Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our names, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Hunter DeRenzis from The National Interest, where he's now a reporter.
And this one, we link to it at antiwar.com, yonder the other day.
Does the bulwark mean the neocons are staging a comeback?
Welcome back to the show, Hunter.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott, happy to be here again.
Cool, man.
So what's the bulwark?
And I don't like the sound of that, neocon comeback.
Well, first off, I don't like the sound of the bulwark.
I think it's a terrible name for a website or a publication.
It just doesn't sound good, but that's more of a personal opinion.
The bulwark is Bill Kristol's new project.
He started it last year as a news aggregator for his Defending Democracy Institute, because, you know, Bill Kristol just loves defending democracy.
And in December, when the Weekly Standard closed after well over 20 years of being the, you know, the publication of neoconservatism, Kristol switched everything over to the bulwark, which is switched from a news aggregator to now a commentary site.
So you basically have all of the old Weekly Standard commentators and reporters and their whole fun house now moved over to the bulwark.
I see.
So remind us then, what happened to the Weekly Standard?
Well, the Weekly Standard closed in December because its main funder, Philip F. Anschutz, who's a Colorado billionaire, he decided to close it.
Because like many political magazines, the Weekly Standard was, you know, works off of very rich funders because political magazines simply aren't a profitable model.
So if anyone is interested in learning more about that, I highly recommend Dan McCarthy's piece about the closing of the standard in Spectator USA where he goes into a lot of detail about how political magazines function, etc.
And basically Anschutz basically got to the point where he decided that the Weekly Standard just wasn't doing what it needed to for him anymore because since political magazines don't make a profit and don't make money, it's all about the intellectual veneer that they're able to have.
It's about respectability.
It's about how much do you care about spreading these ideas even if you're losing pretty penny.
And it got to the point where he just decided the standard was not doing it anymore because more and more it's been misaligned in the Trump era.
Because unlike National Review, which opposed Trump during the campaign and quickly made itself comfortable with the administration with a little criticism, the Weekly Standard has continued to criticize the Trump presidency at every turn, and Bill Kristol continues to be one of the headpieces of the Never Trump movement.
And they've actually declared the bulwark, the news site, to be a last stand for Trump critics where anyone in the conservative movement or on the right who still opposes the administration can basically have a place to write for.
Yeah, well, it's all kind of funny because it's just another case of Bill Kristol making a bad bet, and he just knew that Trump was going to go down in flames and he was going to get to try to take partial credit for it or something like that, and now he's stuck himself on the outside.
And he's gotten more and more pushed out of the conservative movement because he's just viewed as so toxic.
I mean I really wish he was viewed as toxic for his views or his history of supporting illegal wars, but no, just opposing the president is enough to push him to the sidelines, so we've got to take what we can get.
That's true.
And, you know, for the young people who really don't know, maybe if they were missed it, maybe people were a bad guy back then or they were just in school or whatever, didn't realize they weren't paying attention or whatever.
But the story of Iraq War II is the story of, as Justin Raimondo called it, the axis of Kristol.
This is the guy, as much as Dick Cheney or George W. Bush, this is the guy that launched that war, that ran the Project for a New American Century, that ran the Weekly Standard and the parade of neocon talking heads in and out of Fox News all day long for a year and a half running up to that thing.
And was also – I don't know exactly what the name of his position was, but was an important fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, which was the kind of sister organization with PNAC at that time and of course JINSA and WINEP and all of these.
It was all organized by Bill Kristol.
He was the guy at the top of the letterhead of four or five of these organizations pushing for that war.
If his father, Irving Kristol, one of the founders of neoconservatism, was one of their main intellectuals, I would call Bill an operator because I certainly wouldn't call him an intellectual in any way.
But he's a good operator in that he's one of the main guys working these organizations, so many to push his ideas, and for a long time he was extremely successful in pushing his ideas.
We started a war over it and invaded a country based on what he was pushing all through the 90s, and for anyone really interested in getting into those details, I'd recommend another piece from Scott McConnell writing in The American Conservative back in December.
He did a great write-up on how the Standard was the publication being read in Washington back in 2002-2003 and how their editorials had so much influence just going to certain people's desks because it was the Weekly Standard.
It was a print publication that you could read in your hand every week, and that – the factor of that played a big part because it was easy to get and people just enjoy having that because it looks fancy.
It looks smart, respectable, and respectable is the big term here, and that's one of the reasons I think the bulwark is just not going to be nearly successful.
It's a huge step back for Crystal and the neoconservatives because, one, they lost their subscribers list, the Weekly Standards, to the Washington Examiner, which is still owned by Ann Schutz, and he wants to put all of his eggs in that basket.
So the Weekly Standard doesn't have its subscribers list, which was very vast, and also it has none of the credibility or name recognition.
Now, very few people read the Weekly Standard, but I think it's fair to say that a lot of people in the conservative movement were vaguely aware of what it is even if that only came from seeing commercials for their cruises.
But nobody knows what the bulwark is, and nobody knows to look for it or to read it or anything.
It's a complete mystery.
Yeah.
Well, and they don't really have a cause to champion in the way that the Weekly Standard had Iraq War II, which, as you correctly point out, they were lobbying for all through the 1990s, too.
I mean, I remember all their magazine covers back in the 90s about blaming Saddam Hussein for everything.
And it's interesting because back then I didn't know what a neocon was, but I knew that there was this sect of Republican conservatives around the Weekly Standard magazine that would never shut up about Saddam Hussein, who, obviously, as Colin Powell put it, was in his box at that point.
It was no threat to anyone and yet was such an obsession of theirs.
So that really was the phenomenon.
And then it's also worth pointing out that just like famously Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby put the aluminum tubes and other nuclear material story in the New York Times under the byline of Judith Miller and Michael Gordon there and then went on TV to cite it.
Dick Cheney goes on Meet the Press and goes, well, the New York Times says the same thing that he put in there.
Well, they did the same thing with Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard in writing all this garbage about Saddam Hussein's ties to Osama bin Laden.
And then Dick Cheney would go out and say, well, there's this study in the Weekly Standard that claims this and that when he was the one who put it in there and it was all garbage.
And the reason he had to cite that was because he couldn't cite the CIA because they said it wasn't true.
I mean, except when they were torturing Libby and Zubeda to say it was true.
But the rest of the time they were saying it wasn't true.
Absolutely, and one of the big reasons the standard was viewed as so respectable in the early 2000s was that like how the New Republic was viewed as Bill Clinton's magazine in the 90s, the Weekly Standard was viewed as the Bush administration's magazine in the early 2000s.
So if there was, say, a source quoted in the Weekly Standard even anonymously, people in the capital city looked on it as, oh, that's probably trustworthy because they know everybody in the administration, whereas it just served as a vehicle for war propaganda purposely.
Hey, a big shout out and a thank you from me and Sheldon Richman to the guys and girls in the Tom Woods Facebook group who recently made a very generous donation to the Libertarian Institute.
We sure appreciate it.
Thanks, guys.
All right, so now who all has joined Bill Kristol over here at the bulwark?
Well, Kristol is the editor-at-large of the bulwark, which in newspaper speak basically means his name is attached but he's not at all involved in the operations of it or what goes on the site or anything dealing with the actual running of the website.
It's just to have his name on it, to have his association with it, and saying that behind the scenes he provides a little oomph.
The actual editor-in-chief is Charlie Sykes, who's been very associated with The Standard.
He's been a very popular radio host in Wisconsin the past 20 years and is very, very much in line with Kristol's thinking.
And as for everyone else, it's just basically a rundown of everyone who was just at The Standard, everybody who got fired in December and poor writers looking for work for a couple weeks have suddenly found a new home getting paid on just this different website.
All right, and then – so are they writing all about staying in Syria because of Iran and this kind of thing predictably or what?
Partially.
If you look – if you watch the website, it doesn't have so much of a policy it's promoting.
Like you mentioned before, they don't have their own Iraq invasion to call for now.
But the entirety of the site is simply to be anti-Trump.
So anything the Trump administration is doing in both foreign and domestic, you can bet the bulwark will have an article up opposing it, and that includes Trump's proposed withdrawal from Syria and all of his foreign policy tenets that we might ourselves like.
But it's almost – any kind of policy is almost a sideshow because it's just become this obsession with taking down the Trump administration.
Yeah, which – Bill Kristol is not in too much of a very good position.
Obviously for him, it works to have a bunch of Democrats cite him and say, oh, wow, even Bill Kristol says we're right or this kind of thing.
But that kind of talk is pretty cheap.
It's not going to go very far.
Which conservatives are really rallying around the regret they voted for Trump bandwagon?
There's nothing like that.
Maybe in the future looking back, the way they look back on Kristol and the Bushes, but it's hard to see why that would translate into support for Kristol again in the place of Trump.
Yeah, I don't think there's any kind of possibility of the bulwark being successful in its aim or at least if something does happen where the Trump administration goes down in defeat, it will not be because of the bulwark.
As much as they will continue to promote articles about some kind of mythical 2020 primary challenge in defense of the Republican Party circa 2006, it's not going to happen, and if it does happen, it will not be successful.
Yeah, I mean we saw what happened with his last picks from Sarah Palin to David French, and God knows what he thinks is the right answer.
It never is.
But anyway, so … On that same note, just this morning Politico ran a new article saying that Bill Kristol is now starting to promote Larry Hogan, the governor of Maryland, a very liberal Republican who has just reelected.
And also – and while Bill Kristol praised him, he was not in attendance for Hogan's recent inaugural as governor, but guess who was?
Jeb Bush.
So you kind of have almost this coalescing at this point trying to find any kind of candidate to challenge Trump, and Hogan has not ruled it out entirely.
Yeah, I mean the problem is I think the Republicans who really preferred Jeb to Trump have already died of old age.
There's really nobody there.
The Jeb Bush constituency in the GOP.
Yeah, I'm not sure there is one at all.
Exactly.
Please clap.
They've either died of old age or really seen what side their bread is buttered on.
I mean all of these billionaires who are talking about funding an anti-Trump Republican back in 2016 in the primaries, they're not going to do anything now because a lot of – some of them are ideological, and they really despise the kind of policies Trump is instituting.
And some of them are just honestly grifters who are just trying to stay in the halls of power, and as long as Trump is in power, they'll be fine with them.
Hey, it's a very political economy in a lot of ways.
And speaking of which, Pierre Omidjar, the guy who bankrolls The Intercept, gave Bill Kristol a million dollars to do this?
Over a million.
Wow.
And then it's funny you have this quote from the freaks over at FrontPageMag saying, he's a radical leftist, so therefore that's why the bulwark is not trustworthy.
But I would say he gave a million dollars to Bill Kristol, and that is why Omidjar is not trustworthy.
And never mind his role in the coup in Ukraine in 2014, financing some of those NGOs and all of that.
But how could any human being give a million dollars to Bill Kristol?
And then how could it be the same guy who would be interested in giving a million dollars to Glenn Greenwald?
I don't get it.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Just to add a couple of details to your summation, so specifically, as I mentioned, the bulwark was created last year originally as a news aggregator by the Defending Democracy Institute, which is 501C3.
And that 501C3 has a 501C4 partner organization, which is Defending Democracy Together.
Same thing, just doesn't have the institute attached.
And it's that 501C4 that received two separate $600,000 grants last year from the Democracy Fund Voice, which is an advocacy group funded solely by Omidjar.
So Omidjar gave this advocacy group the money, and they promote the same things Bill Kristol always promotes, but it's just an activist arm, the sister organization of the institute which created the bulwark.
Still not much question that it was his decision to do so.
It's not like it was all out of his control at that point or anything.
Absolutely.
The institute – the 501C4 and the 501C3 have exactly the same board, exactly the same participants.
They're sister organizations doing the same thing, just legal reasons they are separate.
You just sort of got to understand a little of the legal nuances of this, but for the big picture, you can say that Omidjar did give absolutely – gave $1.2 million to Bill Kristol's organization.
That is absolutely true.
That is crazy.
And the logic to that is – well, first you have the irony, like you pointed out, that Omidjar is funding Glenn Greenwald and now kind of Bill Kristol.
The same journalist who broke the Ed Snowden story and revealed that the NSA was having warrantless surveillance on Americans is being funded by – Greenwald is being funded by Omidjar, and Omidjar is also funding the same person who was calling Ed Snowden a traitor when that story broke.
All because I – obviously I can't know for sure, but I would guess it's reasonable to assume that the motivation for this is to – again, it goes back to opposing Trump in that Greenwald and The Intercept is a left-wing publication.
I think it's fair to say democratic socialists, most of them, would describe a lot of their writers, and that's all kind of with Omidjar's push for independent media.
Well, likewise you could say that the bulwark is quote-unquote independent media and that it's independent of the administration.
It's independent of the policies happening now because even though they're promoting foreign wars and empire and imperialistic ambitions, they're doing so as critics, not as people in power.
So they are sort of in the same realm of that very general term, independent media, and Omidjar has donated over $500,000 to the Democratic Party in the last 20 years, and there's no reason to think that he would not fund someone like Kristol who's now trying to have a publication oppose Trump, which Omidjar certainly does.
I mean, at the same time, he could have given a million dollars to Doug Bandow and the guys at Cato.
If you're going to try to cause some anti-Trump dissension on the right, why has it got to be Bill Kristol that gets the benefit of it?
I don't know.
I completely agree, and it's just confusing.
I'd be interested to see what Greenwald thinks about his funder also funding this or if he has any commentary on that.
I actually had a dream that Glenn Greenwald resigned out of principle over this.
And then when I woke up, I was like, ah, that was funny.
Oh, that'd be great.
I'm sorry.
Hang on just one second.
Hey, y'all, I was talking with Derek Sherriff from Listen and Think Audiobooks, and he agrees with me that it's so important that the Trump White House hears from large numbers of Americans who support his efforts to end the wars in Syrian Afghanistan, especially from combat veterans like himself.
The president must hear voices of support from out here in the real world to counteract the cries of the war party in D.C. and on TV.
Now, the phone lines are jammed, but they have a pretty good email system there at WhiteHouse.gov.
Email me, Scott at ScottHorton.org when you do.
And Derek Sherriff at Listen and Think Audiobooks will give you two free ones for your effort.
All right, well, well, dang, I guess, you know what?
Not to pick on Bumper because I love Bumper, but I saw that Jacob Hornberger posted a thing from the bulwark about free trade with China.
Oh, did he?
And I thought, well, he just must not know what's going on here, or maybe he just doesn't care because he's like, hey, it's a good article about trade with China, this kind of thing.
But it makes me wonder about how much purchase this thing has already gotten or not.
That is interesting.
I didn't know that about Hornberger.
But, yeah, it does have some limited influence or perhaps better to say friends in high places because while the grants were issued middle of the year last year and also they received $150,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation back in September.
When those grants were issued, the idea of the bulwark as the kind of commentary site that exists now didn't exist.
The plan didn't exist because they didn't know exactly what was going to happen with the standard.
So Crystal raised most of the money for the website, and CNN ballparked the cost of the website at about $1 million.
That money had to have been raised in late December, early January, the month in between when the standard closed and the bulwark opened its website on January 7th.
So Crystal was able to gather enough friends to throw together at least a million to put everything together.
So it does have some influence in higher circles because I bet anything that wasn't grassroots funding.
Right.
Those grassroots are already dead.
Okay.
Well, thank you very much for your time, Hunter.
Great reporting here and an alarming development for us to be very careful and aware of here.
So thank you for your time.
Thank you so much, Scott.
Really appreciate it.
All right, you guys.
That's Hunter DeRenzis.
He is a reporter at the National Interest.
This one is called Does the Bulwark Mean the Neocons Are Staging a Comeback?
It has a big, ugly picture of Bill Crystal at the top of it, too.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
