Weekly Standard Shuts Down

There's a lot of whining by NeverTrumpers that this is terrible because we need dissenting voices in media, and the closing of the Weekly Standard means that we must all "kneel" to one rich arrogant man's ego.

Well, you know who might agree with that? Lee Smith, who was fired -- purged -- from The Weekly Standard last October immediately having offered them an article exposing FusionGPS, the firm that Bill Kristol hired to try to take out Trump and Cruz, for those who like to forget that last name.

I know a lot of NeverTrumpers pretend they were Cruz supporters but funny, when I was supporting Cruz, I didn't see them anywhere near me. They were taking snarky shots at Cruz and seemed to be rather enamored of Ruuuuubioooo.

Anyway, Lee Smith offered a rich (well, at least he lives richly off other people's money) arrogant man whose ego cannot bear to hear any dissenting voices a story about the company he paid (or rather, used his donors' money to pay) for dirt on Trump and Cruz, and was canned.

I have repeatedly brought this up and I have not seen a single NeverTrumper, or one of the people eulogizing this magazine which supposedly fostered a spirit of contrarianism and dissent, so much as mention it, let alone condemn it.

So to all of those Weekly Standard people upset about losing your jobs -- Lee Smith lost his job last Christmas (he was fired in October, but generously paid through Christmas), and none of you said a goddamn thing.

If you want some advice on how to recover from an unexpected firing, write me and I'll give you his email; he went through all this (and is still going through some of this) himself. Maybe he can help.

So spare me. As usual, you're all in favor of deplatforming and scalphunting, so long as it's people you don't like being deplatformed and scalphunted.

Another claim being made is that there were buyers but mean old Clarity Media put an end to that.

The grossly fat John Podhoretz, for example, wrote "There were buyers. Potential buyers." But he claimed that the search party for buyers was told to stand down in September.

So that Clarity Media could strip The Weekly Standard for the few assets it had which were actually valuable, like its subscriber list.

Dealing with this one at a time:

Obviously, potential buyers are not actual buyers. Or we'd just say "buyers." So once again, we have a cuck claiming that there were "buyers" but then when you ask, "so why was it not bought?," they start talking about potential buyers.

Well, Kurt Schlichter is a potential buyer. So are commenters here, who talked about putting together an IndieGoGo buyout fund.

But none of this is serious, is it?

Furthermore, Hayes and his search party were permitted to seek buyers for months, and found none. Further beyond that, whether or not they stop actively looking, People have known that TWS was buyable since the search began. They could have made offers at any time.

They didn't. Because there are no buyers. Just... potential buyers.

Lastly, this shit about Clarity wanting to shut down an unprofitable, money-losing biilionaire's vanity project and recover something valuable from it:

When you decide to rely upon the kindness and generosity of a billionaire donor, and are not actually profitable -- when your "business model" is to be a charity forever -- well, sorry, but that means you have an Audience of One. If Phil Anchultz thought that his Vanity Project was no longer boosting his vanity, because, let's say, it was a moribund, low-influence afterthought, well, you lost your audience of one.

You were being kept afloat to make his estimation of himself larger; if you produced dreck, and precious little of it to boot, that's on you.

Next, and finally: This idea that if the rest of the magazine is failing and valueless, but one aspect of it has value (the subscriber list), then it is immoral and terrible to "strip" the company for its "assets:"

Isn't this part of the cycle of creative destruction of capitalism you defend and claim is central to conservative identitarianism? Wasn't the candidate you loved in 2012, Mitt Romney, a practitioner of just this sort of wring-inefficiencies-out-of-the-market-by-breaking-down-nonperforming-companies-and-selling-their-useful-parts capitalism?

You're not very good capitalists if you suddenly start whining "Oh no, capitalistic profit-seeking and inefficiency-eliminating hurts when it happens to you! No fair, no fair! Make the bad men stop!"

You guys can't talk like Gordon Gecko when it's someone else getting a pink slip but then whine like Michael Moore when it's you.

There are bad guys here -- but they're not Clarity Media, who kept this sinking ship afloat with bales of money for a long time.

The bad guys here are the ones who purged dissenting voices, spiked any story that wasn't explicitly anti-Trump, resulting in a relatively low amount of product on offer and usually the same repetitious product again and again and again (Jeryl Bier's 6000th toss-off "column" on how Trump coarsens civic dialogue! YAYYY!!), and refused Larry O'Connor's common-sense recommendation to have some stories that actually commented on current news to increase traffic (and oh yeah -- he got fired too, because Steve Hayes was too good for "clickservatism").

Steve Hayes kept the august Weekly Standard completely free of clickbait headlines.

And oh yeah, the magazine also constantly baited and insulted Trump voters, also known as 88% of the GOP and 75% of the Weekly Standard's former subscriber base.

And oh -- staffers participating in what sure looked like a paid political operation against Salena Zito -- an actual colleague of the Weekly Standard (well, a fellow employee of Clarity Media, at the Examiner). Apparently for daring to be not explicitly anti-Trump.

That was swell.

Did Jim Swift receive discipline for participating in the coordinated political hit on a colleague? Or was he permitted to do it by his supervisors?

Or was he... ordered to do it?

Who knows. There are so many Pierre Omidyar-funded ops going it's hard to keep track of them all.

And oh right -- nearing the end, the sudden zealotry with which the Weekly Standard's staffers defended the honor of George Soros, accusing his critics of being antisemites.

Say, doesn't he have a lot of money he's willing to fund anti-conservative ventures with? He does? Wow, what a coincidence that at the end, the Weekly Standard turned into George Soros' PR firm.

And oh yeah: Going on an expensive hiring spree -- landing the scary talents of THE Charlie Sykes, for example -- while the magazine was already melting down financially.

He had three wives and nearly as many fans.

Take ownership of your failure, Bill, Steve, and John. You put people out of work for Christmas through a combination of ego, obsession, and heedless incompetence so rank it reaches the levels of true immorality.

posted by Ace of Spades at 12:21 PM

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