bulwark kristol jr sykes

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primary ez

prolly neglected

see fascism

see lincoln pjt, never trumpers

SEE TIM MILLER

see sykes

former neo-con

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/burn-it-all-down-conservative-calls-for-purge-of-every-single-trump-enabler-in-the-senate/

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an 4 26 Conservative Bill Kristol urges push for 'Mad King' Trump impeachment - Alternet.org

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AN 3 26

President Donald Trump is increasingly unpopular, as the No Kings protests demonstrate — and this means that right now “the public is leading the elites” in standing up for democracy, at least according to one conservative commentator.

“This all ends with enough of us saying no,” conservative commentator William Kristol said on his website The Bulwark on Sunday. “The bad news is that Trump is president for the next almost three years, and in the sense that we don't have a parliamentary system, his poll numbers could go down further and people could turn out even more.”

Kristol added, “But hopefully the elites — I feel like the public is now leading the elites by quite a lot. It's so striking, right? In terms of turning against Trump, you see it in the polls, but also in the turnout for 'No Kings.' And the elitist institutions are still accommodating Trump to a somewhat shocking degree.”

According to polling analyst G. Elliott Morris, an October No Kings event drew at least 5 million people all over America, marking it as the “largest single-day political protest ever.” Even though repeatedly claims he won the 2024 presidential election in a “landslide” (in fact he won the popular vote by roughly 1.5 percent, with less than a majority of 50 percent). MSNBC reporter Antonia Hylton found that one October event in New York City “far exceeded” the original estimated turnout of 200,000.

Kristol, despite being a lifelong conservative Republican, has repeatedly and emphatically criticized Trump for what he argues are the president’s assaults against American democracy. In February, as Trump continued dragging his feet on releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files and said he was “sad” at the arrest of the UK’s former Prince Andrew, Kristol wrote that “there is no evidence the Trump administration has any interest in seeing justice done, or any intention of having the truth come out. We have an executive branch that is on the side of the Epstein class, not the Epstein survivors.”

In February, Kristol praised Americans like Minneapolis residents who protected Trump’s ICE and its brutal deportation of immigrants.

“The American people are better than our current government,” Kristol said. “Civic spirit and enlightened patriotism are by no means dead in the United States. As the people of Minnesota have again reminded us.” He also argued that Trump administration officials do not understand the principles of the American revolution that they claim to honor.

“The administration in which Rubio serves pretends to celebrate that revolution, but hates the abstract truth which animated that revolution and which elevates it above merely another mundane struggle for power or profit,” Kristol said. “The Trump administration hates that fact because it is a reminder that there is more to life than power and profit. And it hates that truth precisely because it remains a stumbling block to tyranny and oppression.”

Kristol has also blisteringly denounced Trump’s rationale, or lack thereof, for declaring war against Iran earlier in March.

“Why did we go to war four days ago?” Kristol asked. “And why are we going to continue this war, apparently for weeks or longer? The Trump administration can’t answer either question.”

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bulwark

klepto expl for policy

3 3 26

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mona+charen+bulwark

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Mar 3, 2026 Bulwark Takes

Will Saletan revisits Tulsi Gabbard’s past warnings that Trump “lied” about ending wars—and compares them to her current role defending new bombings in Iran and moves in Venezuela.

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AN 1 26

In a stark warning on the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second term in office, The Bulwark’s editor, Jonathan V. Last, suggests that under Trump, America may adopt Putinism as its domestic policy, having already adopted it for its foreign policy.

“Will Putinism take over American domestic politics, too?” Last asks, in an opinion piece titled, “This Is the End.”

“America has adopted Putinism as its modus operandi for foreign affairs,” he says. “Why would America not also adopt Putinism in its domestic affairs? Why would the American regime tolerate free and fair elections or the transfer of power to an opposition party?”

Pursuing the question, Last continued: “Are there examples of expansionist, rogue regimes which ignored international law and attempted to subjugate free people abroad, but respected liberal democratic outcomes that terminated their possession of power at home?”

To those who suggest Trumpism is temporary, Last suggests he disagrees.

“Many people comfort themselves by saying some version of ‘Donald Trump is an aberration’ or ‘This isn’t who we are,'” he writes.

But, he continues, “If Trump was an aberration and his actions did not have sufficient public support, then he would be removed from office. There are two mechanisms for doing so—impeachment and the 25th Amendment.”

“Trump will not be removed from office; which allows one of two conclusions. Either: Trump’s policies are supported by a sufficient percentage of Americans to be viable; or America’s constitutional order is so ossified that it no longer functions to safeguard the will of the people.”

“Neither of these is an alibi,” Last warns, noting that, “either one supports the conclusion that the problem is not Trump. It is America and Americans. This is who we are. Like it or not.”

Last also makes several other predictions:

“The days of intelligence sharing between America and our former allies are drawing to a close.”

“The death of NATO.”

“Germany, Poland, and Canada will acquire nuclear weapons. So will Japan. Sweden, Australia, and South Korea may develop nuclear capabilities as well.”

“Europe will draw closer to China.”

“Greenland will become disputed territory.”

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AN 1 26

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Conservative Bulwark Editor Jonathan Last argued there are two groups of President Donald Trump's voters: Those who signed on to deport 20 million immigrants regardless of whether they had committed any crime, and those who signed on with Trump’s plan to remove only immigrants who were criminals.

“Because people are stupid, that first group of voters believed that there were 20 million undocumented immigrants who have committed felonies. This is not possible,” said Last. “The total number of people in jail in America today — this includes federal, state, local, and tribal land prisons — is just under 2 million. The number of undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes cannot be 10x the entire prison population of the United States. If it were, then daily life in America would look like Escape from New York.”

“So, some Trump voters were duped owing to their general ignorance and/or innumeracy. But others were not,” added Last. “Others signed up for Trump because of his second promise (the 20 million deportations) and viewed the first promise (about deporting only criminals) as the pap necessary to get the suckers onboard.”

The question Last wants to answer is how many “dupes” voted for Trump vs the avowed racists who simply want Brown people gone. To get his answer, Last reviewed an AP/NORC poll showing consistent 80 percent support for Trump’s immigration policies among Republicans. Then he compared that to a more recent YouGov poll showing 80 percent of Republicans still "approved" of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement even after they shot and killed 37 year-old U.S. citizen Renee Good in footage that reveals no threat to agents.

“It seems pretty clear that, at best, one in five Trump voters were duped. The majority of them are getting exactly what they wanted,” Last said. "Now if Trump were to lose the support of 20 percent of Republican voters — or even 14 percent — it would be meaningful for Republican electoral prospects. Which is nice. The problem is that having 80 percent of Republican voters actively supporting a fascist race war is meaningful for our societal prospects.”

That’s a lot of racists in one party, said Last, but what’s worse is the tally of avowed racists occupying high federal positions, including “Vice President JD Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem," as indicated by a recent Homeland Security post claiming to seek the deportation of "100 million" deportations.

“There are 43 million foreign-born Americans. Most of them are legal immigrants. In order to perform 100 million deportations, DHS would have to round up every immigrant of any status —even naturalized citizens — and then also snatch 57 million American who are citizens by birth and deport them, too,” said Last.

“Want to guess who those other 57 million Americans might be?” Last asked, before sharing a recent U.S. Department of Labor X post ordering Americans “To remember who you are.” Last said this slogan is a dead ringer from Adolf Hitler’s own iconic “One People, One Country, One Leader” post from the 1940s. Couple that with a volley of blonde, blue-eyed propaganda posts from Trump’s Department of Labor, and you’ve got even more insight.

“On the one hand, it feels weird to say that the U.S. government is attempting some low-key ethnic cleansing,” said Last. “On the other hand, the reality is that we have a masked secret police force going door-to-door attempting to kidnap brown people; one government agency publicly daydreaming about deporting 100 million people; and another government agency saying that the ideal worker is a 20-year-old white guy.”

Last said this information mingles horribly with the White House’s obsession with white Americans’ falling fertility rate and it’s constant citation of “Stuff white people like” including false claims that white men who “did extremely well” in high school are not getting invited to college despite white men having a “significant advantage” during the application process.

Read the Bulwark report at this link.

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AN 1 26

President Donald Trump and senior members of his administration are now openly communicating that the only law they respect is that "might is right." One conservative is warning that Americans should take their words very seriously.

In a Monday article for anti-Trump conservative website The Bulwark, editor Jonathan V. Last pointed to a recent post by far-right social media influencer Matt Walsh justifying the recent capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Walsh referred to Maduro as a "s——little tinpot third world dictator" whose ouster was necessary because he was "harming our country" and "interfering with our national interests."

"'International law' is fake and gay. The only international law is that big and powerful countries get to do what they want," Walsh wrote on X. "It has been that way since the dawn of civilization. It will always be that way. And we are the most powerful country on the planet. It's about time that we start acting like it."

Last also observed that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller made a similar argument in an interview with CNN host Jake Tapper. When Tapper asked him about Trump not ruling out using the U.S. military to seize Greenland from Denmark, Miller defended the president by arguing that powerful countries should be able to assert their authority by force if necessary.

"We live in a world, in the real world ... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power," Miller said. "These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time."

The Bulwark editor doubted if this worldview stopped at international law, and posited that the Trump administration likely viewed domestic laws as able to bent and broken to accommodate the wishes of the powerful. He opined that Trump is "seeking a return to an old international order which antedates the modern, rules-based era" in which global hegemons carve up the world into "spheres of influence where the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must."

"Tell me: Do you think it is impossible that Trump and his revanchists also seek to return America to an old order in which control of the military is control of the government?" He wrote. "He wants Russia and China’s foreign policy. Why would he not also want their domestic policies?"

"[T]he law says that federal agents cannot brutalize the citizenry. But the practical reality is that the federal agents outnumber and outgun local law enforcement. So they cannot be arrested for brutalizing the citizenry," he added. "The law of the jungle is already here."

Click here to read Last's full article for The Bulwark.

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see thom on dei purge 11 14

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an 11 25

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President Donald Trump’s Department of Defense is now targeting a sitting U.S. Senator, one of six Democratic lawmakers who appeared in a video reminding members of the U.S. Armed Forces and the Intelligence Community of their right to refuse to obey an illegal order.

U.S. Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a retired astronaut and former naval officer, along with the other five said, “threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home.”

“Our laws are clear,” they added. “You can refuse illegal orders.”

In an official statement on social media, the Department of Defense alleged it has “received serious allegations of misconduct against Captain Mark Kelly, USN (Ret.).”

It added, “a thorough review of these allegations has been initiated to determine further actions, which may include recall to active duty for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures.” The statement also said, “federal laws such as 18 U.S.C. § 2387 prohibit actions intended to interfere with the loyalty, morale, or good order and discipline of the armed forces.”

President Trump last week in a series of social media posts promoted hanging the six Democrats.

“It’s called seditious behavior at the highest level,” the president also charged. “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be Arrested and put on trial. Their words cannot be allowed to stand – We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example must be set.”

“Seditious behavior, punishable by death!” he continued.

Critics blasted the Pentagon’s move.

“Sen. Kelly didn’t tell troops to defy lawful orders, he reminded them of their duty to refuse unlawful ones, which is literally what the UCMJ and decades of military precedent require!” wrote The Bulwark’s Evan Rosenfeld. “Pretending that doing so is ‘misconduct’ is complete propaganda and not rooted in law.”

Punchbowl News’ Andrew Desiderio called it “Pretty extraordinary to call out a sitting senator in this way.”

The Bulwark’s Sam Stein labeled it “ham-handed,” and Bill Kristol of Defending Democracy called it “Naked authoritarianism.”

But The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg noted that the video “looks to have been an official one for which [Kelly] would enjoy Speech or Debate immunity.”

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AN 10 25

Miles Bruner, a top Republican strategist who "worked inside GOP circles through Trump’stakeover of the party" is quitting the party and encouraging others to do the same, he writes in The Bulwark.

Under President Donald Trump, the Republican party, he writes, has "devolved into a cult of personality that mirrors the worst authoritarian regimes of the last one hundred years."

But Trump hasn't worked alone, Bruner says. "While Trump and his supporters in Congress have been the driving force behind the right’s descent into despotism, it would not have been possible without the thousands of consultants, aides, and politicos working behind the scenes to fully execute their systematic dismantling of American democratic norms," he writes.

For 12 years, Bruner worked in various facets of the GOP, from grassroots voter outreach to digital fundraising.

"I worked inside GOP circles through Trump’s takeover of the party, his initial downfall, and his resurgence in 2023–2024. At every step along the way, I rationalized, compartmentalized, and found excuses to stay tethered to the party, even as I grew to believe it was undermining the foundations of our constitutional republic," he says.

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Bruner says he could no longer rationalize any of it, leading to his decision to leave the party.

"But over the last few months, the compartmentalization and coping stopped working to silence my conscience," he says, using this piece in The Bulwark as his resignation letter.

"I quit. I quit the Republican party and my job as an accomplice to the party in the throes of an authoritarian cult. Today, I resigned from my career as a senior fundraising strategist for one of the leading Republican digital fundraising firms in Washington, D.C," he says.

Bruner says his decision was twofold: "first, to shed light on why someone would continue to work for an increasingly corrupt and authoritarian political party despite their divergent ethical and political beliefs; second, to convince any number of consultants, staffers, and former colleagues to follow their consciences and leave with their integrity still intact."

Bruner says that he wasn't fully on board with Trump at all in the beginning and he didn't take him seriously either.

"The thinking was that Trump’s candidacy was a joke—why alienate the sliver of voters Trump was holding when he’d be out of the race in a few months? From that point on, my anxiety began to fester," he says.

As political coordinator for Republican Janet Nguyen’s state senate campaign in California, Bruner says they were horrified at the Charlottesville, Virginia white supremacist rally which Trump excused with that now infamous "good people on both sides" statement.

"We buried the condemnation of Trump on Twitter, believing that fewer of her Republican supporters would see it," Bruner says, but within minuTes, Nguyen was attacked by Trump supporters.

"It was the first time I should have drawn the line and said I quit. But, again, I stayed," he said. And it weighed on him.

"The emotional and mental weight one feels when one’s career suddenly conflicts with one’s beliefs," he says. But when a new job came along, Bruner found himself deeper in the Trump world.

"In my new position, I became enmeshed in the D.C. Republican consulting ecosystem that was now fully orbiting around Trump," he says, and his clients were "100 percent pro-MAGA."

After President Joe Biden won and theJanuary 6insurrection at the Capitol happened, Bruner thought Trump would go into exile at his Palm Beach country club "as a political pariah."

As Bruner's career took off during the years after, which went by "uneventfully," Bruner writes, "at a superficial level and putting my ethics aside, I was living the life I had imagined having as a teenager."

And it wasn't Trump that broke him out of his "comfortable cocoon," Bruner says. "Rather, it was the rightward lurch of theSupreme Court and the lengths to which the right was willing to go to undermine established legal precedents and access to reproductive rights."

Bruner says it was his and his wife's experience trying to start a family that broke him out of his staunch pro-life stance and he "slowly became pro-choice."

To a degree, I understood the selfishness of my reaction. I had been willing to work in a system and for a party that had allowed rulings like these to take hold—that had celebrated them, in fact—only to find it unbearable when I felt personally attacked," he admits.

"It is not to excuse my actions that I note that sometimes a personal experience is what it takes for an awakening like this to occur," he adds.

That's when he began plotting his exit from the Republican party, and while he previously excused Trump's role on Jan. 6, "his lack of leadership during the COVID pandemic," and his "migrants are rapists tirade," Bruner says "our nation has arrived at a moment in its history where staying silent for personal comfort isn’t an option anymore."

"I know now that if I continue to stay, I won’t be able to explain to my children why I didn’t take a stand when I had the chance," he says. "I wish I had realized this sooner and I applaud my colleagues who did so long before me."

Bruner's clarion call encourages those who care about the country to speak out and do something.

"If you believe in this country now is the time to refuse to ferry its destruction for a tainted livelihood. Take a stand. Speak out. Show your pride as an American who believes in the Constitution and the values we grew up with. Today, I quit allowing my complacency to destroy America, and I urge you to quit, too."

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AN 10 25}:

Barbara F. Walter, author of “How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, warned Sunday that democracy in the United States is in decline and President Donald Trump could create "fake emergencies" to intensify his campaign against his opponents.

Speaking ata podcast on*The Bulwark*posted Sunday morning, Walter said, "I think American democracy is in a really sad place, actually. It's in a place of democratic decline. It's probably likely in the near future to be in a place of economic decline. And these are things that are not going to turn around anytime soon. If you look at the underlying conditions for political violence, the United States, unfortunately, has all of them right now."

She continued: "Political violence tends to happen in countries with weak and declining democracy, especially democracies that are changing rapidly and moving more and more towards autocracy. We call those anocracies, and that's actually the most dangerous place to be. Full, healthy democracies almost never experience political violence."

She added that hardcore autocracies rarely experience political violence, and most of the violence happens in the middle.

"And since January 2025 of this year, America's democracy has declined faster than it ever has in its history. And it's declined faster than democracy in any other advanced industrialized democracy in the world," she added.

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Likening Trump to a "wannabe dictator," Walter said the president could use "fake emergencies" to "clamp down on citizens."

"These types of sort of fake emergencies allow these wannabe dictators to declare a state of emergency, declare martial law, and basically just clamp down on citizens so that citizens aren't allowed to leave their homes," she said.

She added: "There's curfews. Soldiers are now patrolling the streets. There's roadblocks. And this effectively ends democracy. So people were saying, okay, is theCharlie Kirk murder, and in particular, the Republican Party's reaction to it, that this is almost a declaration of war by the left. People were worried that that would be that type of situation."

Walter also warned that Trump does not see the American constitution as an impediment.

"I don't think Trump sees the Constitution as an impediment in any way. [Viktor] Orban did not see Hungary's Constitution as an impediment. He simply changed it. Netanyahu doesn't see Israel's Constitution as an impediment. You know, these guys are bullies and strongmen, and they just push their way through and see if anybody stops them," she said.

The analyst noted that following conservative activist Charlie Kirk's murder, many expected a war on the left by the Trump administration, but it didn't play out that way. The administration, she argued, is now looking for a bigger reason to ramp up its efforts to go after its opponents.

"The Trump administration isn't ready to declare a state of emergency and to basically take control of the potential hotspots for opposition. Those hotspots for opposition are going to be America's big cities," she said.

Walter added: "It's hard for most Americans to feel deeply threatened because an outspoken activist on the right was killed. They might be horrified by it. They might desperately wish it never happens again, but they don't feel personally threatened by it. And for people to be willing to give up their rights and freedoms to say, 'okay, martial law is okay with me.' They have to be, they have to truly believe that their and their family safety is threatened. And Charlie Kirk's murder didn't do that. So it's going to have to be something bigger than that," she said, noting that Trump is still trying to "create a situation" where he can "suddenly grab all power."

"That's where you have most of the people who disagree with Trump, feel threatened by Trump. And he doesn't have his soldiers in place there. He started to do that in Washington, D.C., in Los Angeles, and he tried to do that in Chicago. But he's not ready for the moment to sort of pull the trigger," she said.

Asked if this democratic backsliding could lead to a civil war in the U.S., Walter said, "So the main point I want to make is that citizens are much more powerful than they think they are. There's over 330 million of us. You know, think back to your time at school in the schoolyard. You know, everybody's seen bullies operate and and they see what happens when the you know, the kids in the schoolyard, dozens of them, just stand up."

She continued: "Bullies tend to wither. We have 300 and, you know, over 330 million Americans. And if we just in our own separate individual ways, simply just started silently and peacefully resisting, not voluntarily complying when we're told that to do something that's illegal .So there's a whole series of things. And then protest is the greatest tool," she added.

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AN 9 25 BULWARK

Bulwark writer Philip Rotner says American law did not account for a bad-faith actor in the Oval Office, and it shows.

“Time and again in just eight months back in office, Donald Trump has advanced norm-busting assertions of presidential power far beyond anything ever attempted — or even dreamed of — by his predecessors,” said Rotner, referring to Trump declaring national emergencies that would typically require congressional approval or regulatory review. This include his unilateral tariffs, sending the military to Los Angeles, federalizing the Washington, D.C. police force, militarizing the southern border, ending birthright citizenship, deporting foreign students, targeting colleges and law firms and destroying the independence of administrative agencies.

“As tempting as it may be to call these actions ‘blatantly illegal,’ the truth is actually worse,” said Rotner. “The constitutional and statutory ambiguities Trump is attempting to exploit really do exist. Indeed, strategic ambiguity has until recently generally been viewed as a feature, not a bug, of our legal system.”

Rotner said the Constitution is framed in generalized language, with phrases like “due process” and “equal protection” left largely undefined. But broad, nonprescriptive constitutional and statutory language is only a virtue when the American public puts good-faith actors in the White House. In the hands of a bad-faith leader, strategic ambiguity becomes a weapon.

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“Trump is a bad-faith actor with a wide authoritarian streak,” Rotner said. “He is systematically testing the limits of the law, probing for soft spots, loopholes, and ambiguities to increase his power and provide him legal cover to do ‘whatever I want.’”

And he trusts the courts will allow him enough leeway to expand his power vastly beyond "what anybody had previously imagined," Rotner said. It does not matter when his assertions of presidential power are thin or nonexistent in the eyes of most legal scholars. Scholars don’t get the last word,’ Rotner said. That belongs to the courts, which appears to rule by unexplained shadow docket decree.

“A clear pattern has emerged in the Court’s repeatedly putting its thumb on the scale in Trump’s favor, often ‘without a murmur of explanation,’” Rotner said. “Virtually all of the cases will require the Court to interpret vague, ambiguous statutory language drafted by Congress to permit presidents to act swiftly and decisively in times of crisis.”

But the Republican majority Congress has ceded some of its powers to the executive branch, said Rotner, and it will be up to a future Congress to get us out of the mess by no longer assuming good faith when it drafts legislation or amends existing statutes.

“The rules of the game have changed and good faith can no longer be assumed,” Rotner said.

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AN 825

In his latest column for The Bulwark — a conservative website opposed to President Donald Trump's administration — editor Jonathan V. Last acknowledged the conservative movement's role in making Trump's "authoritarian" second term possible, and admitted to his own biggest blind spot.

Last opened his Thursday essay by sharing an email from a reader welcoming him to the anti-Trump effort, but reminding him that liberals, leftists and Democrats had been fighting the same fight longer than he had. The reader also posited that there was a "straight line" from former President Ronald Regan's brand of traditional conservatism to the far-right Trump administration.

He then shared a familiar argument from traditional conservatives, with one insisting that Democrats' intransigence on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork (a failed Reagan appointee) paved the road to a more stridently conservative Republican Party, thus sowing the seeds for someone like Trump to rise to power. Last suggested that both arguments hold water, but then offered an observation of his own along with an ask of his fellow conservatives to consider an uncomfortable truth: The pervasiveness of racism in American society, and its influence on the conservative movement.

"I keep coming back to the African-American experience because it’s also central to understanding this moment," Last wrote. "African Americans have always understood America’s authoritarian shadow-self."

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"Which is why I count my ignorance about the centrality of race in politics among my biggest analytical mistakes," he continued. "More than anything else, it’s why I didn’t see Trump coming."

However, Last didn't save all of his criticism for conservatives. He blamed "authoritarian-curious" voters on both sides of the political aisle for voting Trump into power the first time, noting that a significant portion of Americans on both the right and the left have long craved a strongman-type leader to bulldoze through institutions to accomplish their respective goals. He cited a recent piece from Nick Catoggio of The Dispatch (another conservative site founded by traditional Republicans opposed to the MAGA movement), who proposed that many Americans are well-aware of the country's descent into authoritarianism but won't do anything to stop it because they're, as commentator Andrew Sullivan said, "sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise."

"Americans will not be roused. All indications are that they’re going to ride this rocket into the ground," Catoggio wrote.

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7 25 note no f word but he got there

neoconservative writer Bill Kristol says President Donald Trump’s firing of the Commissioner of Labor Statistics over her department’s accurately reported numbers was moving the U.S. into “third world” territory.

“My alarm scale is pretty high,” Kristol told podcaster Tim Miller. “It’s been pretty high for quite a while, but it’s ticking higher.”

The furious president fired Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after a dismal June jobs report showing only 73,000 new jobs added and downward revisions of more than 250,000 for April and May.

“She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “… The Economy is BOOMING under “TRUMP.”

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Kristol said past presidents often spun bad numbers with claims that ‘it’s complicated” or "these adjustments are a little bigger than usual."

“That would’ve been a normal political reaction,” Kristol said. “But spin is not OK anymore. I guess we just have to have pure propaganda. You can’t report the facts if they run counter to the narrative of America First, that everything is fantastic, everything that Trump does has instantaneously great results and there will never be another disappointment or a down month in the economy as long as Trump is president.”

“The numbers weren’t even outright recessionary,” added Kristol, but now Trump has amplified them to shake confidence in everything now coming out of the administration.

Miller called the firing a "don’t believe your lying eyes-authoritarian creep" and agreed that McEntarfer lost her job “because she reported the facts.” This will signal that nobody will now be able to take as truth any “facts” coming from the administration, whether it’s economic numbers or the details of a hurricane.

“The economy is based on trust and the belief that institutions will pay their bills, that the numbers they report will be accurate and there will not be a corrupt scheme that hyperinflates or deflates the value of the dollar,” said Miller. “This is the reason the U.S. has the world’s reserve currency, why the U.S. is still la trusted world harbor for investment for people around the world It is because our institutions are strong and legitimate. If you delegitimize our institutions that puts you on a path of having an economy that looks like Argentina.

Miller asked why anybody would invest in the U.S. if they suspect the government is going to put out “fake numbers to please the despot.”

And it is to please the despot, said Kristol. The abrupt nature of the firing proved that.

“They want the intimidation. They want the sense that the whole government works for Donald Trump,” Kristol said, adding that the all caps “Trump” in Trump’s Truth Social post was “revealing.”

Hear the Bulwark podcast at this link.

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an 6 25

Bulwark Policy Editor Mona Charen says Americans do more damage than they know when they dismiss gross corruption as “everybody does it” —because everybody doesn’t.

“It’s perfectly clear why Trump and his many enablers rely on whataboutism. It’s the easiest deflection,” Charen writes. “What is the proper response to Trump’s iniquitous treatment of women? What about Bill Clinton? How can one evaluate his pardons of the January 6th insurrectionists? What about all those who rioted in protest of George Floyd’s murder and were never prosecuted? (They were.) Was Trump’s refusal to return highly classified documents a serious breach? What about Joe Biden keeping files in his garage?(Biden returned them when asked.) Is Trump corrupting the rule of law with his pardons of friends, donors, and political allies? *What about Joe Biden’s pardons of Hunter and his entire family?”

Many people, when caught in a lie or transgression admit their guilt and seek to repair the damage, said Charen. “That’s how mature people and societies stay civilized. … But “truly depraved people don’t take that route. Trump uses whataboutism not just to change the subject or disarm the accuser … but also to breed cynicism.”

Cynicism is corrosive because it invites the very thing it scorns, said Charen. “Once you elect a sociopath and agree with his jaundiced view that everyone is corrupt, you’ve lost any chance of upholding basic values.

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“Yes, Biden’s pardons of his family were grubby, but they were a few pebbles compared with Trump’s avalanche of corruption,” Charen concedes, however, “… Trump’s corruption is so off the charts (a Qatari luxury jet, hundreds of millions in memecoins and tokens, bidding wars to dine with him as his club) that it defies comparison.”

Charen ticks down a list of the president’s worst: “Through the memecoin, anyone anywhere for any reason can put hundreds, or thousands, or millions of dollars directly into Trump’s pocket. Not into a campaign fund, not into a political party, but into the hands of the president. And as we witnessed on his Middle East trip, eager foreign leaders and businessmen are lining up to do so. Vietnam, hoping for relief from tariffs, is in talks to help Trump build a luxury golf course. Due almost entirely to his crypto holdings, Trump has, by one estimate, doubled his net worth in just four months.”

The Bulwark podaster says the Constitution could not be clearer that “no person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign state.” But that doesn’t appear to be preventing the administration from disbanding the Justice Department unit devoted to ferreting out crypto crime just in time for the Securities and Exchange Commission to drop an investigation into one of Trump’s largest donors “—the one who donated top dollar (or memecoin) to have dinner with Trump at his country club outside D.C.,” she said.

If Americans do treasure honesty, integrity, the rule of law and decency, Charen said they must be prepared to reject whataboutism and risk mockery by insisting that no, not everybody does it, and we don’t want to accept the kind of society in which that is assumed.

“We must disenthrall ourselves from the whataboutism mindset,” she said. “There are honorable politicians. There are honest businessmen. There are police and soldiers and teachers and programmers and athletes and judges of integrity. Millions of Americans are appalled and deeply embarrassed by the kakistocracy we’ve elevated. Hold on to that outrage. It’s the road back from this disaster.”

Read the full Bulwark report here.

===

AN 12 24

A month from this Friday, December 20, President-elect Donald Trump will return to the White House. And he has made no secret of the type of administration that he wants.

Many of the people he plans to nominate in 2025 are far-right MAGA loyalists, and he is only doubling down on his more controversial campaign promises — which include imposing tariffs on Mexico and Canada, mass deportations, and targeting members of the media for retribution.

In a biting article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on December 17, journalist A.B. Stoddard is vehemently critical of "demoralized" Democrats — who, she argues, have spent too much time licking their wounds after Vice President Kamala Harris' loss and need to be planning a resistance strategy to Trump's second administration.

"Six weeks after Election Day," Stoddard laments, "Democrats remain in a fetal position. While Donald Trump enjoys a honeymoon, his opposition is barely protesting as he runs right over them. While some Democrats are eager to offer up post-mortems and engage in self-flagellation about how the party failed, most of them are barely speaking about Trump."

Stoddard continues, "Even as he outlines his mass deportation plans, makes promises of inflationary tariffs, and delivers post-election acknowledgement that he cannot mitigate inflation, Democrats are quiet. The average voter could be forgiven for thinking Democrats are more interested in what podcasts Kamala Harris didn't go on than the high-stakes policy debates and political battles rapidly approaching."

Post-election Democrats, Stoddard observes, "seem to be content to hunker down until they have more answers about why and how they lost so many of their former voters to Trump."

"Trump is also threatening to jail members of Congress," Stoddard warns. "The president-elect has been trying to force the governor of his home state to name his unqualified daughter-in-law to a Senate seat there. His online mob has been threatening GOP senators with primaries if they don't approve of his unfit and unqualified nominees."

Stoddard adds, "Do Democrats accept this erosion of checks and balances? It's hard to know. They're not saying much…. Being demoralized to the point of paralysis is bad for their party and for the country. But it's great for Trump."

READ MORE:['Damning information mounts': Trump's 'worst' nominees could be in for a rude awakening

*A.B. Stoddard's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.

an 12 24

The Democratic Party not only lost control of the White House and the U.S. Senate in 2024, but also saw its advantage in traditional Democratic strongholds erode. One veteran Democratic operative is offering several explanations, and solutions for how to rebuild.

In an essay for the Bulwark, longtime Democratic campaign operative Steve Schale wrote that his party has now become "a shell of itself" in the wake of its 2024 loss. He specifically lamented that his home state of Florida has gone from a battleground state that Democrats carried in 2008 and 2012 to a Republican vote sink, with even the bluest counties trending increasingly Republican. He also pointed out that Iowa and Ohio have morphed from competitive swing states to safe GOP states since Barack Obama's presidency.

"That’s not just a canary in a coalmine. It is a massive boulder landing in front of you on the only road home," Schale wrote. "Even worse, my party has largely avoided reckoning with how big that boulder is. We can no longer do that or we will find ourselves in an even worse situation than we do following the 2024 election. Now is not the time for quick fixes. We must make real structural changes."

Schale argued that there are four ways Democrats can rebuild their party to once again have a 50-state presence. He proposed that Democrats should spend money earlier before voters' opinions can "harden" on contentious issues like crime, immigration, transgender rights and the economy. He called for more groups to be involved in helping candidates and campaigns make decisions, as opposed to one super PAC or group serving as a bottleneck. He also said Democrats should be smarter about using data rather than using it as a crutch, and that campaigns should make data work for them, rather than the other way around. And he pointed out that the far right has a "tremendous advantage" in delivering its ideas compared to Democrats.

"After 2020, I had a billionaire ask me what I thought would be useful going forward. My advice was to spend a billion dollars building out an ecosystem like the right to deliver information to not only our base but persuadable voters. There was an acknowledgement of the problem, but that was all," Schale recalled. "I worry that coastal Democrats don’t fully grasp just how much of a disadvantage we face on the news consumption front—especially podcasts and social media—and that to solve it, we need a donor or two willing to invest significant capital."

The Floridian said Democrats' pattern of gradually losing its base should be particularly alarming to party leaders. He noted that in the three predominantly Hispanic counties of Miami-Dade, Hendry and Osceola, Democrats went from having a 324,000-vote margin in 2016 to President-elect Donald Trump winning those counties by a total of 133,000 votes just eight years later.

"The truth is we got here because our brand sucks. We tend to put voters in different buckets—black, Hispanic, young, gay, etc.—and treat these groups like they are more progressive than they really are, and somehow unique from each other," he wrote. "At the same time, we’ve made decisions to stop talking to large chunks of the electorate."

READ MORE:[(Opinion) Too many Democrats need to hear this truth bomb

Click here to read Schale's full essay in the Bulwark.

===

charlie Sykes, like other veteran journalists who write for The Bulwark, has spent much of his career promoting conservatism. From a policy standpoint, the Never Trumper has a lot in common with conservative Republicans of the past — including President Ronald Reagan, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) and Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona).

But these days, Sykes — who supported President Joe Biden in 2020 — is sounding the alarm about 2024 presidential frontrunner Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, which he views as an authoritarian departure from traditional Reagan/Goldwater conservatism.

In his December 1 column, Sykes laments that way too many Americans are acting like politics are normal in the United States when Trump and his loyalists are laying the groundwork for an authoritarian dictatorship.

On November 30, the Washington Post published a Robert Kagan op-edwith a troubling headline: "A Trump Dictatorship Is Increasingly Inevitable. We Should Stop Pretending." Sykes quotes Kagan's op-ed extensively in his column, arguing that many Americans — including Trump's critics — aren't nearly as worried as they should be.

Sykes writes, "Let's start with Robert Kagan's extraordinary warning: 'Would Trump be a dictator? And can he be stopped?' Spoiler: The answers are: (1) Yes, absolutely, and (2) Maybe not…. When he seals the nomination…. the GOP will fall into line behind a Trump 2.0 presidency. As Kagan notes, Trump is making no secret of his agenda of revenge and retribution."

The Never Trumper goes on to saythat Trump will be "largely unconstrained" if he returns to the White House but laments that "we seem to be sleepwalking toward a worst-case scenario."

Sykes also quotes an article by The Atlantic's David Grahampublished on November 29. Graham warns that many Republicans who aren't Trump loyalists will go along with Trump's worst ideas in the months to come, fearing that they will end up in prison if they alienate him.

Graham wrote, "A candidate who is running to potentially stay out of prison is a dangerous candidate. He is not just running for his own ideology or pride; he's running for his very freedom. That warps his incentives, making him more likely to employ demagogic tactics, less concerned about the way history might judge him, and more inclined to use every avenue possible to win the election — even if it means bending or breaking the law."

===

an 9 22

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York City has been calling for the impeachment of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, arguing that in light of his wife Ginni Thomas’ efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, he has no business taking part in cases that are related, in any way, to the January 6, 2021 insurrection. But fellow House Democrats, for the most part, haven’t been receptive to AOC’s recommendation — although they agree that Thomas should recuse himself from any January 6-related cases.

Like presidents, U.S. Supreme Court justices canbe impeached in the United States. Members of the U.S. House of Representatives have the power to impeach a Supreme Court justice and give members of the U.S. Senate articles of impeachment to be considered in an impeachment trial. But impeaching High Court justices is even more of a rarity in U.S. history than impeaching presidents.

Four U.S. presidents have been targets of articles of impeachment: Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump — although, in Nixon’s case, there was never a trial in the Senate. Nixon, during the Watergate scandal in, resigned before the impeachment process got that far. But as presidential historian/author Lindsay M. Chervinsky explains in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on September 2, only one U.S. Supreme Court justice has faced impeachment in the country’s 246-year history: Samuel Chase. And that was back in 1804/1805 when Thomas Jefferson was president.

“On February 4, 1805, Vice President Aaron Burr gaveled into session the impeachment trial of Justice Samuel Chase for high crimes and misdemeanors,” Chervinsky explains. “The stakes were impossibly high. No Supreme Court justice had ever been impeached. Every decision would establish precedent and shape future proceedings — so that the aftermath of the trial lasted far longer than the participants could have possibly imagined, down to the present day. Our ideas about impeachment and its role in the justice system can be directly traced to Chase’s trial, over 200 years ago.”

Chervinsky continues, “Chase certainly made an excellent target. Outside of his family, no one liked him. When George Washington nominated Chase to the High Court in 1796, many Federalists questioned whether he had the temperament to serve as a justice, even though he belonged to their party…. His cantankerous and querulous nature was so extreme that it earned him thenickname ‘Old Bacon Face.’ Bad humor was one thing, but Chase’s behavior on the bench was also highly partisan. He had campaigned openly for John Adams in 1800 and relished handing down extreme sentences to defendants accused of sedition against the Adams Administration.”

In 1804, Chervinsky notes, the U.S. House of Representatives voted, 73-32, to impeach Chase — and in 1805, Chase was “acquitted on every charge” in his Senate trial. Chase remained on the High Court until his death in 1811 at the age of 70.

“All told, the House has impeached 14 federal judges since 1789, and the Senate has removed 8 of them,” Chervinsky observes.“The charges have included waging war on the U.S. government during the Civil War, improper business relationships with litigants, favoritism, tax evasion and criminal conviction, perjury, and solicitation of a bribe. Among the acquitted judges, the articles of impeachment cited charges of favoritism and abuse of power. The Senate has never removed a Supreme Court justice.”

Chervinsky goes on to explain what this history means for Justice Thomas in 2022.

“Let’s say, hypothetically, that evidence continues to emerge implicating Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, in the efforts by Trump supporters to overturn the 2020 election,” the presidential historian writes. “And let’s further suppose that a case involving some aspect of those efforts or the January 6th insurrection comes before the Supreme Court. Under these circumstances, most judicial ethics experts and reasonable observers would likely agree that Justice Thomas should recuse himself, but he has shown no interest in doing so thus far.”

Chervinsky adds, “He has already been involved in several Supreme Court actions that have in some way touched on the 2020 election. Most strikingly, when the Court in January rejected Trump’s attempt to keep various White House records from being sent to the House January 6th Committee, Thomas was the only justice who disagreed; he would have sided with Trump.”

Chervinsky has two recommendations: (1) “Congress could pass legislation mandating that the code of conduct for federal judges applies to the Supreme Court,” and (2) “Congress can start to treat impeachment as a suitable response to wildly inappropriate, if not outright illegal, behavior.”

“To reconceive of judicial impeachment in this way would force us to revisit the precedents set by Samuel Chase’s impeachment,” Chervinsky writes. “Two years after Chase’s acquittal, Jefferson wrote that the whole debacle was ‘a farce which will not be tried again.’ He was right — so far.”

===

https://www.thebulwark.com/the-decay-at-the-claremont-institute-continues/

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when the Claremont Institute, America’s Trumpiest think tank, is in the news nowadays, it is mostly because of John Eastman, the institute senior fellow who wrote the notorious “coup memos” for Donald Trump.Last month, a federal judge ruled that Eastman and Trump were likely involved in a criminal conspiracy together. The ruling arose from a civil suit concerning Eastman’s claim that some of his documents should not be disclosed to the House Jan. 6th Committee, and the judge only opined on possible criminal behavior because it factored into the narrow decision regarding Eastman’s claims. Still, the ruling is an important reminder of what was at stake with Eastman’s work for Trump: nothing less than a concerted effort to overturn a democratic election and thwart the peaceful transfer of power, which, had it succeeded, would have brought on a major constitutional crisis. The judge ordered Eastman to hand over to the committee 101 documents he had been withholding, and Eastman has grumblingly said he will comply—although he now wants to withhold another big batch.

The Eastman saga has been the most prominent Claremont Institute-related drama in recent weeks, but it hasn’t been the only one. The institute’s descent into Trumpian trolling, conspiracism, and fringe extremism has continued to have bizarre ripple effects. It is worth taking a look at some episodes of the last few weeks and what they reveal about the institute’s character—and how Claremont’s leaders seem to understand that character themselves.

Last month, theAmerican Mind, the Claremont Institute’s web magazine, published an article called “The Decline is Real.” Brimming with male sexual anxiety, the piece discusses some research suggesting that testosterone levels and sperm levels are falling in Western populations. It edges up close to replacement theory. And it gripes about “clownworld”—“Soy boys. Simps. Plant-based lifestyles. Polyamory. Incels. Furries. Et cetera… honk honk!”—and suggests that the “dissident right” is “unique[ly]” well suited to making men manly.

But the problem with the piece is less its content than the author’s background. The American Mind has made something of a habit of publishing pseudonymous writers: “Peachy Keenan,” “The Huntsman,” “Horatius,” “Rebecca,” “Privata,” and others. So it is, too, with the article worried about Western man’s sperm count—but its pseudonymous author, “Raw Egg Nationalist,” stands apart for having recently published a book with a Nazi publishing house. As in: a publishing house that is infatuated with Adolf Hitler.

I wish I were joking or exaggerating. What Raw Egg Nationalist’s American Mind byline doesn’t tell you is that his Raw Egg Nationalism Cookbookis published by Antelope Hill Publishing. Antelope Hill is a small publishing house that translates and publishes books like A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, by Richard Walther Darré, described in this way on the Antelope Hill site:

Richard Walther Darré, an Obergruppenführer in the SS, was the leading “Blood and Soil” ideologist of Germany and served his people as Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture. This book,A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, was massively popular in the Third Reich and led to a strengthening of the agrarian and agriculturalist movements. Highly influential on Hitler, the principles in this book are foundational to the National Socialist worldview.

Antelope Hill, we learn, is proud to present this new translation of Darré’s book, which is the first English-language edition. A *Daily Beast* article from January referred to Antelope Hill as “openly fascist”; a blog that tracks reactionary racism labeled it “a white supremacist publishing company”; and Amazon has faced calls to stop selling its products. The Antelope Hill Twitter and Instagram feeds contain promotional material that playfully celebrates “uncle Hitler.” To celebrate Hitler’s birthday yesterday, Antelope Hill offered a discount on all its books, and an even bigger discount on a collection of Hitler’s speeches, with the cutesy discount code “birthday_boy”:

The Claremont Institute seems to have no qualms publishing one of Antelope Hill’s main authors.

And it is impossible to believe that the publishers of the American Mind do not understand who Raw Egg Nationalist is and what he stands for.

For one thing, he appeared as recently as November 11 of last year on Jack Murphy’s podcast. Murphy was a Lincoln Fellow at the institute last summer, and numerous prominent Claremont folks have come on his podcast since its inception in 2018. For example, Matthew Peterson, the founder and original editor of the American Mind, was Murphy’s guest a couple of weeks before Raw Egg Nationalist, and Glenn Ellmers, a Claremont senior fellow, was on the show a few days before that.

Other Claremonters Murphy has hosted include Ryan Williams (president of the Claremont Institute); Thomas G. West (senior fellow and a member of Claremont’s board of directors); Spencer Klavan (an editor at the Claremont Review of Books and features editor at the American Mind); Jack Posobiec (2019 Lincoln Fellow); Michael Anton (Claremont senior fellow); Christopher Caldwell (Claremont senior fellow); Dave Reaboi (Claremont fellow and 2012 Lincoln Fellow); and Arthur Milikh (executive director of Claremont’s Center for the American Way of Life). Several of Murphy’s other guests have been alumni of Claremont’s fellowship programs, including Breitbart writer Allum Bokhari, anti-critical-race-theory activist Christopher Rufo, and Trumpist conspiracy theorist Darren Beattie.

In short: Jack Murphy is a Claremont intimate, and his hosting Raw Egg Nationalist is another indication that the latter is a known quantity to the Claremont crowd.

Murphy’s interview with Raw Egg Nationalist is, unsurprisingly, offensive. The two men share an interest in bodybuilding as a way of life; during a discussion of the relationship between mind, body, and aesthetics, Murphy asks Raw Egg Nationalist to explain how he understands the relationship between physiognomy and politics. Raw Egg Nationalist says:

I think that it’s difficult . . . today not to see just how closely linked together nutrition and lifestyle and political orientation are. . . . Bring up all of the mug shots from the “mostly peaceful protests” of last summer and you’ll see that all of these people look the same. I mean, they are hideously ugly, malformed people.

Raw Egg Nationalist concludes that the left has abandoned all concerns with health and “is for a kind of dysgenic existence.” It follows, then, that, “the right, or some people on the right and some traditionalists, just have to be for a healthy physical lifestyle. I think it’s that simple.”

Murphy agrees: “It really is. And I was out on the streets during all the riots in Washington, D.C., and I’ve seen the protesters right up front.”

The exchange, which takes place ten minutes into their conversation, offers a crystal-clear glimpse of this Claremont writer’s character, in case his choice of publishing house isn’t already enough of a tell.

it’s worth saying more about Jack Murphy.

Murphy is a prominent influencer in the “Manosphere” and the founder of a secretive manliness club called the Liminal Order. “Jack Murphy” is also a pseudonym. His real name is reportedly John Goldman, a fact that became common knowledge in December of last year following salacious revelations about his past.

In 2018, Murphy wrote a blog post about sending his girlfriend to have sex with a stranger from Tinder. This became known as Murphy’s ,” and it caused a stir on the right—both the family-values right and the cult-of-masculinity right. It further turned out that Murphy had participated in amateur pornography, and that he had been placed on administrative leave from a job with Washington, D.C.’spublic charter schools for wildly misogynist and racist screeds he had posted online.

The revelations about Murphy/Goldman received coverage last December from conservative journalists like Rod Dreher at the American Conservative, Mary Harrington at UnHerd, and Megan Fox at PJ Media. (This scrutiny came after an earlier period of wagon-circling: Two months earlier, one Twitter user was blocked by several prominent Catholic integralists after he criticized their acceptance of Murphy.)

But a far more tragic story was unfolding right around the time of Murphy’s scandals: On December 27, a deadly shooting spree in Denver left six people dead, including the alleged shooter, Lyndon McLeod.

Before the tragedy, McLeod was a far-right novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Roman McClay. The Denver shootings followed the plot of his novels, and two of his victims were mentioned by name in the books.

McLeod was also a fan of Jack Murphy’s, and he even appears to have been a member of Murphy’s club, the Liminal Order.

What’s more, Murphy returned the future mass shooter’s admiration. In an online post from February 2020, he deemed Roman McClay’s work “an epic three volume masterpiece.” (He praised the work of reactionary writers Bronze Age Pervert and Curtis Yarvin in the same context.) After the Denver shootings, even Anthony Dream Johnson, the self-professed “President of the Manosphere,” was willing to denounce Jack Murphy. But Claremont stayed mum.

To summarize: One of Claremont’s future Lincoln fellows had an unconventional sexual relationship with his girlfriend that he wrote about publicly, created pornography, broadcast truly vile racist and misogynist views, and celebrated the violent fictions of a person who would later use them as a roadmap for conducting his own mass shooting.

you will recall Murphy’s Claremont-heavy roster of podcast guests before his scandals in December. The description for one of those episodes contains this intriguing line: “Ryan Williams, The President of the Claremont Institute, explains to Jack Murphy why they engaged with Bronze Age Pervert, Curtis Yarvin, and Jack Posobiec.”

The interview took place in March 2020, the month after Murphy praised McLeod’s violent novels. Much of it is dedicated to standard-fare Claremont grievance-mongering against identity politics, multiculturalism, and the left. But almost an hour into the conversation, Murphy does ask Williams directly why Claremont decided to engage with “underground new media figures” like Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), Yarvin, Posobiec, and himself.

First, he praises Williams for Claremont’s engagements with “your grassroots population,” mentioning Michael Anton’s review of Bronze Age Pervert’s book in the Claremont Review of Books and a BAP symposium at the American Mind. “This was, like, a big signal to me that you guys understood the landscape,” Murphy says. “So can you tell me how the Bronze Age Pervert connection came to be?… How did it all work out? Would you do it again?”

Williams is prepared for this. Beginning cautiously, he says that he and others had noticed BAP’s “weird little book” floating around among young folks on the right and wanted to talk to Claremont’s “very boomer” audience about it as a youth phenomenon. He also wanted to communicate the way “some of his older peers and fellow travelers at Claremont talked about politics and took seriously this energy amongst the young on the right that was sort of up for grabs.”

Williams acknowledges the dangers involved in making these overtures, and says that Claremont traditionally stands for equal rights and believes reactionary politics is a “dead end.” He appears to suggest that his goal in engaging BAP’s audience was to show them an alternative approach and outlook.

But soon Williams starts to hedge. Sounding increasingly sympathetic to what Murphy calls the “grassroots,” he praises BAP’s book as a piece of philosophical art, and admits that they published Anton’s piece in part “to stir things up.” He concedes that Claremont had something to prove: that “we weren’t just fusionist Reagan Republicans,” but are instead “open to new ideas” and “not . . . afraid of the arguments that are gaining some traction on the right.”

Then Williams takes a more evangelical turn. He talks about how important it is to bring eclectic and heterodox thinkers like Yarvin to new readers in order to “continue the conversation.” He and Murphy gloat about how these thinkers have influence in Trump’s White House. Williams argues that the very online landscape of the New Right is an “increasingly huge thing” that is quickly replacing and delegitimizing the old media. After windily defending the right-wing conspiracy theoristJack Posobiecas “nothing but a gentleman and respectful, an engaged discussant in our seminar and a family man,” Williams insists on the importance of engaging seriously with “this new media landscape” and “this growing cohort of people with huge influence.”

He resumes a cautious stance at the end of the episode. In case the audience has forgotten, Williams reminds listeners that Claremont hopes to be the teacher and fearless influencer in its relationship with Murphy’s “grassroots,” not the one being taught and influenced.

Murphy, though, heard things differently: “I really commend you guys for . . . the direction you’re taking the organization. I respect it. It got my attention. If the Bronze Age Pervert thing was meant to be a bat-signal to the young and new right and the internet right—well, we heard it, we saw it, here we are.”

Williams chuckles at the mention of the bat-signal and doesn’t object to the characterization of Claremont as inviting Murphy and his ilk into its domain. He thanks Murphy for his public-spiritedness, saying that “America is a better place because of what you do, so keep doing what you do.” The Claremont Institute would accept Murphy as a Lincoln Fellow the following year.

Maybe Raw Egg Nationalist will make the cut for 2022.

this trip through the Claremont underworld ends with a return to a more familiar and respectable side of the institute: a March 17, 2022 episode of the Power Line podcast hosted by Steven Hayward and featuring guests Charles Kesler and John Yoo. Titled “The Claremont Question,” the episode raises explicit questions about the coherence of the organization and the relationships among its various constituents.

Hayward is a resident senior scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley and a graduate of Claremont Graduate School. Kesler is a professor at Claremont McKenna College and the founding editor of Claremont’s premier publication, the Claremont Review of Books. Yoo, a professor at Berkeley Law School, is best known for authoring the Bush administration’s notorious “torture memos,” which made him a figure of perennial controversy. It is a sign of strange times that he is among the least polarizing figures in Claremont’s orbit today.

The title of the episode suggests that the three longtime Claremont associates might address the institute’s efforts to accommodate Murphy’s “grassroots.” But while Ryan Williams showed a measure of confidence and security in responding to Murphy’s questions, this conversation went differently. The 44-minute Power Line talk alternates between chummy banter, outrage at the left, and the occasional nod to non-MAGA realities. It is also full of awkward yuks and guffaws. Hayward, Kesler, and Yoo may represent the Claremont Institute’s old guard—the conservative intellectuals who like to have deep conversations about statesmanship and the Founders and the dangers of progressivism—but they don’t have any of the confidence one might expect from them. A mood of uneasiness prevails. The three men often fall into anxious laughter at one another’s bad jokes.

“My goodness!” Hayward begins. “The Claremont Institute has everybody’s attention these days, and lots of enemies on the left and on the right. . . . I’m not quite sure where to begin!”

After reviewing the facts, he asks Kesler to explain the sources of controversy at Claremont.

From the perspective of, say, Bronze Age Pervert and company, Kesler makes a handful of “normie” admissions: His colleague John Eastman’s plan for Vice President Mike Pence was “impossible” and “not credible”; Jan. 6th was “a terrible stain” on the Trump presidency; Trump should probably cede the stage to a younger Republican to draw a better contrast with Biden. But before Kesler gets to all that, he acknowledges a simpler truth: Trump was a boon for Claremont. Everything is going great at the institute, and some of their good fortune has resulted directly from their public pro-Trump stance. Subscriptions to the CRB are at an all time high and growing, he says. They have real momentum.

But given everything that has been going on at Claremont, the discussion is awfully evasive. For example, while the three men agree on the most salient part of the Eastman debacle—that there was no real dispute over any state electors—they do not grapple with the implications of that admission. Instead, they act as though Eastman’s various legal notions about Pence’s decision-making authority on Jan. 6th are still worth taking seriously. The truth is closer to this: Eastman can interpret the law however he pleases, but because there was no serious dispute about the electors, his ideas are, at best, perfectly irrelevant to the reality of the situation.

Yoo says that Eastman “got the facts wrong but the law right.” Imagine if someone understood the laws governing murder but merely “got the facts wrong” in a given case: it would be the definition of a miscarriage of justice. And when Hayward, Kesler, and Yoo concede that there were no disputed electors, they unwittingly imply that Eastman’s perspective runs closer to delusional fabrication than to serious legal commentary, let alone reasonable advice to a sitting VP with a crucial role to play in the peaceful transfer of power.

Rather than grapple with that truth, the group praises Kesler for expounding the Eastman controversy in the pages of theClaremont Review of Books. They revel in the seriousness of a followup exchange between Eastman and critic Joseph Bessette in the CRB. They take credit for presenting “both sides” of the issue “utterly without snark or invective on either side.” And Kesler prides himself on allowing the magazine not to take a stance on such “very complicated” issues.

To be clear, Bessette’s critique of Eastman’s position is excellent. The problem is that the CRB’s “both-sides” approach launders Eastman’s arguments and gives them false legitimacy.

And what the CRB did for Eastman, Hayward’s Power Line conversation does for Claremont as a whole. The three members of the old guard are reticent about Eastman, their “friend and colleague,” throughout the episode. This reflects a larger unwillingness to attempt a substantive reckoning with Claremont’s recent past.

That past includes plenty of cynical publication decisions—among them, Anton’s solicitous review of Bronze Age Pervert’s book; institutional decisions to grant fellowships to conspiracy theorists and extremist influencers; an eagerness to publish authors too timid to put their real names on their articles, including an author who sends his writing to a Nazi publishing house. Does Charles Kesler think these decisions represent a brave stance on the part of the institute?

Conservatives are very good at calling out instances of excess zeal and censoriousness on the left. But the decline at the Claremont Institute demonstrates inverse dangers: namely, the cratering of accountability and good judgment. The Claremont old guard acts as though the rest of what’s happening at the institute isn’t their concern, and with a few exceptions the intellectuals of the New Right operate the same way with respect to the Claremont Institute: as though there are no right-wing viewpoints or associations that can be unequivocally condemned, no liberal norms that don’t deserve challenging, no fringe that’s too fringey for them.

In its outreach to the Manosphere, in its welcoming of fascist-curious and bigoted Trumpy writers, not to mention its months of support for lies about the last presidential election, the institute is allying itself with some of the most dangerous tendencies in politics.

The Power Line episode ends on a surreal but fitting note:

Steven Hayward (abruptly): Well, we never really did get to the contents of the issue, but that would take us four or five hours. Thank you, Charles; thank you, John.

John Yoo (genuinely surprised): That’s it? It’s over?

Hayward (cheerfully): I think we’ve taxed our listeners long enough with our quips and jests.

Charles Kesler (deadpan): Do you mean to ask . . . is that all there is?

(guffaws all around)

That’s it: no reckoning, no grappling, no calling to account. Instead, we are left with a throwaway reference to a wry little song by. But “Is That All There Is?” also happens to capture the essence of intellectual life at Claremont today: the carnival atmosphere, the old boys’ club, and the decay.

Share on FacebookShare on Twitter Share via e===

an 5 22

in a blunt column for theconservative Bulwark, Cato Senior Fellow Cathy Young raged against the spread of the so-called "replacement theory"that played a major part in prompting an 18-year-old white man in New York to go on a shooting rampage Saturday afternoon in a Buffalo-area grocery store situated in a community that is reportedly 80 percent black.

As Young put it, "Those who follow the news know that this is far from the first time “replacement theory” has figured in the ravings of a mass shooter," before adding, "We know these ideas are floating out there. We also know that, disturbingly, “replacement theory” is being mainstreamed on the right," the columnist specifying Fox News host Tucker Carlson who has repeatedly claimed that Democrats are trying to "replace" Americans with immigrants.

As Young notes, two prominent Republican lawmakers have also taken up the "replacement theory" banner, withRep Matt Gaetz (R-FL)tweeting, "The Left/Media think of replacement solely on race/ethnicity terms. I don't at all. Democrats failed voters who relied on them to run their states/cities. Now they are importing new voters. That is my argument. Those reading more into it are projecting their own bias."

Add to that, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who Young explained, ".. jumped on the bandwagon as well with a Facebook ad claiming that the Democrats were going to use amnesty for illegal immigrants to 'overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.'"

"This is hateful, stupid, paranoid nonsense," she wrote before adding, "It is also, need I point out, the epitome of collectivist 'identity politics' the right sometimes likes to deplore in its progressive guises."

Noting that a recent poll shows that a third of Americans "agreeat least somewhat that 'There is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views,'" Young wrote, "In a sane and decent political climate, both media figures and political figures on the right would quickly and emphatically disavow “great replacement” as un-American, race-baiting nonsense. Which means … don’t hold your breath."

"That was a joke. Cue bitter laugh," she lamented.

You can read more here.

===

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Marjorie Taylor Greene has become the 'ideological enforcer' of House Republicans: Charlie Sykes

Alex Henderson December 01, 2021

At first glance, the attention-grabbing headline of Charlie Sykes’ December 1 column for The Bulwark might seem like clickbait: “Speaker Marjorie Taylor Greene.” But when one reads the column, it become...

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on Friday, November 19, teenage vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on charges of homicide and attempted homicide by a jury in Kenosha, Wisconsin — where, in August 2020, he shot three protesters (two of them fatally) during a racial justice demonstration. Countless right-wing media pundits, along with MAGA politicians like Rep. Matt Gaetz and Rep. Madison Cawthorn, have been celebrating the verdict. But Never Trump conservative Tim Miller, in a humorous**but biting video posted by The Bulwark, lays out some reasons why he finds this reaction so problematic.

"The right wants to make Rittenhouse a hero, a freedom fighter," Miller explains. "Ann Coulter says she wants Rittenhouse for president. He's been called a (patriot) and also a (good Samaritan)…. In their delusion, he's being wrongly persecuted by the woke state…. In this narrative, Kyle is a righteous vigilante battling against the real enemy, Antifa, and the BLM looters who are roaming free."

Miller goes on to show clips of "Hillbilly Elegy" author J.D. Vance (who is running for the U.S. Senate seat in Ohio) and Fox News' Greg Gutfeld praising Rittenhouse and mocks both of them as "soy boys." On the right, "soy boy" is a major insult. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his colleagues at Infowars have long been claiming that soy-based food products are a leftist "deep state" plot designed to reduce testosterone and make American men more feminine.

Miller says of Vance and Gutfeld, "Let's just take a moment to entertain this as a serious position rather than a performative tough-guy act. Is this really the society that these soft-handed soy boys want? One where a 17-year-old can self-deputize, marching through town with his gun drawn, making citizen's arrests if he doesn't feel like the government is doing a good enough job? That's a path to chaos, not justice."

The Never Trumper continues, "Now, we know the Fox hosts and Ivy League Republican politicians don't want this type of society because: (1) you can't even imagine these rich assholes sending their own teenagers into a riot armed with a weapon — and (2) there's no way we would've seen this same hero narrative on Fox if the righteous teen had been Black and he'd self-deputized to the Mall on January 6, killing two insurrectionists."

But as vehemently as Miller slams the MAGA far right in his video, he also criticizes some liberals and progressives for their comments on Rittenhouse — including Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, who described him as a "White supremacist domestic terrorist." Miller strongly disagrees that Rittenhouse fits the definition of a terrorist, but rather, considers him a "stupid kid in a shit situation."

Miller argues, "There's no evidence this kid is a White supremacist…[hang w proud boys hand gest oK?]. When it comes to Rittenhouse, here's the bottom line: He's not a martyr. Or a hero. Or an evil enemy. He's an 18-year-old with underdeveloped frontal lobes who got in way over his head."

Watch the video below:

===

ref

https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/militias-with-badges

chls sykes

yes, it could get worse.

The Claremont Institute — the home of John Eastman, author of the blueprint for overthrowing the presidential election — has a new initiative for undermining the rule of law.

And if you are not alarmed, you ought to be.

The Trumpian institute is launching a programto weaponize "patriotic law enforcement officers" to counter "the perversion of the justice system by which the revolutionary left seeks to advance its totalitarian agenda."

In announcing its new "Sheriff’s Fellowship" the institute tied together last year’s urban disorders, Covid-19 lockdowns, and “the electoral disaster of 2020,” and declared that “our nation's conservative movement needs a countervailing network of uncorrupted law enforcement officials.”

Specifically, Claremont envisions a cadre of sheriffs “not beholden to bureaucratic masters, and whose geographic boundaries, jurisdictional latitude, and - most important - direct connection and responsibility to citizens, places them on the frontlines of the defense of civilization.”

Think of it as militias with badges, guns, and formal law enforcement powers. Or, if you like, secession-by-sheriff.

Indeed, Claremont is late to the game. The so-called Constitutional Sheriffs have been a thing for quite a while now.

“Although the Oath Keepers, another anti-government extremist group that recruits from law enforcement, have garnered more media attention in recent years,” the Anti-Defamation League said in their report, the Constitutional Sheriff movement “has arguably had more success infiltrating law enforcement, including at the executive level.”

The central tenet of [the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association], borrowed from the anti-government extremist sovereign citizen movement, is that the county sheriff is the ultimate authority in the county, able to halt enforcement of any federal or state law or measure they deem unconstitutional.

This is no longer simply a fringe movement confined to a few rural counties.

Trump and members of his administration cultivated and encouraged the sheriffs’ movement, and openly embraced leading figures like Arizona’s Joe Arpaio. Former Attorney General Sessions famously praised what he called “the Anglo-Saxon heritage” of the office.

“Since our founding, the independently elected sheriff has been the people’s protector, who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people through the elected process,” Sessions said. “The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement. We must never erode this historic office.”

Milwaukee’s Sheriff David Clarke — who was named Constitutional Sheriff of the year in 2013 — became a prominent Trump surrogate and was, reportedly in line for a position in Trump’s Department of Homeland security.

More recently, Clarke urged January 6 participants to refuseto cooperate with law enforcement authorities.

"ALERT!!!," Clarke wrote. "If you attended the Trump rally in Washington DC last Wednesday and are contacted by the FBI or they come to your home, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TALK TO THEM. DON'T LET THEM IN YOUR HOME EITHER. POLITELY TELL THEM TO LEAVE AND CLOSE THE DOOR."

"If you did not go into the US Capital (sic) you do not have to explain why you exercised your Constitutional right to assemble," Clarke wrote. "TRUST NO GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL right now." [twt pix]

clarke has since fallen into well-deserved obscurity, but the hot new face of the movement is Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County, Arizona.

In a new Politico profile, Lamb calls himself ‘America’s Sheriff,’ who “fashions himself as more of a vigilante resister, with a heavy dose of anti-government, sometimes militant rhetoric.”

Sheriff Lamb is the very model of the modern Trumpian law enforcement official. Politico reports:

Lamb supported the “stop the steal” campaign in Arizona and has expressed sympathy for the Jan. 6 rioters. He has called vaccine mandates “garbage” and spoke at a recent anti-vaccine rally in Phoenix, where he told supporters, “We’re going to find out what kind of patriots you are. We’re going to find out who is willing to die for freedom.” He also makes direct appeals to citizens, an effort that looks more dangerous after former President Donald Trump riled up supporters on Jan. 6. For example, Lamb, an ardent defender of the Second Amendment, has spoken in support of the formation of private militias — “well within the Constitution,” he told a group of supporters in March — and emphasized the power of sheriffs in Arizona, an open-carry state, to call local civilians into service to “suppress all affrays, insurrections and riots that comes to the attention of the sheriff.” Last year, as Black Lives Matter protests swept across the country, he formed a local civilian “posse” to assist his office with law enforcement, even though there were no such protests in Pinal County.

Now, fresh off its role in trying to overthrow the 2020 election, Claremont wants a piece of that action. Here is how a recent fund-raising letter for Claremont described the Trumpian think tank’s new program:

• The current revolution against the American regime, involving as it does both crime and political malfeasance, requires a coordinated response from patriotic law enforcement officers. Those whose "chain of dependency" is directly to the people of their region - officers not beholden to the centralized ( and often corrupt) bureaucracies of federal or state governments, nor the vicissitudes of easily pressured city officials.

• Sheriffs are appropriate for this response. Since their beginnings as "shire-reeves" ("county watchmen") centuries ago in England, sheriffs have been intimately connected with, and answerable to, the people of their "shires" and therefore the first layer of protection, and last line of defense, for the people's rights.

• Our project will equip sheriffs with strategic knowledge and end their isolation. Their efforts will be supported, enhanced, and multiplied through a reliable like-minded network of fellow sheriffs and others with complementary areas of expertise and potency.

(Here is a screen shot of the letter.)

If Claremont gets its way, there will be sheriffs like Joe Arpaio, David Clarke, and Mark Lamb all across the country.

You are not worried nearly enough about what that might mean.

===

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Conservative pundit recently expressed concern about Republicans in Arizona, Texas, and Florida as he detailed what he describes as the "race to the bottom" to "see who can be the most MAGA."

On Friday, October 15, Charlie Sykes, founder of the conservative website The Bulwark, appeared on MSNBC where he specifically criticized the "absolutely batshit crazy" Republicans in Texas. "I know that Republicans in Texas have been conservative for a long time but there was a time when conservative Republicans in Texas were not absolutely batshit crazy," Sykes said to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace.

He went on to compare the differences he sees between Texas Republicans of the past and present. He also highlighted common behaviors he's seeing in Republicans across three states: Texas, Florida, and Arizona.

Sykes' remarks came amid a discussion about Texas law requiring teachers to develop that offers "opposing perspectives on historical events," HuffPost reports. In fact, a school administrator was recently criticized for insisting educators "should 'make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one' with alternative viewpoints."

"Texas Republicans used to be respectable," Sykes continued. "And now we are almost in this competition … between Florida, Arizona, and Texas to see who can be the most MAGA, who can play the most hair-on-fire culture war games, because that seems to be this race to the bottom that we're talking about here."

Sykes, however, insisted that it is "easy to beat up on the administrator" but "the focus ought to be on the law and the fact that the teachers are terrified. They don't know what's going to happen."

"What is the other side of the Holocaust?" Sykes later asked. "Are you going to assign fourth-graders 'Mein Kampf'? Are you going to make them listen to Seb Gorka's radio show? I just don't know what she actually had in mind. But again, this is exactly what you get when you have politicians playing culture war and then trying to ram that into badly thought out draconian legislation."

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/russian-media-are-promoting-trumps-bogus-voter-fraud-claims/

alexh

Many European leaders, from U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, were quick to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden on his victory over President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election — and it isn't hard to see that Johnson, Merkel and Macron all believe that U.S. voters made the right choice. But one leader who has yet to congratulate Biden is Russian President Vladimir Putin. And writer Cathy Young, in an article for the conservative website The Bulwark, stresses that Russian media pundits have been tirelessly promoting the bogus conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from Trump because of widespread voter fraud.

In Russia, Young notes, media pundits have been describing the 2020 election as evidence of the failure of U.S. democracy.

"So far, Putin is the only major national leader to have held back on congratulating Joe Biden on his victory," Young explains. "Meanwhile, the Russian state-run or state-friendly media have alternated mostly between open gloating over an American election in chaos and equally open sympathy for Trump."

According to Young, "On November 4, discussions of America's election drama on Russian airwaves eclipsed a patriotic holiday at home, Russian Unity Day, and the pro-Trump cheerleading grew more heavy-handed. That evening's edition of the political talk show 'Big Game' on TV-1, Russia's main federal channel, was almost entirely dominated by pro-Trump voices."

Young observes that "Big Game" host Andranik Migranyan, a staunch Putin supporter, told Russian viewers, "The majority of American voters want law and order, and today, alas, only Trump symbolizes the idea of law and order." Migranyan, according to Young, joined Trump in saying that Democratic governors and mayors in the U.S. are allowing rioters and looters to run amok — and Migranyan also made the offensive and racist comment that Democrats "get down on their knees and kiss the feet of Blacks."

Must read by @CathyYoung63 ---> Trump’s Men in Moscow https://t.co/OvhcN4CjVG via @BulwarkOnline

— Charlie Sykes (@Charlie Sykes)1605377956.0

Another Russian program that has been promoting Trump's baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, according to Young, is "Evening With Vladimir Solovyov," which airs on Russia's Rossiya-1. Host Solovyov echoed the talking points of Trump supporters in the U.S., claiming that Republican observers were kept away from vote-counting facilities.

Solovyov scoffed, "Some precincts simply barred observers…. It's just brilliant. This is what they call an electoral system."

One of Solovyov's guests, pundit Sergei Stankevich, told him, "Most likely, the Democrats will be able to torture the arithmetic until they get a win — that is, Biden will be declared president of the United States. But he will be a president without legitimacy, because a thick cloud of doubt will hang over his presidency for many Americans. Millions of his votes came from mail-in ballots, and no one will ever know how many of those votes were from real people."

Young observes, "The only anti-Trump voices in Putin's Russia came from the dissidents. Opposition activist Alexei Navalny, currently in Germany recovering from a poisoning widely blamed on Kremlin agents, congratulated Biden and (Vice President-elect) Kamala Harris on their victory in a 'free and fair election.'"

Young wraps up her article by noting how quick pro-Putin pundits in Russia believed pro-Trump conspiracy theories that were invented in the United States.

"For less discerning people in Russia and elsewhere," Young writes, "the claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election will surely undermine not only America's moral authority, but that of her democratic institutions. And that's on the people who have spread or condoned these toxic fictions."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/gop-insider-explains-why-5-prominent-trump-allies-finally-turned-against-the-president/

:{:{}:

no lnx

Alex Henderson September 14, 2020

Some Republicans who were blistering critics of President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election have since turned into devoted supporters, including Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. But with some other prominent Republicans, the opposite is true: they went from being Trump allies to being vehement critics. Amanda Carpenter, a Never Trump conservative who formerly served as Cruz’s communications director, takes a look at some of those defectors in an article published in The Bulwark on September 14 and explains the reasons for their defections.

“For all the loyalty Donald Trump enjoys from his most sycophantic followers, many prominent figures who famously assisted him have given up on the president altogether,” Carpenter explains in her article. “It’s worth taking a look at the breaking points for these various White House staffers, cabinet secretaries, political advisers and others — the moment when each decided he or she just couldn’t stick with Trump anymore. Because we can learn a lot about Trump and the overall effect he is having on our country by studying what made these individuals — from revered military leaders to Trump’s sleazy surrogates — finally snap.”

Here are five of the former Trump allies who, according to Carpenter, reached a breaking out.

Elizabeth Neumann

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

In 2016, conservative Republican Elizabeth Neumann voted for Trump. But now, Neumann — who served as assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Trump — is making no secret of the fact that she plans to vote for former Vice President Joe Biden in 2020’s presidential election. And she endorsed Biden in an anti-Trump attack ad by the group Republican Voters Against Trump.

Neumann, Carpenter notes, has stressed that a white nationalist’s August 2019 terrorist massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas did a lot to turn her against Trump. The shooter killed more than 20 people, mostly Latino, in response to what he called the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Carpenter told The Bulwark, “The point at which my position changed and I said ‘No, at this point, you are culpable’ was after El Paso…. Post-El Paso, there is no excuse.”

John Bolton

John Bolton was an odd choice for Trump’s national security director: while Trump has been greatly influenced by the isolationist and hypernationalist Patrick Buchanan, Bolton is a devout neocon and an unapologetic war hawk. Nonetheless, having Bolton in his administration was a way for Trump to thumb his nose at liberals — that is, until Bolton reached the point where he could no long stomach Trump’s foreign policy views. Bolton, Carpenter observes, “decided he had to leave in September 2019, after Trump made plans to invite the Taliban to Camp David public.”

Bolton, Carpenter notes, has said of Trump, “The day after the election, whether Trump wins or loses, we face a real debate — maybe an existential debate — about what the future of the Republican Party is. I just think it’s important for the Republican Party to separate itself from Trump and for the conservative philosophy to separate itself from Trump.”

Gen. James Mattis

Like Bolton, former Defense Secretary James Mattis left Trump’s administration because of the president’s views on foreign policy. Carpenter explains, “Mattis walked out on Trump in December 2018 when the president ignored his advice and abruptly pulled troops out of the Middle East. Mattis is quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book, ‘Rage,’ as saying, ‘When I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid, strategically jeopardizing our place in the world and everything else, that’s when I quit.’”

Miles Taylor

Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at DHS, told The Bulwark, “The total tonnage of bad Trump ideas that never materialized were enough to crush anyone’s hopes about a successful presidency. But the one that broke my desire to continue serving was his perverse insistence on resuming family separation at the border — and making it worse. It was sick, wrong, and un-American. That’s when it became clear that saying ‘no’ to Trump was no longer enough.”

Like Neumann, Taylor has appeared in a pro-Biden ad from Republican Voters Against Trump:

Steven G. Calabresi

Steven G. Calabresi, co-founder of the right-wing Federalist Society, turned against Trump when, in July, the president suggested postponing this year’s presidential election. In a July 30 op-ed for the New York Times, Calabresi wrote, “I have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, including voting for Donald Trump in 2016. I wrote op-eds and a law review article protesting what I believe was an unconstitutional investigation by (former Special Counsel) Robert Mueller. I also wrote an op-ed opposing President Trump’s impeachment. But I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.”

:{:{}:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/conservative-journalist-warns-trump-supporters-desire-for-actual-bloodshed-may-be-spreading

no twt lnx pix

Alex Henderson August 31, 2020

Conservative journalist Charlie Sykes, one of President Donald Trump’s persistent critics on the right, has been expressing fears that violence and civil unrest will escalate during this year’s presidential election — and recent violence at demonstrations in Portland, Oregon and Kenosha, Wisconsin have not calmed those fears. Sykes, in an article published on the conservative website The Bulwark on Monday, writes that he hasn’t grown any less apprehensive and argues that Trump is only adding fuel to the flames.

“It’s 2020, and nothing seems likely to get mellow anytime soon,” Sykes warns. “Welcome to the Daily Countdown. We have 63 days to go until the election — and then, 78 days after that until Inauguration Day.”

Sykes notes that some of Biden’s conservative supporters, including Washington Post columnist George Will and CNN pundit/Bulwark contributor Amanda Carpenter, have urged him to condemn violence at protests as forcefully as possible — and Sykes doesn’t disagree with them. But Sykes also writes that another journalist, Matthew Dowd, had a valid point when, last week, he tweeted, “Why does the media pressure Biden to speak out against violent protests but doesn’t pressure Trump to speak out against police misconduct?”

Dowd, Sykes writes, “could have gone further. Why is there no pressure on Trump to condemn vigilantism? As he cheers on the caravans that descended on Portland over the weekend and his supporters rally behind the 17-year-old boy who killed two people in Kenosha, where is the concern on the right that ‘this is how Trump loses?’”

Sykes adds that another Biden-supporting conservative, Sarah Longwell, recently wrote, “People still expect Biden to do the right thing, which he has. No one expects that of Trump, but we should.”

Agreeing with Longwell, Sykes writes, “Where are the Republican voices urging Trump to categorically and unambiguously denounce all of the violence? Where is the media speculation that Trump’s visit to Kenosha could be his Nixon Goes to China Moment, where he condemns all the violence, declares that Black Lives Matter, then calls on the caravans, militias, and gun-toting vigilantes to stand down?”

Trump, according to Sykes, “continues to play the arsonist” during a period of tension and unrest and does so with the help of other Republicans — for example, Rep. Ken Buck, who chairs the Colorado Republican Party and was recently seen at a fundraiser wearing a t-shirt that said, “Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out.”

“The right increasingly seems to relish the prospect of violence,” Sykes laments. “Hugh Hewitt’s colleague Kurt Schlichter has long trafficked in violent fantasies of a racial civil war, but the ardor for actual bloodshed seems to be spreading.”

4/20

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/conservative-writer-accuses-rush-limbaugh-of-having-blood-on-his-hands-for-dismissing-the-coronavirus-crisis/

jon last bulwark

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/dumbassery-conservative-editor-calls-out-right-wing-medias-bad-takes-on-deadly-coronavirus-pandemic/

no lnx

‘Dumbassery’: Conservative editor calls out right-wing media’s ‘bad takes’ on deadly coronavirus pandemic

Written by Alex Henderson March 17, 2020

As the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic continues to grow in the United States and many other countries, one thing The Bulwark can take pride in is the fact that — unlike so many other right-wing media outlets — it didn’t spend weeks trying to convince readers that coronavirus was merely a liberal hoax or “fake news” designed to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency. The Never Trump conservatives at The Bulwark always took the pandemic seriously, including The Bulwark’s senior editor, Jim Swift — who lambasts some of the incredibly moronic things that various Trumpistas and far-right media figures have said about coronavirus recently.

“The internet being what it is, and politics being what it is — and 2020 dumbassery being what it is — there are a lot of bad covid-19 takes floating around,” Swift asserts. And he cities Newsmax writer John Cardillo as a glaring example.

On March 13, Cardillo went to Twitter and said of coronavirus, “Treat it like the flu. The panic and hysteria created by the media is criminal. They are destroying lives, businesses, and the economy to make Trump look bad and again screw with elections.”

In response to Cardillo’s tweet, Swift writes, “Sure, John. The news media aren’t covering this story because it’s important and deadly, they’re only covering it because they want to take down President Donald J. Trump.”

In other words, treat it like the flu.

The panic and hysteria created by the media is criminal.

They are destroying lives, businesses, and the economy to make Trump look bad and again screw with elections. https://t.co/Pmclsy25wJ

— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) March 13, 2020

Swift also slams Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell, Jr. Appearing as a guest on Fox News’“Fox and Friends,” Falwell argued that Americans are “overreacting” to coronavirus and that all the media coverage of the pandemic is merely an “attempt to get Trump.” Moreover, Falwell claimed that coronavirus is a North Korean bioweapon.

On Fox & Friends, Jerry Falwell Jr claims people are “overreacting” to coronavirus, the national response is “their next attempt to get Trump,” and the virus itself is a North Korean bioweapon. pic.twitter.com/2JPuNBW7C3

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) March 13, 2020

Swift goes on to lambast Infowars’ Alex Jones and “old-school televangelist grifter Jim Bakker” for “hawking” bogus treatments they claim will cure coronavirus. And Swift cites a March 12 tweet from The Federalist’s Sean Davis as another example of idiocy: Davis tweeted, “Corporate political media hate you, they hate the country, and they will stop at nothing to reclaim power to rule over you. If that means that they destroy the economy via a panic that they helped incite, all while running interference for the communist country that started it, so be it.”

Truly deranged, InfoWars level stuff from The Federalist. pic.twitter.com/FzBTldunsg

— andrew kaczynski?? (@KFILE) March 13, 2020

Sarcastically describing Fox News’ Ainsley Earhardt as an “aviation expert…. not to be confused with Amelia Earhart,” Swift notes her recent comment, “It’s actually the safest time to fly. Everyone I know that’s flying right now, terminals are pretty much dead.”

Ainsley Earhardt: “It’s actually the safest time to fly. Everyone I know that’s flying right now, terminals are pretty much dead.” (It is not the safest time to fly.) pic.twitter.com/a3BnajAbj5

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) March 13, 2020

AmGreatness’ Julie Kelly, who Swift describes as a “nutty, bad-faith operator,” has called social distancing a left-wing plot to “get control” that is “far scarier than any virus.”

Scientists and health officials say social distancing (reducing contact, temporarily) is an effective way to reduce infections. Naturally, some are claiming it’s a leftist plot to gain control of the country. pic.twitter.com/TDMJM6ddir

— Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) March 13, 2020

At this point I think you have a greater chance of being attacked by Joe Biden than catching coronavirus

— Julie Kelly (@julie_kelly2) March 10, 2020

China. https://t.co/VULqyrceUH

— Ron Coleman (@RonColeman) March 13, 2020

Good news on the coronavirus you won’t find anywhere else:

-China has closed down its last coronavirus hospital. Not enough new cases to support them.

-Italy is hit hard, experts say, because they have the oldest population in Europe (average age of those that have died is 81).

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) March 13, 2020

Swift concludes his article by warning that as coronavirus “spreads” in the U.S., Americans will do themselves a favor by not taking nonsense from Fox News seriously.

“Things are going to get worse — not only as the pandemic spreads, but as the bad takes spread too,” Swift warns. “If you’re stuck at home, I’d encourage you not to watch cable news — and encourage your family to avoid it, too. Especially Fox News.”

GAME OVER?!

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/welcome-to-the-new-mainstream-gop-conservative-website-delivers-sobering-news-about-republicans-descent-into-the-alt-right/

no lnx

'Welcome to the new mainstream GOP': Conservative website delivers sobering news about Republicans' descent into the alt-right

Written by Alex Henderson November 27, 2019

Founded by Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol in December 2018, The Bulwark has become a refuge for conservatives who are disdainful of Donald Trump's presidency. And contributor Laura K. Field, in a November 27 article, delivers some sobering news to The Bulwark's right-wing anti-Trump readers: the alt-right fringe has become the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Most of The Bulwark's readers probably knew that already, but Field (who has held faculty positions at Georgetown University and American University) offers a lot of evidence to drive the point home. Under Trump, Field laments, alt-right figures like Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Miller have become "the face of today's conservatism and today's Republican Party."

Field demonstrates the prominence that extremists have achieved in the GOP by discussing an event held during Donald Trump Jr.'s recent book tour in support of "Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us." The writer notes that when the tour took Trump Jr. to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Trump Jr. and the group Turning Point USA were described as "mainstream conservatives" - and Trump Jr. was heckled by supporters of antisemite Nick Fuentes.

"This shift in language represents a victory for Don Jr., as well as for the extremists who attacked him," Field explains. "Now that Junior has been upstaged by the neo-fascist far right, he gets to be cast as mainstream. And if Turning Point USA counts as establishment, it means that the extremists aren't so far out there anymore. It's a win-win for them all."

Field goes on to say that many of the people who defined "movement conservatism" in the past have been marginalized in the modern GOP.

"You don't have to lionize the old GOP to see that many of the think tanks, magazines and intellectuals that made up movement conservatism since the Reagan years have slid into irrelevance under Trump, while talk radio and Fox News have grown in influence," Field observes. "Individuals and organizations dedicated to defending Trump and promoting Trumpism have prospered."

Field also laments that recently, "e-mails were leaked that definitively proved Stephen Miller's white supremacy, and not a single Republican member of Congress has joined the call for his resignation."

The leaked e-mails that Field is referring to were exchanges between Miller and journalist Katie McHugh, formerly of Breitbart News, in 2015 and 2016. Some of the e-mails show Miller recommending that McHugh use white nationalist websites like VDare and American Renaissance as sources of information.

Field wraps up her article on a troubling note, warning that extremists such as Fuentes won't be disappearing from the GOP anytime soon.

"The extreme environmentalists and Green New Dealers are fighting for the future of life on this planet; Nick Fuentes and his ilk want a white Christian ethnostate," Field writes. "That conservatives today aren't reeling at this difference tells us all we need to know about the successes of the alt-right…. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the new mainstream GOP."