Frum, D

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an 3 26

The Atlantic's David Frum, the former George W. Bush speechwriter and conservative, lambasted the far-right wing for playing up the conflict online to generate more traction, more clicks and, with it, more money. It begins a cycle that both he and British historian Andrew Roberts believe has created the rise in far-right hate.

The art of the hate-click is real. It's when people are so disgusted by a headline that they click on it. Frum said that the latest tool is being deployed by the fringe right with an attack on former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Frum said that they're doing it all for the clicks and their fringe behavior is simply itching for "shock value." Roberts explained, "the more shocking you are, the more likely you are to appeal to the lowest form of human nature."

He recalled the nickname "shock jocks," radio DJs who would "say the most outrageous things possible, therefore drawing attention," Roberts said.

"That is the nature of the internet," he added. "The more shocking you are, the more likely you are to appeal to the lowest form of human nature, I suppose. So it’s built into the algorithm of the internet, in a sense. But also, I think that, as well as wanting to shock and be perverse and so on, there’s also a very—even darker side to all of this, which, as I say, is anti-Semitism, and I think it has contributed enormously to the present rise of anti-Semitism in the world."

On Wednesday, a jury found Google and Meta culpable for pushing addictive algorithms. in one talk that people can become just as addicted to negative emotions as they can positive ones.

"The arousal of these stress hormones that create fear, that create anger, aggression or that create pain give the body a rush of energy," he said. "People become almost like an addict. They need the problems in their life to reaffirm their addiction to that arousal to that emotion. And if you can turn that response on by thought alone, number one, you become addicted to your own thoughts. And number two, you become addicted to the very life that you don't even like."

It made Frum ask what the cause is and what the effect is.

"Do you start as an anti-Semite and then wanna rehabilitate the Third Reich, or do you start by wanting to rehabilitate the Third Reich because you look at a lot of old picture postcards and imaginary scenes and Leni Riefenstahl movies and think, Well, that’s an accurate depiction of reality. They must have had a point about the Jews? Which goes first, this cultish attraction to the Third Reich or the anti-Semitism driving the cultish attraction to the Third Reich?" asked Frum.

Roberts thinks that they're both sides of the same coin. They can then lead people down the road of "anti-democratic, anti-Western, anti-civilization, anti-Christianity, and anti-culture" ideologies, too. Some turn anti-Semitic and toward Christian Nationalism, while others go from anti-semitism to Islamic extremist groups.

He also touched on Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strongman example that has inspired the manosphere and incel (involuntarily celibate) communities. They think it's "macho" to invade and blow up buildings, Roberts said.

This culminates in the recent debate over Winston Churchill, who is currently on the five-pound note. There's a movement in the U.K. to remove him and replace him with a bird. There are other movements to remove the people like the writers "and the people we're proud of" and replace them with animals or flowers.

"The British people, typically, are taking it as a huge joke, and they’re putting forward completely absurd animals that are going to do — if it’s done on a vote, then all hell’s gonna break loose, frankly," Roberts laughed.

But it's part of a larger issue that has been ongoing since the 1970s, in which the neo-Nazi, Holocaust denier and author David Irving sought to destroy Churchill's reputation. He has become an icon for the far-right. For the neo-Nazi community, it comes from Joseph Goebbels, who "demonized Churchill," said Roberts.

Frum noted a growing divide between real history and the world of what he called "internet history."

That rewriting is alive and well in the U.S. as President Donald Trump's administration tries to remove any mention of the history of slavery or the forced removal of Native Americans from museums and universities.

He chastized, "And the development and peace that the world enjoyed after 1945 was a product of American power and British endurance, and had the British made the choice that is being recommended to them by all these fool, loudmouth bloggers, their own childhoods would’ve been overhung by terror and fascism and tragedy."

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pro NOAA

Decline and Fall of the Conservative Mind | The David Frum Show

Nov 26, 2025 The David Frum Show

On this episode of “The David Frum Show,” The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the unceremonious end of the Department of Government Efficiency. He examines the legacy DOGE leaves behind, why it failed, and how it became yet another example of the Trump administration’s drive to make America’s government weaker and smaller. David is then joined by the historian and biographer Sam Tanenhaus to discuss his sweeping new biography of William F. Buckley Jr., “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.” Frum and Tanenhaus reflect on the Bill Buckley they both knew, exploring his strengths, his flaws, and his influence on the American conservative movement from the 1960s onward.

paperwork makes fraud hard ~ doge

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an 11 24

Despite his unpopularity among the American electorate, dozens of felony convictions and a failed coup attempt, Donald Trump still managed to not only win the Electoral College but also the national popular vote. One former Republican White House staffer is offering three main reasons why Trump defied the odds in 2024.

In a Friday essay for the Atlantic, David Frum — who was a speechwriter for former President George W. Bush — noted Trump "waged a relentless campaign against any and all rules that restrained him" in his third bid for the presidency. He also pointed out that Trump notched three "all-important successes" that paved the way for his eventual November 5 victory.

"First, he frightened [President Joe] Biden administration’s Justice Department away from holding him to account in courts of law in any timely way," Frum wrote. "Second, he persuaded the courts themselves — including, ultimately, the Supreme Court — to invent new doctrines of presidential immunity to shield him."

"Third, he broke all internal resistance within the Republican Party to his lawless actions," he continued. "Republican officeholders, donors and influencers who had once decried the January 6 attempted coup as utterly and permanently debarring — one by one, Trump brought them to heel."

As if to illustrate Frum's point, Trump's sentencing in the New York hush money cover-up case has now been indefinitely postponed. Judge Juan Merchan issued a one-page ruling on Friday announcing that the late November sentencing date for Trump's 34 felony convictions had been scuttled, and did not announce a new date. His two federal cases will likely be officially dismissed once Trump takes office on January 20, and his Fulton County, Georgia election interference trial will likely be delayed until 2029, after Trump's final term ends.

Frum observed that because American institutions and the courts failed to hold Trump accountable, whether the ex-president (and now president-elect) would ever face any consequences for his actions ultimately came down to the election. He opined that regardless of how the American electorate may have felt about the importance of preserving democracy, a majority of voters viewed the economy as a higher priority — hence Trump winning with voters who ranked that issue as the most important.

"So the ancient struggle resumes again: progress against reaction, dignity against domination, commerce against predation, stewardship against spoliation, global responsibility against national chauvinism," Frum wrote. "No quitting."

:{Click here to read Frum's essay in its entirety (subscription required).

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gR briefly took high road ~ putin?

no lnx twt

Geraldo Rivera lashes out after conservative journalist slams Fox News’ Ukraine commentary

Alex Henderson March 22, 2022

Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera lashed out at Never Trump conservativeDavid Frum after the journalist posted a tweet slamming the Kremlin talking points that have come from some opinion hosts at the right-wing cable news outlet.

On March 21, Frum tweeted, “I'm trying to recall a single instance of a resignation of conscience at Fox News over the network's support for Putin's war. Marina Ovsyannikova risked life and liberty to tell her viewers the truth. Is there one wealthy Fox director or employee willing to forgo a single check?”

After seeing Frum’s tweet, Rivera angrily posted, “Fuck you. You don’t know me. Do you even have a job?”

Frum, a right-wing conservative who has been a scathing critic of former President Donald Trump, regularly appears in The Atlantic and other major publications.

The disparity between Fox News’ hard news division and far-right opinion host Tucker Carlson has been evident during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While Carlson has been an apologist for Russian President Vladimir Putin and been more than happy to push Kremlin talking points, Fox News’ hard news division has had plenty of boots-on-the-ground reporting from Ukraine during the conflict — and some Fox correspondents have been killed in Ukraine, including cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and Ukrainian correspondent Oleksandra Kuvshynova.

Mother Jones’ David Corn recently reported that Carlson’s commentary has been so pro-Putin that a Kremlin memo urged state-owned Russian television to feature him more prominently.

Frum, in his March 21 tweet, obviously wasn’t referring to Zakrzewski or Kuvshynova, but to all the pro-Putin comments that Carlson has drawn so much criticism for.

Mediaite’s Michael Luciano, reporting on Rivera’s anti-Frum tweet, commented that it is false to say that Fox News universally supports Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Luciano wrote, “Numerous Fox News hosts, including Rivera, Jesse Watters, and Sean Hannity, have vocally supported sending military aid to Ukraine.”

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/lab-origin-theory/

In 2020, then-President Donald Trump went from bragging about his ability to make deals with Chinese government officials to pushing the conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 coronavirus was invented in a lab in Wuhan, China and leaked out. Never Trump conservative David Frum, in an Atlantic article published by The Atlantic on May 18, lays out some ways in which Trump and his sycophants are still trying to use that conspiracy theory as a political weapon in the United States.

Although Frum's article is critical of Trump, it is also critical of the Chinese government's initial response to COVID-19. The novel coronavirus was first reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and spread rapidly in January 2020, when Chinese officials downplayed its severity — which is the same thing Trump subsequently did when COVID-19 spread rapidly in the United States. But Frum rejects the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan.

"Early on, it became clear that Chinese authorities were lying about the disease's human toll," Frum explains. "Nick Paton of CNN, in December 2020, reported on 117 pages of internal Chinese government documents suggesting that the local authorities in Wuhan had massively underreported COVID-19 infections in the early weeks of the outbreak. In January 2021, HBO aired a documentary by the director Nanfu Wang minutely detailing the Chinese undercount. From the beginning, though, many have suspected the Chinese authorities of concealing an even darker secret about the outbreak than China's count of the sick and the dead. Those doubters suspected that the Chinese were also lying about how the outbreak started. They suspected that the official story of a spread from bats to humans was an excuse to conceal the fact that the virus had originated in a Chinese lab."

Frum adds that on January 29, 2020, the Washington Post published an article headlined "Experts Debunk Fringe Theory Linking China's Coronavirus to Weapons Research." And on February 17, 2020, the New York Times published an article headlined "Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins." Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, has been a devoted Trump supporter.

"Over time, the suspicious modulated their accusation a little," Frum notes. "In the spring of 2020, Trumpworld was also arguing that the virus was no big deal, no reason to shut down the U.S. economy. The president and his supporters wanted to argue that masking was stupid and that public-health officials were hysterical. You couldn't argue both that the virus was absurdly exaggerated and that it had begun its existence as a Chinese superweapon. By the time Secretary of State Mike Pompeo endorsed a lab-origin theory of the virus in May 2020, the suspicion about the virus' origin had been downgraded from 'superweapon' to 'medical experiment gone wrong.' Despite this softening, the scientific community, for the most part, continued to emphatically reject the lab-origin theory."

Scientists, Frum points out, are unsure exactly how COVID-19 started — adding that Trump supporters are happy to toss science aside if it is politically advantageous.

"If there is any group of people more disliked by Trump supporters than Chinese Communists," Frum observes, "it is the U.S. scientific community. For months, scientists had irritated Trump supporters by not falling in line with the pro-Trump argument that the coronavirus was much exaggerated and no big deal."

Frum adds, "Anthony Fauci in particular has become a hate figure to the pro-Trump world and the Fox News network. It's weird, it's hard to explain, but it is an organizing fact of American politics: More than Biden, more than Vice President Kamala Harris, more than any Democrat in Congress other than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Fauci has become the emblem and totem of everything that Trumpists resent."

The Never Trump conservative stresses that although COVID-19-releated "misconduct" on the part of Chinese officials needs to be called out, that shouldn't include pushing bogus conspiracy theories.

"Pro-Trumpers want to use Chinese misconduct — real and imagined — as a weapon in a culture war here at home," Frum warns. "They are not interested in weighing the evidence. They want payback for the political and cultural injuries inflicted on them by the scientists. They want Fauci to have time in the barrel. What the rest of us should want is the truth…. By actively seeking the truth, the Biden Administration will deny the Trump dead-enders the culture-war weapon they want."

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conservative bashes his own party’s hostility to democracy: ‘It’s always Republicans’

Travis Gettys / Raw StoryMay 25, 2020

Conservative David Frum blamed the Republican Party for undermining U.S. democratic institutions. The former speechwriter for George W. Bush told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that President Donald Trump’s hardcore base was…

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/what-trumps-choice-of-bolton-reveals/556352/

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[later: congress turns blind eye to djt graft in retuen for his signing bills]

zinke hunting pal of don jr; mick m pushed gov't default; chao;

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press: hannity and new say no indep media eg CNN

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rep sez that dem congress wins2018 not enough?

disillusioned conservatives, Jennifer Rubin, Peter Wehner, David Frum, Anna Navarro and Charlie Sykes among them. Michael Gerson, once a speechwriter for George W Bush, says: “The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased. The movement has been seized by a kind of discrediting madness, in which conspiracy delusions figure prominently.”

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/10-disgraced-iraq-war-supporters-who-are-desperately-trying-undo-obamas-iran-deal

CONSERVATIVES exerted enormous pressure on their party to follow its new and more radical line, and the pressure quickly grew unbearable not only for Republicans in elected office but for many moderate intellectuals as well. The most high-profile of these figures was David Frum. In some ways he is also the most surprising.

In 1994,Frumwrote a book called Dead Right, a treatise urging the GOP to return to a more pure form of limited government conservatism. He joined the Bush administration in 2001 as a speechwriter, and two years later left to assume a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and write a fawning memoir of Bush titled The Right Man. Like many conservatives in the waning years of the Bush administration, he turned against the administration that he once supported so fervently. But unlike most of them, Frum did not conclude that Bush had failed because he had abandoned the true faith of the conservative creed. In 2008, he wrote Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, which took a distinctly more pragmatic line than he had advocated before, but still placed him within the bounds of conservative-movement thought, albeit clinging to its left edge.

The GOP’s rightward lurch in response to the Obama administration flung Frum right off. AEI fired Frum in 2010, after he castigated the GOP for launching a holy war against health care reform rather than negotiate with Democrats who were desperate for bipartisan concord. (AEI had very much thrown itself into the holy war cause.) Intellectually, the party had left Frum, as he found himself defending its old positions on health care, climate change, and stimulus and monetary policy against its new ones.

Emotionally, though, Frum had left the party. Patriots, his new self-published novel, expresses in fictional form a sharper criticism of conservatism than his policy tract had done. The story centers on Walter Schotzke, a ne’er-do-well heir who stumbles into a fictionalized version of the Republican Party. Walter takes a job working for a Northeastern moderate “Constitutionalist”—the GOP in this universe—who, working alongside a McCain-like president, attempts to see through the sort of middle-ground agenda that Frum would like. But Schotzke is stymied by a network of cynical movement conservatives spreading their own pseudo-facts, and creating irresistible career incentives for its foot soldiers to comply with the dubious cause.

The first line of the novel (“I didn’t get the job through merit”) subverts the entire Randian worship of Job Creators that has dominated contemporary Republican cant. Frum’s portrait of Washington—and, especially, the precincts of official conservative Washington in which he spent most of his career—is savage. (As a novel, Patriotsis at about the level one might expect from a non-novelist like Frum, but the unremarkable story is mainly a vehicle for Frum’s well-informed Washington anthropology.) The self-interest of the right-wing donor base, the sensationalism of the right-wing media, and the careerism of the movement’s foot soldiers come together in Frum’s interesting narrative to create a Republican world the internal reality of which barely intersects with that of the real world, an apparatus more like the Comintern than a properly functioning party in a mature democracy. The only sense of Republican loyalty one can find in Patriots is loyalty to a party that no longer exists and cannot exist without blowing up and reconstructing the current version.

Frum is not the only conservative who has found himself irreconcilably opposed to the GOP and the conservative movement. Bruce Bartlett, a fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, lost his post for his fierce criticisms of Republican budgeting in the Bush era. Josh Barro left the Manhattan Institute. Frum has approached his dilemma in more patient (and perhaps more immodest) fashion, conceiving of himself as the curator of a kind of Republican Party in exile, one whose opportunity to exert influence will come only after the party suffers a sufficiently dire and prolonged setback. A colleague of his once compared Frum’s project to “monks preserving knowledge during the Dark Ages.” For the time being, his wing of estranged moderates has sutured themselves off from their former allies, persevering in their ability to re-think moderate Republicanism, but depriving themselves of any immediate chance to exert influence within the party.

IF FRUM AND HIS fellow exiles have maintained a coherent analysis but forfeited their chance to affect the Republicans, a larger and more influential coterie of moderate conservatives has done the opposite. Columnists such as David Brooks, Michael Gerson, and Ross Douthat have formulated a serious and often stinging critique of the GOP’s radical direction, and, with varying degrees of seriousness and specificity, laid out an alternative path. What they have failed to do is to face up to the cold reality that the alternative they propose diverges wildly from the actually existing Republican Party. They have instead convinced themselves that their reform crusade has succeeded, or will soon succeed. They consign the massive impediments before them to a small corner of their mental space. They invoke the Republican Party that they hypothesize as though it were real, and the real Republican Party as though it were hypothetical.