad in an apron, brings out a turkey and places it in front of him, and then the tranquil scene is interrupted by a blaring alarm and a glowing red “perimeter breach” sign. Wilson excuses himself, heads to his garage, and straps on a flamethrower. After using it to light a cigar, he aims the fire at cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses Elsa and Ariel, and the logos of Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Netflix.
Wilson’s willingness to make campy content sets him apart, says Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who has been studying Christian nationalism for decades. “Instead of a crotchety old guy talking about stoning people, he’s like, super cool,” she says. “He’s witty.”
In subsequent videos, Wilson tackled women’s culpability in rape, the dark side of empathy, and the virtues of “something called the patriarchy—that which, according to our soi-disant and lisping political theorists, must be smashed. Only they say something like ‘thmasth.’”
Melek Zertal
Wilson has used his platforms to anoint the next generation of ultraconservative reformed Christian pastors, all of whom happened to be men. Mefferd, the conservative Christian journalist, told me that Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism got traction in mainstream Christian circles in part “because Doug Wilson endorsed.” Another Wilson is Joel Webbon, a 38-year-old pastor who hosts a podcast and YouTube show, which he films from a wingback leather chair in a book-lined room.
Webbon wasn’t always reformed—he is an alumnus of a Bible school run by a New Apostolic Reformation affiliated outfit, which he now considers “straight-up heretical.” In his 20s, he broke from the group, moved to Texas, and started his own church. In a video from a few years ago, Webbon Wilson with emboldening him to say whatever he wanted—like telling a guest that the Founding Fathers weren’t responsible for the slave trade because Africans had done the actual kidnapping and enslaving.
“Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”
For Webbon, it was intensely liberating to watch Wilson speak in public without worrying about being canceled. “You stay in your little corner, you stay on your little leash, because you’re like, I don’t know what will happen,” Webbon said. “But when you see some other guy do it, and you’re like—that’s the worst thing that can happen? Vice writes an article about you? [Christianity Today editor-in-chief] Russell Moore won’t invite you to his birthday party anymore? Like, that’s it.” At a
, he registered dismay over immigrants in his community. “It’s like full, straight-up Hindu garb at our neighborhood swimming pool, that my daughter is asking [about and] I’m trying to explain.”
In August, he remarked on his show that “a lot of people are gonna be surprised” when “you’re spending eternity worshipping Christ next to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, and, you know, George Whitefield and Martin Luther King Jr.’s in hell.”
Webbon is so impressed by his own audacity that he maintains an online list of all the controversies in which he’s become embroiled. There, he explains why he called Christian men living in California “stupid” (they could just move to a red state); why he once ordered his wife to stop reading a book on theology (he didn’t want her exposed to beliefs that were different from his own); and why he believes in a patriarchal household structure (the Bible says so). Webbon, who is planning to host a conference in Texas next spring called “Christ Is King: How to Defeat Trashworld!” maintains that a “return to the Constitution is impossible” and that the only viable alternative is the Ten Commandments.
Some of Wilson’s other acolytes are attempting to create their own versions of Moscow, Idaho. Take Brian Sauvé, a 33-year-old Christian recording artist, podcaster, and pastor of Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah. Like Webbon, Sauvé wasn’t always reformed—Refuge began as a charismatic Christian church. After the lead pastor resigned in a scandal, the then-24-year-old Sauvé ascended to take his place, immersed himself in reformed theology, and moved the church in a new direction. Today, he presides over a Moscow-esque ecosystem: a publishing house called New Christendom Press, as well as St. Brendan’s Classical Christian Academy, modeled after those in Wilson’s network. “Can you feel it in the sails?” reads St. Brendan’s website. “The stiff breeze out of Moscow, Idaho? We can.”
On his three podcasts and to his more than 53,000 followers on X, Sauvé regularly states that women’s primary function is to bear children. In July, after Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies who are miserable” began widely circulating, he posted: “It is desperately sad to think of all the intentionally barren women who will find themselves totally alone in their 50s, realizing their irreversible mistake. They will wish they could trade it all—money, vacations, independence, all of it—for children they can now never have.”
But unlike more mainstream conservatives, Sauvé does not even pretend to champion the idea of a Judeo-Christian nation. He posted in July, “[O]ur political system is heavily influenced by Jews who reject Christ and embrace all manner of evils.”
An even more well-connected Wilson emulator is Josh Abbotoy, executive director of American Reformer and managing partner of a venture capital fund and real estate firm called New Founding. A former fellow of the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, Abbotoy reported that he recently participated in a Project 2025 presidential transition “strategic planning session” hosted by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist Chris Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher of American Reformer. (The publication’s cofounder, Nate Fischer, later clarified to Mother Jones that Buskirk’s listing in the filing had been a clerical error, and that he was actually a board member of American Reformer.) In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network? None other than JD Vance.
Thiel, Vance’s mentor and former employer, is also a major funder of the National Conservatism movement. Obsessed with global birthrates, Thiel spent $10 million on his protégé’s successful 2022 Senate campaign. In July, shortly after Trump had announced Vance as his running mate, Cohn surfaced a tweet by New Founding’s network director, Josh Clemans: a photo of Vance with several New Founding staffers. The caption read “Our guy.”
New Founding lists as a partner the Society for American Civic Renewal, a secretive fraternal order founded by Indiana shampoo baron Charles Haywood, who describes himself as an aspiring Christian “warlord.” According to founder Nate Fischer, New Founding wants to “form the backbone of a renewed American regime” and that its members “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise.” But its main public-facing project appears to be turning tracts of land in Appalachia into Christian communities. Promotional materials describe a community of “unmatched seclusion” where “simple country faith” protects local culture from rainbow flags and crime. Potential buyers, he advises, should not delay. “Who’s going to grab the land? Is it going to be good, based people who want to build something inspiring, something authentic to the region’s history, or is it going to be Bill Gates and BlackRock and hippies from California?”
One eager customer is 38-year-old TheoBro Andrew Isker—the pastor who interned at Wilson’s church, studied divinity at New Saint Andrews, and co-wrote a book on Christian nationalism with Andrew Torba, the openly antisemitic CEO of the social media platform Gab. In July, Isker announced on X that he planned to move his family of seven to lead a church in a New Founding community in Tennessee. Life in his native Minnesota, he said, had become untenable because of permissive laws around trans rights and abortion, not to mention how hospitable the state has been to refugees. “Minnesota is one of the top destinations for resettling foreign people hostile to our way of life,” he said.
That month, Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the “war on white America” alongside Paul Gottfried, the mentor of prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer. The conference was hosted by the True Texas Project, a far-right group with ties to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Like many TheoBros, Isker sees much to like in Vance. In early July, before Trump announced his running mate, Isker referred to him as “Senator JD Vance (R-Heritage America).” In late July, he posted a video of Vance and told his 29,000 followers, “You need to double down on childless cat lady discourse. Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”
One problem is that there simply are not enough TheoBros to populate Christian communities like the one Isker plans to move to. Enter William Wolfe, the founder of the Center for Baptist Leadership, which aims to persuade members of the Southern Baptist Convention that it, the largest of all Protestant denominations in the United States, has fallen prey to the corrupting forces of liberalism. Baptists are only the beginning. Wolfe wants to win over the entire evangelical mainstream, which he and other TheoBros refer to as “Big Eva.” In August, he posted on X, “Once you realize that Big Eva thinks it’s a bigger sin to desire to preserve the customs, heritage, values, and cultural homogeneity of your own nation than to kill the unborn in the womb, you can better understand their moral framework.”
Wolfe served in the Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He is also an alumnus of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists. The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors and Oklahoma Sen. Dusty Deevers as a co-author, called for “civil magistrates” to usher in “the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”
The manifesto doesn’t specify exactly how Christian nationalists should achieve these goals. As Tabachnick, the extremism researcher, interprets it, the TheoBros are imagining a utopia where “they are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses, including the tech world that they’re mixing with so freely.” The key, she said, is that authoritarianism “is required to have the utopian vision.”
Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch
a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage. There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says. “If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”
William Wolfe’s Christian nationalism manifesto made the rounds on social media, but in mainstream conservative outlets, it was Stephen Wolfe who brought TheoBro ideas to the wider world. In his book, which was praised by editors at the Federalist and theAmerican Conservative, Wolfe paints America as a “gynocracy” whose government and culture have been feminized by unhappy women leaders. (Sound familiar?) He has stated on X that women should not have the right to vote, and that “interethnic” marriage can be “sinful.”
Wolfe grew up in Napa, California, and his father was an admirer of the right-wing pundit and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. After attending West Point and serving in the Army, Wolfe earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to “do the Wendell Berry thing” in North Carolina with his wife and four kids.
Over the summer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe” and call him an “expert on Christian nationalism.” The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand I’d watched online. He said his ideal version of America would be led by a Caesar figure. Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited. Women would not be allowed to vote—instead, men would vote for their households.
When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed. “I do think it’s permissible, in principle, for a state to suppress theological heresy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s prudent or proper, suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life.” The Founding Fathers, he added, had encouraged religious liberty, so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit.
We turned to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauvé: “I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?” What role, I asked him, would Jews play? After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exercise their religion freely.”
“We need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?”
We spoke a week before Vance’s RNC speech, and Wolfe’s remarks helped me understand what the TheoBros heard in Vance’s phrase about America as a people. The founders, Wolfe noted, intended for their country to be “Anglo-Protestant with an American inflection.” America, he continued, is “a place of settlement and rootedness, but it’s an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us.” Which is to say that, like some others, Wolfe is not necessarily opposed to the idea of nonwhite people in America—as long as they agree to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant dominant culture.
In this telling, America is not a pluralistic society at all, but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Wolfe what motivated him. “I want Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life, and to seek to restore that,” he said. “This is a Christian country, and we’ve got to work to restore it to what it once was.”
In his keynote at Sauvé’s conference, titled “Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead,” Wolfe called the concept of America as a melting pot “an early 20th-century idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the confident Anglo-Protestant establishment.” WASPs were the “distinct ethnicity” of America, he insisted, and America should only welcome those who aspired to assimilate. As he put it, “This is our homeland, and we welcome you on the condition of conformity.” Or, in the words of JD Vance, America “is a group of people.”
*Correction, September 19: An earlier version of this article inaccurately described Chris Buskirk’s role at American Reformer.
Update, January 14: After this story was published, Nate Fischer, CEO of New Founding and co-founder of American Reformer, clarified toMother Jonesthat Buskirk’s listing in tax filings as the editor and publisher ofAmerican Reformerhad been a “clerical error (presumably copying his bio fromAmerican Greatness, where he was editor and publisher)” and that Buskirk was actually a board member ofAmerican Reformer. The sentence has been revised.*
{Read our full investigation into the rise of Christian nationalism.*}:
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mma
Steve Bannon rips Donald Trump Jr.’s business partner for defending the “aristocracy”
Bannon accused Trump Jr. associate Chris Buskirk of “playing right into the hands of Mamdani”
Written by John Knefel
:{Published 11/06/25
MAGA podcaster Steve Bannon ripped into a major business partner of Donald Trump Jr. on Wednesday, highlighting cracks in the Trump coalition just one day after the Republican Party suffered bruising losses in elections around the country.
Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, took issue with an argument advanced by Trump Jr.’s associate Chris Buskirk in a lengthy Washington Post profile on a shadowy group of conservative donors known as the Rockbridge Network. Silicon Valley multibillionaire Peter Thiel and future Vice President JD Vance “convened” the group’s first meeting in 2019, according to the Post.
In the piece, Buskirk defended the existence of an “aristocracy,” claiming such a class was inevitable and the question was simply what form it took. The Post writes:
His various projects echo what some on the right call “aristopopulism” and aim to build a bridge between wealthy capitalists and the working-class people they intend to represent, according to interviews with Buskirk and nine other people in his inner circle, profitably reindustrializing the country and tying their interests to that of their base.
“You either have an extractive elite — an oligarchy — or you have a productive elite — an aristocracy — in every society,” he said in an interview in his office in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Many innovative periods in history have been driven by such an aristocracy, Buskirk argues, a point he makes in his 2023 book, “America and the Art of the Possible.” “In the classic Greek sense,” the term isn’t pejorative, he says, but “a proper elite that takes care of the country and governs it well so that everyone prospers.”
Bannon responded during his War Room podcast on Wednesday morning, referencing Buskirk’s quote without mentioning him by name.
“People on the right, you know, Peter Thiel and all these guys — we need an aristocracy, the MAGA people are too dumb,” Bannon said, telling his audience, “Yeah, that would be you.”
Bannon, a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, then offered his rebuttal.
“Not only are we not going to need an aristocracy, we’re not going to have an aristocracy,” Bannon said. “Not in this country. Not in this time.”
“You’re playing right into the hands of Mamdani,” Bannon said, referring to the New York City mayor-elect.
Video
Citation
From the November 5, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
Buskirk and Trump Jr. are business partners at venture capital firm 1789 Capital, which reportedly manages more than $2 billion in assets. Since Trump’s reelection and the addition of Trump Jr. to the firm, 1789 Capital has enjoyed “a dramatic expansion in its portfolio to include defense contractors, AI startups and other companies that ethics experts say could benefit from federal contracts and regulatory changes,” according to Reuters.
1789 Capital’s co-founder and president, Omeed Malik, is also the CEO of a special-purpose acquisition company called Colombier Acquisition Corp. III. Trump Jr. and Fox News host Laura Ingraham are both directors at Colombier, which is attempting to raise $260 million in an upcoming initial public offering. As Media Matters previously reported, the partnership between Trump Jr. and Ingraham creates a litany of possible conflicts of interest and potential for corruption.
In addition to serving as the nucleus of the Rockbridge Network, Buskirk is the publisher of MAGA media website American Greatness, which traffics in January 6 apologia, anti-Black racism, and xenophobia.
Despite Bannon’s stated antipathy toward the aristocracy, in the past he has benefitted from the largess of at least one of its members. Rebekah Mercer was a top funder for Bannon until 2018, when she reportedly cut him off. She is also a co-founder of 1789 Capital.
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11 25 BEAT 3X!
The secretive donor circle that lifted JD Vance is now rewriting MAGA’s future
Chris Buskirk put tech elites at the center of power in Trump’s Washington. His efforts are grounded in a controversial theory: An “aristocracy” is needed to move the country forward.
Chris Buskirk leads a coalition of business and tech donors who helped re-elect Donald Trump and are now at the center of power in Washington. (Ash Ponders/For The Washington Post)
20 min
By Elizabeth Dwoskin
In 2019, a small group of right-wing donors rented a resort outside the 100-person town of Rockbridge, Ohio, for a summit to secure the future of the MAGA movement. They aimed to turn a singular candidate — President Donald Trump — into an enduring political coalition, with a pipeline of voters, donors and candidates that would cement a radical transformation of the GOP.
---
AN 11 25
A controversial theory that states an “aristocracy” is needed to move the country forward is being pushed as the playbook for a post-President Donald Trump MAGA with tech-elites at the center of power, according to the Washington Post.
At the center of this theory is a lesser known "tech elite," Arizona insurance entrepreneur and conservative media Chris Buskirk, who according to the Post, "helms the Rockbridge Network, a secretive organization ... that has established itself as one of the most influential forces in GOP politics."
"With significant funding from tech leaders, Rockbridge aims to equip MAGA to outlive Trump," the Post explains.
The group is gearing up for the midterms and the 2028 presidential election, in which members "hope" Vice President JD Vance — a close ally of tech billionaire Peter Thiel — will be the Republican nominee.
Although Buskirk is much more low-key than Thiel and his more known billionaire buddies, his ties to the Trump world run deep, the Postexplains.
1789 Capital, the venture capital firm Buskirk co-founded with investor Omeed Malik, focuses on what the partners call “patriotic capitalism” and now counts Donald Trump Jr. as a partner, the Post says, adding "the pair — along with administration officials and friends — recently launched Executive Branch, a $500,000-a-head membership club for Trump-supporting business leaders to hobnob in D.C."
While some see a direct contradiction to the notion of MAGA elite at the helm a populist movement, Buskirk, the Post says, argues they're "not in defiance of MAGA’s populism."
"Buskirk says the MAGA movement has energized a new generation of stewards for the country," the Post writes.
"His various projects echo what some on the right call 'aristopopulism' and aim to build a bridge between wealthy capitalists and the working-class people they intend to represent, according to interviews with Buskirk and nine other people in his inner circle, profitably reindustrializing the country and tying their interests to that of their base," the Post explains.
Buskirk explains it, saying, "You either have an extractive elite — an oligarchy — or you have a productive elite — an aristocracy — in every society."
And while Buskirk says he was initially skeptical of Trump as he emerged from reality television host to the presidency, "He’s actually been saying the same thing for 40 years! And that’s when I realized, okay, he’s for real. And the people that are saying he is not serious are lying.”
In his book "America and the Art of the Possible," Buskirk argues for "a proper elite that takes care of the country and governs it well so that everyone prospers.”
Oren Cass, chief economist of the conservative think tank American Compass, says that while some still view Trump’s support as “a cult of personality,” Buskirk helms a "powerful ecosystem" that now backs the MAGA movement.
“Chris is the convener of that ecosystem,” he tells the Post.
Malik agrees, telling the Post that Buskirk was “the first mover” to recognize that there were going to be thousands of well-off people who “no longer felt at home in the Democratic Party."
Vance, who became fast friends with Buskirk after being introduced by Thiel, also gave a rousing endorsement in a statement to the Post saying, he's an "original thinker” who saw “before almost anyone” how the “right combination of ideas, organizing and funding can ensure lasting political success for the Republican Party.”
Malik hosted a small fundraiser for Vance at a Palm Beach restaurant during his "long-shot bid" for public office in 2022. Following that, they went to Mar-a-Lago, where Buskirk was having a Rockbridge conference.
"The men spent the week bonding over their rage about what they viewed as online censorship and a feeling that innovation was being stymied in favor of liberal priorities such as sustainability and diversity initiatives," the Postwrites.
Critics, however, see Buskirk's movement as "the rise of a group of unelected American oligarchs who are undermining Trump’s promises to benefit working people," the Post writes.
Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, says "the government’s job is to advance the prosperity of the nation and not the prosperity of wealthy individuals, founders, and executives.”
However, thePost says that interest in Buskirk's group has surged and "the vibe is euphoric."
"Several of the group’s members are billionaires; prominent investors Marc Andreessenand David Sacks are already members," they explain.
Richard Painter, a corporate law professor at the University of Minnesota who served as chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House, "said this influx of interest in Rockbridge, 1789 and Executive Branch, creates the appearance of a 'pay-to-play' network, of people who are paying to get access to administration officials or the Trump family."
Buskirk insists he knows what will make America actually great, telling the Postthat American greatness will only be accomplished “by the intentional cultivation of talented, high-agency people working together in high-trust environments.”
SOUNDS LIKE THE Mafia?
---
America and the Art of the Possible: Restoring National Vitality in an Age of Decay: Buskirk, Christopher: 9781641771740: Amazon.com: Books
cover guy in suit supervise ship
Between 1920 and 1950, America saw an unprecedented expansion of wealth and power underwritten by technological innovation, cultural confidence, and victory in war. American elites won World War II, rebuilt the world order with America at its head, inaugurated the jet age, and put a man on the moon. The boom led to a larger, richer middle class that confirmed America’s best ideals.
By the early 1970s, that ended. American elites have captured a disproportionate share of the social and economic rewards over the last fifty years. Meanwhile, the middle class has shrunk in size and has become economically insecure, owning a smaller share of national wealth than at any time in the nation’s history. This has happened even while most households have two income earners, versus the single-income households that characterized the period of shared prosperity. At the same time, technological innovation that improves people’s standard of living has dramatically slowed. monop w/ vc help --> enshitification
These trends undermine the basic premise behind the broad acceptance of a meritocratic elite, whose rule is predicated on the belief that if the best rise to the top, their talent and energy will create a rising tide that lifts all boats. We had that once. We can have it again.
Review
“Chris Buskirk attributes America’s current stagnation to elite credentialed professionals and their almost un-American creed of equivocate, downsize, and cancel. In short, he argues the country can be saved only by unorthodox mavericks who question, stir, experiment, and risk—and reject our current upside-down values. Unlike many critiques of a sclerotic America, this one offers concrete proposals for how to stop the decline by encouraging and honoring the kind of unorthodox people and policies that have always rescued the country in the past. A historically sourced and much-needed manual for national renewal.”
—Victor Davis Hanson, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author of The Dying Citizen
“In this brilliant book, Chris Buskirk argues that America has become a stagnant society, with no national self-confidence or ability to deliver better lives for its people. But he does more than diagnose. He offers concrete ideas for how to recapture our vitality. I suspect this book will influence American politics for decades. Our leaders would do well to absorb its message and arguments.”
—Senator J. D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy and founder of Narya Capital
About the Author
Chris Buskirk is the publisher and editor of American Greatness. He is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He has written for The Washington Post, The Spectator, USA Today, The Hill, The New Criterion, and other publications. He is a frequent contributor to Fox News, NPR’s Morning Edition, and the PBS Newshour. Chris is a sought after speaker and has spoken recently at the Aspen Ideas Festival and to other groups around the country. He is the author of the book, Trump vs. The Leviathan and the co-author of American Greatness: How Conservatism, Inc. Missed the 2016 Election & What the Establishment Needs to Learn. Chris is a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold businesses in financial services and digital marketing. He received his B.A. from Claremont-McKenna College.
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America and the Art of the Possible: Restoring National Vitality in an Age of Decay
---
Product details
- Publisher : Encounter Books
- Publication date : January 10, 2023
- Language : English
- Print length : 192 pages
---
Capital Research Center
https://capitalresearch.org › article › america-and-the-art-of-the-possible-and-philanthropy
America and the Art of the Possible - Capital Research Center
Recapturing, Rebuilding, and Revitalizing; Re-Examining, Reconsidering, and Maybe Relinquishing? Buskirk calls at the end of America and the Art of the Possible for the nation to once again do great things—big projects for a big country, the one that once conquered the frontier. He admirably presents a positive, optimistic, forward-looking ...
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Encounter Books
https://www.encounterbooks.com › books › america-and-the-art-of-the-possible
America and the Art of the Possible - Encounter Books
Chris Buskirk is the publisher and editor of American Greatness. He is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.
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---
LI 11 25 NOT MUCH THERE
Chris Buskirk
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Founder & Chief Investment Officer of 1789 Capital; Founder & President of The Center for American Greatness
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EVIL BUT
| Location: | Santa Rosa Beach, FL |
|---|---|
| Tax ID: | 45-2338676 |
| Tax-Exempt Status: | 501(c)(3) |
| Founded: | 2016 |
| Publisher and Editor: | Chris Buskirk |
American Greatness is a right-of-center news and opinion website aligned with populist or nationalist conservatism. The outlet emerged in 2016 when Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination and says it is not tied to any candidate or party. It accuses the pre-2016 conservative movement of having lost its way on issues such as immigration, trade, and foreign policy. ^1
Background
American Greatness is a nationalist conservative news and opinion website established in 2016. It claims to be the “voice of the next generation of American Conservatism,” claiming the American conservative movement has “lost its way.” ^1 ^2
The American Greatness website claims to receive about 2.4 million visits per month. ^3
The editors of the website wrote a declaration of their independence from the conservative movement in July 2016, claiming to represent the next generation of American conservatism. They declared the movement cannot attempt to relive the politics of 40 years ago. ^1
The American Greatness editors wrote the outlet is not affiliated with the Journal for American Greatness but says the defunct publication was its inspiration. ^1
Principles
American Greatness describes its “Greatness Agenda” as focusing on prioritizing American interest above all else, particularly on policy matters of immigration, international trade, and foreign policy and national security matters. ^1
In its founding editorial in July 2016, American Greatness accused the conservative movement of “intellectual stagnation and a tiresome policy orthodoxy” with too much focus on the word “conservative” and too little on “America.” ^1
While the outlet’s name sounds similar to the “Make America Great Again” slogan of former President Donald Trump, the American Greatness editors asserted, “We are not political partisans” and “we can be neither vindicated nor embarrassed by the personal successes or failures of any candidate or collection of them in this or any other election year.” ^1
Commentary and Reporting
After Donald Trump lost his 2020 re-election bid, American Greatness assistant editor Pedro Gonzalez said the 45th president strayed from the populism that got him elected in 2016 and that by the end of his presidency had governed like an establishment Republican. ^4
In 2021, the website published an unsubstantiated story based on anonymous sourcing alleging that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) was having an extramarital affair with former Trump campaign advisor Corey Lewandowski. ^2 Noem denied the claims, for which other journalists had found no solid evidence. ^5
American Greatness published articles challenging the mainstream media’s account of the January 6, 2021, riot in which Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 Electoral College win. ^6 One article raised questions about whether an FBI sting operation played a role in the riot. ^7 The outlet has also covered the alleged mistreatment of prisoners charged with crimes allegedly related to the riot. ^8
Leadership
Chris Buskirk is the publisher and editor of American Greatness. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Spectator, USA Today, the Hill, and the New Criterion. Buskirk has also been a contributor to Fox News, NPR’s Morning Edition, the PBS Newshour, and MSNBC. He is the author of Trump vs. The Leviathan and co-author of American Greatness: How Conservatism, Inc. Missed the 2016 Election & What the Establishment Needs to Learn. ^9
Ben Boychuck is the managing editor of American Greatness. Boychuck is a former columnist for the Sacramento Bee and Tribune Media and has also written for City Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, the Riverside Press-Enterprise in California, and the Claremont Review of Books. ^9
Julie Ponzi is a senior editor for American Greatness. She was previously director of academic programs at the Claremont Institute and taught American politics at Azusa Pacific University. She has written for the Claremont Review of Books, the Online Library of Law and Liberty, the Columbus Dispatch, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Washington Times. ^9
References
- The Editors. “Our Declaration of Independence from the Conservative Movement.” American Greatness. July 21, 2016. https://amgreatness.com/2016/07/21/declaration-independence-conservative-movement/
- Polumbo, Brad. “American Greatness smears South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem with anonymous sources and no evidence.” Washington Examiner. September 30, 2021. Accessed October 22, 2021. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/american-greatness-smears-south-dakota-gov-kristi-noem-with-anonymous-sources-and-no-evidence
- “American Greatness.” Ad Fontes Media. Accessed October 22, 2021. https://adfontesmedia.com/american-greatness-bias-and-reliability/
- “American Greatness editor on how Trump’s abandonment of populism affected 2020 election.” The Rising. The Hill TV. December 3, 2020. Accessed October 22, 2021. https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/528623-american-greatness-editor-on-how-trump-abandonment-of-populism-affected-2020
- Fugleberg, Jeremy. “Fugleberg: How the Noem-Lewandowski Rumors Became News.” Bemidji Pioneer. Bemidji Pioneer, October 8, 2021. https://www.bemidjipioneer.com/opinion/columns/7228445-Fugleberg-How-the-Noem-Lewandowski-rumors-became-news.
- Kelly, Julie. “New Capitol Video Contradicts Justice Department, Media Narrative on January 6.” American Greatness. October 18, 2021. Accessed October 22, 2021. https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/18/new-capitol-video-contradicts-justice-department-media-narrative-on-january-6/
- Kelly, Julie. “Was January 6 Part of the FBI’s ‘Operation Cold Snap’?” American Greatness. October 14, 2021. Accessed October 22, 2021. https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/14/was-january-6-part-of-the-fbis-operation-cold-snap/
- Kelly, Julie. “Federal Judge Finds DC Jail Officials in Contempt, Demands Civil Rights Inquiry.” American Greatness. October 13, 2021. Accessed October 22, 2021. https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/13/federal-judge-finds-dc-jail-officials-in-contempt-demands-civil-rights-inquiry/
- “Meet the Team.” American Greatness. Accessed October 22, 2021. https://amgreatness.com/meet-the-team/
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NEW RT ref jrnl of am gtness
anton misquotes lincoln
...5:12
tell from the Going back to something that Sydney just just mentioned about John Lock. I mean, how do these guys square what they're
25:18
talking about with the American founding with, you know, the framers, with the kind of government that actually they
25:24
were not only the kinds of people they were reading philosophically, but actually the institutions that they built? Um, it seems to me as if this is
25:30
an attempt to overthrow the American founding philosophically. But how do they try to square this?
25:36
So, if you if you look at Michael Anton, it's very interesting. and and before he did that flight 93 essay, he wrote this
25:43
he and a few of these other characters including Gladen Papen who's the uh
25:48
post-liberal guy, they had this this blog called the Journal of American
25:53
Greatness and and there and this is probably one of the most shocking things I found in my research. They because the
26:00
Claremont group is are the heirs of Harry Jaffa who loved nothing more than the Declaration of Independence and
26:06
Abraham Lincoln and the founding. I mean, he had his problems, but right um
26:11
and and would get into these epic arguments with other conservatives about this stuff. and Michael Anton in and and
26:19
I think Julius Crin and Gladen Papen, the others involved in that journal of American Greatness was pretty explicit
26:25
that that given I think especially immigration and the changing demographics of America, it was time to
26:34
to to level sort of um
26:39
it was time to let go of that pure um sort of declarationist way of thinking
26:45
and basically em embrace a certain kind of paleoconservatism which is much more nivist and he called himself a
26:52
paleouseian and he and they quoted Sam Francis constantly and I think that might have
26:59
been a bit tongue-in-cheek that was that I really do think for some of those writers it might have been but I don't think it was for Anton so I think there
27:06
was a who Sam Francis was just Sam Francis was a paleoconservative who
27:12
was close to Pat Buchanan and uh white supremacous IST racist. Racist.
27:17
Yeah. Yeah. He he got ousted from the mainstream conservative movement I think in the '9s and then just went fullon
27:23
white supremacist. Um uh but but a sort of smart guy and so
27:29
and so read wrote a lot of interesting things that were kind of precient for for the deeper you know things happening
27:35
in the country. Um but so I thought it was really shocking that someone like
27:40
Michael Anton would would basically turn his back on the declaration. so explicitly and tap into those other
traditions. Um, I think so. And and he he he you might you probably noticed
this, Sydney, when you read it cuz I know you I know about your work on Lincoln, but he he he quotes Lincoln in
that Journal of American Greatness about concerning the Declaration and Equality and he he basically lies about what
28:07
Lincoln says, you know, he says that Lincoln didn't believe that Lincoln even Lincoln admitted that that we weren't
28:13
equals. Um, and he sort of Yeah. Yeah.
intellectually dishonest. Lincoln denounced those leading into the Civil War among
28:25
um the southern um um secessionists. They became secessionist who denounced
28:31
the Declaration of Independence particularly the u phrase all men are created equal and he says you know
28:37
they're hawking said Lincoln at the Declaration. Lincoln spoke about this quite often and explicitly and uh anyone
28:46
who wants to read any of his um debates with Douglas in 1858 um uh he speaks
28:57
about that but also in the um uh Cooper Union uh speech of um February of 1860.
29:05
I urge everyone to read that. I've written an essay about that recently in the New Republic, but that is a um that
29:13
it that is a reflection of profound intellectual dishonesty. Yeah. I mean this is comes close to what
29:19
Lincoln was arguing against were those um southerners in particular but not just southerners who were claiming the
29:25
Declaration of Independence was merely a a pack of glittering generalities that it had no you know um actual meaning um
29:32
for our own time and it should not be um admired. Um it it was actually they
29:39
wanted to find out something completely different which was the Confederacy um
29:44
you know and and and and this is what Lincoln saw. So the idea that Lincoln was a person who saw the declaration as
29:50
a bunch of glittering generalities and this is beyond dishonest. This is just Can I um I totally agree. Can I read
29:56
this little section from the speech because because Lincoln gave this speech on the Dred Scott decision which dis
30:03
this notorious decision where they decided black people were not equal, right? And
30:08
Lincoln said, and this is the part that I think Matt Anton is quoting from badly. Um, and this is I just so I
30:15
wanted to make sure I got this in the book and I'm going to get it in the interview here too. Okay, so this is um
30:20
Lincoln uh was was expounding upon his understanding of the the declaration and
30:25
saying that it was not a statement of actual reality, right, of what was going on, of course, but it was a beacon of
30:31
hope, right, and and a kind of aspiration. And he says they meaning the founders meant simply to declare the
30:37
right so that the the right of equality that is so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances
30:44
should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all. constantly
30:50
looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby con
30:58
thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all
31:04
people of all colors everywhere. So with that, Laura
31:13
from Abraham Lincoln, a reputation not only of Chief Justice Roger B. Tony in
31:20
the Dread Scott decision, but the MAGA apologist Michael Anton
31:27
um we are going to close um this episode,
31:33
but we are going to urge everybody to read your book further to explore these
31:39
questions in much greater detail because we're going to need to understand this as we go along. A Furious Minds: The
31:46
Making of the Maga New Wright, a new book by Laura Field. Um, thank you Laura
31:52
very much. Um, and on behalf of um Sean Mens and myself, subscribe to Legal AF,
pt 2 
0:00
Welcome to the Court of History. I'm Sydney Blumenthal. I'm here with my
0:05
uh co-host Sean w alen of Princeton. We are here on Legal AF, subscribe to Legal
0:12
AF. We are um joined by Laura Field, the author of Furious Minds, the making of
the Maga New Right, discussing not simply the philosophical in um ideas
0:25
behind Trump and Trumpism and the infrastructure, but their real influences
junk rt polls
an 10 24
Countless national and battleground state polls are showing the United States' 2024 presidential race to be incredibly tight, and many pollsters consider the race a toss-up or a "coin flip."
Yet right-wing media outlets are painting Donald Trump as the presidential candidate with the momentum, and they typically point to GOP-associated pollsters to make their case. American Greatness, Quantus, Trafalgar and Rasmussen are among the right-wing pollsters who have been providing Trump-friendly polls.
In a New York Times article published on October 31, reporters Ken Bensinger and Kaleigh Rogers describe the way right-wing pollsters are helping create the impression of Republican nominee Trump as having stronger momentum than Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
READ MORE:Ocasio-Cortez warns Trump NYC rally was primer for taking power 'by force'
"The torrent of polls began arriving just a few weeks ago, one after the other, most showing a victory for Donald J. Trump," Bensinger and Rogers explain. "They stood out amid the hundreds of others indicating a dead heat in the presidential election. But they had something in common: They were commissioned by right-leaning groups with a vested interest in promoting Republican strength. These surveys have had marginal, if any, impact on polling averages, which either do not include the partisan polls or give them little weight."
The reporters continued, "Yet some argue that the real purpose of partisan polls, along with other expectation-setting metrics such as political betting markets, is directed at a different goal entirely: building a narrative of unstoppable momentum for Mr. Trump."
These "partisan polls," according to Bensinger and Rogers, "appear focused on lifting Republican enthusiasm before the election and — perhaps more important — cementing the idea that the only way Mr. Trump can lose to Vice President Kamala Harris is if the election is rigged."
Joshua Dyck, director of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, told the Times, "Republicans are clearly strategically putting polling into the information environment to try to create perceptions that Trump is stronger. Their incentive is not necessarily to get the answer right."
READ MORE:[Wall St. CEOs betting on Trump victory — but stock market may favor Harris
*Read the New York Times' full article at this link (subscription required).
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AN 5 24
The GOP over the last decade, Reuters noted in March, has transformed into a "Republican electorate that is more isolationist, more skeptical of globalization, more suspicious of the electoral process and more likely to view Democrats as a threat than it was when former President [Donald] Trump launched his first run for the White House in 2015."
University of Virginia Center for Politics analyst J. Miles Coleman said the stark changes "reflect an electorate that has become more populist, both feeding off of Trump's populism and influencing the broader party." Now, he added, "It's hard to see the (party) going back to nominating Mitt Romney-type candidates."
In a Tuesday, May 7 op-ed published by MSNBC, columnist Charlie Sykes discusses the right-wing's shift through the eyes of conservative ghost writer Nancy French.
READ MORE:Johnson demands all Trump prosecutions cease, vows to use Congress 'in every possible way'
French's new book, Ghosted: An American Story, according to Sykes, is "a powerful and horrifying account of how a once fringe movement, the alt right, has come to occupy the central seat of the Republican Party."
The book reveals "the vicious racist attacks against her and her family after she and her husband, David French, a well-known conservative commentator who is now a New York Times columnist, broke with Trump," the Bulwark founder notes.
Sykes writes:
*In late 2015, online trolls seized on the existence of their daughter Naomi, who the Frenches had adopted from Ethiopia, as an attack tactic. In her book, French recalls the moment she saw the picture online: a photoshopped image of 7-year-old Naomi “in a gas chamber, with Donald Trump — wearing a Nazi uniform — pulling a lethal gas lever.”
*There was more. Other online trolls photoshopped the girl’s face onto images of enslaved people and identified her with racial slurs that don’t bear repeating here.
French writes in her book, "The alt right tried to inflict as much personal pain as they could on us, in the most intimate ways possible. These radicalized Trump supporters harassed us, mocked us, maligned us, and believed we should lose our jobs, and — at least according to our email inboxes — our lives."
READ MORE: 'Terror into votes': Expert examines Trump and MAGAworld’s 'deep investment in promoting fear'
"This casual racism and brutality was not pushed by a fringe element,” French emphasizes. "It had become the main political strategy of many conservatives. These people spouting conspiracy theories and shouting invectives were now embedded, wrapped up, and intertwined with mainstream Republicans."
Sykes notes:
In 2019, the Trump-supporting magazine American Greatness published a blatantly racist poemtitled 'Cuck Elegy,' which accused 'parasites' of surrendering to the 'mocha-skinned' and 'low-life reprobates.'* In case the references were too subtle, the magazine accompanied the poem with a photo of David and Naomi French.
The same year, "the Aspen Institute featured a panel that included both French and Christopher Buskirk, the editor and publisher of American Greatness, titled'Can the Republican Party Survive the Alt Right?' (In the spirit of transparency, I helped moderate that panel.)," Sykes emphasizes. "French writes that Aspen’s decision to invite the publisher of American Greatness to talk about the alt-right 'was akin to asking an arsonist to give advice on putting out fires,' adding, 'but they did not ask me for my advice.'"
*Sykes' full op-ed is available at this link.
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only white male xian are real am fit to lead
loomer fever swamp base of escalator
mma 1 24
re-birtherism
On January 8, former President Donald Trump shared a Gateway Pundit post on X falsely claiming that Trump’s former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is constitutionally disqualified from a “presidential or vice presidential candidacy.”
The false argument, which made its way to Trump through a far-right blog and a notoriously Islamophobic conspiracy theorist, follows a separate, simmering conservative media trend of calling Haley by her first name, Nimarata, rather than the middle name she goes by. Taken together, the two lines of commentary expose the racism behind some of pro-Trump media’s Haley coverage. This attack comes as Haley's polling numbers approach Trump's in New Hampshire.
The Gateway Pundit article the post is based on builds on a post from another pro-Trump blog, American Greatness, which itself pressed the same points as a blog from Rumble host and failed congressional candidate Laura Loomer: Since Haley’s parents weren’t U.S. citizens at the time of her birth, these conservative outlets argue, she is merely a birthright citizen, and not a “natural born citizen” as the Constitution requires for presidents and vice presidents.
This is simply not true: Haley is constitutionally eligible for either office, with her South Carolina birth qualifying her as a “natural born citizen.” The immigration status of her parents is legally irrelevant, despite right-wing media’s long-standing hatred for birthright citizenship and repeated attempts to use these arguments against enemy politicians.
On X (formerly Twitter), the author of the American Greatness piece credited Loomer’s “great investigative work” for having “uncovered” the fact of Haley’s parents’ citizenship -- a secret which Haley wrote about in her 2012 autobiography, and shared with a newspaper in 2015. Longtime Trump ally Roger Stone also promoted Loomer’s so-called investigative work before it ultimately reached the former president.
The racist claim notably echoes some falsehoods levied against former President Barack Obama who, among the many conspiracy theories about his birth, also faced incorrect allegations that he was ineligible for office because of his Kenyan father. (Right-wing influencers also made similar claims about Vice President Kamala Harris.)
But this is not the only commonality between right-wing media coverage of Obama, Harris, and Haley. During the Obama years, conservative media frequently referred to him by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, in a racist attempt to otherize him for what he called his “funny-sounding name.” Again, similar things happened with Harris. And now, some pro-Trump voices are beginning to deploy a similar playbook against Haley and her birth name, Nimarata Nikki Randhawa.
Perhaps the most frequent example is Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk, who seems to find a certain thrill in using Haley’s first name. “Yeah, that’s right. Her real name is Nimarata,” he once quipped. (Nikki, her middle name, is also her real name.)
Kirk does not exclusively or even mostly use her first name. But for months he has peppered in references to Haley as “Nimarata” while attacking her campaign, warning against her for vice president, or once as an aside while pushing restrictive immigration policy. During an interview with businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, he even corrected himself after calling her “Nikki” instead.
American Greatness also had a hand in this trend, with a November debate recap mentioning her squabble with Ramaswamy. The article, which refers to her as Nikki Haley elsewhere, reserves her full name for one brief paragraph that reveals the racist attitudes at the heart of this type of coverage:
Ramaswamy then said something, to which Nimarata Nikki Randhawa Haley replied, “You’re just scum.” She must be right: after all, Ramaswamy’s the child of people who immigrated from India. Scum indeed!
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https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/right-wing-media-continues-defend-january-6-insurrectionist-couy-griffin
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escalator of fox bs
mma 1123 no twt
Fox News falsely reported last Wednesday that a car accident at the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara, New York, was an act of terrorism. Much of the network’s coverage was based on reporting from correspondent Alexis McAdams, who attributed her information — later debunked — to anonymous law enforcement sources. A close look at Fox’s treatment of this event shows how the network manufactured a terrorist event out of thin air, and then blamed it on Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, and their supporters.
Fox News personalities and guests made at least 97 claims alleging or speculating that the crash was an act of terrorism or an attack from when the incident happened at 11:30 a.m. ET, until about approximately 5:15 p.m. ET, when Gov. Hochul stated that the explosion was not related to terrorism. From when the network first began reporting the crash, around 1:15 p.m. ET, through Gov. Hochul's statement, Fox News aired 1 hour and 45 minutes of on-screen text that speculated that the car crash at the U.S.-Canada border was an act of terrorism or an attack. Several Fox guests and personalities backpedaled their statements over the course of the timeframe.
The incident occurred on November 22, one of the busiest travel days of the year, at a border checkpoint between the United States and Canada. By 9:40 p.m. ET Wednesday evening, the FBI had concluded its investigation, determining that “no terrorism nexus was identified.” Local police have now taken over the investigation, and a cause of the crash has yet to be released. The Niagara police chief criticized media outlets for spreading misinformation about the crash, which he said had “created significant and unnecessary anxiety in the community.”
Right-wing media outlets including Fox News have consistently fearmongered about the purported threat of Muslims and Arabs looking to cross into the United States to carry out violence following an attack in Israel on October 7 by the armed wing of Hamas, the Palestinian organization that governs the occupied Gaza Strip. An estimated 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas attack; Israel responded with a bombardment and invasion of Gaza that has reportedly killed more than 14,000 Palestinians, an estimated 10,000 of whom are women and children. Incidents of anti-Muslim discrimination in the United States have skyrocketed over this period.
- ### Fox quickly suggests Niagara crash was terrorism
Fox News was an early source to falsely claim the accident in Niagara was an act of terrorism, with the clear implication that it had been carried out by Islamists.
“High level police sources tell me this is an attempted terrorist attack,” Fox’s McAdams posted on X (formerly Twitter) at 1:53 p.m. ET on Wednesday, November 22. “Sources say the car was full of explosives. Both men inside dead.” By 3:16 p.m. ET, The New York Times reported, “A preliminary investigation has found that the car did not contain explosives,” which users on X added to McAdams’ post as a community note.
CitationFrom the official X account of Fox News correspondent Alexis McAdams
- ### Fox's claim spreads, and a Fox anchor suggests Hamas may be to blame
McAdams’ post spread fast. Fox News border reporter Bill Melugin shared McAdams’ post to his more than 350,000 followers and made his own post paraphrasing and citing his colleague. Melugin later deleted that post, but his repost of McAdams’ initial message is still viewable on his timeline.
Around the same time, Fox News anchor John Roberts read McAdams’ reporting on air, including information not contained in her post.
“Alexis McAdams is reporting that according to high-level police sources, the explosion was an attempted terrorist attack,” Roberts said. “A lot of explosives in the vehicle at the time, the two people who were in the car are deceased, one Border Patrol officer was injured. Driving from the U.S. apparently to Canada, and were trying to drive toward the CBP [Customs and Border Protection] building.”
Video
CitationFrom the November 22, 2023, edition of Fox News' America Reports
Roberts also suggested that Hamas might be behind the attack, claiming the “unrest in the Middle East that has spilled out past Israel” means there “could be operatives in this country sympathetic to terrorists who want to send a message here in the United States.”
Video
CitationFrom the November 22, 2023, edition of Fox News' America Reports
- ### Supercharged misinformation
From there it was off to the races, as other Fox News on-air talent and guests began pushing the narrative that the incident was an act of terrorism. “When you are talking about radical Islamic terrorism and the attacks against the United States, this has happened before," said senior correspondent Eric Shawn.
During the 2 p.m. hour of America Reports, Roberts speculated whether the two people involved were "acting alone” or if the explosion was “part of a larger plot.”
“How long have these people been in the country — are they American, are they foreign-born, are they radicalized, are they just trying to make a statement here?” he continued. “I mean, there’s so many possibilities.”
McAdams joined the program as well, reporting that there may have been a “second car possibly involved” and that the original car was “full of explosives, according to those high-level sources.” She added that “there’s going to be big crowds of people coming here to New York City for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade," insinuating it could be a target, and also repeated that the explosion was “a planned terrorist attack, according to high-level police sources who were on the ground."
Video
CitationFrom the November 22, 2023, edition of Fox News' America Reports
- ### Former Homeland Security adviser suggests “jihadists” may be behind it
Later that hour, former Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend suggested, like Shawn before her, that Hamas or another group of “jihadists” may be to blame.
“We don't know yet whether or not this is attributed — can be attributed to Hamas or another terrorist group, but I will tell you from our own experience we know that this sort of bomb, this kind of a vehicle bomb is sort of a classic technique of, you know, jihadists,” Townsend said. “So I don't think law enforcement yet understands who it was or what the intended target was, but the detonation of an explosive, a vehicle explosive this size, is regrettably — look, there could have been many more casualties — but as I say, very much a hallmark of jihadists.”
Roberts interviewed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who used the opportunity to go on an anti-migrant tirade. “We have a number of people, by the tens of thousands, who have entered this country with bad intentions,” Ramaswamy said.
- ### Fox reporter stands by the terrorism claim even as it falls apart, before finally retracting it
At 4 p.m. ET, McAdams joined Your World with Neil Cavuto to double down on her initial reporting, only to then retract it — all over the course of a few minutes.
“We’ve been checking in with police sources who were very confident just in the past hour or so saying that they believe this was a terrorist attack there, at that border crossing,” McAdams said. But the story had already started to fall apart.
“The bomb techs, who have lots of experience, thought that this was an explosive — that the car, I was told, had explosives in it, several explosives were in that vehicle,” she continued. “Now they’re backing that up, saying it was the way that the car landed that caused such an explosion.”
Finally, McAdams was forced to retract her initial claims. “We started seeing those conflicting reports, but that’s what happens with breaking news,” McAdams said. “They get new information, they give it to us, and we bring it back to the viewers.”
“So as of now, they’ve walked back that it was a possible terrorist attack,” she concluded.
- ### Even after the report was retracted, Fox used the crash to attack Palestinians and migrants
Still, McAdams’ walkback didn’t prevent Fox from continuing to weaponize the incident against Palestinians and migrants.
On The Ingraham Angle, guest host Jason Chaffetz acknowledged the explosion might not have been an act of terrorism, but used it to argue for a nativist immigration policy anyway.
“Today's explosion at the border, regardless of the motive behind it, is a chilling reminder that we are all on high alert and living in a post-9/11 mindset, which means that our borders need to be secure,” Chaffetz said, adding, that the Biden administration doesn’t “have the political will to actually shut down the border."
Later that evening, Fox’s Kayleigh McEnany insinuated that it was only natural to assume the explosion was tied to Hamas or connected with Palestinian solidarity demonstrations.
“The crash was so fierce and in such a sensitive location that everyone's mind of course went to the same place — terror,” McEnany said on Jesse Watters Primetime. “With war in the Middle East, violent domestic protests, radicals calling for days of jihad, the FBI director telling us to be vigilant — we are all on edge.”
- ### Fox's false reporting spread beyond Fox
McAdams’ misinformation reached far beyond the confines of Fox News.
On The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, host Clay Travis interviewed former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie about the incident, also citing McAdam’s reporting. “Alexis McAdams, who is at Fox News, says: 'High-level police sources tell me this is an attempted terror attack,'” Travis told his listeners.
“This should not be surprising to any of us,” Christie concluded.
On X, a paid X Premium account called The Insider Paper posted Fox News’ supposed confirmation that the car crash was an “attempted terrorist attack,” which was reposted by right-wing media figures including Richard Grenell and Colin Rugg, racking up thousands of reposts and millions of views.
Right-wing sites American Greatness, The Gateway Pundit, The Daily Caller, and PJ Media also amplified McAdams’ false report, only to be forced to update their stories after she retracted her initial claims.
There was no terrorist attack at the U.S.-Canadian border on Wednesday, November 22. But Fox News’ manufactured panic was very real, and risks exacerbating the threats that Muslims and Arabs in the United States already face.
- ### Methodology...
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-role-spreading-conspiracy-theories-one-january-6-defendant-using-his-trial
mma 7 23
january 6 defendant Alan Hostetter will reportedly rely on three conspiracy theories at his trial, each of which he could have seen repeatedly on Fox News.
Hostetter, a former police chief, was initially charged alongside four other January 6 defendants who the government has accused of being Three Percenters — an extremist, anti-government ideology. The judge severed his case, however, “in a nod to the unusual nature of Mr. Hostetter’s proposed defense,” according to the New York Times.
The Times further reports:
Acting as his own lawyer, Mr. Hostetter has said that he intends tofight charges of conspiracy and obstruction based on what he calls“three fundamental pillars”: that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald J. Trump; that he and other rioters had no desire to disrupt the challenges to the vote results that were taking place inside the Capitol on Jan. 6; and that, therefore, the assault on the building had to have been staged by “federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”
Fox News embraced Hostetter’s first false claim — that the 2020 election was stolen — across nearly the entire network.Fox cast doubt on the election results almost 800 times in the two weeks after it called the race for President Joe Biden, and falsely claimed machines run by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic were unreliable or had been hacked to change vote totals. Dominion sued Fox for defamation, forcing a massive settlement on the day the trial was set to open. Smartmatic also filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox, which is ongoing.
Fox News also pushed Hostetter’s second inaccurate claim,that the rioters were simply tourists or otherwise not looking to disrupt the transfer of power. As recently as this March, prime-time host Laura Ingraham argued the insurrectionists were “old ladies walking through the halls of Congress taking selfies.” In January, her guest Miranda Devine, a Fox News contributor, claimed “most of the people that they've been rounding up are just guilty of trespassing. A lot of them were confused.” Fox’s Mark Levin said the rioters were simply “parading on public lands,” and compared them to “people in the civil rights movement.” On the day after the riot, Fox & Friends insisted the insurrectionists were at the Capitol to “voice their concerns” and to “defend our Republic.” That type of language was a fixture of Fox’s coverage, with on-air talent and guests calling the rioters “nonviolent” and “political prisoners." [twt]
hostetter’s final claim, that the insurrection was an inside job orchestrated and manufactured by federal law enforcement, was also a mainstay on Fox News. Like much of the network’s January 6 revisionism, this particular myth was largely, but not exclusively, driven by former marquee star Tucker Carlson. He filled his prime-time show and a documentary-style series called Patriot Purge with unsupported allegations that the riot was driven by FBI agents or informants, a claim that doesn’t stand up to even the mildest scrutiny.
Carlson promoted the series on Fox & Friends, during which co-host Brian Kilmeade asked, “Do you think maybe, perhaps and maybe you don't want to give away your series, you find indications that the FBI was actually pushing for this invasion?”
Hostetter recently criticized the network’s decision to fire Carlson in a rambling, incoherent defense motion that also referenced the JFK assassination and The Wizard of Oz. Prior to his ouster, Carlson had defended Hostetter as a victim of deep state persecution.
But Carlson wasn’t alone in spreading the conspiracy theory that the federal government was behind the attempted insurrection. Ingraham devoted a segment in October 2021 to the conspiracy theory that a man named Ray Epps was an FBI informant who had surreptitiously provoked the riot. She suggested in March of this year that FBI informants were “working the crowd either before they entered the Capitol or while they were in the Capitol.” Her guest in that segment was American Greatness’ Julie Kelly, a leading January 6 conspiracy theorist, who frequently pushed the same line on Carlson’s program as well.Levin interviewed Kelly in November 2021, asking, “Was this attack on the Capitol building instigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on January 6?” And a guest on the radio program of Fox’s Sean Hannity recently suggested that then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi “planned and conjured up” the riot to add drama to her daughter’s documentary film.
As the Times reports, prosecutors in Hostetter’s case are worried about the trial devolving to a “circuslike atmosphere.” If it does, Fox News will have played no small role in providing the elements for Hostetter’s spectacle.
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when The New York Times disclosed the existence of a new multipronged right-wing project, the Rockbridge Network, backed by multibillionaire Peter Thiel in April, the paper named only one person with an official position in the new organization: its founder, Chris Buskirk. Little is known about the new venture, and Buskirk himself remains relatively obscure, although he maintains considerable access to mainstream media outlets.
In reporting on the new organization, the Times didn’t mention that the website Buskirk edits and publishes, the far-right and nationalist outlet American Greatness, is home to an array of January 6 conspiracy theories, supplemented with defenses of military coups and a combination of thinly coded and occasionally overt racism. In general,American Greatness aims to stay just barely inside the mainstream discourse, typically avoiding the kind of open white nationalism that can relegate an outlet to being rejected by legacy right-wing media.
Given the near-total secrecy around Rockbridge, it’s difficult to know what its exact plans are, but the Times reported that the group is planning to spend “more than $30 million on conservative media, legal, policy and voter registration projects, among other initiatives.” It’s not hard to determine what kinds of candidates it’ll back — both Thiel and Buskirk are supporters of far-right Senate candidates J.D. Vance and Blake Masters. As for its media ambitions, the group budgeted $8 million in 2021 towards the goal of creating a “new conservative ecosystem.” It’s not clear who got that money, but Thiel is rumored to have funded the efforts of a cadre of right-wing nationalist media figures. Whether that was through his foundation or Buskirk and Rockbridge is unclear. Regardless, Buskirk is an admirer of the late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, and the best window into the types of projects the organization is likely to support — or is already supporting behind the scenes — is probably his site, American Greatness.
As the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, riot prepares to present to the American people, starting this week, facts and evidence about the events of that day and those leading up to it, the need to examine the role Buskirk’s website has played in spreading misinformation about the attempted coup is especially urgent – particularly since Buskirk’s money-man, Thiel, wrote in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel also has close ties with figures who openly opine about their anti-democratic ideologies, and it's worth considering that one of Thiel’s main interests in Buskirk may be his site’s attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
Buskirk himself serves two audiences. As publisher of American Greatness, he’s the ringmaster of a motley collection of firebrands and trolls looking to find how far they can push the concept of “nationalism” before it crosses into something more openly ugly.In his own writing and public speaking, he’s not a provocateur but a kind of human Botox that smooths out the rough edges of the far-right, presenting its palatable if slightly anesthetized face. “‘Build the wall’ … — that’s like a shorthand version of saying ‘let’s have a more sensible immigration policy,’” he implausibly
in an interview with Charlie Kirk in 2020.
Unlike many of the writers he publishes, he presents as a fairly mainstream figure. He is a contributing writer to the Times op-ed page, though he hasn’t published a piece there in over a year. He has written for The Washington Post and has appeared numerous times on PBS and NPR. In 2019, he spoke on a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival, criticizing mainstream outlets for writing profiles of the white nationalist Richard Spencer. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to give oxygen to that sort of thing,” Buskirk said. It’s a fair point, if a bit misleading, because his site has also provided a platform to Spencer.More generally, American Greatness has given oxygen to a host of far-right, anti-democratic ideas.
Buskirk in his own words
Buskirk sees himself as a champion of the working man as a household provider, albeit one calcified by Fordist-era nostalgia. And while he will regularly rail against “elites,” he has no problem with billionaires like Thiel as such. “The problem isn’t that rich people are getting richer. It’s that almost everyone else is, at best, running to stand still,” Buskirk wrote in December 2020.
Because Buskirk is committed to preserving capitalism while adopting an anti-elitist pose, his analysis is often superficial. He has railed against “globalism,” which he argues “wants two things above all others: consumers and cheap labor.” There is, of course, an economic mode of production and accompanying ideology that demands cheap labor and the constant flow of commodities; it is called capitalism.
Buskirk’s anti-“globalism” and facile pro-worker affect is a common strain among reactionary nationalists across the world, alliances Buskirk and company hope to deepen. Toward that end, he dined with far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in 2019, and he has referred to Italy’s far-right politician Matteo Salvini as a “charismatic” candidate with “powerful ideas.” Salvini is virulently anti-migrant and often makes barely hidden allusions to fascist tropes or ideas. The neo-fascist group Forza Nuova supported Salvini as well.
When Buskirk approaches the right’s more extreme ideas, it’s often with a degree of plausible deniability, carefully calibrating his message to satisfy readers of his site without losing access to mainstream outlets like NPR or PBS. He recently retweeted an endorsement of “Christian nationalism,” which one scholar of the far-right has described as a way to “cool down the idea of fascism without losing the fascism.” Similarly, in 2018 he quoted a piece he’d published pushing a toned-down version of the racist “great replacement” theory....twt]
his belief in the theory is to be expected, given his admiration of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, the person most responsible for mainstreaming it. Carlson “is the most articulate spokesman for a set of principles and priorities that are important to middle America, but anathema to the bipartisan ruling class,” Buskirk wrote in 2019.
Buskirk hasn’t appeared on Carlson’s show often, but in one segment ostensibly about how conservatives can protect the environment in which Buskirk was a guest, Carlson pushed eco-fascistic talking points. “Crowded places are ugly places. I mean, you could make a really strong case for restricting immigration on environmental grounds. We've made that case on the show,” Carlson said. Buskirk did not contradict or challenge Carlson, which is not surprising given that Buskirk had previously exploited a family’s tragedy to argue for lowering immigration levels.
In 2018, the death of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts became an anti-immigrant propaganda tool for the xenophobic right, because her killer had entered the country without authorization. “The way many people see it, if a foreign national, apparently in the country illegally, kills an American citizen, it underscores the urgency of Trump’s message of putting Americans first,” Buskirk wrote in the Times, passing off the xenophobia off on to “many people” rather than owning it himself. (Tibbetts’ family asked the right to stop using her death to demonize immigrants.) His writers don’t bother with the act, though. On June 1, Daniel Oliver asked whether immigrants, specifically Muslims, know how to “behave in a ‘civilized’ society?”
Like most in the Trump wing of the conservative movement, Buskirk supported Judge Roy Moore in the Alabama Republican Senate primary in 2017. After multiple women came forward to report that Moore sexually assaulted them, including one who was 14 at the time of the incident, Buskirk continued to back Moore. Buskirk dismissed Moore’s behavior as “actions while he was single” and suggested the candidate was “someone who appears to have lived a life of personal probity since then.” Moore was in his early 30s during the alleged incidents.
That wasn’t the first time Buskirk had downplayed abusive behavior toward women. After tapes of Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy” were revealed in October 2016, Buskirk dismissed the recording as “comments about the women he [Trump] tried to have sex with,” writing that the occasion “offered the GOP’s prissy moralizers yet another opening to leap on top of a soap box.” Most importantly for Buskirk, “Trump’s lewd and crude comments 11 years ago do not diminish the dangers of a Clinton election in 30 days” (emphasis original).
As for Buskirk’s ambitions with the Rockbridge media project, his praise of Roger Ailes may provide clues. “It wasn’t until Ailes built Fox News into a powerhouse that broke the monopoly of Left-liberal legacy media on television news that he became public enemy number one,” Buskirk wrote. “It’s a role he seems to have relished.”
“Ailes was energetic, ambitious, unorthodox, creative, brilliant, charming, disarming, and a bunch of other things that made all kinds of different people yell, at critical moments, ‘Get Ailes!’” Buskirk gushed. “I didn’t know him, but I wish I had.”
American Greatness and the January 6 attempted coup
American Greatness, and specifically senior writer Julie Kelly, is one of the key sources of conspiracy theories and misinformation about the January 6 insurrection. Kelly is a regular guest on right-wing media outlets, including appearing at least 17 times on Fox News to discuss the riot and its aftermath. Her purported investigations have propelled much of the manufactured confusion about that day.
Kelly has referred to January 6 as an “inside job,” suggested it was a false flag, and pushed a conspiracy theory that the FBI planted pipe bombs at the offices of the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee the day before the riot. [vid?
July 2021, Kelly tweeted that Washington, D.C., police officer Michael Fanone – who was testifying before Congress about the January 6 attack at the time – was acrisis actor. She said that prosecution of the insurrectionists is an attempt to “silence political dissent,” and said it is “encouraging” that Republican voters “do not think that Joe Biden was fairly elected in 2020.” Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander praised Kelly, along with Tucker Carlson, as “patriots that are doing great work out there.”
Buskirk is a consistent champion of Kelly, calling her “indispensable,” and although he typically stays away from outright election denial, he walks up to the line. One day after the 2020 election, Buskirk tweeted in support of a “protect the vote” rally in Maricopa County, Arizona, one of the states Trump’s allies targeted in their effort to change the election results. In a recent interview on America First with Sebastian Gorka, he said a ridiculous new Dinesh D’Souza film about the election was “very, very well-researched” and “the evidence it presents, I think, is conclusive.” His site took a similar line, running a piece with the headline “2000 Mules Documentary Provides Compelling Evidence That 2020 Election Was Stolen.” The Washington Post, on the other hand, captured the reality of the film: “‘2000 Mules’ offers the least convincing election-fraud theory yet.”
Beyond Kelly, American Greatness regularly runs pieces that downplay January 6 and has accused liberals of being the real coup-plotters. Immediately after the election, the site published a conspiracy theory-addled piece alleging voting irregularity with Dominion Voting Systems, which was completely unsubstantiated at the time and remains so today. (Dominion sued Trump-affiliated lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell for making similar claims.)
John Eastman, whom the New York Times recently described as “the architect of a strategy to overturn the 2020 election,” has written for American Greatness, including about his own role in attempting to keep Trump in power. In a piece headlined “Trying to Prevent Illegal Conduct From Deciding an Election Is Not Endorsing a ‘Coup,’” Eastman repeated the lie that there was significant illegal voting in 2020. He also argued that a legal memo he wrote, outlining various other ways the electoral vote could be certified in Trump’s favor, was simply advice on how to defend the legitimacy of the election. “The memo outlined ways to ensure election integrity in the face of significant and demonstrable violations of state election law,” Eastman wrote in his own defense.
Far from how he portrays himself in his American Greatness blog, Eastman appears to have been intimately and proactively involved in overturning the election results, including working behind the scenes to get a Pennsylvania legislator to “strip Mr. Biden of his win in that state by applying a mathematical equation to accepting the validity of mail ballots, which were most heavily used by Democrats during the pandemic.”
In reality, there was never any evidence of voter fraud that could change the outcome of the election. In March, a federal judge concluded that Trump and Eastman probably committed felonies in their pursuit of overturning the election, which he referred to as “a coup in search of a legal theory.” According to Judge David Carter’s findings, Eastman participated in two meetings in the immediate run-up to January 6 “explicitly tied to persuading Vice President Pence to disrupt the joint session of Congress.”
Others with direct ties to Trump’s effort to overturn the election have also written for the site. American Greatness has published Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who was recently subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee because, the committee said, she “promoted false claims of election fraud to members of Congress.” She was on a phone call when Trump tried to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “‘find’ enough votes to reverse his loss there,” according to the New York Times.
There’s also no shortage of hyperbole and exaggeration in American Greatness pieces regarding the aftermath of the insurrection and subsequent prosecutions. “American conservatives are, right now, on a course for being every bit as ostracized and alienated from broader society as Jews were in the years leading up to Nazi Germany,” wrote Eric Lendrum. He added that January 6 defendants were being abused by prison guards because of “their race and political beliefs.” Two defendants were, in Lendrum’s telling, “forced to undergo political indoctrination from judges and prosecutors” when they “were ordered by the courts to declare that Joe Biden was legitimately elected, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
And when American Greatness isn’t whipping up conspiratorial frenzies or allowing coup-plotters to rewrite their own narrative, it just does straight revisionism. “The immense and justified outrage of President Trump and his 75 million followers never led to violence or illegality and the gathering in Washington on January 6 demonstrated solidarity with the outgoing president,” wrote Conrad Black, in March 2021.
American Greatness’ bigotry
American Greatness generally eschews open racism in favor of barely coded dog whistles, but not always. One of the site’s most overtly racist pieces was a poem called Cuck Elegy. The anonymous poem was published after “Never Trump” conservative David French confronted Buskirk about harassment he’d received from Kelly regarding comments French’s wife had made about Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Separately from Kelly, French had been subjected to racist harassment from alt-right trolls regarding his Black adopted daughter, suggesting that the child was the product of French’s wife sleeping with Black men. Kelly was not implicated in that harassment, but she had alluded to it in a tweet to French. Shortly after French confronted Buskirk about Kelly’s harassment, American Greatness published Cuck Elegy and included a photo of French with the post. The piece has since been removed from the site, but a tweet from the official American Greatness account promoting it is still up.[aud]
far more common on the site are familiar complaints against wokeness and claims that anti-racism efforts are the real racism. The headline of one piece referred to Juneteenth as “George Floyd’s Critical Race Holiday.” The subheading elaborated that the decision to make the day a federal holiday is an “enormous win for the racism industrial complex.” The piece called the holiday an act of “reifying unjustified contemporary black grievance” and suggested it “could at least be combined with Martin Luther King Day.” Another argued that anti-racism is simply “thinly veiled anti-white hate.”
Apocalyptic visions of armed Black people are common on the site as well. “The African American militants who were allowed by the Democratic big-city mayors to ransack urban America all summer and were rewarded for their murder, vandalism, and looting with the defamation and defunding of the nation’s urban police forces, are agitating and threatening with redoubled vigor,” wrote Conrad Black, in March 2021. He added, “Many of the great anti-Trump newsrooms are being overrun by belligerent white-hating minorities.”
Another recurring theme is writers lamenting a perceived deficiency in Black culture. “Unfortunately, American blacks were made to think that because of landmark legislation [of the civil rights era], their major socio-economic problems could be solved through direct political action—a disastrous misconception,” wrote Paul Gottfried. “There could be no substitute for communal cooperation, hard work, and the maintenance of the family bonds that existed in the black society that I observed as a child.” He added that the Voting Rights Act has resulted in “a radicalized black electorate that has empowered the racially divisive, antiwhite Congressional Black Caucus.” Another piece enumerated the “pathologies of inner-city black culture,” including: “fatherlessness, crime, nihilistic alienation, and the exaltation of thuggery.”
Variations on white pride abound as well. A post written by Jeremy Carl argued that Democrats have “attacked, on a relentless and increasingly hysterical basis, white Americans, who as the overwhelming majority population, were the primary developers of America’s cultural, intellectual, and political heritage.” Carl went on to echo sentiment from the white supremacist movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which called for the creation of a white ethnostate in the American West and Pacific Northwest. “We must begin to relocate physically to welcoming local geographies and rebuild our capacity for independent action by creating parallel institutions to the existing corrupted ones,” he argued. Another piece, dripping with resentment, argued that the “media and elite-driven” message is “white America will always be guilty and white America can never put the past behind it.”
The site is often virulently anti-trans as well. A recent post about a fascist attack on a drag show in Dallas used the bigoted term “transvestite” to refer to a drag queen. Buskirk himself called the drag performers “evil people” who were “coming after kids,” arguing “there is almost nothing that can be done that is over the line to stop this.” Sean Ross Callaghan used the deliberately offensive term “transexuals” in a post in 2021. Another discussed “the evil of children’s transgenderism,” and yet another focused on “the insanity of transgenderism.”
These are the arguments that Buskirk is happy to feed with oxygen. He has the backing of Thiel and other multimillionaires and at least some access to mainstream platforms. Right now, American Greatness barely punches at its weight, much less above, but it would be a mistake to underestimate the effect the Rockbridge Network could have on the country.
---
mma
...This right-wing media campaign to excuse the Capitol attack is seemingly reflected by views among the rank-and-file GOP: A recent CBS News/YouGov poll finds that Republican voters have become less disapproving of the events of January 6 than they once were. While the vast majority still say they disapprove, a deeper look finds that this opinion has become spread between those who “strongly disapprove” and a plurality who only “somewhat disapprove.” Moreover, only 21% of Republicans will describe the riot as an “insurrection,” while 47% describe the people who entered the Capitol as having been motivated by “patriotism,” and 56% say they had been “defending freedom.” Moreover, 38% of Republicans say that political violence could be justified over election results.
Indeed, much of the response to January 6 has depended on the source’s view about whether such an event could succeed — or only result in ignominious defeat. Far-right activist and talk show host Charlie Kirk, in the days following January 6, deleted a tweet in which he had boasted that his organizations were sending “80+ buses full of patriots” to Washington in order to “fight for this president.” A Turning Point Action spokesperson claimed that the organization had sent only seven buses, but it also later emerged that at least one suspect in the Capitol insurrection had traveled to D.C. on one of Turning Point Action’s buses.
It is also worth looking at what Kirk now has to say about political violence. When an audience member at one of Kirk’s events asked this past October, “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” Kirk responded that the questioner was “playing into all their plans,” because their opponents were “trying to make you do something that will be violent that will justify a takeover of your freedoms and liberties.”(Others pointed out that Kirk’s supposed objection to violence was based on its high probability of failure instead of any moral qualms.)
Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has created a propaganda series claiming that the attack was a false flag operation mounted by government elements in order to persecute conservatives, has also for long time cultivated a parallel narrative in which the insurrectionists were just regular citizens who “talked about the Constitution, and something called their rights.” Moreover, Carlson has claimed, they “were correct” that the 2020 presidential election had been rigged against Trump — and “if a mass of people show up angry at the Capitol, you should at least pause for a second,” and “maybe we should address their concerns." [vid]
CARLSON (HOST): What was January 6? Well, there was destruction of property, which we’re totally opposed to, but what motivated it? Why were all those people there?
Well, for the most part, a year later, it’s very clear, January 6 was essentially what it appeared to be. Thousands of ordinary American citizens, voters — people who believe in our democracy far more fervently than Liz Cheney ever has — came to Washington because they sincerely believed democracy had been thwarted.
They believed the presidential election was unfair, and they have a right to believe that and by the way, in many ways, they were correct. The presidential election was unfair and you don't have to get into anything about voting machines to believe that.
…
OK, if someone broke the law, punish that person. That applies to BLM activists as much as it does to QAnon people. We're for enforcing the law, fairly, equitably. But we also think that as you do that, if a mass of people show up angry at the Capitol, you should at least pause for a second if you believe in democracy and ask, what are they angry about? Maybe we should address their concerns.
And on New Year’s Eve, right-wing site American Greatness— whose contributors have spread lies about the 2020 election and attacked Capitol Police officers — upped the ante with a piece titled “Of Reichstags and Bastilles.” Repeating a series of false claims that there was “overwhelming evidence of widespread voter fraud in multiple swing states,” contributor Eric Lendrum declared that “thus, the protesters were justified.”
The piece also claimed that Ashli Babbitt, the QAnon conspiracy theorist who was killed by a Capitol Police officer as she attempted to climb through a broken window leading to the Speaker’s Lobby, was “an actual hero … who was willing to give her life for her country—and ultimately did just that, albeit in a far more tragic way.” (Babbitt had posted online the day before the Capitol attack that “Nothing will stop us,” further adding: “They can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours… dark to light!”)
Lendrum concluded his piece with a declaration that conservatives should “stop trying to qualify their stances on January 6 with an obligatory disavowal,” and instead openly celebrate the actions of that day as “a reaction to a long train of abuses and usurpations perpetrated against the American people by an entrenched elite class that has infected our institutions.”
The only course of action at this point is to be just as firm in our stance as the Left is. If they truly want to address January 6 by making dramatic historical comparisons, then so should we. If their aim is to make January 6 their Reichstag Fire, then we should go forward celebrating the events of that day as our Storming of the Bastille; a day where a symbol of the degeneration of our ruling class into total corruption and tyranny was challenged, and the elites were shown just what happens when millions of freedom-loving citizens finally grow sick and tired of a boot perpetually stomping on their necks.
Another peculiar set of visuals and commentary came Monday night on the far-right One America News....
===
11 25 GGL
eric lendrum american greatness
[### Trump administration speechwriter linked to hate speech ...
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com › us-news › aug › eric-le...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/19/eric-lendrum-trump-dhs-speechwriter-hate-speech)
Aug 19, 2025 — Eric Lendrum, of Department of Homeland Security, likened US conservatives to Jews in Nazi Germany.
[### US Homeland Security speechwriter promoted 'Great ...
The Times of Israel
https://www.timesofisrael.com › us-homeland-security-s...](https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-homeland-security-speechwriter-promoted-great-replacement-theory-on-podcast/)
Aug 21, 2025 — Eric Lendman endorsed the conspiracy theory in episode called 'Is White Replacement a Myth?' while denying it's antisemitic: 'Literally no ...
[### The Chosen One › American Greatness
American Greatness
https://amgreatness.com › Category: Donald Trump](https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/14/the-chosen-one/)
Jul 14, 2024 — It is quite impossible to exaggerate the historic nature of the moment in which we are all currently living. Our nation, our civilization, ...
[### The Coming Era of MAGA Dominance › American Greatness
American Greatness
https://amgreatness.com › Category: Elections](https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/15/the-coming-era-of-maga-dominance/)
Nov 15, 2024 — Only Donald Trump could have pulled off the kind of victory we witnessed just over one week ago. The victory achieved by, and for, ...
[### DHS speechwriter linked to hateful social accounts while ...
Yahoo News Canada
https://ca.news.yahoo.com › dhs-speechwriter-linked-ha...](https://ca.news.yahoo.com/dhs-speechwriter-linked-hateful-social-184327526.html)
Aug 18, 2025 — A blog post reportedly authored by Eric Lendrum celebrated the January 6 insurrection and compared the following fallout for conservatives to ...
[### Reflections on an American Saga ...
American Greatness
https://amgreatness.com › Category: Donald Trump](https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/04/reflections-on-an-american-saga/)
Nov 4, 2024 — The end of the 2024 election will have a bittersweet feel to it, for it will be the final chapter of Donald J. Trump's story.
[### HSD speechwriter talks about 'Great Replacement' theory
The Jerusalem Post
https://www.jpost.com › antisemitism › article-864835](https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-864835)
Aug 20, 2025 — Homeland Security speechwriter promotes antisemitic 'Great Replacement' theory on podcast. Several months after the Buffalo shooting, which ...
[### House of Representatives Passes Continuing Resolution ...
American Greatness
https://amgreatness.com › Category: News](https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/12/house-of-representatives-passes-continuing-resolution-in-win-for-trumps-agenda/)
Mar 12, 2025 — Although some hard-line Republicans opposed the bill due to being against any form of continued government funding, President Trump, Vice ...
[### Social Security Administration Identifies $800M in Savings ...
American Greatness
https://amgreatness.com › Category: News](https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/05/social-security-administration-identifies-800m-in-savings-for-fiscal-year-2025/)
Mar 5, 2025 — The Social Security Administration (SSA) has managed to identify at least $800 million in cost savings for the agency for the fiscal year ...
[### DOJ Refuses to Release Audio of Biden-Hur Interview > ...
Congress.gov
https://www.congress.gov › house › documents](https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/117383/documents/HHRG-118-JU00-20240604-SD009.pdf)
Jun 3, 2024 — As Fox News reports, the DOJ announced its decision in a court filing on Friday, in response to a legal challenge demanding that the tape he ...
---
[### Trump administration speechwriter linked to hate speech ...
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com › us-news › aug › eric-le...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/19/eric-lendrum-trump-dhs-speechwriter-hate-speech)
Aug 19, 2025 — Eric Lendrum, of Department of Homeland Security, likened US conservatives to Jews in Nazi Germany.
[### US Homeland Security speechwriter promoted 'Great ...
The Times of Israel
https://www.timesofisrael.com › us-homeland-security-s...](https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-homeland-security-speechwriter-promoted-great-replacement-theory-on-podcast/)
Aug 21, 2025 — Eric Lendman endorsed the conspiracy theory in episode called 'Is White Replacement a Myth?' while denying it's antisemitic: 'Literally no ...
[### DHS speechwriter linked to hateful social accounts while ...
Yahoo News Canada
https://ca.news.yahoo.com › dhs-speechwriter-linked-ha...](https://ca.news.yahoo.com/dhs-speechwriter-linked-hateful-social-184327526.html)
Aug 18, 2025 — A blog post reportedly authored by Eric Lendrum celebrated the January 6 insurrection and compared the following fallout for conservatives to ...
[### HSD speechwriter talks about 'Great Replacement' theory
The Jerusalem Post
https://www.jpost.com › antisemitism › article-864835](https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-864835)
Aug 20, 2025 — Homeland Security speechwriter promotes antisemitic 'Great Replacement' theory on podcast. Several months after the Buffalo shooting, which ...
[### A speechwriter for the Trump administration's Department ...
Instagram · guardian_us
5K+ likes · 2 months ago](https://www.instagram.com/p/DNimHZAOXAC/)
... (DHS) has come under scrutiny after he was linked to hate speech online. Eric Lendrum compared the circumstances of American conservatives ...
[### Kristi Noem defends DHS speechwriter's racist, antisemitic ...
LGBTQ Nation
https://www.lgbtqnation.com › 2025/08 › kristi-noem-d...](https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/08/kristi-noem-defends-dhs-speechwriters-anti-lgbtq-social-media-posts/)
Aug 19, 2025 — Eric Lendrum has told followers to vandalize LGBTQ+ art displays and to stop LGBTQ+-inclusive education "by any means necessary."
[### Trump Staffer Exposed for Hate Speech Against LGBTQ+ ...
YOUR EX
https://gayexpress.co.nz › 2025/08 › trump-staffer-exp...](https://gayexpress.co.nz/2025/08/trump-staffer-exposed-for-hate-speech-against-lgbtq-people-and-migrants/)
Aug 23, 2025 — Homeland Security speechwriter Eric Lendrum has been linked to racist, antisemitic, and anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech, including calls to ...
[### Accounts Linked to a DHS Speechwriter Include Anti-Trans ...
NOTUS — News of the United States
https://www.notus.org › trump-white-house › dhs-speec...](https://www.notus.org/trump-white-house/dhs-speechwriter-rhetoric)
Aug 18, 2025 — Blogs, podcasts and X posts that appear under Eric Lendrum's name reveal an extensive history of hateful rhetoric.
[### ICE Barbie Speechwriter Said J6ers 'Did Absolutely ...
Yahoo
https://www.yahoo.com › news › articles](https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/ice-barbie-speechwriter-said-j6ers-142716129.html)
Aug 18, 2025 — A devout supporter of President Donald Trump hired as a speechwriter for the Department of Homeland Security has a long record of praising ...
[### Homeland Security Cites With First Amendment After ...
Latin Times
https://www.latintimes.com › ... › First Amendment](https://www.latintimes.com/homeland-security-cites-first-amendment-after-surfacing-speechwriter-engaging-hate-speech-588611)
Aug 20, 2025 — A speechwriter for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been linked to a series of online posts and recordings containing extremist ...
===
pundit for dem convention 8/20 got beat?
judy w said polls say am ppl still trust trump more on economy (is that even true?), and he said economy is the only issue in election ~ 170K KIA, send kids to school...
===
421 ggl grab BS
I Won't Take the Vaccine Because It Makes Liberals Mad https://amgreatness.com › Great America
2 days ago — If it turns out that the vaccine doesn't prevent infection, then there's no ... up the vaccine as the Holy Grail that would lead us back to “normalcy,” that I ... support helps protect our independence so that American Greatness can ...
Why I'm Not Getting the Vaccine › American Greatnesshttps://amgreatness.com › Great America
6 days ago — If you're in a high-risk group and you'd like to get the vaccine, go right ahead. I'm not a doctor and I have no wish to advise anyone in the ...
COVID-19
Common questions
Can Covid positive get vaccine?
How safe is the COVID-19 vaccine?
Can 16 year olds get the Covid vaccine?
How do COVID-19 vaccines work?
For informational purposes only. Consult your local medical authority for health advice.
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Apr 10, 2021 — Because of the natural mutation the clever little RNA strand undergoes, it is clear to anyone with a critical mind that the COVID-19 vaccines will ...
Was Pfizer's Vaccine News Slow-Walked Until After the ...https://amgreatness.com › Elections
Nov 9, 2020 — About Julie Kelly. Julie Kelly is a political commentator and senior contributor to American Greatness. She is the author of Disloyal Opposition: ...
Twitter Allows Louis Farrakhan Vaccine Claims Despite ...https://amgreatness.com › News
Mar 8, 2021 — Twitter Allows Louis Farrakhan Vaccine Claims Despite ... They included claims that the vaccine was a “vial of death. ... Jerome Adams, the former U.S. surgeon general, in January said ... Support Free & Independent Journalism Your support helps protect our independence so that American Greatness can ...
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no lnx
I Won’t Take the Vaccine Because It Makes Liberals Mad
My newly formed and well-developed opinion on vaccines is this: If those bastards want me to get the jab, I’m not going to do it, because it annoys them.
By Peter D'Abrosca
April 26, 2021
I will never allow myself to be injected with Big Pharma’s mass-produced mystery juice, in part because it was rushed out of the lab and into the manufacturing line like a replacement for a Honda Civic’s recalled airbags.
It just wouldn’t be prudent.
As a healthy 29-year-old, my likelihood of dying from the virus is practically nil, so why risk the blood clots?And before anyone accuses me of trying to murder granny, shouldn’t she be immune to the virus if she gets the vaccine? Whether that’s actually true seems to be the topic of some debate. We’ll have to followThe Science™, then parse through its legitimacy relative to its political value for Democrats (that’s a new step in the scientific method) before we can know for sure.
If it turns out that the vaccine doesn’t prevent infection,[NOT IN DISPUTE] then there’s no point in getting it in the first place, and I suppose we’ll have to sew our masks to our faces for the rest of our natural lives.
Maybe It’s Petty
But in truth, I’m not really avoiding the vaccine due to potential medical complications, or because of the speed with which it was produced.
Personal liberty is not the reason I’m avoiding it, either. I’m not a member of the “don’t tread on me” club. Though I don’t think mandated “vaccine passports” are a brilliant idea, my refusal to take the vaccine is not related to some perceived or real government overreach. I’m not here to take a principled stand against the federal or state governments on this issue. In fact, I’m saving my principled stands against the federal or state governments for issues that really matter, like strengthening libel laws so that lying journalists can finally be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay where they belong.
My primary reason for refusing the vaccine is much simpler: I dislike the people who want me to take it, and it makes them mad when they hear about my refusal. That, in turn, makes me happy.
Maybe it’s petty, but the thought of the worst people on planet earth, those whom I like to call the Branch Covidians, literally shaking as I stroll into Target vaccine-free, makes me smile.
Allow me to emphasize my point.
Before this pandemic, I had a grand total of zero opinions on the issue of vaccines. I’ve never met an “anti-vaxxer” in my entire life, despite working in conservative politics, where, from my understanding, they can generally be found. Frankly, I don’t know a thing about their movement. I thought vaccines were what kids took periodically to eliminate the risk of ancient diseases like the mumps, which can only be found today in the illegal aliens we’re importing, and what people of a certain age took during autumn to avoid contracting the flu.
In fact, before the COVID-19 craze swept this nation, I devoted more attention to the liberal cause of preserving the Sea Turtle population than I did to thinking about vaccines. I like nature. (Tangentially related, an estimated 1.56 billion plastic masks ended up in the ocean in 2020 alone. Good work, liberals!)
Ain’t Nobody’s Business
It wasn’t until the sociopathic mediocrity that is the entrenched liberal political class in Washington began bullying normal people into wearing masks, staying home, standing six feet apart from others at all times, mobilizing even less impressive liberal stormtroopers to play the role of COVID-19 prevention Gestapo, and then finally propped up the vaccine as the Holy Grail that would lead us back to “normalcy,” that I finally began to have an opinion on vaccines. And though I don’t know much about the “anti-vaxxers,” I do know that I’m displeased with the way they have been portrayed by the aforementioned GITMO-bound media, simply for harboring opinions that are considered non-mainstream.
So I have decided that because the vile political Left, which I despise in the abstract,[ie WO THINKING OR FACTS] wants me to take their coveted vaccine, I simply will not. After the horrifying displeasure of meeting several of their militant COVID-19 restriction enforcers in person over the past year, I have become even more steadfast in my stance.
My newly formed and well-developed opinion on vaccines is this: if those bastards want me to get the jab, I’m not going to do it, because it annoys them.
Perhaps you think I’m being obtuse. I do not care.
I’ve seen too many videos of screaming ninnies losing their minds on people who didn’t buy into the mask hype. It is impossible to convince me that I am somehow abnormal for refusing the vaccine, and that the ranting pro-mask schizoids in the supermarket are the normal ones.
I also don’t care whether you decide to get the vaccine. It’s really none of my business.
Perhaps you’re not as committed to upsetting the enemy as I am. That is fine.
Perhaps you just want to go on a cruise vacation again. If so, call Bill Kristol or Jonah Goldberg and have your vaccine identification card ready. Godspeed.
About Peter D'Abrosca
Peter D'Abrosca is a conservative campaign strategist, author, and columnist. A proud law school dropout,he is not a decorated member of the fancy credentialed class, and that's just the way he prefers it. He considers himself a political outsider who seeks to give a voice to thelong-forgotten American working class.
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Always Wrap Rubber Bands over Your Door Knob when Alone, Here's Why
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20 Stars Who Just Became Republicans
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GREAT AMERICA
Why I’m Not Getting the Vaccine
Whether we're allowed to live by the decisions we reach freely within our rights as citizens—even when the decision may be wrong—is the ultimate test of whether we are free or slaves.
By Dan Gelernter
April 22, 2021
If you’re in a high-risk group and you’d like to get the vaccine, go right ahead. I’m not a doctor and I have no wish to advise anyone in the matter—but, equally, I resent people throwing unsolicited advice at me.
I am not in a high-risk group. I’m a young, healthy man. I have probably been exposed to coronavirus (early in the pandemic) and never came down with it. The chances of my getting the virus are extremely tiny, and the chances I’ll die from it are infinitesimal. Further, the Centers for Disease Control has published a paper that found no risk of asymptomatic transmission. So as long as I don’t feel sick (and as long as I stay home if I do) I am not going to give the virus to anyone else in the extremely unlikely case that I contract it.
A friend of mine who is a medical professional points out that the safety profile of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines is excellent, and their effectiveness impressive. She says that RNA is transient and unlikely to do harm in the long term. But she also admits that RNA vaccines are new and we do not have a full understanding of what the long-term effects might be.
Known Unknowns
It is this last point, which seems self-evident to me, that many of my friends dispute my right to consider: We cannot yet know the long-term effects of this type of vaccine. It’s not the vaccine’s fault. The issue is time: There hasn’t been enough of it.
If this were a disease like polio, where the young and healthy were most at risk, I’d get vaccinated in a heartbeat. But with the coronavirus, a young and healthy person is balancing a very low and known risk, unvaccinated, against a probably very low but unknown risk with the vaccine. You can talk all you want about how we’re sure this vaccine is utterly, totally safe—but, if we’re being honest, only time will tell.Only time can tell.Common sense should be enough to make that plain. [new strain affects younger ppl worse? b/c older got vax?]
And frankly, I find it peculiar that all the people who told me they knew for certain that hydroxychloroquine was both dangerous and ineffective are now equally certain this vaccine is harmless and effective. Since I know they were lying before, their current proclamations don’t inspire confidence. There is a staggeringly massive financial incentive for the drug companies, and a staggeringly massive power incentive for the government, in having a safe vaccine. Even assuming that Big Pharma and the government are always strictly truthful, we might at least acknowledge a degree of confirmation bias may exist.
But in the main, there is simply no significant downside to my waiting to find out if there are long-term side effects. And, yes, I know RNA vaccine technology has existed for some time. But it has never been used on a wide scale before now, and it doesn’t help to pretend that it has.
The combined probability of me both getting the virus and being killed (or even having a severe case of it) is so low that it looks like zero unless you take it out to several significant digits. Judging from my own experience—which I’m entitled to do—I’m at much higher risk of getting an eye infection from the facemask shooting my breath into my glasses. And, really, rebreathing what you just exhaled plus all the microscopic garbage that collects in your mask over a day cannot possibly be good for you or your respiratory system.
If getting the vaccine meant I no longer had to wear a mask in New York or on a plane, that would represent a real inducement. But no such inducement exists. And that would still be a poor substitute for a strictly medical argument for the vaccine’s safety and efficacy. It would at least demonstrate a level of practical confidence in the vaccine which the government has not shown.
Liberty Under Pressure
No doubt many American politicians would love a vaccine passport. In Europe, you can only travel with a binder full of documents and, in some places, a government-issued QR code. This is even less persuasive and less reassuring. With a safe and effective vaccine, governments shouldn’t have to resort to their favorite argument (“do what we want or we’ll ruin your life”).
The government should, in theory, be willing to allay my worries with reasoned discussion and accept whatever conclusion I reach as a free individual. Whether I am allowed to live by the decisions I reach freely within my rights as a citizen, even when a decision may be wrong, is the ultimate test of whether I am a free man or a slave.
But far from being encouraged to make our own decisions, we’re being barred from any real discussion as well, thanks to aggressive media and social media censorship, combined with peer pressure of the sort they used to lecture us about in high school. When I posted on my Facebook profile that I wasn’t planning to take the vaccine, Facebook immediately appended a little message to my post so my friends could get the real information.
But I simply want to know if the vaccine will still look safe a year from now. Can you blame me? Many of my friends could, and did: Some accused me of being a danger to society, some simply thought I was a danger to myself. But, little by little, other friends arrived to point out that no one has a right to badger me into doing what I don’t want to do. That was encouraging. Still, other friends messaged me privately to say they agreed with me but were afraid of saying so in public. That was not so encouraging. Neither does it suggest that we are making an effective argument for the vaccine that doesn’t involve suppression and intimidation.
One wonders just how many people are taking this vaccine because they believe it is a good idea, versus how many have felt pressured into doing so. If the vaccine is not being taken almost exclusively by people who freely believe it’s a good idea—and I suspect it is not—then we’ve got a serious problem that far transcends this vaccine or this health crisis.
“Science” is very popular these days. It is now defined as “a series of dogmatic principles which cannot be questioned or evaluated.” This is somewhat different from how I remember science being explained to me in school, when it referred to precisely the opposite concept: Having a testable hypothesis open to revision as new information becomes available.
“Believing in science,” it turns out, is much more about believing than it is about science. It is hardly surprising that it has become a new religion to people who threw away Christianity or Judaism before realizing they needed to believe in something. Invoking “science” with religious fervor as the reason certain precepts are beyond question is, I think, more dangerous to society than my own desire to wait and see how safe the vaccine is.
But I’m open to persuasion. Go ahead, change my mind.
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About Dan Gelernter
Dan Gelernter is a writer and entrepreneur living in Connecticut.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/dumbassery-conservative-editor-calls-out-right-wing-medias-bad-takes-on-deadly-coronavirus-pandemic/}:
no lnx
‘Dumbassery’: Conservative editor calls out right-wing media’s ‘bad takes’ on deadly coronavirus pandemic
Written by Alex Henderson March 17, 2020
As the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic continues to grow in the United States and many other countries, one thing The Bulwark can take pride in is the fact that — unlike so many other right-wing media outlets — it didn’t spend weeks trying to convince readers that coronavirus was merely a liberal hoax or “fake news” designed to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency. The Never Trump conservatives at The Bulwark always took the pandemic seriously, including The Bulwark’s senior editor, Jim Swift — who lambasts some of the incredibly moronic things that various Trumpistas and far-right media figures have said about coronavirus recently.
“The internet being what it is, and politics being what it is — and 2020 dumbassery being what it is — there are a lot of bad covid-19 takes floating around,” Swift asserts. And he cities Newsmax writer John Cardillo as a glaring example.
On March 13, Cardillo went to Twitter and said of coronavirus, “Treat it like the flu. The panic and hysteria created by the media is criminal. They are destroying lives, businesses, and the economy to make Trump look bad and again screw with elections.”
In response to Cardillo’s tweet, Swift writes, “Sure, John. The news media aren’t covering this story because it’s important and deadly, they’re only covering it because they want to take down President Donald J. Trump.”
In other words, treat it like the flu.
The panic and hysteria created by the media is criminal.
They are destroying lives, businesses, and the economy to make Trump look bad and again screw with elections. https://t.co/Pmclsy25wJ**
— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) March 13, 2020
Swift also slams Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell, Jr. Appearing as a guest on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends,” Falwell argued that Americans are “overreacting” to coronavirus and that all the media coverage of the pandemic is merely an “attempt to get Trump.” Moreover, Falwell claimed that coronavirus is a North Korean bioweapon.
On Fox & Friends, Jerry Falwell Jr claims people are “overreacting” to coronavirus, the national response is “their next attempt to get Trump,” and the virus itself is a North Korean bioweapon. pic.twitter.com/2JPuNBW7C3
— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) March 13, 2020
Swift goes on to lambast Infowars’ Alex Jones and “old-school televangelist grifter Jim Bakker” for “hawking” bogus treatments they claim will cure coronavirus. And Swift cites a March 12 tweet from The Federalist’s Sean Davis as another example of idiocy: Davis tweeted, “Corporate political media hate you, they hate the country, and they will stop at nothing to reclaim power to rule over you. If that means that they destroy the economy via a panic that they helped incite, all while running interference for the communist country that started it, so be it.”
Truly deranged, InfoWars level stuff from The Federalist. pic.twitter.com/FzBTldunsg
— andrew kaczynski?? (@KFILE) March 13, 2020
Sarcastically describing Fox News’ Ainsley Earhardt as an “aviation expert…. not to be confused with Amelia Earhart,” Swift notes her recent comment, “It’s actually the safest time to fly. Everyone I know that’s flying right now, terminals are pretty much dead.”
Ainsley Earhardt: “It’s actually the safest time to fly. Everyone I know that’s flying right now, terminals are pretty much dead.” (It is not the safest time to fly.) pic.twitter.com/a3BnajAbj5
— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) March 13, 2020
AmGreatness’ Julie Kelly, who Swift describes as a “nutty, bad-faith operator,” has called social distancing a left-wing plot to “get control” that is “far scarier than any virus.”
Scientists and health officials say social distancing (reducing contact, temporarily) is an effective way to reduce infections. Naturally, some are claiming it’s a leftist plot to gain control of the country. pic.twitter.com/TDMJM6ddir
— Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) March 13, 2020
At this point I think you have a greater chance of being attacked by Joe Biden than catching coronavirus
— Julie Kelly (@julie_kelly2) March 10, 2020
China. https://t.co/VULqyrceUH**
— Ron Coleman (@RonColeman) March 13, 2020
Good news on the coronavirus you won’t find anywhere else:
-China has closed down its last coronavirus hospital. Not enough new cases to support them.
-Italy is hit hard, experts say, because they have the oldest population in Europe (average age of those that have died is 81).
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) March 13, 2020
Swift concludes his article by warning that as coronavirus “spreads” in the U.S., Americans will do themselves a favor by not taking nonsense from Fox News seriously.
“Things are going to get worse — not only as the pandemic spreads, but as the bad takes spread too,” Swift warns. “If you’re stuck at home, I’d encourage you not to watch cable news — and encourage your family to avoid it, too. Especially Fox News.”
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Chris Buskirk is the publisher and editor of American Greatness. He is also the co-host of The Seth & Chris Show on 960 KKNT. He was a Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute and received a fellowship from the Earhart Foundation. Chris is a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold businesses in financial services and digital marketing. Chris has written for The Washington Post, The Hill, and other publications. He is a frequent contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition, the PBS Newshour, and Hardball with Chris Matthews and regularly appears on CNN. Along with Seth Leibsohn he is the author of the book American Greatness: How Conservatism, Inc. Missed the 2016 Election & What the Establishment Needs to Learn. Chris received his B.A. from Claremont-McKenna College. Connect with Chris on Twitter at @TheChrisBuskirk. He can be reached via email at chris@amgreatness.com.
Publius Decius Mus, or “Decius,” is the pen name of Michael Anton. He was a senior contributing editor of American Greatness from July 2016 until January 2017. He currently serves as deputy assistant to the president for strategic communications on the National Security Council.
Ben Boychuk is managing editor of American Greatness. He is a regular columnist with the Sacramento Bee, a weekly syndicated columnist with Tribune Media, and a veteran of several publications, including Investor’s Business Daily and the Claremont Review of Books. He lives in California. Connect with Ben on Twitter at @benboychuk.
Seth Leibsohn is a contributing editor to American Greatness and also hosts The Seth & Chris Show on 960 KKNT. He is the former vice president of Empower America, one of the nation’s premier think tanks and has counseled, written speeches for, and collaborated with candidates for national office and several former cabinet officials. He has also collaborated in the writing of prominent op-eds, speeches, and several national best-selling books. Along with Chris Buskirk he is the author of the book American Greatness: How Conservatism, Inc. Missed the 2016 Election & What the Establishment Needs to Learn. He is a senior fellow with The Claremont Institute, chairman of the board of Not-My-Kid and Co-Director of Americans for Responsible Drug Policy. Seth co-authored The Fight of our Lives with former U.S. Education Secretary William J. Bennett. Leibsohn was the producer, co-host, and guest host for the nationally syndicated radio show, “Bill Bennett’s Morning in America,” helping bring it from its debut on 60 stations to more than 250 stations nationwide and making it the 7th largest national radio show in the country with over 3.75 million listeners. Born and raised in Phoenix, he holds a graduate degree in political theory from the Claremont Graduate School and a law degree from Northeastern University in Boston.
Julie Ponzi is Senior Editor of American Greatness. She holds an M.A. in political philosophy and American politics from the Claremont Graduate University. She was an Earhart Fellow and a Bradley Foundation Fellow while studying at Claremont and also earned a Publius Fellowship from The Claremont Institute. Formerly the Director of Academic Programs at the Claremont Institute, she also taught American politics at Azusa Pacific University. Her writing has appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, The Online Library of Law and Liberty, The Columbus Dispatch, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Washington Times. She was also a regular and long-time contributor to the Ashbrook Center’s blog, No Left Turns. She lives in California. You can follow her on Twitter at @JuliePonzi