"The Rise and Fall of the Never Trump Machine"

At TomKlingenstein.com, by Hayden Ludwig.

Interesting read! You might like it if you like Kremlinology, the study of the workings of the Kremlin. Only this is the Kremlin of the American Neocon/Neoliberal Regime.

Cruise ships added as commentary.

There's no understanding the Never Trump cabal without reading its flagship commentary website: The Bulwark.

The site operates as a hub for all things anti-Trump, charting the Right's descent (as they see it) into knuckle-dragging white supremacy, authoritarianism, and subservience to Moscow. It's a refuge for bitter Beltway relics of the Bush-Romney establishment who smugly cast themselves as the true heirs of Ronald Reagan, rather than out-of-touch elites more aligned with Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden than the Gipper.

The Bulwark was founded by a handful of once-influential Beltway writers, most famously Bill Kristol, son of the late Irving Kristol and editor of the now-defunct Weekly Standard. But his co-founders, ex-Wisconsin radio host Charlie Sykes, who left the Bulwark for MSNBC in February, and Sarah Longwell, a political consultant and one-time chair of the LGBT group Log Cabin Republicans, are just as critical to The Bulwark's evolution into Never Trump's lodestar.

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With Kristol and Longwell at the helm, The Bulwark grew into the Kremlin for an organized network of anti-Trump forces that developed across Trump's first term. In a few short years, they transformed the jumbled anti-Trump forces into an eight-figure political ad machine for boosting Democrats, funded overwhelmingly by mega-donors on the Left.

But none of that would have been possible without support from a lesser-known D.C. group, the Niskanen Center, which set the stage for what became The Bulwark.

Though it's hardly a household name, the Niskanen Center is infamous in conservative Beltway circles as a gun-for-hire for Big Green activists. The think tank was born from a 2014 row within the libertarian Cato Institute over environmental policy led by then-Cato vice president Jerry Taylor. Taylor, who spent 20 years fighting as Cato's "lead climate denier," became convinced of the global warming threat and jumped ship to found his own left-leaning libertarian organization.

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(The obscure name was Taylor's way of flipping the middle finger to Cato. It comes from legendary Cato co-founder William Niskanen, Reagan's economic advisor and far from a global warmer, whose 2011 death sparked high drama within D.C. libertarianism and precipitated Taylor's split from the flagship of the movement.)

There is nothing pettier than a born bureaucrat.

The Niskanen Center's first project was selling conservatives on the merits of a carbon tax, a tax levied on companies' carbon dioxide emissions to punish them into reducing their CO2 footprint. In 2019, when I spent significant time exposing the growing coalition of "eco-Right" groups -- all funded by liberals -- the carbon tax push emerged as a dire and underreported threat to the Republican Party. The eco-Right gained support in Congress from squishy Republican congressmen such as Reps. Carlos Curbelo (FL) and Brian Fitzpatrick (PA), who tried to normalize global warming and carbon taxes as conservative issues. If successful, they could have split the fragile GOP and given Democrats a powerful electoral edge. They lost that fight, while Curbelo lost his seat.

As time went on, Niskanen's eco-proposals grew more extreme. At one point, Taylor -- writing with the Sierra Club's former climate counsel -- proposed fining companies for "increas[ing] the number and severity of wildfires, droughts, and flash flooding," which they blamed on climate change. For justification he cited James Hansen, Obama's radical NASA director who told Congress in 2008 that fossil fuel company "CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature." At the same time, Taylor opened a public feud with his own brother, James, who became head of the climate-skeptic Heartland Institute.

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Money immediately began pumping into the new organization from the Left. I've traced six- to eight-figure grants from major "green" funders: the Hewlett and Packard Foundations; League of Conservation Voters; the multi-billion-dollar Arabella Advisors network; Arnold Ventures, bankrolled by ex-Enron billionaire John Arnold; Carnegie Corporation (despite its name, a foundation); the Joyce Foundation, whose board once included Sen. Barack Obama; eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; and arch-progressive George Soros.

Soros, in particular, played an influential role in the Niskanen Center's retreat from libertarianism to leftism and the development of its positions on far more than climate change.

In 2019, Niskanen announced it was "leav[ing] ideology behind" for a new vision of an "open society" at the same time it was quietly receiving millions of dollars from Soros's Open Society Foundations. The phrase isn't a coincidence; in both cases it's taken from the writings of Karl Popper, an ex-Marxist philosopher whose definition of libertarianism hinged on social engineering programs. Soros credits Popper for inspiring his globalist attitude "that no philosophy or ideology is the final arbiter of truth." So, too, does Niskanen credit Popper in describing itself as a band of "globalists who share progressives' desire to robustly address economic and social inequality."

The Niskanen Center's reputation as a chisel to peel conservative voters away from the Republican Party has diminished along with the rest of the eco-Right (and climate fearmongering in general). Jerry Taylor himself left Niskanen in 2021 amid police reports that he'd drunkenly strangled and slapped his wife, to which he pleaded guilty. But at its peak the center was a vital hub for connecting Kristol and others who would become the masters of Never Trump Inc.

They're such good people.

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DDT for Democracy

Shortly after Donald Trump took office, Jerry Taylor invited distraught neocons to a series of quasi-secret gatherings he deemed "Meetings of the Concerned."

Besides Kristol and Longwell, the collection included George Conway (former husband of Kellyanne), Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the future Lincoln Project founders Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson. Those desperate first meetings between Longwell and Kristol resulted in a trifecta of new groups launched in January 2018 under the umbrella Defending Democracy Together, which bears the delightful acronym "DDT."

I didn't know that Kellyanne had finally divorced her cuck husband, but Wikipedia said she finally dropped this ugly troll in 2023.

Structurally, DDT consists of a 501(c)(3) "charitable" arm, which publishes The Bulwark; a 501(c)(4) arm that houses their attack group, Republicans for the Rule of Law; and the Republican Accountability PAC, variously branded "Republican Voters Against Trump" or simply "Republican Accountability." All share overlapping leadership and major donors.

The Bulwark is an "educational charity." Educational charities are not supposed to engage in partisan activities. But these fine people, dedicated to preserving the rule of law, violate the law every single day.

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Their goal is the same: humble the Republican Party into submission by helping Democrats beat Trump. Lick him hard enough and conservatives will soon abandon MAGA altogether. Then Kristol et al. can retake their rightful place at the head of the GOP, and all will be well in Washington.

So the theory goes. In reality, they quickly discovered the pool of anti-Trump conservative donors is trifling and has only shrunk since 2016. Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, for instance, spent heavily to stop Trump's nomination in 2016 -- even engaging the now-notorious firm Fusion GPS -- but later changed his mind, contributing $5 million to a pro-Trump super PAC in 2024.

So DDT did the predictable: It cozied up to mega-donors on the Left.

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Really good article. I hope I haven't excepted too much.

Below, Adam Kinzinger explains to The Bulwark's liberal lesbian Sarah Longwell that the BLM riots and arsons weren't so bad because they didn't "threaten democracy."

That's absurd. Due to this terrorism, the US was scared into accepting a series of deranged leftwing racialist positions, including mass release of prisoners, decriminalizing crime, and enacting de facto Jim Crow hiring discrimination against whites that it never would have accepted if not for the terrorism.

"Democracy," meaning the freedom of the sovereign people to make decisions free of coercion, was in fact "destroyed" by BLM.

On the other hand, Trump was evicted from office with no real investigation into serious voting irregularities that we all know occurred in 2020.

The BLM terrorist riots were largely responsible for the chaos and insanity of 2020-2024:

Peter Boghossian @peterboghossian

The most remarkable thing about the last decade was its sheer idiocy: Pretending not to know what a woman is, inventing conspiracies without conspirators, and labeling free speech as racist. It was a golden era for dangerous nonsense and intellectual laziness.

BLM insurrectionists prevailed, while J6ers were jailed. Seems clear who actually threatened, and in fact conquered, Muh Democracy, and who were easily brushed aside and demolished for challenging the establishment.

NeverTrump thinks only of Principle and Patriotism, you know.

posted by Ace at 04:03 PM

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