Goldberg, Jonah

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SEE DISPATCH

son of lucianne, busted for plag?

HARLAN CROW FUNDER CLARENCE? GINNI?

KOCH AEI

no merri

opposite of pension plan?! nevertrumper?

left fox b/c of lies?!

see the dispatch

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Lucianne Goldberg - Wikipedia

l ucianne Goldberg (née Steinberger; April 29, 1935 – October 26, 2022), also known as Lucianne Cummings, was an American literary agent and author. She was named as one of the "key players" in the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton. She controversially advised Monica Lewinsky's confidante Linda Tripp to tape Lewinsky's phone calls about their affair. The 20 hours of recordings became crucial to the Starr investigation. She was the mother of Jonah Goldberg, a conservative political commentator, and Joshua Goldberg, a Republican nominee who ran for New York City Council.

Early life and education

She was born Lucianne Steinberger in Boston to Dr. Raymond Leonard and Lucy Jane (née Moseley) von Steinberger.^[2][3][4] She grew up in Alexandria, Virginia near

...

Goldberg said she was on Kennedy's White House staff, but according to The Washington Post, her name does not appear on any staff records. In response, she said she worked in the Old Executive Office Building doing opposition research and then worked in the National Press Building in public relations.^[6]

Public relations firm

In 1963, she opened a one-person public relations firm, Lucianne Cummings & Associates.^[6] She received national media attention in 1965 when she attempted to sell a handwritten note from Jackie Kennedy to Lady Bird Johnson through an auction house for $1000 ($10216 in today's dollars).^[8] She had come into possession of the note when acting as a messenger for Kennedy in 1960. After hearing of the auction, the First Lady became irate and demanded that the note be returned to the White House.^[8][9] Cummings apologized and returned the note, then found out the next day that her income tax returns were going to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service.^[8]

...

Public relations firm

ghost write watrgate wices novels]

Monica Lewinsky scandal

The Tripp tapes

Goldberg met Linda Tripp in 1993 or 1994 while working on the proposal for the book on the death of President Bill Clinton's aide Vince Foster.^[5] The two women became friends and in 1997 Goldberg advised Tripp to secretly record former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, talking about her sexual relationship with President Bill Clinton.^[7] Goldberg advised Tripp that it was legal to record phone conversations in Maryland without the consent of the other party; in fact, it was illegal to do so.^[19]

Goldberg urged Tripp to take the resulting 20 hours of tapes to special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who had a broad mandate to investigate improprieties by Clinton.^[20][21] Goldberg also brought the tapes to the attention of lawyers working on the Paula Jones sexual harassment case against Clinton.^[20][21] The tapes became crucial to Starr's investigation on whether Clinton committed perjury during a sworn deposition when he denied his affair with Lewinsky,^[22] which led to his impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives and acquittal by the U.S. Senate.

Soon after the secret taping began in the fall of 1997, Goldberg arranged for Tripp to speak with Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff, who had been investigating other allegations about Clinton's sex life.^[1**8] After the scandal became public in January 1998, the media interviewed Goldberg frequently.^[6] She declared that the tapes proved that Lewinsky and Clinton had had a sexual relationship,^[23] and previewed other highlights of the Clinton–Lewinsky affair such as the existence of a semen-stained dress which later proved to have Clinton's DNA.^[6]

The Washington Post called her "the producer and publicist" who set the stage for the scandal and the investigation; she called herself the "facilitator".^[6] Of Goldberg's role in the scandal, Time said, "At a minimum, she is forever sealed in history as the New York City literary agent who uttered to her friend the most ruinous sentence of the Clinton presidency: 'Linda, buy a tape recorder.'"^[24] Author Jeffrey Toobin named her as one of the seven "Key Players" in the impeachment.^[25][26]

Goldberg said her actions in helping to disclose the Lewinsky–Clinton affair were motivated by her sense that general morality had declined and that America needed "a wake-up call".^[24] She also said that the disclosure of Lewinsky's affair with Clinton helped to protect Lewinsky, who suffered from an obsessive infatuation with Clinton.^[7] During this time, Goldberg made no secret of her animus toward Clinton, saying she was glad Clinton was getting caught "at something" and that "[i]f it took this to get him, fine".^[22] She also said she was a political independent,^[7] although she was said in the press to have long-standing ties to the Republican Party.^[**27][28]

Repercussions

After the disclosures about the Clinton–Lewinsky affair, Goldberg was subjected to media attacks on her character and past business dealings.^[7] The Democratic National Committee faxed an unflattering "information sheet" on Goldberg to reporters within days after the story broke. Goldberg admitted that slurs on her character were to be expected: "'I have never thought of myself as a victim in all this'", she [said]. "'Never. Let them take their best shot.'"^[24] She later said the scrutiny had worn her down.^[7]

Goldberg denied allegations made in the media that she was part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to bring down the presidency of Bill Clinton.^[7] When Jeffrey Toobin published his 1999 book, A Vast Conspiracy, that also alleged Goldberg had told friends that she had an affair with Lyndon Johnson,^[26] and a Washington Post writer claimed he and others had overheard Goldberg bragging about an affair with Vice President Hubert Humphrey as well, Goldberg threatened Toobin and Random House with a libel suit, denied both affairs, and denied telling any such stories.^[29]

Goldberg was subpoenaed to testify before a Maryland grand jury contemplating indicting Tripp for having made the recordings. Under Maryland law, the knowledge that such recordings were illegal was a necessary element of the crime. Goldberg explained that she had given Tripp incorrect advice, telling her it was legal to make secret recordings.^[19] Charges against Tripp were later dropped.^[30]

Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore later set up a webcam focused on the windows of Goldberg's Manhattan apartment, which he called "I See Lucy Cam".^[31][32] Moore's project did not violate New York State's laws. Claiming that Goldberg did not respect the privacy rights of other people, Moore wrote, "'[s]he believes in keeping an eye on persons who are a threat to the country. So do we'." Goldberg responded by "selling advertisements to be placed on her window for $1,000 a week".^[33]

Later career

Goldberg was a prominent presence on the conservative website Free Republic in the late 1990s, posting under the name "Trixie". She and other conservatives, including Matt Drudge, left the site when the webmaster, in Goldberg's words, "let all the Y2K, gun-nut, Jew-baiting crazies take over [the forum] and flame the plain-old conservatives".^[34] She then founded her own website, "Lucianne.com",^[34][35] and for a time, was a nationally syndicated talk radio host whose show featured a Washington correspondent.^[36]

an 5 26

The Founding Fathers of the U.S. had a system in mind to rein in a rogue, criminal president, one who might try to pardon themselves for their own crimes.

It was a system, however, that could never have conceived of a president like Donald Trump, or a party like the modern GOP that surrounds him, according to a new piece from The Dispatch, leaving the fundamentals of the constitutional order in disarray.

In the piece, Dispatch editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg observed that a foundational rule undermining the drafting of the U.S. Constitution came from British statesman Edmund Burke, and said that in a decent society, "no man should be judge in his own cause." James Madison later added to that idea, "because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity."

"This idea lurks behind all of Congress’ powers and responsibilities, including advice and consent, the sole authority to tax and spend, the power to declare war, and, of course, impeachment," Goldberg wrote. "Presidents are not arbitrary rulers. They are stewards, with defined and limited powers."

One of Trump's latest corrupt acts, however, runs directly in the face of that notion: the settlement of Trump's suit against the IRS by creating a "weaponization" slush fund to pay out to his allies, and absolve him of future audits.

"On Monday, President Trump settled a $10 billion lawsuita $10 billion lawsuit brought by himself," Goldberg detailed. "In his first term, Trump’s tax returns were illegally leaked. When Trump returned to the presidency, he filed suit against the Internal Revenue Service. So, as a constitutional matter, Trump is suing the executive branch he runs for a crime committed by the IRS back when he ran it in his first term... On Tuesday, the DOJ announced that Trump, his family and business will be functionally exempt from IRS audits or prosecutions from any past tax returns, literally placing him above the law."

Goldberg further laid out some of the most blunt and high-profile examples of Trump declaring himself the sole arbiter of government action, without regard for Congress. On the subject of the U.S. potentially lending aid to Taiwan if it were invaded by China, Trump said, "I'm the only person" who would decide what happens. Following the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces, Trump said that only his "own morality" and "own mind" decided the limits of his executive actions.

"It may, in fact, be legal for the president to be the judge in his own cause and create a taxpayer-financed slush fund for him to reward cronies and henchmen on a whim," Goldberg concluded. "It is already clear that presidents can launch wars without Congress or the courts unduly getting in the way. But I struggle to think of hypothetical scenarios that would be more likely to arouse in Madison and his contemporaries the—now misplaced—reassurance that impeachment was an available remedy."

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an 12 25

Heritage Action and President Donald Trump are coming under fire after the conservative advocacy organization made a claim that the president threatened to defund the state of Indiana should lawmakers not pass legislation to redraw its congressional district maps.

“President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders: if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state,” Heritage Action wrote on social media on Thursday. “Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame.”

The post ended with, “#PassTheMap.”

While President Trump has publicly threatened to support primary challengers against lawmakers who oppose his redistricting push, NCRM has not found any news reports confirming Heritage Action’s assertion. It is possible the group is relying on information that has not been reported or made public.

Should Indiana pass legislation to redistrict, it reportedly could pick up only two more GOP-held seats.

Critics blasted Heritage Action, a sister group to the Heritage Foundation, for appearing to support Trump’s alleged threat, and blasted the president as well.

“The president and one of the most influential conservative groups in the country are threatening to deprive all Indiana residents of paved roads, guard bases, and major projects if they don’t pass an extremely gerrymandered map to deprive voters of choice,” noted Isaac Saul, founder of Tangle News. “Awesome stuff.”

“Heritage sure loves authoritarianism,” remarked Media Matters researcher Zachary Pleat.

Calling it “nonsense,” Joel Griffith, a senior fellow at the conservative group Advancing American Freedom wrote: “Appalling to see @Heritage_Action endorse this unconstitutional threat by @realDonaldTrump. The President does not have power to coerce state legislators to redraw congressional maps.”

Others appeared to aim their ire directly at the president.

“This is the behavior of a madman,” declared Tim Carney, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

“This isn’t conservative. This is fascist,” commented former Republican U.S. Congressman Joe Walsh.

Mother Jones’ D.C. bureau chief David Corn declared the move “dictatorial.”

“This does not sound like an appropriate or legal use of federal authority or presidential discretion,” observed Bloomberg columnist Matthew Yglesias.

“Nothing about this shakedown is conservative,” noted CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Jacob Stewart, the deputy opinion editor for the IndyStar called the move “illegal.”

Jonah Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the conservative online magazine The Dispatch, wrote: “I remember when Heritage cared about federalism, the rule of law, separation of powers, and all that stuff. Now it’s all ‘We love Trump’s musk, do what he says (or what Tucker says).'”

“This is called extortion,” wrote former White House correspondent Sam Youngman, also deeming it “illegal.”

“If this comes to pass,” wrote IndyStar columnist James Briggs, “then the story will be that Trump is punishing Indiana citizens for reasons that have nothing to do with them and so-called Indianans will see the punitive measures for what they are.”

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an 12 25

White House may deter Trump from future rallies as aides say he's not 'capable' of empathy

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an 4 25

MAGA media outlets like Newsmax TV, One America News (OAN) and Breitbart News are full of relentless cheerleading for President Donald Trump's second term. On those outlets, Trump is often praised for, MAGA pundits claim, getting a lot done at breakneck speed.

But Trump's policies are by no means universally loved on the right. Liberal-leaning MSNBC features plenty of Never Trump conservatives, The Bulwark is a bastion of right-wing Trump-bashing, and The Lincoln Project continues to crank out anti-Trump videos.

The conservative website The Dispatch offers in-depth analysis of Trump's second term in an editorial published on April 10, attacking Trump on everything from the economy to foreign policy.

"Donald Trump has literally made America — and Americans — poorer, bringing the United States to the brink of a recession in recent weeks by threatening to unilaterally impose one of the most regressive tax hikes in U.S. history," The Dispatch laments. "He's momentarily been talked into standing down, but an economic environment in which the whims of one famously mercurial man can upend the international trade system and wipe out trillions of dollars in stock market value is not one conducive to sustained growth."

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The Dispatch continues, "For the next 90 days — and really, for the remainder of Trump's term — decision-makers at businesses across the country and the world will be forced to speculate: Are the president's tariffs merely a negotiating tool, or an effort to fundamentally remake the global economy? Even key White House officials seem not to know."

The Dispatch stresses, however, that the "financial volatility of recent days is just one symptom of a broader, more deliberate descent."

"Decline doesn't solely mean impoverishment; it means degeneration, to sink backward and down," The Dispatch argues. "And that is what the United States' current leadership class is choosing for this country by willfully dismantling the free-market system, abandoning America's role as a global leader, and degrading the separation of powers and rule of law."

The Dispatch adds, "Even worse, it is doing so based on a suite of false assumptions: that Americans are weak, unable to compete in an open market, and incapable of responding to any incentives or exhortations more high-minded than rank self-interest or partisan contempt."

The editorial, headlined "Slouching Towards Tyranny," also lambasts Trump for failing to respect "the rule of law."

"Nowhere is the evidence of the new right's willful decline more obvious than in its rejection of fidelity to the rule of law and the Constitution," The Dispatch warns. "As the Trump Administration ignores due process, encroaches upon press freedom, and subverts the independence of the judiciary — all central pillars of self-government — top executive branch officials and Republican members of Congress turn a blind eye, or cheer it on."

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kennedy staffer

congressinal inst

winston gp anti-commie

wiley rein ethics

jonah goldberg aei LAT? 2019

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see full wiki bottom

5 24

Jonah Jacob Goldberg (born March 21, 1969) is an American conservative syndicated columnist, author, political analyst, and commentator. The founding editor of National Review Online, from 1998 until 2019, he was an editor at National Review.^[1] Goldberg writes a weekly column about politics and culture for the Los Angeles Times.^[2] In October 2019, Goldberg became the founding editor of the online opinion and news publication The Dispatch.^[3][4][5][6] Goldberg has authored the No. 1 New York Times* bestseller *Liberal Fascism, released in January 2008; The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, released in 2012;^[7] and Suicide of the West, which was published in April 2018 and also became a New York Times bestseller, reaching No. 5 on the list the following month.^[8][9]

:{Goldberg is also a regular contributor on news networks such as CNN and MSNBC, appearing on various television programs including Good Morning America, Nightline, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Real Time with Bill Maher, Larry King Live, Your World with Neil Cavuto, the Glenn Beck Program, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Goldberg was an occasional guest on a number of Fox News shows such as The Five, The Greg Gutfeld Show, and Outnumbered. He was also a frequent panelist on Special Report with Bret Baier.

From 2006 to 2010, Goldberg was a frequent participant on bloggingheads.tv. Goldberg has been a noted critic of President Donald Trump, fellow Republicans, and the conservative media complex during and after the Trump presidency.^[10] In November 2021, Goldberg and his colleague Steve Hayes resigned from Fox News in protest over Tucker Carlson's documentary Patriot Purge. Goldberg described the documentary as "a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions."^[11]}:

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note // new evidence on keeping docs illegally?

an 5 24

donald Trump and his allies are falsely claiming President Joe Biden, the U.S. Dept. of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had a plot to assassinate his top political rival, the ex-president, during the execution of a search warrant in 2022 at Mar-a-Lago. Critics, including law enforcement experts, are blasting Trump and his MAGA associates for the “dangerous” lie.

On Tuesday a U.S. District Judge unsealed court documents in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Espionage Act case against Trump where he faces 40 felony counts, most over his alleged unlawful removal, retention, and refusal to return classified documents including some of the nation’s top nuclear secrets.

One of those filings, as The Washington Post reported, was a law enforcement documents that included a standard statement reminding FBI agents on the Bureau’s policy on the use of deadly force, “which says officers may resort to lethal force only when the subject of such force poses an ‘imminent danger of death or serious physical injury’ to an officer or another person.”

But on Tuesday, Trump explosively posted on Truth Social, “WOW! I just came out of the Biden Witch Hunt Trial in Manhattan, the ‘Icebox,’ and was shown Reports that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE — 25TH AMENDMENT!”

Later, in a fundraising email Trump went much further.

“They were authorized to shoot me!” the subject line reads, according to an archive of political emails.

“TRUMP ALERT,” it begins. “BREAKING FROM TRUMP: BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!”

“You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable… Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”

Attorney and former FBI Special Agent Asha Rangappa observed, “Including the deadly force policy [in] an ops plan is SOP [standard operating procedure]. But just so I make sure I’m following the plot, according to Trump’s position in court, what he is accusing Biden of would be perfectly legal and within the scope of his ‘official’ powers, right?”

Trump repeatedly has insisted presidents must have complete and total “absolute immunity.” His attorneys have argued in federal court and before the U.S. Supreme Court a president could order Seal Team Six to assassinate his political rival and it would be lawful, as was noted here:

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was among the top allies who falsely characterized the court filing.

“The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light,” she posted to her official federal government account on X. “Does everyone get it yet???!!!! What are Republicans going to do about it?” hold my beer

She also wrote: “This is grounds for impeachment of Wray and Garland. Trump and team was cooperating the entire time with the FBI,” Greene claimed, both of which are false.

“Was deadly force authorized against Biden for his docs? Were they going to shoot SS then Pres Trump, Melania, and Barron too??? Speaker Mike Johnson fully funded the DOJ and FBI plus new building and tied our hands behind our backs to hold them accountable. We have the power of the purse and Johnson has handed the purse to Chuck Schumer. All of this is unforgivable.”

Fox News Business host Maria Bartiromo also promoted the false claims Wednesday morning:

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NBC News’ Ryan Reilly mockingly explained the situation: “GOP members of Congress think the feds wanted to assassinate Trump and so they did a raid on his place in Florida when they knew him to be in New Jersey because Mar-A-Lago was closed for the season.”

Meanwhile, critics are sounding the alarm on Trump’s and the GOP’s lies.

“This is wildly irresponsible, even for professional troll like Marjorie Taylor Greene,” wrote conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg. “FBI knew Trump wasn’t there. It was all coordinated with Secret Service in advance. This is deeply dangerous bullshit.”

“Trump wasn’t there,” said talk radio host Joe Walsh, a former GOP U.S. Congressman, responding to U.S. Rep. Greene’s remarks. “Everything was coordinated with Secret Service & local law enforcement. Even for you, this is a deeply irresponsible and dangerous thing to say.”

David Axelrod, the former top Obama strategist and White House advisor, remarked, “This is patently nuts…and dangerously provocative!”

Watch the videos above or [at this link]

:{:{//}:

Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Tuesday claimed that President Joe Biden and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) planned to "assassinate" former President Donald Trump.

The MAGA lawmaker also claimed that she attempted to warn the ex-president of such matters.

"The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light," Greene wrote via X/Twitter. "Does everyone get it yet???!!!! What are Republicans going to do about it? I tried to oust our Speaker who funded Biden’s DOJ AND FBI, but Democrats stopped it."

She also claimed, "I made sure that he knew."

The Georgia Republican leader was responding to Truth Social post from Trump, in which he wrote: "WOW! I just came out of the Biden Witch Hunt Trial in Manhattan, the 'Icebox,' and was shown Reports that Crooked Joe Biden's DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREATTO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE -25TH AMENDMENT!"

Retired FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi responded to Greene's claim, noting that "every FBI operations order contains a reminder of FBI deadly force policy."

The Dispatch Editor-In-Chief Jonah Goldberg commented: "This is wildly irresponsible, even for professional troll like Marjorie Taylor Greene. FBI knew Trump wasn’t there. It was all coordinated with Secret Service in advance. This is deeply dangerous bulls—t."

Columnist Goldie Taylor's replied to Greene, saying, "Something is really wrong with you."

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LAT

OPINION

Column: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Jan. 6 committee

A video of former President Trump is displayed on a screen during a hearing of the House Select Committee on Jan. 6.

A video of former President Trump is displayed on a screen during a hearing on Monday of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

By Jonah Goldberg

Columnist

June 14, 2022 3 AM PT

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Twitter

We’re only two installments into the limited-run production of the Jan. 6 hearings, and so far, I think they’ve been great. But I also think they’ll leave almost everyone, except for me, unsatisfied.

For many Democrats and Never Trumpers, the hope is — or was — that this would lead to criminal prosecution of Donald Trump. On Sunday, Rep. Adam B. Schiff chummed the waters for those already ravenously hungry to see the former president in leg chains. Schiff (D-Burbank) said on ABC’s “This Week” that he’s seen what he believes to be “credible evidence” that Trump broke the law in his effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Schiff might be right that Trump broke some laws, but if you’ve got your hopes set on Trump filling Truth Social with complaints about the food in the prison commissary, you’re destined for disappointment.

Some Democrats have high hopes that the hearings will rescue the Democrats from electoral catastrophe in the midterms. That’s very unlikely, too. Whatever the hearings do, they won’t solve inflation, the border crisis, crime or Biden’s dismal approval rating.

And for some, including me from time to time, we had a vague hope that these hearings would so conclusively prove Trump’s lies about the stolen election and his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol that Trump would be permanently discredited and that his defenders would admit their error like Claude Rains in the climactic comeuppance in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

That’s not going to happen either, at least not in the satisfying, schadenfreude-rich, cinematic way we feel we deserve.

But I’ve decided that’s OK.

Because here is what the hearings are well on their way to do: Create a safe space for elected Republicans, activists and conservative media figures to state openly what many already knew — the election wasn’t stolen, Trump lied about it being stolen and that he bilked hundreds of millions of dollars from the poor marks he conned.

Sadly, very few of them will say it so bluntly. But you can already see the migration out of crazyland.

Take Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, who was supposed to testify in person on Monday, but canceled at the last minute because his wife went into labor. Stepien told investigators in taped testimony that he considered himself to be on “Team Normal” as the Trump White House descended into post-defeat madness. Team Normal knew Trump lost and told him so. The implied Team Abnormal included everyone from Rudolph W. Giuliani and the whole Four Seasons Total Landscaping team to Trump himself.

Stepien is letting himself off the hook more than some would like. The Bulwark’s Tim Miller lays out a good case against Stepien’s hypocrisy and “self-flattery” — for instance, Stepien’s cowardly refusal to correct the record when it mattered. He was willing to privately contradict Trump’s lies but stay quiet about them when they mattered most.

But if you take a step back, Stepien’s rebranding is still a good sign. Most of the pro-Trump “influencers” were always cynical opportunists, letting the political winds guide them. That Stepien wants to publicly declare himself on Team Normal is a sign that the winds are blowing in a better direction.

The same principle applies to many of the witnesses — all from the campaign or the White House — including Trump’s daughter Ivanka, a once-celebrated administration official. Former Atty. Gen. William Barr, long a hero in Trump world, surely broke some congressional hearing record for using the word “bullshit” to describe virtually all of Trump’s election fraud claims.

Tucker Carlson and his prime-time Fox News colleagues may never give up the dream of convincing their audiences that there’s no “there” there, but Fox’s news side has covered the hearings as, well, news.

And while you might sometimes get the sense from Fox News that the big story out of these hearings is that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) should have been seated on the panel to represent Team Abnormal, from what I’ve seen, the hosts and the legal experts, not to mention Rupert Murdoch’s other media properties, are perfectly content to let the underlying evidence and testimony go unrebutted, even if they call it “old news.”

In other words, most conservatives, borrowing a tactic from the Clinton impeachment, are arguing that we should “move on” from Trump’s misdeeds. I get why that bothers people — including me — but arguing that we should move on requires conceding the facts of what happened. And that alone would make these hearings worth it.

@JonahDispatch

More to Read

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 09: Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Redlands), Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank),and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) during a House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th hearing in the Cannon House Office Building on Thursday, June 9, 2022 in Washington, DC. The bipartisan Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack On the United States Capitol has spent nearly a year conducting more than 1,000 interviews, reviewed more than 140,000 documents day of the attack. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

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https://www.alternet.org/2015/01/10-historical-facts-only-right-winger-could-believe

as you may have noticed by following their writings, conservatives are not sticklers for historical accuracy, especially when they have a point to defend and not a lot of evidence to support it. Get a load, for example, of John Podhoretz explaining how the pro-choice Rudy Giuliani reduced abortions in New York City (though, um, not really) because he cut crime, which is one of "the spiritual causes of abortion."

Yeah, deadline pressure's a bitch. But there are some bizarre notions of American history in which conservatives have become so invested they've adopted them into their worldview. The best-known example is probably Jonah Goldberg's notion of "Liberal Fascism"; nowadays anytime a conservative talks about, say, Woodrow Wilson or Hillary Clinton, you may expect him to mention their resemblance to Benito Mussolini. They don't even have to think about it, even when normal people are gaping at them open-mouthed like audience members at "Springtime for Hitler" -- it's part of the folklore that helps them understand the American experience.

There are plenty of others. I've picked out 10 such ideas that are widespread enough to qualify. (In the nomenclature I have treated "Republican" and "conservative" as synonyms because, come on.)

10. The Robber Barons weren't robbers -- they were capitalist heroes.

The overarching task of the conservative historian is to rehabilitate the image of capitalism, even at its most red-toothed and -clawed. Not a hard job, as both our history and culture ceaselessly celebrate the innovative dynamism of American business.

But one of the rare areas in which history teachers are allowed to criticize unfettered capitalism is the Gilded Age of the "robber barons" -- Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Fisk, et al. These men, many of whom first rose to prominence through unseemly wartime speculation, built enormous fortunes on the exceedingly generous terms of the times, which included bribery, monopolies, and stock manipulation, perverting the alleged power of the free market on their own behalf. They were kind of like the Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers of their day -- except they never got caught.

Most of us still look on this as a shameful thing. But historians of the conservative-libertarian persuasion such as Thomas E. Woods, Lawrence W. Reed, and Thomas J. DiLorenzo (better known now as a neo-Confederate) look at the robber barons' dirty records and ask: So what? J.P. Morgan built a nice library!

They tend to skirt the smelly stuff, and talk instead about how Carnegie's machinations drove down the price of steel -- surely you're not against low prices? And if Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt paid off legislators to acquire land for their railroads, the railroads got built, and that's what counts.

why do they so eagerly defend the robber barons even at their worst? Maybe because, as economist Brad DeLong has noted, the grotesque inequity in American wealth that characterized their era has only one equivalent in U.S. history -- that of our own time. And if one's business is excusing the perfidy and criminality of today's speculators and swindlers, it is helpful to make heroes of the speculators and swindlers who are their models.

9. Sputnik bankrupted the Soviet Union.

This one comes from the top of the conservative food chain: Sarah Palin. In her Fox News rebuttal to President Obama's recent State of the Union, Palin said that the Russians' "victory in that race to space... incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union."

It has been pointed out that Palin's version of history is confused on many points. But don't tell that to conservatives. Among them, Palin's charisma is so overweening that her bizarre POV is yet defended -- in some cases, on the grounds that her "larger and more important point about history" was misunderstood (which then mutated into "Palin was right"), and in others just because, as a poster at Lucianne Goldberg**'s site put it, "The left will have puppies because of it."

Palin's ahistoricism has since metastasized among her following into an indictment of America's entry into the space race, which National Review's Jonah Goldberg described as "the government tells the people what to do, and it relies on a handful of expertsto get it done according to government specifications."

(It should be noted that Sputnik revisionism didn't start with Palin; John Bircher Cleon Skousen claimed in the '50s that the USSR built Sputnik with plans stolen from the United States. It kind of figures Palin would follow in that tradition.)

8. Galileo was a conservative.

You may recall how conservatives made lifelong socialist George Orwell into a neocon icon. Now they're trying to do the same thing with Galileo.

You may think Galileo's an odd choice, because he's history's most famous scientific dissident, having been forced by the Catholic Church to deny his heretical finding that the earth revolved around the sun. But it's not his devotion to truth that makes him attractive to conservatives -- it's his persecution. As they feel themselves persecuted by a liberal conspiracy, conservatives will easily adopt as their avatar any historical figure who suffered and was later shown to be right, regardless of the relevance of his cause to theirs. If you've seen The Passion of the Christ, you know how it works.

The Catholic Encyclopedia, for reasons that should be obvious, has long portrayed Galileo's ordeal as not so bad; why, the Pope didn't even torture him, he just threatened to, and anyway the Church was only reasonably trying to "prohibit the circulation of writings which were judged harmful."

Scholarly apologists such as Jonathan Weyer and Paul Feyerabend have amplified the theme, but their heady thoughts were brought crashing to earth by National Review'sJonah Goldberg, who in 1999 attacked the "ancient, pro-enlightenment, zealot spin" on Galileo with easy-reading versions of the Catholic argument. (Dinesh D'Souza provided similar arguments at a slightly higher reading level.)

Galileo may have been prosecuted by the Church, said Goldberg, but he was persecuted by "jealous fellow-scientists," one of whom he compared to James Carville. Actually, Goldberg said, the Church loved Galileo. Admittedly they did try him, but that was "very complicated" -- the upshot being that "one need not look much further than then-Senator Al Gore's treatment of dissenters on global warming to see how modern inquisitions work."

Thus continued the rehabilitation of Galileo -- no longer the enemy of the Church, but the patron saint of global warming denialists. In 2001 the American Spectator called skeptic Lloyd Keigwin "The Galileo of Global Warming" and claimed he made a giant contribution to discrediting a movement that would impose a deadly energy clamp on the world economy...." More recently the "ClimateGate" scandal prompted a new wave of Galileo reclamation, with Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal lamenting, "The East Anglians' mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming's claims... evokes the attempt to silence Galileo."

Scan the blogs, and you'll see plenty more of this stuff (e.g. "The Great Global Warming Inquisition"). Next stop: J. Robert Oppenheimer -- Victim of a Liberal Conspiracy.

7. The Founding Fathers really tried to end slavery.

Even in the exceedingly forgiving musical 1776, the Founding Fathers are shown willing to table the issue of slavery in order to win a consensus for the Declaration of Independence. (It also shows Jefferson "resolved to release my slaves," which he never did.)

That's not patriotic enough for Tea Party princess Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who told a sympathetic audience that "the very founders that wrote those documents [the Declaration and Constitution] worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States." The one "founder" Bachmann cited was John Quincy Adams, who was actually the son of the founder John Adams.

Her bizarre assertion got negative press, and the inevitable right-wing defenses from Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism, and others.

That's no shock; Bachmann's theme was right in line with a traditional conservative method of reconciling their fairy-tale vision of American history with the founders' self-evident hypocrisy. Fundamentalists, for example, frequently cite the founders' verbal objections to the practice as the inspiration for abolitionism.

The basic idea seems to be that because the Founders were embarrassed by slavery, that meant they were in some secret way fighting against it. Author Paul Gottfried, for example, has argued that "Presbyterian theologians spilled rivulets of ink doing what Cicero and Pliny never felt obliged to do, showing how in their society slavery was being elevated to solicitous education for a backward people. The fact that such arguments had to be provided... underscores the perceived need to humanize a 'peculiar institution.'" So, like very young children in permissive households, the founders' dim awareness of guilt excuses them from blame.

It's hard for most of us to imagine that men who, shortly after the Revolution, countenanced the military suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion would have endorsed John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, or that George Washington, who tried to solve his dental challenges by having implanting in his gums teeth extracted from his slaves, was a precocious abolitionist. But when you hang out with people in tricorner hats and knee-breeches who think the Founders were guys just like themselves, it's a little easier to suspend disbelief.

6. Teddy Roosevelt was a socialist.

Theodore Roosevelt was a naval theorist and war aficionado, a lawman in both the Dakota Territory and New York City, and a cheerful imperialist. You'd think conservatives would appreciate him better. But Glenn Beck has helped turn that around, lambasting TR at last year's CPAC and denouncing his words as "a socialist utopia" which "we need to address ... as if it is a cancer."

In an essay at Beck's site, R.J. Pestritto, a professor at the conservative Hillsdale College, said that while "the progressives were elitists; they looked down their noses at the socialists, considering them a kind of rabble," nonetheless "the progressive conception of government closely coincided with the socialist conception." Pestritto was given room to defend his and Beck's views in the Wall Street Journal. And the Ashbrook Center's Ken Thomas concluded that Roosevelt "pushed centralization of power far further than circumstances justified."

Now even when conservatives defend Roosevelt, they qualify their enthusiasm, saying while he went wrong with his statism, he did do some good things, like subjugate foreigners and so forth.

You might wonder why conservatives have chosen to start picking on the guy from Mt. Rushmore. One explanation may be that they were sick of hearing liberals say, oh, if progressive taxation is socialist, then what about TR, was he a socialist too? Now, instead of sputtering, they can just say yes.

5. Conservatives swept MLK and the Civil Rights movement to victory.

Back during the Civil Rights era, the preeminent conservative journal National Review stood foursquare against the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Many modern conservatives would be shocked to hear this, as they are convinced that Republican conservatives defeated the Klansmen of the Democratic Party to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and realize King's dream.

They usually start with the Civil War, at which time Republicans really were African Americans' better friend among the Parties, and then slide on up to the Civil Rights Act -- skipping Strom Thurmond leaving the Democratic Party over segregation, Truman's integration of the Armed Services, etc.

They point out, rightly, that a greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Act in both chamber. They generally don't recall that nearly all the Democratic opponents were Southern, nor that President Lyndon Johnson, who had pushed for the Act, reflected afterward that the Democrats had "lost the South for a generation" -- which turned out to be accurate, plus a decade or two, as Southerners abandoned the Democrats in consequence of their race-mixing ways.

To this day, though they are unsupported by later political developments (such as Tea Party pet Rand Paul's criticism of the Civil Rights Act), conservatives will claim King and civil rights for themselves, and react to the continuing, massive disposition of black Americans to vote Democratic as an act of stunning ingratitude.

4. Margaret Sanger was all about the eugenics.

Margaret Sanger is known to most normal people as the feminist pioneer who fought law and superstition to educate women to better methods of birth control -- mainly condoms and early diaphragms, as opposed to the caustic chemicals and folk remedies desperate women had previously used, sometimes disastrously, to prevent pregnancies.

In the course of her crusade, Sanger made common cause with a variety of world figures, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Reader's Digest founder DeWitt Wallace -- and followers of the pseudoscience of eugenics. This last was an unfortunate choice, to put it mildly, as eugenicists championed forced sterilization and even managed to get laws passed mandating it in some states.

Sanger's own writings show that eugenics was for her a hook for spreading the word about contraception, rather than the other way around; preventing unwanted pregnancy was her life's work. Still, it's a fair cop, and her eugenics endorsements -- like H.L. Mencken's anti-Semitic remarks and Robert Byrd's Klan membership -- are a dark spot on an otherwise admirable reputation.

But ask a modern conservative about Sanger, and you'll find they've got her backwards -- eugenics is literally all they know about her. Though they talk about eugenics as if it were still a popular movement, they usually don't condemn the prominent churchmen and scientists who supported it, not the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, nor Charles Lindbergh, nor Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, et al. It's always Sanger who symbolizes it -- which is rather like portraying Ezra Pound as the head of the Third Reich. Not only lowly lunatic fringe figures, but also big-time wingnuts like Jonah Goldberg and Michelle Malkin take this approach.

It's not hard to guess why: As the recent Lila Rose Planned Parenthood sting reminds us, conservatives aren't just against abortion -- they're against anyone who offers women any alternative to childbearing whatsoever. By portraying America's First Lady of Contraception as an enemy of freedom, they may hope to mask their their own authoritarian ambitions.

3. Women were better off before they got the vote.

Perhaps because they are not usually associated with the extension of rights to the disenfranchised -- or because American women tend not to vote the way they want -- conservatives are a little squirrely about women's suffrage. Some rather defensively insist that "conservatives and libertarians played central roles in drafting and ratifying" the 19th Amendment, so there. Others, like National Review's John Derbyshire, Ann Coulter and the editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, affect to be against women's suffrage, either in clumsy emulation of H.L. Mencken's playful remarks on the subject, or because they're assholes.

But among conservatives a consensus is forming that women were better off when they didn't have the vote. The notion does not seem to be based on the premise that women don't deserve the vote, mind you, but that it is extraneous to their real interest, which is to live in a pre-feminist society.

Last year Jacob G. Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation asserted that Americans were freer in the 1880s than they are today. When called on it, Hornberger said okay, maybe black people and women weren't so free. But this prompted George Mason professor Bryan Caplan to ask, "In what ways, then, were American women in 1880 less free than men?" Their lack of franchise, sexual autonomy, etc. struck Caplan as irrelevant: Such women lived in an era before gun control or the Department of Education, so, he judged, they were by definition more free than now.

Discussion generally ran against Caplan, but he had his high-profile defenders. At the Atlantic, Megan McArdle said, "The overwhelming majority of women in 1880 would be positively horrified by the prospect of living my life. Not only is it flagrantly immoral, it violates much of what they themselves thought of as the core of womanhood. Should we get excited about women being denied the right to go to medical school, who did not want to go to medical school?" We may imagine 19th-century women who did not want to go to medical school raising their fists in approval.

Others suggested that if conservative women didn't come out ahead, then women's rights were merely ephemeral. Last year Concerned Women for America celebrated the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment thus: "Women Won the Right to Vote 90 Years Ago; Conservative Women Still Fighting the Media for a 'Place at the Table.'" "90 years after the 19th Amendment," wrote Lori Zingano at RedState, "Democrats are actively seeking to figuratively repeal the amendment" -- that is, by promoting "the myth of a wage gap" between men and women and disapproving of Sarah Palin. Thus, she said, Democrats "are striving for a form of reverse-suffrage, wherein every woman must walk in lockstep with their ideology, or you are not a 'real' woman."

It is probable that, put under harsh lights and in front of a crowd, any of these people would declare himself or herself an avid women's suffragist. But among themselves they almost never mention women's rights without observing how insignificant they are alongside their own idea of the way things ought to be.

2. Darwin is a menace to Western Civilization.

You will from time to time hear about how some conservatives, at least, are cool with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. But they're usually discussing the science of evolution -- and on that score, they still can't bring a majority of Republicans onto their side.

On the philosophical implications of man evolving from monkeys, prominent conservatives have long believed and still believe that, in the words of Center for a Just Society Chairman Ken Connor, Darwin would have us believe that "God is simply a creature of our imagination. Human beings emerged gratuitously from the primordial ooze. Since we are the product of mere chance, we have no inherent dignity, value or worth." And that just ain't right.

Thus at the Conservative Book Club you can buy The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinismand Intelligent Design, which assures us that "Darwinism -- like Marxism and Freudianism before it -- is simply unfit to survive," and you can buy from the Conservative DVD Club films like How the Cambrian Fossil Record Disproves Darwin, and so on.

Some intellectual cons who can't quite go full knuckle-dragger try to finesse their way out of it. Dinesh D'Souza noted that, while "evolution does seem to turn many Christians into unbelievers," the discovery of evolutionary principles didn't sour Darwin himself on God -- Darwin's own bitterness over the death of his child did that; and when the evil Thomas Huxley later tied evolution to atheism, the embittered atheist Darwin supported him by becoming "increasingly insistent that evolution was an entirely naturalistic system, having no room for miracles or divine intervention at any point." If Darwin had been in his right mind, of course, he'd be singing Glory Hallelujah.

First Things author Peter Lawler made a noble effort, writing that as Darwinism shows that "our happiness comes from doing our duty to the species as social mammals. .. this account of who we are is basically conservative. It promotes family values—including such insights as people who come from large families are generally happier…."

Nice try, Poindexter! But, as with so much in conservative thinking, Jonah Goldberg iced the cakewith his statement that while "I disagree with those who would lump Darwin with Freud and Marx… I don't think one can glibly say that just because the book was scientifically correct (speaking broadly, we've discovered lots of new things since then) and pioneering, doesn't mean it can't also be harmful. Darwinism certainly led to many horrors and abuses across the ideological spectrum…."

This thing goes way back and, despite the efforts of some pointy-heads, conservatives aren't backing off it anytime soon.

1. FDR: History's greatest monster.

If you have aged grandparents still living who remember the New Deal, or are among America's prominent historians, you will hear nothing but good from them about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president who shepherded America through the Great Depression and the Second World War.

Conservatives have never felt that way, of course -- back in the day they went to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt, and FDR welcomed their hatred. For some years they were obliged to keep their anger at FDR on the down-low -- after all, wasn't Reagan a Roosevelt fan? Plus there were many more people then than now who actually remembered that presidency, and it didn't play well to contradict their memories.

Lately, though, conservatives have gotten back to the Trans-Lux, and this time they're not just hissing. "FDR's public works only exacerbated the Depression," says The American Conservative. "The New Deal was harmful medicine for a struggling economy," claims The American Spectator. "Faced with a similar crisis, there cannot be more than one in a hundred who would now recommend FDR's specific curatives" -- at least, not among the hundred the Spectator would ask.

A book by right-wing factotum Amity Shlaes called The Forgotten Man, all about how FDR prolonged the Depression, has gained a place of honor on conservative bookshelves. As you may imagine, the Wall Street Journal reviewer loved it -- "Ms. Shlaes rightly reminds us," he wrote, "of the harmful effect of Rooseveltian activism and class-warfare rhetoric." The reviewer did mention that "one question that Ms. Shlaes never quite answers is just what Roosevelt should have done to beat the Depression beyond practicing a Coolidge-like passivity." But no true conservative would need to ask such a question: Of course FDR should have done as Tea Partiers counsel be done for our current depression: Cut the deficit and screw the poor.

When the book was criticized by John Updike (what does he know about books? Or the Depression? Oh, he lived through it? Well, what does he know about books?)Ross Douthat leapt to condemn Updike's "solipsistic flapdoodle": "FDR could have given us the fireside chats and the rhetoric of government action" that Updike's dad admired, said Douthat, "and yes, even the stronger safety net without the counterproductive attempts at centralized planning and the relentless scapegoating of business."

Ah, what might have been! Any previous U.S. policy may be reexamined, and no administration is sacrosanct. Who knows how things might have been better or worse had James Knox Polk chosen not to pursue the Mexican-American War? But it is evident that the current wave of anti-FDR sentiment coincides with the rise of Democratic power in the last half of the previous decade, and anti-Rooseveltians are always eager to explain how FDR's disastrous presidency -- to which the American people, for reasons unknown, returned him for four terms -- is an ominous warning for the allegedly similarly socialistic Obama.

Clearly the War on FDR is a proxy struggle with the (substantially less aggressive) current president -- they seek to make activist government look foolish, in hopes of preventing it from being tried again. But then, in a way all their other historical revisions are also directed at their current enemies. They go through the ghost of Margaret Sanger to stymie feminists; through the shades of Galileo and Darwin to warn off scientists; through the late MLK to get at voters whose enthusiasm for a black president thwarts their own electoral ambitions, etc. For them, history, like everything else, is just politics by other means.

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no lnx see blum

https://www.levernews.com/the-paid-pundits-defending-clarence-thomas-and-his-billionaire-benefactor/

lever

after ProPublica reported that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had failed to disclose two decades worth of luxury trips provided by billionaire conservative mega-donor Harlan Crow, right-wing pundits and think-tank staffers raced to defend Thomas and his benefactor — without mentioning what they all had in common: their own financial ties to Crow.

The episode is a reminder of how many conservative pundits and scholars owe their sinecures to the same billionaires who fund Republican election campaigns and efforts to influence the judiciary.

Hours after ProPublica dropped its report on Thomas, Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow at the right-wing think tank Manhattan Institute, tweeted, “Unless Harlan Crow has some business before the Court, the @propublica report about Justice Thomas is a big breathless nothingburger.”

Unmentioned: The Manhattan Institute, where Shapiro leads an amicus brief filing program lobbying the Supreme Court to rule certain ways on issues like student debt cancellation and corporate taxation, boasts Crows’ wife Kathy on its board of trustees and has been called “wonderful” by Crow himself.

Many of these pundits came forward to vouch for Crow’s honor and moral character after ProPublica’s story prompted renewed scrutiny of Crow over his collection of Nazi memorabilia, which includes two paintings by Adolf Hitler himself and a signed copy of Mein Kampf.

In 2016, Supreme Court justices — including Thomas — unanimously voted to condone the practice of giving lavish gifts to public officials in exchange for access.

“There’s Not Even An Appearance Of Impropriety”

Crow, heir to a Dallas real estate empire, is the CEO of Crow Holdings, a sprawling real estate investment and private equity firm that manages retirement savings for public employees. A relatively private man, Crow has long been a major donor to Republican political campaigns and outside groups.

He’s also been a donor to tax-exempt dark money groups and charitable organizations that do not have to report their donors. In 2011, Crow told the New York Times, “I disclose what I’m required by law to disclose, and I don’t disclose what I’m not required to disclose.”

While those donations are not for the most part traceable, it’s clear that Crow has been generous to conservative think tanks, legal groups, and media outlets.

ProPublica reported last week that Crow has for years offered Thomas, the conservative Supreme Court justice, free trips on his private jet and superyacht. Those trips should have been disclosed under federal ethics rules, according to seven experts consulted by the nonprofit news outlet.

Shapiro, who joined the Manhattan Institute last summer, took time away from a trip to Legoland last week to record an audio clip defending Crow’s gifts to Thomas, in addition to tweeting his support for the justice.

“It is not against the rules to receive all sorts of gifts — even lavish gifts, even yachts, and rides on private jets, and stays at luxury resorts,” he said. “Nor do the Supreme Court ethics rules even require reporting such gifts if they’re personal hospitality — gifts from friends, things like that.”

While Shapiro suggested that maybe the rules should be changed, he asserted that “there’s not even an appearance of impropriety, unless Harlan Crow has some business before the court, which no one has alleged — not even in ProPublica’s big, breathless, nothingburger report.”

It’s an interesting argument, given that Shapiro effectively lobbies the Supreme Court for the Manhattan Institute. Last summer, Kathy Crow was added to the board of trustees listed on the Manhattan Institute’s website. Harlan Crow, for his part, lavished praise on the organization during a debate at his Dallas business compound in 2021.

in his role at the Manhattan Institute, Shapiro regularly files amicus briefs attempting to persuade justices to rule certain ways on cases. Shapiro recently submitted a brief calling on the Supreme Court to issue a decision blocking President Joe Biden’s student loan cancellation plan.

Last month, Shapiro filed a brief calling on the Supreme Court to review a case upholding the constitutionality of a one-time repatriation tax imposed on foreign earnings accumulated by foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies, which was passed as part of President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law.

On Tuesday, Shapiro tweeted that he didn’t know Kathy Crow sits on the Manhattan Institute’s board,while downplaying the significance.

“Alas no private-jet travel here,” he wrote, “but what you’re saying is that conservative donors support conservative organizations? Amazing.”

“Deeply Honorable, Decent, And Patriotic”

As controversy mounted over Harlan Crow’s undisclosed gifts to Thomas, public attention extended to the Texas businessman’s extensive collection of Nazi artifacts — which includes oil paintings by Hitler, a signed copy of Mein Kampf, a teapot engraved with Hitler’s initials, and linen napkins embroidered with swastikas.

Those items have drawn scrutiny before. In 2015, Democrats called on Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to cancel a presidential campaign fundraiser scheduled at Crow’s house on the eve of Yom Kippur.

In 2019, after scholars who dined at Crow’s mansion were disturbed by his collection of Nazi artifacts, Crow offered a half-hearted apology to their host organization, according to a letter obtained by Mother Jones.

“I am sorry that anyone would be offended,” wrote Crow, adding: “I would very much hope it would be completely obvious that having anything that related to Nazis or slavery could not possibly be interpreted as support or glorification for those evils.”

Over the weekend, several conservative pundits came forward to defend Crow and his collectors items, without mentioning that they have benefited from his family’s financial support for their think tanks and media outlets.

Jonah Goldberg, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the conservative news site The Dispatch, tweeted, “Harlan Crow is a deeply honorable, decent, and patriotic person.” He characterized Crow’s separate garden of dictator statutes — featuring Russia’s Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin — as “an attempt [to] commemorate the horrors of the 20th century in the spirit of ‘never again.’”

Goldberg later tweeted, “My conscience is clear. Harlan Crow is a good man and the farthest thing from a Nazi.”

As The Dispatch separately noted in a news article covering Crow’s gifts to Thomas, “Harlan Crow is a minority investor in The Dispatch and a friend of the founders.”

Goldberg is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank where Crow serves on the board of trustees.

Previously, Goldberg was a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, the nonprofit affiliated with the conservative National Review magazine. The National Review Institute has regularly hosted its debate series at Crow’s Old Parkland campus.

Crow was additionally a co-chair of a 2021 National Review Institute dinner honoring Leonard Leoand Eugene Meyer of the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyers network. (Leo, also a friend of Thomas, was a key architect of conservatives’ 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court.)

David French, a former National Review Institute senior fellow and former senior editor at The Dispatch, defended Crow, too.

“I know Harlan also,” French tweeted. “I’ve participated in several debates at Old Parkland. The idea that he’s a Nazi sympathizer is utterly ludicrous. He abhors tyranny, from fascism to communism to everywhere in between.”

Crow’s character was also defended by Charles Murray, a longtime American Enterprise Institute scholar who’s best known for mainstreaming racist pseudoscience via his book, The Bell Curve.

“Harlan Crow surely has enemies but, as far as I can tell, they consist exclusively of people who don’t know him,” Murray tweeted. “Everyone who does know him may disagree with him on some issue, but they universally recognize his decency, integrity, and kindness. Including people of the left.”

Murray dedicated his most recent book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, “to Harlan Crow.”

d-souza hillary 's am beyond bogus BS

natrev

...Construction sites create special procedurs to protect the theft of power tools, because the temptation is so much greater. Similarly, journalism (like science) creates special rules for plagiarism because the temptation and risk is so much greater, not because it’s a sin unique to journalists.

I’m not a huge stickler about plagiarism. I’ve never done it intentionally mind you, but I’ve made a mistake once or twice and I can see how it happens, which is why I’ve usually not made a big deal when people have plagiarized me. One Canadian writer lost her job because she ripped me off, for example. I never made a stink about it. But one can be easygoing about enforcement of a principle whithout arguing the principle doesn’t exist....

harlan nazi collection

it's not a tribute to evil or something to be mocked. It's an attempt commemorate the horrors of the 20th century in the spirit of "never again." Harlan Crow is a deeply honorable, decent, and patriotic person. He's not the strawman Thomas haters are trying to make him

ah an 4 23 1 of 2

On April 6, ProPublica published a bombshell report saying that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thomas had, for "over 20 years," been "treated to luxury vacations by Republican donor Harlan Crow" and failed to report it. Thomas' allies were quick to rush to his defense. And some of those defenders, according to The Lever's Andrew Perez, are Crow associates themselves.

One of them is The Manhattan Institute's Ilya Shapiro.

READ MORE: How Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion suggests other rights may be vulnerable after Roe: analysis

Perez also notes that conservative journalist Jonah Goldberg, formerly of the National Review and now editor-in-chief of The Dispatch, has been defending Crow vigorously. On April 8, Goldberg tweeted, "Harlan Crow is a deeply honorable, decent, and patriotic person. He's not the strawman Thomas haters are trying to make him."

According to Perez, "As The Dispatch separately noted in a news article covering Crow's gifts to Thomas, 'Harlan Crow is a minority investor in The Dispatch and a friend of the founders.' Goldberg is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank where Crow serves on the board of trustees. Previously, Goldberg was a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, the nonprofit affiliated with the conservative National Review magazine."

READ MORE: Democrats must do all they can to expose 'corrupt' Clarence Thomas and 'destroy his reputation': journalist

Read The Lever’s full article at this link.

links

on April 6, ProPublica published a bombshell report saying that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thomas had, for "over 20 years," been "treated to luxury vacations by Republican donor Harlan Crow" and failed to report it. Thomas' allies were quick to rush to his defense. And some of those defenders, according to The Lever's Andrew Perez, are Crow associates themselves.

One of them is The Manhattan Institute's Ilya Shapiro.

Perez, in an article published by The Lever on April 11, explains, "Hours after ProPublica dropped its report on Thomas, Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow at the right-wing think tank Manhattan Institute, tweeted, 'Unless Harlan Crow has some business before the Court, the @propublica report about Justice Thomas is a big breathless nothingburger.' Unmentioned: The Manhattan Institute, where Shapiro leads an amicus brief filing program lobbying the Supreme Court to rule certain ways on issues like student debt cancellation and corporate taxation, boasts Crow's wife Kathy on its board of trustees and has been called 'wonderful' by Crow himself." READ MORE: https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/clarence-thomas-2657559336...How Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion suggests other rights may be vulnerable after Roe: analysis ttt Perez also notes that conservative journalist Jonah Goldberg, formerly of the National Review and now editor-in-chief of The Dispatch, has been defending Crow vigorously. On April 8, , "Harlan Crow is a deeply honorable, decent, and patriotic person. He's not the strawman Thomas haters are trying to make him."

https://www.levernews.com/the-paid-pundits-defending-clarence-thomas-and-his-billionaire-benefactor/

https://www.mediamatters.org/cnn/cnns-conservative-contributors-still-pushing-false-notion-fox-has-separate-straight-news-and

The latest filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News further demonstrates that there is no difference between the network’s purported “straight news” and opinion divisions. However, during CNN’s coverage of the filing, conservative commentators, includingDavid Urban,Alyssa Farah Griffin, and Jonah Goldberg, continued to claim otherwise — contradicting CNN’s own journalists.

On February 27, the latest filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit was released to the public and revealed that Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox News’ parent company Fox Corp., and other executives knew that claims about Dominion and election fraud during the 2020 presidential election were false, but allowed hosts and guests to continue to push them.

The filing also included new details about how decisions around reporting were made to appease the network's pro-Trump viewers, rather than on the basis of facts. In one instance, the filing revealed that Murdoch instructed Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott to fire then-Managing Editor Bill Sammon, who oversaw the network’s call of Arizona for now-President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election and drew ire from former President Donald Trump, his supporters, and hosts such as Tucker Carlson. The filing also showed that Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch complained that coverage of a Trump rally was too critical, telling Scott, “News guys have to be careful how they cover this rally. So far some of the side comments are slightly anti, and they shouldn’t be. … The narrative should be this is a huge celebration of the president.”

Since the release of the filing, which clearly laid out how Fox personalities on both the “straight news’ and opinion sides were influenced to deprioritize factual information, some mainstream media figures, including a CNN host and some reporters, acknowledged that Fox News does not truly have separate “straight news” and “opinion” divisions. Yet, some of CNN’s paid contributors, who have ties to the Trump administration, Fox News, or conservative circles, have continued to push the fiction that Fox distinguishes between real reporting and opinion.

CNN pundits are still pushing Fox talking points, saying that there is a distinction between “straight news” and opinion at the network

Conservative CNN contributors Urban, Griffin, and Goldberg continued to defend Fox’s reputation as a news outlet during CNN’s coverage of the latest filing.

Urban said that there’s a difference between “hard news and entertainment” on Fox, calling shows like Hannity or Tucker Carlson Today “the news equivalent of the WWE.” Urban has been a paid contributor at CNN for years, and Media Matters has previously highlighted numerous ethical problems with the arrangement, as the network has repeatedly failed to disclose Urban’s lobbying efforts and role in the Trump campaign. Most recently, Urban participated in discussions about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, during which the network failed to disclose that Urban lobbied for the train operator Norfolk Southern. On the February 27 edition of CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper, Urban pushed the false notion that Fox has separate news and opinion divisions.
[ vid]
jaKE TAPPER (HOST): And David, Fox viewers heard these false claims night after night after night, and Murdoch apparently, according to Oliver, said it was damaging. What was it damaging though?

DAVID URBAN (CNN CONTRIBUTOR): You know what it was damaging? Their brand. Their price. How much the company — how much Fox was valued at, right? That’s what it was damaging. They weren't concerned about damaging the body republic. They were concerned about damaging corporate profits and that's what I think is the most troubling. And what Fox viewers, and what people don't understand is there's a difference between hard news and the entertainment it is, you know, 7 p.m. on, on Fox News, right. Hannity, Tucker, and those shows, which are purely — they’re the news equivalent of the WWE.

Griffin placed blame on Trump for Fox News hosts spreading conspiracy theories in hopes of retaining their viewership, while claiming that “there’s a lot of really good journalists at Fox, dayside programming I don’t have really any major problems with.” CNN formally hired Griffin in December 2021, despite her lengthy history of lies and distortions, including during her tenure as a spokesperson for the Trump administration. In December 2020, Griffin had appeared on Fox News and claimed there had been voter fraud in the election[ vid]

aLYSSA FARAH GRIFFIN (CNN CONTRIBUTOR): Donald Trump is a big part of this by the way, because he started to create the narrative after he spread the election lies that, you know, Newsmax is where we should go, One America News Network is where true believers are going. So there was a sense of fear within Fox that they were going to lose market share to the outlets. The reality is that they never even picked up enough that it in a major way affected the very high viewership that Fox News had. But you can just see sort of the fear he instilled in the big-time hosts, the prime-time hosts. And I just want to say, like there’s a lot of really good journalists at Fox. Dayside programming I don't have really any major problems with. But prime-time is where they make their money and it has descended into conspiracy-mongering. It is basically anything to get people to tune in and drive viewership and not risk losing to the fringier outlets.

Goldberg placed blame on Fox CEO Suzanne Scott for her “lack of leadership,” claiming that, when it comes to Fox’s role in the lawsuit, “the opinion side basically became the dog wagging the tail instead of the other way around, and the news side basically became sort of this cleanup crew.” Goldberg is a former Fox News contributor and founding editor for conservative magazine National Review, who now simultaneously works as a CNN contributor and editor-in-chief of right-wing online magazine The Dispatch[ vid]
jONAH GOLDBERG (CNN CONTRIBUTOR): I know too many people who work in the Fox News division to this day who are serious, honest, and sincere journalists trying to do the job right. There are too many people, including who work at CNN, who got their starts or worked at Fox for a while and have warm things to say about it, to just say that it was always a political operation. I think the problem that happened at Fox was that the opinion side was allowed to run free. Everyone likes to think that this was some grand policy, the transformation of Fox, set from above. It was really the lack of leadership under Suzanne Scott, the CEO, to reign in, curtail, discipline the prime-time people in any way to the point where the opinion side basically became the dog wagging the tail instead of the other way around. And the news side just became sort of this cleanup crew. Even in the Dominion filings, the news division comes out OK in this. Bret Baier and Special Report fact-checked this stuff.

CNN’s own journalists point out that there is little difference between Fox’s opinion and news branches

Others at CNN, such as host John King and reporters Oliver Darcy and Phil Mattingly, have emphasized that the most recent Dominion filing shows Fox’s lack of news credibility because “news networks are supposed to inform viewers what's the truth.”

CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy has repeatedly pointed out the lack of distinction between opinion and news at Fox.On Monday, he said, “I think this really actually exposes the fact that Fox is not at its core a news network. News networks -- they deliver the truth as they know it to viewers. They do the best job to attain the truth and sometimes it's not perfect but that's what they do.” CNN, *Anderson Cooper 360*, [2/27/23]
When asked if he would call Fox News a “news organization” on Tuesday’s edition of CNN’s This Morning, Darcy said: “No, and that’s because news networks are supposed to inform viewers with the truth. In this case we know that Fox News knew the truth and refused to not only tell their viewers but they actually fed them lies to keep their audience because of the financial incentive. That's not what news networks do. That's what maybe, you know, propaganda outlets might do, but it's certainly not what a news network would do.” CNN, *This Morning*, [2/28/23]
Darcy also wrote an analysis on some of the biggest revelations from Dominion’s legal filing, saying that Fox “continues to be exposed for the dishonest organization that it is – this time, with the help of its billionaire owner.”He later continued, “In totality, the documents continue to underscore that at its core, Fox News is not a news network. News networks work hard to deliver the truth to their viewers. … The documents lay bare that the channel’s business model is not based on informing its audience, but rather on feeding them content — even dangerous conspiracy theories — that keeps viewers happy and watching.” CNN, [2/28/23]
Darcy said that “the perception that they are a news company is crumbling.” According to Darcy, “To preserve these business relationships they have to at least, have some reputation they're a legitimate news company. And I have been saying obviously that that's not the case. But the perception that they are a news company is crumbling, and this could result in damage to the actual Fox Corp. brand and really result in problems for shareholders.” CNN, *This Morning*, [3/1/23]
On Inside Politics with John King, King claimed that “Fox is not about news, it's about opinion.” King then played clips of Fox hosts airing claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election and said, “It was not just once, it was not twice. It was this over and over and over again.” CNN, :{Inside Politics with John King:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [2/28/23]
In response to King, CNN reporter Phil Mattingly said, “These filings are laying bare the fallacy of the idea that there is a separation between opinion and editorial.” CNN, :{Inside Politics with John King:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [2/28/23]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/jonah-goldberg-who-quit-fox-news-over-tucker-carlson-joins-cnn

11 21 an

at Fox News, far-right opinion host Tucker Carlson has not only been a supporter of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán and promoted the racist, anti-Semitic Great Replacement theory — he has also been an apologist for the insurrectionists who violently assaulted the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6 in the hope of stopping Congress from certifying now-President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory over then-President Donald Trump. And Carlson's coverage of January 6 is so beyond the pale that two conservative journalists, according to National Public Radio, have left Fox News because of it.

Those conservatives, NPR's David Folkenflik reports, are Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes. Goldberg is known his years as a National Review editor.And Hayes was with the now-defunct Weekly Standard, whose Bill Kristol started The Bulwark with fellow Never Trump conservative Charlie Sykes following the Standard's demise.

"Two long-time conservative Fox News commentators have resigned in protest of what they call a pattern of incendiary and fabricated claims by the network's opinion hosts in support of former President Donald Trump. In separate interviews with NPR, Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg pointed to a breaking point earlier this month: network star Tucker Carlson's three-part series on the January 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol that relied on fabrications and conspiracy theories to exonerate the Trump supporters who participated in the attack."

Goldberg and Hayes, Folkenflik notes, became "mainstays" of Bret Baier's "Special Report" when Fox News hired them in 2009. And together, Goldberg and Hayes started the conservative website The Dispatch.

Goldberg, interviewed by NPR, said of "Patriot Purge," Carlson's three-part series, "It's basically saying that the Biden regime is coming after half the country, and this is the War on Terror 2.0. It traffics in all manner of innuendo and conspiracy theories that I think legitimately could lead to violence. That, for me and for Steve, was the last straw."

Speaking to NPR, Hayes was vehemently critical of Fox News for airing promotional videos for Carlson's "Patriot Purge" series.

"I thought it was irresponsible to put that out into the public airwaves," Hayes told NPR. "The trailer (for the series) basically gave people the impression that the U.S. government was coming after all patriots — half of the country, in the word of one of the protagonists in the piece. And that the federal government was going to be using the tools and tactics that it used to go after Al-Qaida. And that's not happening. That's not true."

Hayes continued, "It's a narrative that's contradicted by certainly the vast collection of legal documents charging those who participated in January 6, the broad reporting by a wide variety of news outlets on what happened on January 6 then and in the time since — andcontradicted in part by Fox News' own news site and the reporting that people on the news side have done."

READ:Trump lawyer who tried to overturn the 2020 election gets named to US Election Assistance Commission cleta

Goldberg also told NPR,"Being a Fox contributor is kind of a brass ring in conservative and right-wing circles, and I was well-compensated. I'm not looking to be a martyr or ask for pity or any of that kind of stuff. But it's a significant financial hit, for sure.And it's also cutting yourself off from a very large audience. We don't regret the decision, but we found it regrettable that we had to make the decision."

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah1.asp

horo

i don't get beef

August 20, 2018

David Horowitz versus Jonah Goldberg

Here:

The posture of these NeverTrumpers is transparently self-serving. It preserves their intellectual credentials as “conservatives,” and simultaneously takes them out of the line of fire from an increasingly vicious Left whose goal is to destroy Trump and his presidency, and—incidentally—conservative America. Sitting on the fence affords them new career opportunities—appearances on CNN and MSNBC and columns in the New York Times. All that’s required is that they avoid taking sides in the political war that is engulfing the country. All this reminds me of a memorable Trotsky sneer about liberals, whom he accused of being reluctant to step into the stream of political conflict because they were afraid to get their moral principles wet.

Right. The principles of the Never-Trumpers are for discussion but not for implementation. The members of the bow-tie brigade love to yap and scribble, and they do it at a very high level, as witness Goldberg's Suicide of the West, which I recommend to you for its insights; but they wilt at the prospect of bringing their principles to bear upon political reality and "getting them wet."

Up until now I had considered Goldberg to be the least offensive of the Never-Trumpers, but having read Horowitz's piece, Goldberg has dropped a notch in my estimation.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/conservative-**jonah-goldbergs-fraudulent-claim-that-fascism-is-really-a-left-wing-phenomenon-**will-not-die-more-than-a-decade-later/

Jonah Goldberg just keeps inspiring people—whether he intends to or not.

Take Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, for example. Earlier this week, after visiting a Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Bolsonaro was asked whether he agreed with comments made by his foreign minister claiming that the Nazis of Germany were “leftists.”

He did: “There is no doubt, right?” he said to reporters. He added that the appearance of theword “socialist”in the Nazis’ official party name proved it.

The museum he had just visited, however, isclear about the matter, telling visitors at its website that the German Nazi party arose out of “radical right-wing groups” in Europe.

Where would Bolsonaro get such ideas? He didn’t credit anyone, but the ultimate lineage of this idea really belongs to Goldberg. Perhaps, secondarily and more contemporarily, he’s been absorbing the derivative work of Dinesh d’Souza.

Worst of all, he is far from alone. From Charlottesville to Portland to Christchurch, we’re awash in the effects of a resurgent white-nationalist movement that considers the “liberal smear” that fascism was a right-wing movement further evidence of a “cultural Marxist” campaign against white Western civilization.

D’Souza’s book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left—which has been a bestseller, despite having been systematically dismantled by everyone from Ross Douthat to Mark Bray to Kevin M. Kruse and exposed as a risible fraud from start to finish—was in fact, as Douthat suggests, essentially a dumbed-down, frat-boy repackaging of Goldberg’s 2008 best-seller, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. D’Souza also made a slickly produced “documentary” pursuing this thesis further, titled Death of a Nation.

Indeed, it seems that even though Goldberg has been previously supportive of d’Souza’s work—including appearing in, as well helping to promote, his previous film, Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party, which in fact includes his earliest iteration of the “Nazis were leftists” claim—he’s becoming uncomfortable with where the whole thing has been going.

This all came up, I should mention, in the context of a post Goldberg published at National Review’s blog The Corner last weekend, attacking me for a series of tweets in which I had tweaked him recently. But this is an argument dating back more than a decade.

“I am not a fan of Dinesh D’Souza’s effort to take my argument and twist it into the kind of indictment of liberalsNeiwert levels at conservatives or that I was accused of doing,” he wrote.

It was something of a mere side-note to an otherwise long-winded defense of what he has always believed is a deep and subtle argument that partisan simpletons like myself cannot comprehend. But in many ways it encapsulates perfectly the argument we’ve been having for the past decade—the way it caricaturizes my argument en route to building a strawman, the way he shifts the goalposts, and most of all his continued evasion in confronting what his little intellectual exercise has produced in the real world, a la Jair Bolsonaro.

Distancing himself from d’Souza is probably how Goldberg eases some of the resulting cognitive dissonance, but then, unfortunately, there are annoying little ankle-biters like your humble correspondent around to remind him of this evasion. (I also like to remind him that he himself actively helped promote this supposedly bastardized version of his original thesis back when it was Glenn Beck doing it.) Thus the odd way of striking back at a Twitter critic in a forum that lets him not have to deal with the inevitable responses.

The argument dates back to 2008, when I published a harshly negative review of Liberal Fascismat American Prospect,headlined “Jonah Goldberg’s Bizarro History.” As I pointed out at the time, its chief flaw was that it conveniently omitted any consideration of the history and continued presence of actual fascist and neo-Nazi organizations in the American landscape, and their relationship to movement conservatism:

"Beyond the Klan, completely missing from the pages of Goldberg’s book is any mention of the Silver Shirts, the American Nazi Party, the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, or the National Alliance — all of them openly fascist organizations, many of them involved in some of the nation’s most horrific historical events. (The Oklahoma City bombing, for instance, was the product of a blueprint drawn up by the National Alliance’s William Pierce.) Goldberg sees fit to declare people like Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and Hillary Clinton “American fascists,” but he makes no mention of William Dudley Pelley, Gerald L.K. Smith, George Lincoln Rockwell, William Potter Gale, Richard Butler, or David Duke — all of them bona fide fascists: the real thing.

This is a telling omission, because the continuing existence of these groups makes clear what an absurd and nakedly self-serving thing Goldberg’s alternate version of reality is. Why dream up fascists on the left when the reality is that real American fascists have been lurking in the right’s closet for lo these many years? Well, maybe because it’s a handy way of getting everyone to forget that fact.

Goldberg responded, and we had a brief but spirited exchange at our blogs that ended after he decided I was unworthy of his time, which seems to be his most recent conclusion as well. Most of those exchanges can be found at my old blog *Orcinus,*though most of Goldberg’s original retorts seem to have vanished into the ether.

I remained dismayed at seeing how readily Goldberg’s fundamentally fraudulent thesis not only spread into the mainstream but became a kind of received wisdom among movement conservatives, especially because I was fully aware how dimly real historians of fascism viewed this work. So in 2010 I organized a group of them into a forum to air their grievances with Goldberg’s book at History News Network. We invited Goldberg to participate, and he did offer one relatively meek attempt at rebuttal that mostly complained about my participation and how mean everyone was to him.

[Note: Goldberg’s claim in his Corner post that I “tried valiantly to exclude me from it at the time” is just a straight-up lie. I eagerly welcomed his participation. I wrote to Rick Schenkman, the HNN.com editor at the time, to ask if he could recall me doing any such thing, and he replied he couldn’t recollect anything either way.]

Our most recent exchange on Twitter began when Goldberg rebukedRep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her recent remarks about “economic injustice” being closely connected to “environmental justice,” which Goldberg dismissed as “Embarrassing hogwash.”

AOC’s remarks might have the odor of liberal cant, but they also have a factual grounding reflected in serious academic work—unlike certain hoax theses I could name. So I tweeted back the same phrase to him, accompanied by a mock cover of his book and his own core thesis, from those pages: “Fascism, properly understood, is a not a phenomenon of the right at all. It is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left.”

Goldberg winced: “David, I’m sorry I’m your white whale.”

I answered: “As long as your hoax thesis continues to pollute our discourse — thanks, in recent years, no small part to the @DineshDSouza permutation of it — I will remain compelled to call it out for the toxic nonsense that it is, Jonah.”

His reply: “I don’t like what Dinesh did with my book. But I still think you’re essentially a shill talking up your business model rather than dealing with my actual arguments. You’ve acted in bad faith for over a decade now. It’s kind of sad.”

The next day, obviously still irritated, he subtweeted a response that didn’t actually link to me, but which of course I saw anyway:

Me: Conservatism/classical liberalism in the Anglo-American tradition = limited government, sovereignty of the individual, moral and religious traditionalism, and free market economics. Therefore fascism is not “right wing.”

Left wing obsessive: HOW DARE YOU, YOU IDIOT!?

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) March 31, 2019

This occasioned my response pointing to our long-ago debates that in turn drove him to reply to me at The Corner. It was classic Goldberg, really, as I’ve noted before:

"One of the more striking aspects of Goldberg’s dishonesty is how he manipulates his definitions in self-serving fashion that lets him move the goalposts at will, as though we were playing Calvinball. John Cole calls this “the Goldberg Principle”: “You can prove any thesis to be true if you make up your own definitions of words.” For instance, his operative definition of fascism is actually just the generic definition for totalitarianism, and it omits entirely the special characteristics that distinguish fascism from other forms of totalitarianism. One of these, for instance, is its overpowering, indeed dominant, antiliberalism – a fact that Goldberg conveniently omitted from throughout his entire 400 or so pages, and later dismissed by claiming that the “liberalism” it opposed was not modern liberalism, but classical liberalism (as though the two have no connection whatever).

All of the classic Jonah tactics—building strawmen, arguing from self-created/self-serving definitions that counter consensual reality, moving the goalposts, gliding over damning counter-evidence and considerations he considers irrelevant—were present in that little aside in which he again tossed d’Souza under the Jonahbus: He characterizes d’Souza’s output as “the kind of indictment of liberals Neiwert levels at conservatives.”

And what kind of indictment was that? According to Goldberg, it was that “his definition of Fascism must indict American conservatives — and only American conservatives.”

This is complete and utter rubbish, of course, because this is never what I’ve argued. I have insisted all along that fascism must be understood as a phenomenon of the right and not the left NOT because I have a project of smearing all conservatives by association, as Goldberg has assumed and insisted for a decade without an iota of evidence, but because it is the very real frame that helps the public understand how fascism can infect our politics.

You know, like most people, I recognize that there’s a spectrum of behavior, and that mainstream conservatives are distinct from right-wing extremists. Or at least were at one time.

Indeed, I’ve argued for many years—as a onetime Republican from Idaho myself—that it’s essential for mainstream conservatives to publicly oppose the radical right because their denunciations carry more weight with the intended audience. Unfortunately, I can’t say I’ve been able to persuade any mainstream conservatives to join that cause, but that may be a product of my pleasing personality.

I do know that when I first began reporting on the Aryan Nations and The Order in the 1980s, followed by Ruby Ridge and the militia movement in the ‘90s, it wasn’t considered a partisan thing at all to do this reportage. It was simple common sense that we needed to shine a spotlight on hate groups and the poisons they bring to communities, not just among people on the left but among communities of faith and chambers of commerce too, all of whom understood that hate is bad for communities.

At one time, Goldberg composed a theory about what kind of person I must be:

Here’s my grand theory about this guy. He’s made his career hyping the terrible threat from the Posse Comitatus, Aryan Nations and American Nazi Party and so like the bureaucrats in Office Space who think TPS reports are the most important thing in the world, he can’t seem to grasp that they’re pretty trivial.

In other words, he came to his understanding of fascism by following bands of racist white losers in the Idaho woods while using some Marxist tract or other as a field guide to identify the various species he encountered. In other words, he’s internalized every cliché and propagandistic talking point I set out to demolish in my book. Moreover, his career depends on maintaining his version of the fascist peril. So, he’s banging his spoon on his highchair a lot because my book undercuts his whole reason for being.

This is what Goldberg means when he dismissively references my “business model”. But as I noted at the time, I wasn’t reading any Marxist tracts to frame my work: I was listening to what these guys were preaching to their crowds and pitching to their recruits. If the neo-Nazis of the Aryan Nations were not definably fascist because of what they preached and not because they were “bad guys,” then the term no longer has any meaning. Which I suspect is Goldberg’s intent all along.

More to the point, they were right-wing—but extremists, as opposed to mainstream. They not only opposed abortion, they believed providers should be executed. They not only resisted civil rights for minorities, they sought to exclude nonwhites from their rights. They not only opposed gay rights, they believed gays should be put to death. Sometimes their views could be indistinguishable from a mainstream conservative, but the body of beliefs put them on the far right. I learned this from talking with and listening to people.

Fascism in reality—as I know it in its on-the-ground American variant, not a theoretical version cooked up as an intellectual exercise—is a kind of right-wing populism turned metastatic, unleashing an authoritarian tide, fueled by a belief in a phoenix-like national rebirth, that uses violence in defense of business interests, established authorities and leaders, and against perceived liberal enemies. I know this from reporting on what they say and do for 30 years, not because I’ve been influenced by some unknown Marxist texts.

But I have researched them deeply over the years in hopes of understanding them. And their orientation has never been in question. Fascism is fundamentally right-wing in large part because it is fundamentally anti-left. As George Orwell wrote, “the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human inequality, the superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world.”

Of course, Jonah’s assumptions notwithstanding, not only am I utterly unflummoxed by Goldberg’s ready recitation of various facts about how many contemporaneous liberals and progressives flirted with fascist ideas, and how many left-wing ideas were woven into the early fascist appeals (thus the National Socialist Party business), but I’ve always acknowledged their existence, dating back to that first review in the Prospect.

Goldberg, however, accords them more weight than most historians, who have good reason for taking a broader view of these strands as part of the natural complexity of human ideas and their history. As Robert Paxton explained, placing undue weight on fascists’ (frequently misleading) words and propaganda is a categorical mistake, since the reality of their political base and orientation is revealed by their real-world deeds:

"Goldberg simply omits those parts of fascist history that fit badly with his demonstration. His method is to examine fascist rhetoric, but to ignore how fascist movements functioned in practice. Since the Nazis recruited their first mass following among the economic and social losers of Weimar Germany, they could sound anti-capitalist at the beginning. Goldberg makes a big thing of the early programs of the Nazi and Italian Fascist Parties, and publishes the Nazi Twenty-five Points as an appendix. A closer look would show that the Nazis’ anti-capitalism was a selective affair, opposed to international capital and finance capital, department stores and Jewish businesses, but nowhere opposed to private property per se or favorable to a transfer of all the means of production to public ownership.

A still closer look at how the fascist parties obtained power and then exercised power would show how little these early programs corresponded to fascist practice. Mussolini acquired powerful backing by hiring his black-shirted squadristi out to property owners for the destruction of socialist and Communist unions and parties. They destroyed the farm workers’ organizations in the Po Valley in 1921-1922 by violent nightly raids that made them the de facto government of northeastern Italy. Hitler’s brownshirts fought Communists for control of the streets of Berlin, and claimed to be Germany’s best bulwark against the revolutionary threat that still appeared to be growing in 1932. Goldberg prefers the abstractions of rhetoric to all this history, noting only that fascism and Communism were “rivals.” So his readers will not learn anything about how the Nazis and Italian Fascists got into power or exercised it.

The bottom line: Does toying with the concept of “liberal fascism” as an intellectual exercise enhance the public’s understanding of fascism—or does it confuse it, in effect destroying it with Newspeak-like negation? After all, given that its antiliberalism is universally understood as an essential component of the complex phenomenon fascism can be, it’s an obvious kind of oxymoron, as useful an idea as “hateful love.”

I’d argue that not only has the latter happened, but the muddied waters have obscured the incoming white nationalist tide—which Goldberg now says he despises, but whose growing presence he really doesn’t really want to acknowledge. So, naturally, he accuses me of being pleased that the alt-right has arisen and spread, when my eternal and ongoing dismay is already well established.

But Goldberg’s idea—that fascism is really a left-wingphenomenon—has been part of that incoming tide. Some of that, of course, is attributable to d’Souza. But the combined effect of Goldberg’s foundation-laying and d’Souza’s sheer demagoguery has meant that the idea of a “fascist left” is everywhere now, particularly among the “Patriot” militias, the Proud Boys, and the alt-lite media mavens who defend them avidly as victims of an insidious antifascist movement.

And now even South American right-wing strongmen are parroting it.

Dan Schneider, executive director of the American Conservative Union, told attendees at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 23 that members of the alt-right are “anti-Semites, they are racists, they are sexists.” (The Washington Post)

Richard Spencer, a founder of the alt-right movement that seeks a whites-only state and that strongly backed Donald Trump for president, was expelled from the Conservative Political Action Conference after being criticized from its main stage, then giving interviews to a growing crowd of reporters.

“People want to talk to me,” Spencer told NBC News from outside the Gaylord National Harbor complex. “They don’t want to talk to these boring conservatives. They want to learn about ideas whose time has come, not whose time has passed.”

Spencer, who has frequently attended CPAC without incident, became a minor media sensation during and after the 2016 election. One of the first speeches at this year’s conference challenged the media to stop referring to the alt-right as conservative.

“There is a sinister organization that is trying to worm its way into our ranks,” said Dan Schneider, the executive director of the American Conservative Union, which runs CPAC. “We must not be deceived by [a] hateful, left-wing fascistgroup.”

There was an irony to Spencer’s expulsion on the same day the conference featured White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, the former CEO of Breitbart News, who once called the site “the platform for the alt-right.”

In 2013 and 2014, Breitbart News sponsored forums on the outskirts of CPAC called “The Uninvited,” featuring guests who were not welcome on the main stage due to controversial views on Islam and immigration.

“I didn’t like ‘the Uninvited,'” said the ACU’s president, Matt Schlapp, introducing Bannon with White House Chief of Staff Reince Preibus. “Everybody’s a part of our conservative family.”

But not Spencer, apparently. Over seven tense, perplexing minutes, Schneider argued that the alt-right was philosophically left-wing because it departed from a conservatism in which “the individual” was sovereign.

“They hate the Constitution. They hate free markets. They hate pluralism,” Schneider said. “Fascists tend to want big government control.”

The argument wasn’t unique to Schneider.In 2009’s “Liberal Fascism,” the National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg drew a zigging line from the fascism of the 1930s to the welfare state liberalism of the Clinton/Obama era.

But inside the main ballroom of CPAC, the argument didn’t generate much applause. Some in the audience cheered the denunciation of “left-wing fascism,” while a few listeners walked out....

mayer hit

Friday, Jan 22, 2016· 8:21:12 AM PST · WeAreKochs

Jonah Goldberg, from the National Review, just published two critical pieces about Jane Mayer’s new book, on the National Review website and NewsMax. At the end of the National Review article, it says:

Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review.

The National Review Institute has directly received money from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and DonorsTrust.

Also, just a reminder: according to SourceWatch:

David H. Koch is on the American Enterprise Institute's National Council, whose members "serve as ambassadors for AEI, providing AEI with advice, insight, and guidance as [it] looks to reach out to new friends across the country."

Between 2002 and 2013, the American Enterprise Institute received a total of $867,289 in funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation.

It looks like SourceWatch retrieved the AEI National Council page back in 2014. Looking at the current National Council page, we are unable to locate David H. Koch’s name.

Friday, Jan 22, 2016 · 8:59:31 PM PST · WeAreKochs

Jonah Goldberg’s defense of the Kochs, from his perches at the Koch-funded AEI and Koch-funded National Review Institute, has now been published in the New York Post.

Tuesday, Jan 26, 2016 · 10:00:23 PM PST · WeAreKochs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Jonah_Goldberg

talk mostly supportive, no need to clarify pinochet evil? but someone asks brochure

Candidate for deletion ?[

Jonah has apparently decided to write book a where he compares liberals to Nazis on the basis of their shared love of homosexuals, animal rights, vegetarian diets and socialist policies, among other things.]

Jonah Goldberg (born 1970) is a writer for the National Review Online and the Jewish World Review. He covered the 2004 Republican National Convention for USA Today and frequently appears as a television commentator.

Liberal Fascism (2009)](http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Jonah_Goldberg#Liberal_Fascism_.282009.29)

Liberal Fascism (2009)

In 2009, Goldberg published the book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the Left From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Writing in the Guardian UK" Nick Cohen finds much to admire in a blistering attack on liberalism." [1]

The History News Network published a number of reviews of this book from various political pespectives, see.

Quotes

"John Kerry is a sphincter. Okay, that's a bit juvenile." [2]

"I suppose in John Kerry's world good diplomacy lets the boys in the bar finish raping the girl for fear of causing a fuss. Okay, that was unfair." [3]

What others say

Goldberg recently disparaged Prof Juan Cole in one of his columns, and followed-up abusive comments in a blog. Cole replied:

I think it is time to be frank about some things. Jonah Goldberg knows absolutely nothing about Iraq. I wonder if he has even ever read a single book on Iraq, much less written one. He knows no Arabic. He has never lived in an Arab country. He can't read Iraqi newspapers or those of Iraq's neighbors. He knows nothing whatsoever about Shiite Islam, the branch of the religion to which a majority of Iraqis adheres. Why should we pretend that Jonah Goldberg's opinion on the significance and nature of the elections in Iraq last Sunday matters? It does not.

Jonah Goldberg was a cheerleader for the unprovoked, unilateral US attack on Iraq. The reason he repeatedly gave was that Iraq was close to having a nuclear weapon.…

Extremist rightwing hawks like Jonah Goldberg used their privileged position as pundits to terrify the US public that Iraq was a threat to the US. He repeatedly said in the buildup to the war that Iraq was a menace to the US, and he repeatedly brought up North Korea's nuclear weapons as a reason for a preemptive attack on Iraq.

Iraq never has had nuclear weapons. Iraq never has been as close as two decades from having nuclear weapons. Iraq dismantled all vestiges of its rudimentary and exploratory nuclear weapons research in 1991. Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program in 1992, 1993 and all the way until 2002, when Jonah Goldberg assured us Americans that we absolutely had to invade Iraq to stop it from imminently becoming a nuclear power just like North Korea.

By the way, I am in print in January 2003 saying that I did not believe Iraq posed a danger to the United States. It did not.

If Jonah Goldberg had asserted that he could fly to Mars in his pyjamas and come back in a single day, it would not have been a more fantastic allegation than the one he made about Iraq being a danger to the United States because of the nuclear issue. He made that allegation over and over again to millions of viewers on national television programs, to viewers who trusted his judgment because CNN and others purveyed him to them.

Jonah Goldberg is a fearmonger, a warmonger, and a demagogue. And besides, he was just plain wrong about one of the more important foreign policy issues to face the United States in the past half-century. It is shameful that he dares show his face in public, much less continuing to pontificate about his profound knowledge of just what Iraq is like and what needs to be done about Iraq and the significance of events in Iraq.

…

So let me propose to him that we debate Middle East issues, anywhere, any time, he and I. Otherwise he should pleaseshut up and go back to selling Linda Tripp tapes on Ebay.

—Juan Cole, Jonah Goldberg Embarrasses Himself Once Again, February 5, 2005.

Bottom and digging: the spat continues…

Although Cole has exposed Goldberg's ignorance pertaining the Middle East, what is remarkable is that Goldberg proves that he is a glutton for punishment:

Goldberg seems to like embarrassing himself, so he won't let go.

Let us see what has been established. First, I alleged that Goldberg has never read a book about Iraq, about which he keeps fulminating. I expected him at least to lie in response, the way W. did when similarly challenged on his book-reading. I expected Goldberg to say, "That is not true! I have read Phebe Marr's book on modern Iraq from cover to cover and know all about the 1963 failed Baathist coup!" But Goldberg did not respond in this way. I conclude that I was correct, and he has never read a book on this subject.

I am saying I do not understand why CNN or NPR would hire someone to talk about Iraq policy who has not read a book on the subject under discussion. Actually, of course, it would be desirable that he had read more than one book. Books are nice. They are rectangular and soft and have information in them. They can even be consumed on airplanes. Goldberg should try one.

Goldberg is now saying that he did not challenge my knowledge of the Middle East, but my judgment. I take it he is saying that his judgment is superior to mine. But how would you tell whose judgment is superior? Of course, all this talk of "judgement" is code for "political agreement." Progressives think that other progressives have good judgment, conservatives think that other conservatives have good judgment. This is a tautology in reality. Goldberg believes that I am wrong because I disagree with him about X, and anyone who disagrees with him is wrong, and ipso facto lacks good judgment.

An argument that judgment matters but knowledge does not is profoundly anti-intellectual. It implies that we do not need ever to learn anything in order make mature decisions. We can just proceed off some simple ideological template and apply it to everything. This sort of thinking is part of what is wrong with this country. We wouldn't call a man in to fix our plumbing who knew nothing about plumbing, but we call pundits to address millions of people on subjects about which they know nothing of substance.

But I did not say that Goldberg's judgment is always faulty. I said he doesn't at the moment know what he is talking about when it comes to Iraq and the Middle East, and there is no reason anyone should pay attention to what he thinks about those subjects, as a result. If judgment means anything, it has to be grounded in at least a minimum amount of knowledge. Part of the implication of my assertion is that Goldberg could actually improve his knowledge of the Middle East and consequently could improve his judgment about it (although increased knowledge would only help judgment if it were used honestly and analytically). I don't think he is intrinsically ignorant, I think he is being wilfully ignorant. He'd be welcome to get a sabbatical and come study with me for a year some time.

—Juan Cole, "Goldberg v. Cole Redux", Informed Comment, February 8, 2005.

External Resources

Inda Schaenen, "The jester of Monicagate", Salon, September 1998.

Category:

Nuclear PR

date? brochure?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Goldberg

Jonah Jacob Goldberg (born March 21, 1969) is an American conservative syndicated columnist,^[1] author, political analyst, and commentator. Goldberg has written about politics and culture for the Los Angeles Times, where he is a weekly opinion columnist, and is a senior editor at National Review.^[2][3] He is slated to depart National Review during the summer of 2019, while continuing his fellowship at the National Review Institute, in order to become founding editor at a competing online opinion and news entity.^[4][5][6] Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller shortly after its release in January 2008,^[7] The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, released in 2012,^[8] and Suicide of the West, which was published in April 2018 and also became a New York Times bestseller, reaching #5 on the list the following month.^[9][10]

Goldberg is also a regular contributor on news networks such as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, appearing on various television programs including Good Morning America, Nightline, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Real Time with Bill Maher, Larry King Live, Your World with Neil Cavuto, the Glenn Beck Program, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Goldberg is an occasional guest on a number of Fox News shows such as The Five, The Greg Gutfeld Show, and Outnumbered. He is also a frequent panelist on Special Report with Bret Baier. From 2006 to 2010, Goldberg was a frequent participant on bloggingheads.tv. Goldberg also makes an appearance in Dinesh D'Souza's 2016 film Hillary's America.

Early life and career[

Goldberg was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Lucianne Cummings (now Goldberg), a literary agent, and Sidney Goldberg, who passed in 2005, an editor and media executive.^[11][12] In speaking about his upbringing, Goldberg has said that his mother is an Episcopalian and that his father was Jewish and that he was raised Jewish.^[13][14] After graduating high school in 1987, Goldberg left New York City to attend Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, from which he earned his bachelor's in 1991. Goldberg's class at Goucher, which was a women's college until 1986, was the second to admit men.^[15] While at Goucher, Goldberg was active in student politics and served as the co-editor of the school newspaper, The Quindecim, for two years. Goldberg and Andreas Benno Kollegger were the first men to run the paper. He later interned for Scripps Howard News Service, United Press International, and other news organizations.^[when?] He also worked for Delilah Communications, a publishing house in New York.^[when?]

After graduating, Goldberg taught English in Prague for less than a year before moving to Washington D.C. in 1992 to take a job at the American Enterprise Institute.^[16]While at AEI he worked for Ben J. Wattenberg. He was the researcher for Wattenberg's nationally syndicated column and for Wattenberg's book, Values Matter Most. He also worked on several PBS public affairs documentaries, including a two-hour special hosted by David Gergen and Wattenberg.^[] Goldberg was also invited to serve on Goucher College's Board of Trustees immediately after graduating in 1991, a position he held for three years.^[17]

In 1994, Goldberg became a founding producer for Wattenberg's Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg. That same year he moved to New River Media, an independent television production company, which produced "Think Tank" as well as numerous other television programs and projects. Goldberg worked on a large number of television projects across the United States, as well as in Europe and Japan. He wrote, produced, and edited two documentaries for New River Media, Gargoyles: Guardians of the Gate and Notre Dame: Witness to History.

He joined National Review as a contributing editor in 1998. By the end of that year he was asked to launch National Review Online (NRO) as a sister publication to National Review. He served as editor of NRO for several years and later became editor-at-large.^[]

Clinton–Lewinsky scandal[

Goldberg's career as a pundit was launched following his mother Lucianne Goldberg's role in the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, when he wrote about the "media siege" on his mother's apartment in The New Yorker.^[18][19] Goldberg has spoken of his mother and the Lewinsky scandal:

My mother was the one who advised Linda Tripp to record her conversations with Monica Lewinsky and to save the dress. I was privy to some of that stuff, and when the administration set about to destroy Lewinsky, Tripp, and my mom, I defended my mom and by extension Tripp ... I have zero desire to have those arguments again. I did my bit in the trenches of Clinton's trousers.^[20]

These tapes became the focal point of the Lewinsky scandal. Goldberg was privy to the tapes and the conversations his mother had with Tripp because he served as a vice president of his mother's now-defunct literary agency.

Current work[

Goldberg is a senior editor and has a twice-weekly column at National Review, which is syndicated to numerous papers across the United States, and at Townhall.com. National Review consists of fellow contributors such as Ramesh Ponnuaru, Richard Brookhiser, and Dinesh D'Souza.^[21]Writing for National Review and other publications[

Goldberg also writes the "Goldberg File"^[22] at National Review, a column that is generally lighter and more focused on humor and cultural commentary. In the column, Goldberg also makes frequent pop-culture references including to Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, of which he has said he is a fan.^[23][24] Goldberg is also a frequent contributor at the National Review blog The Corner, often authoring posts with light-hearted, comedic and pop-culture references. Aside from being a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, he has written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The Public Interest, The Wilson Quarterly, The Weekly Standard, The New York Post, and Slate. The Los Angeles Times added Goldberg to its editorial lineup in 2005.

Online media[

In addition to appearances on Bloggingheads.tv, Goldberg is a frequent participant in programs produced by the center-right Web site Ricochet.com, including the weekly Ricochet Podcast and The Ricochet Roundtable, which features Goldberg, columnist Mark Steyn, and Ricochet co-founder Rob Long. Goldberg has created several short videos for the conservative education website Prager University. His videos focus on topics in political science.^[25] Goldberg is also the host of The Remnant,^[26] an interview podcast focused on different political topics.

Books[

His book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (ISBN 0385511841) was published in January 2008. It reached #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list of hardcover nonfiction in its seventh week on the list.^[27] While in preparation, the book had a number of different subtitles, including "The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods" and "The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton." After being published in paperback, the subtitle was changed to The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change. Some historians have denounced the book as being "poor scholarship,"^[28] "propaganda,"^[29] and not scholarly.^[30] Other reviewers described the book as "provocative"^[31] and "a wealth of challenging insights, backed up by thorough research".^[32] The audiobook version of Liberal Fascism was narrated by Johnny Heller. Goldberg followed the book with The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas in 2012. The paperback edition of Tyranny of Cliches came out on April 30, 2013. Goldberg himself narrated the audiobook version. His most recent work, *Suicide of the West*, was released in 2018.

Pulitzer claim controversy[

In May 2012, Goldberg was touted as a "two-time Pulitzer prize nominee" in the book jacket of his second book, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. This was a misleading claim, as pointed out by NBC News reporter Bill Dedman, because Goldberg had in fact only been an entrant in the Pulitzer contest and had never been nominated as a finalist, as the moniker "Pulitzer nominee" would seem to suggest. Becoming an entrant in the Pulitzer contest requires only that either the author of a written work submit an entry form along with a small fee or that someone else does so on their behalf.^[33] Following Dedman's reporting, Goldberg and his publishing company acknowledged the error and subsequently removed the line from the book jacket .^[34]

Media appearances and commentary[

Frequent topics[

Some frequent topics of his articles include censorship, meritocracy, liberty, federalism and interpretation of the Constitution, his attacks on the ethics and morals of liberals and Democrats, and his disagreements with libertarians also appear often in his writings. He was a supporter of the Iraq War and has advocated American military intervention elsewhere in the world. He has defended historical colonialism in places such as Africa as more beneficial than it is generally given credit for; in one column, he suggested that U.S. imperialism on the continent could help solve its persistent problems.^[35] When he wrote in October 2006 that invading Iraqwas a mistake, he called it a "noble" mistake and still maintained that liberal opponents of the war policy wanted America to fail: "In other words, their objection isn't to war per se; it's to wars that advance U.S. interests. ... I must confess, one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side."^[36]

He popularized and expanded on a commentary by the late Time writer William Henry III. Henry had written on the subject of multiculturalism and cultural equality, stating that "it is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose." Goldberg stated that "[m]ulticulturalism—which is simply egalitarianism wrapped in rainbow-colored paper—has elevated the notion that all ideas are equal, all systems equivalent, all cultures of comparable worth."^[35]

He has criticized the idea of "social justice" as meaning "anything its champions want it to mean" or "'good things' no one needs to argue for and no one dare be against."^[37]

Relations with other writers and public figures[

Goldberg has publicly feuded with people on the political left, like Juan Cole, over U.S. Iraq policy, and Air America Radio commentators such as Janeane Garofalo, who has accused him of being a chickenhawk on the Iraq War. On February 8, 2005, Goldberg offered Cole a wager of $1,000 "that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years' time, agree that the war was worth it."^[38] Cole refused to accept and the wager was never made.^[39] Goldberg later conceded that if Cole had accepted the bet, Cole would have won.^[40]

The news media[

Goldberg and Peter Beinart of The New Republic for a time hosted a conservative vs. liberal webtv show, What's your Problem?, which originally could be found on National Review Online^[42] but has appeared on Bloggingheads.tv^[41] as of 2013.

Regarding Fox News, Goldberg said, "Look, I think liberals have reasonable gripes with Fox News. It does lean to the right, primarily in its opinion programming but also in its story selection (which is fine by me) and elsewhere. But it's worth remembering that Fox is less a bastion of ideological conservatism and more a populist, tabloidy network."^[43]

Goldberg has criticized liberals for disliking Fox News, claiming they have no "problem with the editorializing of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews, they think it's just plain wrong for conservatives to play that game."^[43] Goldberg has referred to Olbermann as "MSNBC's answer to a question no one asked."^[44]

Family and personal life[

Goldberg is married to Jessica Gavora, chief speechwriter and senior policy adviser to former Attorney General John Ashcroft.^[45] They have one daughter. He lives in the Palisades, Washington, D.C. neighborhood.^[46][47] Goldberg's brother, Joshua, died in 2011 from a fall. Goldberg's father, Sidney, died in 2005, and is survived by his mother, Lucianne.^[13]

Authored books[

:{:{

Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy.Crown Publishing Group. 2018. ISBN 978-1101904947.

The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. Penguin books. 2012. ISBN 978-1101572351.

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Crown Publishing Group. 2008. ISBN 9780-385517690.

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American political writer and pundit

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Jonah Jacob Goldberg (born March 21, 1969) is an American conservative syndicated columnist, author, political analyst, and commentator. The founding editor of National Review Online, from 1998 until 2019, he was an editor at National Review. Goldberg writes a weekly column about politics and culture for the Los Angeles Times. In October 2019, Goldberg became the founding editor of the online ...

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