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How I Murdered The Weekly Standard
By Emerald Robinson

[EmeraldDB3Substack] Three years ago, I wrote an essay on “The Collapse of the Never Trumpers" that caused quite a stir. Rush Limbaugh talked about it on his radio show, while Nigel Farage congratulated me in the halls of Parliament. Hundreds of people wrote me "thank you" notes. The haughty Never Trumpers, not so much. My modest proposal was that the 3% of Republicans who never approved of President Trump should stop pretending that they were spokesmen for the 97% of Republicans who did. In the corporate media, where 97% of that 3% were keeping a high profile on cable news, the distortions became preposterous. This seemed to me elementary logic. But for the tiny group of delusional Never Trumpers, my modest proposal fell on them like a ton of bricks.

In the end, my essay ignited a kind of public war among conservative intellectuals that helped to bring down the neocons and the Never Trumpers in the media. Not only did the Weekly Standard shut down, but the National Review kicked out Jonah Goldberg, and the neocon's peewee prince Bill Kristol went to work for Democrats - all in six months. How did that happen? They had no base of support outside of the Beltway, and they were in willful denial about their own unpopularity. This dynamic was obvious at all levels of media, but let's take a high visibility example: the old panel at Fox New's Special Report with Bret Baier. Now, Bret Baier is obviously a very quiet Never Trumper but if you stacked your daily panel with Stephen Hayes, A. B. Stoddard, and Jonah Goldberg and these were the “conservative” pundits you picked to defend President Trump's policies then it's obvious what Bret was doing.

A week or so after my essay appeared, I got a very short and shrill phone call from one of Bret's staffers - who was a rabid Hillary Clinton supporter, no less. When I picked up the call, she was angry and breathless and did not want to do small talk. She said: "You don't know what you've done, you don't understand the damage you've caused to this show." I asked her to calm down, and be specific. She hung up instead.
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Posted by: badanov 2021-08-21
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=610392