Julie Kelly: NeverTrump is Fat With Leftist Iranian Cash

Even though I'd heard there was a day of reckoning coming for TWS, I didn't really believe it, because I thought there would always be a deep-pocketed liberal out there to fund them. Even Tom Steyer could come in to run them as a zombie brand.

I still think something like that will happen. And I think all the people responsible for turning TWS from a snoozable-but-occasionally-useful magazine into a Trump Derangement Bath-Salts-Fueled Hobo Fuck-Pile will be kept on, while all the actual conservatives will be let go.

Then they'll hire more people from Slate and Vox to fill the ranks.

Because Grifters Gonna Grift.

Omidyar is a former donor to the Democratic Party and a devoted Leftist whose main causes include promoting open borders, climate change, and racial politics. But his latest crusade, funded to the tune of $100 million, is to infect every corner and crevice of the public square with anti-Trump bias.

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If it sounds ominous, it's because it is. What’s even more alarming is that a cabal of longtime influencers on the Right--the political world’s self-appointed moral superiors who now vilify Trump as a greedy, unprincipled charlatan--have their hands in the deep pockets of a Leftist billionaire while pretending to represent core conservative values they clearly have abandoned for political and personal gain.

This list features not only Bill Kristol (as I wrote last month) but others including Evan McMullin, Mindy Finn, Mona Charen, Matthew Dowd, and Linda Chavez. Former GOP officials such as U.S. Representative David Jolly (R-Fla.), former GOP governor Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff are all tied to Democracy Fund affiliates. All are reliable and frequent "conservative" critics of the president and his administration.

In 2017 alone, Democracy Fund spent more than $47 million to bankroll dozens of organizations, including several that support anti-Trump Republicans. (Kudos to Democracy Fund for its transparency. Figures only are available through 2017.)

Here are a few:

Stand Up Republic: Headed up by the losing presidential ticket of Evan McMullin and Mindy Finn, this group received up to $800,000 in 2017 by an affiliate of the Democracy Fund. Rep. Jolly, who scored an appearance on "Real Time with Bill Maher" in October to tell the world he was leaving the GOP because of Trump, is a board member. Stand Up Republic spent $500,000 on ads to urge Alabama voters to vote against Roy Moore in that state's special Senate election last year. McMullin, Finn, and Jolly are outspoken Trump critics on Twitter and in the media.

Protect Democracy: This new group claims that "Congress [is] abdicating its role, and President Trump is now undermining checks and balances by attacking the judiciary, withholding information from Congress, and punishing states that have opposed his policies." Several NeverTrumpers serve as advisers to the project, including National Review author Mona Charen; ABC News contributor Matthew Dowd; writer Linda Chavez; and, of course, Finn and McMullin. John Dean, Nixon's White House counsel and now vocal critic of Trump, also is an adviser. Democracy Fund committed $400,000 in 2017 to the group over two years; advisers engage in "specific projects" or others at a more "general level."

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Defending Democracy Together: Another post-2016 election group, Defending Democracy Together has received at least $600,000 from a Democracy Fund affiliate this year. Headed by Kristol, Charen, Chavez as well as Trump foes Christine Todd Whitman and former Rep. Bob Inglis (who also works with another Democracy Fund recipient--the R Street Institute--which received $650,000 in 2017), Defending Democracy Together is fighting the president on the special counsel probe, tariffs, and immigration policy. The group has run television ads throughout the year demanding that Congress protect the Mueller investigation and that acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker recuse himself.

Other organizations filled with NeverTrumpers hostile to the president and his administration are Democracy Fund grantees. This includes the Cato Institute, the Bipartisan Policy Center (former GOP Chairman and Trump foe Michael Steele is a board member), and the Niskanen Center.

The Niskanen Center is staffed by alleged "libertarians" who are all about that very-libertarian cause, regulating the global energy economy to stop "global warming."

Read the whole thing to learn the names of those with their hands in the piggy bank.

"More to come," Kelly promises.

Update: The Daily Caller has more on the Weekly Standard's failure. An insider tells them they do not even have a budget beyond December 14 -- ten days from now.

"I don't expect it to exist after December 14, 2018," one editor at the magazine told TheDCNF. "There is no budget for it AT ALL."

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Individuals close to the magazine told TheDCNF that [billionaire owner Phil] Anschutz was growing frustrated with the direction of the magazine.

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"They're either closing or they’re folding into a page of the Washington Examiner," said the former Examiner employee.

Yet a current editor at The Weekly Standard disputed that possibility.

"I don't think 'folded' is the right word. It sounds more like get rid of us entirely," the editor said.

I still think a left-wing billionaire will save it. Maybe Mark Cuban or someone.

Maybe George Soros.

But they'll keep the trolls who destroyed the magazine, and the conservatives will either be fired or have to quit -- they couldn't work in an expressly anti-conservative magazine for long. (Though they have stuck with TWS until now.)

posted by Ace of Spades at 06:09 PM

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