In keeping with the annual custom, a progressive journalist attended this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, D.C., with the sole purpose of mocking the event.
The self-admitted liberal posted an ongoing Twitter screed that made fun of several CPAC speakers, including a beloved, elderly man recovering from a brutal bout with cancer. She questioned why so many pro-life, pro-gun and anti-socialists were among the 10,000 attendees, but concluded it must be because Trump supporters are “poorly educated.”
A college dropout herself, the reporter nonetheless tried to shame Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk also for being a college dropout. Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), among others, were on the receiving end of her unfunny, unimaginative insults. “We’re listening to a bearded Ted Cruz fellating Donald J Trump,” she tweeted Friday morning.
She seemed confused at discussions about conservatives being stifled by Big Tech companies and wondered why there was so much hostility toward the news media. She laughed off criticism of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, the Green New Deal, and Planned Parenthood. “I’m happy to have the night off and not have someone screaming at me about socialism,” she tweeted on Friday.
When she was confronted on social media about her hostility to pro-lifers, she proudly brandished her pro-abortion credentials, which included a 2018 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that defended late-term abortion after she considered having one herself. “How dare I say an anti-choice panel was anti-choice. Owned.”
No, the reporter—Molly Jong-Fast—doesn’t work for the New York Times or MSNBC. She is a freelancer for The Bulwark, a new site that claims it will save conservatism from the clutches of Trumpism. “As much of the Right descends into sophism and trollery, we will be a forum for rational, principled, fact-based conservative commentary,” wrote The Bulwark’s editor-in-chief Charlie Sykes when the site launched in January.
But Jong-Fast, who describes herself as a liberal, provided nothing of the sort in either her Twitter diatribes or her article about CPAC. Bill Kristol, the site’s director, commended Jong-Fast’s CPAC coverage and for “triggering so many snowflakes on the right.”
So much for “conservatism conserved.”
They’re Basically Clinton Democrats Now
The Bulwark is the new home for refugees of the now-defunct Weekly Standard, which was shuttered by its owner late last year. (Some of its writers subsequently were hired by the Washington Post and CNN.) Kristol, the Standard’s founder, publicly has harassed and ridiculed Donald Trump for three years; the magazine published numerous hit pieces on conservative lawmakers; and the outlet was tied to both Fusion GPS and a billionaire leftist who funds several causes antithetical to conservatism. All of those factors contributed to the once-regarded publication’s humiliating demise.
Kristol and Sykes manage The Bulwark and predictably have ratcheted up their animus not just toward the president and his administration but also toward Republican leadership, Trump voters, and public policies once considered conservative. Terms such as the “emergency” at the southern border and “fake news” are presented in sneer quotes, as if to suggest they aren’t legitimate.
The outlet mostly has withheld criticism of an alarming caucus of unapologetic socialists now populating the Democratic Party (with the exception of freshman Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, whose anti-Semitism is impossible to ignore) while lambasting the conservative House Freedom Caucus. There was one—one—article about Senate Democrats voting to allow babies to slowly die without medical attention; the degrading media assault against high school boys attending a pro-life march only merited one article as well. (Sykes called the Covington Catholic High School lynch mob a “kerfluffle.”)
But happily for Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), The Bulwark proudly discredited a rumor that she was related to hoaxster Jussie Smollett. Whew.
The FISAgate scandal, an unprecedented abuse of federal power that’s a source of outrage for most rank-and-file Republicans, has been completely ignored at The Bulwark, but there’s plenty of chop-licking about what the pending Mueller report might mean for the president. There isn’t a shred of criticism about former FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who now is on a nationwide book tour where he’s bragging about investigating a sitting U.S. president based on zero evidence but was instead an attempt to settle a personal score with the president.
While McCabe goes unnoticed at The Bulwark, convicted felon Michael Cohen does not. Three articles last week defended Cohen’s egregious congressional testimony and blasted Republicans for their “hostile questioning” of the disgraced and recently-disbarred former attorney. “Put aside the hearsay about racism and Trump’s vanity,” wrote Kim Wehle, a CNN and MSNBC contributor who authored a 2017 column debunking “myths” about the Second Amendment and gun rights. “The real meat of Cohen’s testimony is going to be the predicate it lays for impeaching the president of the United States.” She also, laughably, suggested Congress should ask Cohen if he thinks the country is safe with Trump at the helm.
A More Selective Appeal
The Bulwark, like most anti-Trump voices on the Right, is long on criticism but short on alternatives. Rather than offer rational, measured conservative commentary as promised, the Bulwark Boys instead are on a vengeance campaign against commentators on the Right who support the president. In a recent profile in The Atlantic, Sykes threatened to “raise the opportunity cost” for pro-Trump pundits including Victor Davis Hanson (a regular contributor to American Greatness), Hugh Hewitt, and Washington Post contributors Mark Thiessen and Henry Olsen (formerly a contributor to this site).
Sykes, a former Milwaukee radio talk show host who once ran a failed race for Congress as a Democrat, lamented the Trumpism of his vastly more intellectual and credentialed colleagues on the Right. “This sounds naïve, but I quite frankly feel they know better,” Sykes pompously told The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins. “And at certain points of moral clarity, I could see them coming back to the faith of their fathers.”
In a tweet promoting his article, Coppins claimed Sykes and company are on a “mission to make D.C. dinner parties and green-room visits as uncomfortable as possible for the pro-Trump elite.”
Whoa.
The reality is that anti-Trumpers such as Sykes and Kristol have devolved into the vapid, juvenile, petty bullies they claim to detest. Their coddling of leftists and progressives hostile to every conservative principle exposes their rampant hypocrisy; their arrogance is worthy of mockery.
Meanwhile, they offer no solutions to the woes that afflict most Americans, which is one reason why Republicans ignored their edict to vote for anyone but Trump in 2016. They still don’t get it, nor do they want to get it, because they’re being rewarded with press coverage and funding sources they wouldn’t have if they truly espoused legitimate conservative principles or backed authentic conservative lawmakers and candidates.
Instead they boost maniacs like Jong-Fast who harbor nothing but contempt for conservatives, not to mention most Americans. What a farce.
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