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The Conservative Intellectual Who Laid the Groundwork for Trump
The January 2025 issue of National Review magazine featured, on its cover, a cartoon image of Donald Trump driving a campaign bus-cum-garbage truck into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a handful of Harris-Walz campaign posters tumbling out of its tailgate. 'After the Sweep,' read the triumphant headline. Over the course of eight-odd years, the publication that had once dedicated an entire issue to anathematizing Trump had moved from cool accommodation to warm, if not entirely reservationless, embrace. The February issue offered a study in dissonant juxtaposition: Gazing out beatifically from the cover was the magazine's late founder, William F. Buckley Jr., rendered in schmaltzy watercolor to mark the centenary of his birth. Sam Tanenhaus's marvelous, decades-in-the-making biography, Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America, begins with an epigraph from John Keats's letters: 'Man's life of any worth is a continual allegory.' For many in the Trump era, looking back wistfully on an imagined past of comity and consensus, the Buckleyite allegory has been one of declension: from the sesquipedalian verbalist who gamely sparred with liberals on TV to the monosyllabic vulgarian occupying the White House. From Bach's bouncy Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, with which Buckley's Firing Line television show opened for more than 30 years, to the schlocky Trump-rally ballads of Lee Greenwood. From a movement helmed by a 'responsible' leader who made conservatism respectable by (as the story goes) cleansing it of its kooks and antisemites to one led by a man who enthusiastically welcomed them back in. Tanenhaus's biography complicates this narrative. It offers a deeply affectionate portrait of Buckley's personal life: of his munificence, his sense of humor, his extraordinary loyalty and capacity for friendship—what the ex-Communist intellectual (and early National Review staffer) Whittaker Chambers, the subject of Tanenhaus's first biography, called Buckley's 'special grace.' Yet Tanenhaus also methodically surfaces the darker strains of the movement that flourished even, and sometimes especially, in its most rarefied precincts. The political vision that Buckley helped forge was, as it is now, concerned not primarily with advancing a particular set of principles but with defining and rooting out perceived enemies. When Donald Trump rails against the 'Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Fascists, Marxists, Democrats, & RINOS' who comprise the 'enemy within,' he inherits Buckley's legacy far more than he blasphemes a man who lived an infamously peripatetic life—winters skiing the slopes of Gstaad, summers sailing up and down the Atlantic Coast, decades criss-crossing America on a speaking tour so unremitting that it's a miracle he lived into his eighties—Buckley's politics never strayed far from his childhood hearth and home. 'Everything he learned, and all he became,' Tanenhaus writes, began in the hothouse environment delicately constructed by his father. A Texas-born lawyer turned oil wildcatter who made a fortune in Mexico, Will Buckley was later expelled from the country for 'secretly disbursing large sums of cash to insurgent caudillos and paying for truckloads of Winchester rifles to be smuggled into Baja California' on behalf of right-wing insurgents. Briefly bankrupt, Buckley struck black gold again in Venezuela, returned stateside, and, in 1924, purchased a many-acred property in Sharon, Connecticut, an idyll he christened Great Elm. The Buckley paterfamilias—'Father,' to his growing brood—intensely supervised the cultivation of his children, populating Great Elm with tutors, workmen, groomsmen for the horses, a French mademoiselle, and Mexican nanas. The children were schooled in a curriculum of his own creation, emphasizing history, literature, and music. Tanenhaus writes beautifully of the extended household, which 'numbered more than twenty,' and was 'alive with pranks, schemes, hilarity, and strife.' (The pranks weren't always so innocent: In 1937, the elder Buckley siblings—young Bill was left out, much to his regret—burned a cross on the lawn of a Jewish resort. Years later, his sisters defaced a nearby Episcopal church.) The home often left visitors agog. Buckley's prep school roommate described 'a vast gaggle of smiling, brilliant children, all chattering—in several languages—at once, playing the piano, but, above all, laughing with each other … the whole place rang with music and laughter.' It would 'take Tom Wolfe to describe that scene,' one of Buckley's close college friends, Paris Review co-founder Tom Guinzberg, recalled. Since Buckley and Wolfe would only later become friendly, we are left to settle for the observations of a 19-year-old Sylvia Plath: 'How can I ever, ever tell you what a unique, dreamlike and astounding weekend I had!' she wrote to her mother after attending a coming-out party for one of Buckley's sisters, a college classmate of hers. 'A hundred moons twining in dark leaves, music spilling out and echoing inside my head.' Part of what made the Buckleys such excellent hosts was their ability, 'with no visible effort, to detach personal feeling from ideological passion.' But passion still burned. They were committed America Firsters, their anti-interventionism a species of their ardent anti-communism, their anti-communism a species of their Catholic piety. Bill, displaying a middle child's fear of parental inattention (he was the sixth of 10 children), parroted his father's extreme political opinions 'with remarkable felicity and alarming confidence,' earning him the dictatorial nickname 'Young Mahster.' Buckley's first formal political act, at age 14, was to join the America First Committee. His inaugural public speech, delivered in front of his classmates at the Millbrook prep school, was an argument 'In Defense of Charles Lindbergh.' It began, Tanenhaus writes, 'not as a defense of Lindbergh but as an attack on his critics'—a prelude to the vituperative style Buckley would later deploy as a consigliere to Joseph McCarthy. While still at Millbrook, Buckley came under the spell of the aristocratic thinker Albert Jay Nock. A friend of Buckley's father who engaged the family in 'evening-long denunciations of the New Deal,' Nock became, Tanenhaus writes, Buckley's 'lifelong hero and guide.' In an essay published in The Atlantic when Buckley was 10, Nock drew on the biblical story of Isaiah to distinguish the 'mass-man,' or the great democratic majority, which is devoid of the 'force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life,' from 'The Remnant,' the precious capable few charged with keeping alive the flame of those principles. 'Buckleys against the world' became the family version of Nock's slogan, and young William quickly adopted the requisite pose of condescending hauteur, writing essays against the cult of 'democratism' and sparring with his interventionist peers. 'It was, though a very nice audience, one of mediocre intellectual capacities, and I'm afraid that my thing was a little too complicated,' he reported to his mother after a visit to another prep school to debate Roosevelt's policies. Once at Yale, Buckley leavened his still-extreme beliefs (no longer a strict isolationist, he was equally fervent in his anti-communism) with what he discovered to be a great asset: his profound sociability. Once at Yale, Buckley leavened his still-extreme beliefs (no longer a strict isolationist, he was equally fervent in his anti-communism) with what he discovered to be a great asset: his profound sociability. He had begun to negotiate the gap between his 'two different selves, the rigid ideologue and the boon companion,' developing what the historian Gary Wills—one of Buckley's prized early recruits to National Review, who would later become an apostate over civil rights and Vietnam—described as his 'strange power to ingratiate even on the attack.' It made him popular and admired, even as he wielded his column in the Yale Daily News to 'fire volley after volley from his crossbow into the roaring multitude,' cataloging Yale's offenses against the eternal truths of Christianity and laissez-faire. Unsurprisingly, Buckley gravitated toward Yale's controversialist professor, the political philosopher Willmoore Kendall, a needler of liberal pieties and hard-nosed theorist of majority rule. (When Kendall later wrote that the 'true American tradition' was 'less that of Fourth of July orations and our constitutional law textbooks' than 'that of riding somebody out of town on a rail,' he meant it as a compliment.) Buckley was moved by Kendall's description of a faculty meeting in the early days of Joe McCarthy's rise, in which he'd repeated a conversation he'd had with a Black campus janitor: 'Is it true, professor'—Kendall, with his Oklahoma drawl, idiosyncratically Oxfordized while he studied as a Rhodes scholar in England, imitated the janitor—'Is it true, professor, dat dere's people in New York City who want to … destroy the guvamint of the United States?' 'Yes, Oliver, that is true,' Willmoore had replied. 'Well, why don't we lock 'em up?' Appearing to shed his Nockian pretenses, Buckley heartily agreed. 'Citizenship implies subscription to certain ideals,' he wrote in a paper for Kendall. 'Failure to adhere to these ideals means, in effect, renunciation of citizenship.' Kendall scribbled in the margins that the First Amendment 'will have to go one day.' All the while, Buckley kept in close contact with his father, whose interest in education was not confined to his own progeny. He had begun working with and financially supporting an activist named Lucille Cardin Crain, one of the most important leaders of a growing grassroots campaign to identify and attack 'subversive' educators and books. Buckley Sr. encouraged Crain to draw upon her 'wealth of knowledge and experience' and give his son 'a few pointers.' The book that Buckley published in 1951, God and Man at Yale, included a list of 'collectivistic' textbooks that largely came from Crain; Buckley's core proposal—a call for alumni and trustees to re-exert control over university hiring and curricula in order to 'narrow the existing orthodoxy' on campus—was an idea his father had already discussed with her. But it was Buckley who went on to attain unparalleled heights of public visibility. The year God and Man at Yale became a bestseller (thanks in part to a publicity blitz bankrolled by his father), Crain's Red-hunting publication was castigated by a congressional committee as redolent of the 'book burning orgies' of Nazi Germany; it folded soon after. While Buckley didn't fully avoid charges of fascism—'the methods he proposes for his alma mater are precisely those employed in Germany, Italy, and Russia' was The New Republic's assessment—the book's Latinate prose helped insulate him from the accusation that, to borrow a phrase thrown at a later right-wing polemicist, his work might have sounded better in the original German. His winsome tone—'not one of wild attack,' Tanenhaus writes, 'but of ironic, even amused forbearance'—set him apart from the 'heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy' that Richard Hofstadter would diagnose as the 'paranoid style' in American politics. His was a stylish voice, to be taken seriously, even if, in substance, little separated Buckley's arguments from those emanating from the febrile grassroots. In some ways, he went further than they Kendall believed there were two founding moments of postwar conservatism. The first was the publication of God and Man at Yale. The second was McCarthyism. Buckley might seem an unlikely advocate for the latter, a movement the moderate conservative writer Peter Viereck once described as 'the revenge of the noses that for twenty years of fancy parties were pressed against the outside window pane.' (Buckley's wife, Pat, a Canadian heiress whom he married in 1950, later became one of the most famous high-society hostesses in New York; the couple were a frequent item in the gossip pages.) Yet Tanenhaus describes Buckley as McCarthy's 'tireless champion, defending him on every platform and in every forum he could find,' most notably in McCarthy and His Enemies, published in 1954 and co-authored with Buckley's brother-in-law and former Yale debate partner, Brent Bozell. The effete, eminently clubbable Yale alum had acquired a populist flair for flouting what he derisively called 'the Racquet and Lawn Club rules for dealing with the Communists in our midst.' (When he spoke those words, Tanenhaus notes wryly, Buckley was wearing his own Racquet Club tie.) In 1955, with the peak of McCarthyism having passed, Buckley assembled an eclectic group of ex-Communists, libertarians, traditionalists, and Catholics to found National Review, a publication for 'radical conservatives.' What kind of magazine would it be? And given its indelible association with Buckley, who held a voting majority of stock ownership, what kind of public figure would he become? In its mission statement, Buckley distanced the magazine from the 'irresponsible' right, though he declined to name any names. In a letter quoted in John Judis's 1988 biography of Buckley, he responded to an early complaint that the magazine was too highbrow to be effective by explaining that he wanted to 'abjure the popular and cliché-ridden appeal to the 'grassroots'' and to target 'opinion makers.' But Tanenhaus shows that Buckley and the magazine were also pulled by countervailing impulses. In an early profile of Buckley, the literary gadfly Dwight MacDonald was surprised to hear him defend a crass book by 'two peephole Hearst reporters who trafficked in innuendo, smear, and sexual sensationalism' (the book alleged, for instance, that 90 percent of crime in the city of Cleveland was committed by 'darkies' and called the University of California, Berkeley 'a bed of sexual perversion, left wing teaching and narcotic addiction'). 'I don't like the way the book is written any more than you do,' Buckley admitted. 'But it's on our side.… And anyway you've got to write that way to reach a big public.' For an early issue, the magazine called on McCarthy himself to pan a book by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, though Bozell actually wrote the review, inserting enough schoolyard invective ('As 'Brains' Acheson sees it …') to impersonate Tailgunner Joe. Tanenhaus notes that National Review's editors may have striven 'for learned hyperliteracy, but as leaders of a nascent movement they were prepared to welcome almost anyone who wanted to join and sought them out, wherever they were to be found—including in groups with names like American Heritage Protective Committee, the American Way, Citizens Grassroots Crusade of South Carolina.' South Carolina was a state Buckley knew all too well. Some of the most revelatory parts of Tanenhaus's biography depict the family's second homestead in Camden, a small city in the middle of the state. At the behest of Buckley's mother, a 'proud daughter of the Confederacy' who never quite felt comfortable in Yankee Connecticut, his father had purchased a sprawling antebellum property that was once owned by the first senator to resign after Lincoln's 1860 election. There, the family befriended figures like the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, who garnered more than 80 percent of the vote in their county in 1948, and the archconservative textile magnate Roger Milliken, later the most munificent National Review donor outside the Buckley family. They employed a staff drawn from the area's population of Black sharecroppers and domestics, whom they treated relatively well, at least compared to their neighbors. The 'family seemed, and in many respects were, models of compassion and fair dealing,' Tanenhaus writes. Yet Buckley's parents were also the sole financial backers behind a new local newspaper associated with the white supremacist Citizens Councils. National Review's shameful defenses of white rule in the South, Tanenhaus shows, drew on Buckley's own complicated experience of it. On the one hand, he seemed incapable of grasping white supremacy in its vicious totality, given the more genteel and paternalistic form of racism he experienced within his family: 'Any suggestion, made to a [white] Southerner, that segregation is in fact a manifestation of 'race hatred' elicits from him an expression of sheer wonderment,' he wrote. Yet the magazine also exhibited a 'craze' for John C. Calhoun's defense of states' rights, and Buckley himself made arguments in public that were 'far more incendiary and racist,' according to one historian of the right, than anything said by Robert Welch, the conspiratorial John Birch Society founder whose banishment from the conservative movement Buckley considered a career-defining achievement. Tanenhaus shows just how much Buckley's approach to the 'kooks' to his right was 'strategic, a matter of weighing costs and benefits.' Tanenhaus punctures that self-mythology as well, showing just how much Buckley's approach to the 'kooks' to his right was 'strategic, a matter of weighing costs and benefits.' In print, he called Welch an 'amazing man' and assured him in private that 'we agree on essentials.' Tanenhaus generally concurs. 'The primary distinction between NR's reading of the world calamity and Welch's was that in NR's view the enemies were liberals and in Welch's they were Communists,' he observes. 'And since NR all but accused liberals of being Communist handmaidens the wall of separation between the two positions was so fine as to crumble into dust.' When Buckley finally ventured some temporizing criticisms of Welch, he spared the society's members, whom the Barry Goldwater campaign considered an essential source of grassroots support. It was only after Lyndon Johnson's electoral rout of Goldwater threatened to cast the conservative movement back into exile that Buckley attempted a full-throated excommunication. 1964 may have temporarily set back the cause of radical conservatism, but it was a boon to Buckley's intellectual celebrity. In an election postmortem published in Partisan Review, the sociologist Daniel Bell described watching Buckley—'an all-or-nothing theocratic zealot of the most dangerous kind'—address a college audience with an astonishing level of 'forensic power and control,' even as Buckley's 'simplism' appalled him. 'Forensic power and control' plus 'simplism' was a potent combination, one Buckley employed in his extraordinary 1965 campaign for New York City mayor—then the third-most-visible public office in the country. In his mind, he still maintained a Nockean disdain for the brute din of democratic politics—'I will not go to Irish centers and go dancing. I will not go to Jewish centers and eat blintzes, nor will I go to Italian centers and pretend to speak Italian'—yet Tanenhaus frankly summarizes the demagogic theme that gained him a surprising amount of support. 'That theme was race,' filtered through the topoi of welfare, taxes, schooling, and above all, crime and policing. Buckley set the tone for his campaign with an address to 5,600 Catholic NYPD officers, in which he inveighed against the media's coverage of Bloody Sunday in Selma and defended the brutal actions of the Alabama police. Later, he would acknowledge that his own distorted version of events had come from 'someone who misinterpreted a television comment.' Even his disavowals of racist intent—'I believe that young thugs are young thugs, irrespective of race, color, or creed'—smacked of racism. Buckley, Tanenhaus writes, was groping his way to a position as 'a leader of forgotten Americans'—of American mass-men. His mayoral bid ultimately did best in the city's white ethnic enclaves, especially in Queens, the home of a future Republican president whose early forays into political advocacy included an infamous full-page New York Times ad calling to 'Bring Back Our Police!'Tanenhaus presents the tempestuous 1960s as a crossroads in Buckley's public life. Would he grow into his own as a serious conservative intellectual, or would he succumb to the temptations of celebrity? Buckley had taken some tentative steps down the first path in 1963, when he began work on a book that would, Tanenhaus writes, be 'a definitive statement on the meaning and value of an authentic American conservatism,' and not just another archly written attack on liberals. The thesis was Nockean, a critique of 'the masses' and their demands for 'egalitarianism,' and an argument for the need to restrict the votes of lesser Black citizens as well as whites—a proposal Buckley made in his infamous 1965 debate at Cambridge against James Baldwin. But Buckley never made much headway on the idea, and not only because it complicated the Kendellian majoritarianism he'd evinced in his political life. The basic problem was, as Tanenhaus frequently points out, that Buckley was at his core 'a controversialist, not a thinker and still less a theorist.' He was a 'performing ideologue' who thrived on provocation and had trouble sitting still. As one contemporary of Buckley's put it, he responded to 'ideological battle like Pavlov's dog to the sound of the bell.' The argumentative bell wouldn't stop ringing, especially once the debate show Firing Line debuted in 1966. It would last for more than three decades, launching Buckley to new heights of fame. He was recognized in airports and hounded for autographs on the street, as his unmistakable televisual style—the improbably mobile eyebrows, the serpentine tongue, the ironizing drawl—became fodder for generations of late-night impressionists. Buckley, the talk-show host Jack Paar said, was 'the Tiffany lamp of television.' He was 'pure camp,' the sensibility that, as Susan Sontag famously wrote, converts 'the serious into the frivolous.' It also invited accusations of frivolity, of Buckley the theatrical persona overtaking Buckley the movement leader. The literary modernist Hugh Kenner, who briefly worked as NR's poetry editor and whom Buckley had asked to help him on his abortive book project, later wrote that Buckley had 'ceased to be a public outrage. He became an ingratiatingly unpredictable personality.' Kenner had compared Buckley's telegenic mayoral campaign to Andy Warhol's Pop Art creations and homemade films. Buckley, the talk-show host Jack Paar said, was 'the Tiffany lamp of television.' He was 'pure camp,' the sensibility that, as Susan Sontag famously wrote, converts 'the serious into the frivolous.' The most lacerating assessment of Buckley's celebrity persona came from Gary Wills, who, in his memoir, Confessions of a Conservative, charged that Buckley had become a 'dandy': He is the object of a personal cult subtly at odds with his own intentions. The very thing that charms even those on the left makes grimmer types on the right distrust him. Striving for objective results, he seems only interested in theatrical effects. What a curious trial for the aspiring ideologue: By restricting himself to combat, he floats above it—intending to strike blows, he is applauded for striking has become something of a cliché for liberal and left-wing observers of the Trump era to cite an aphorism now known as Wilhoit's law (after the musician and composer, not the political scientist). It reads: 'Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.' Does that capture the essence of Buckley? Temperamentally, no. He was a 'moderate, even a kind of liberal,' Tanenhaus writes, 'in his openness, in his curiosity, his ability to turn arguments around, look at questions from different sides.' But Tanenhaus also quotes from an assessment given by one of Buckley's prep school teachers, which could easily double as a summation of his politics: He 'has to be made to realize that rules are not merely made so he can invoke them in his favor.' Throughout his life, Buckley never seemed to learn this lesson. He invoked the value of principled dissent to protect the speech of America Firsters, but passionately defended McCarthyite repression. He attacked the credibility of an anti-war intellectual like Staughton Lynd for traveling to North Vietnam to meet with Communist leaders ('Here is an American idiot'), but displayed little compunction about embarking on his own junkets, including to Pinochet's Chile and apartheid South Africa, for whom he happily propagandized. He reproached liberal journalists for declining to testify before government inquiries but stayed mum about his extensive knowledge of Watergate's crimes (knowledge he acquired via his lifelong friend E. Howard Hunt, whom Buckley had met during a brief postgraduate stint working for the CIA in Mexico City). He was a stalwart defender of mass incarceration and the death penalty, but became the loudest voice proclaiming the innocence of Edgar Smith, an articulate fan of National Review (and Buckley's obsequious pen pal) who was convicted of murdering a young girl—and who would attempt to kill again after his release. In this inconstancy, Buckley was carrying on a family inheritance. 'On the one hand he had himself once been a revolutionary, or rather a counter-revolutionary,' Buckley reflected of his father. 'On the other hand, he was the conservative who believed in law and order.'
Chicago Tribune
06-05-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
Post-Tribune reporters win SPJ awards
Three Post-Tribune reporters brought home awards from the Indiana Society of Professional Journalists Pro Chapter banquet Friday night. Staff writer Alexandra Kukulka earned two third-place awards — one in Election and Campaign coverage for 'Indiana Dems excited about Harris-Walz ticket' and one for Government and Politics coverage for 'Supreme Court ruling in Snyder Case could impact how officials interact with contractors, vendors.' Kukulka shared the latter honor with freelance reporter Michelle L. Quinn. Freelance reporter Carole Carlson also brought home a third place award for Sports Reporting with her story, 'Chicago Sky's Dana Evans seeing heightened interest, sellout crowds.' More than 1,100 entries were submitted from around the state, it was announced at the banquet — an all-time high.
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Bernie and AOC Are Starting a New Political Movement Before Our Eyes
Bernie Sanders seemed genuinely impressed by the size of his Los Angeles rally this weekend. 'Unbelievable!' he declared upon reaching the microphone, 'there are people half a mile away!' Moments later, he claimed 36,000 people were gathered before him, which constituted 'the largest rally that we have ever had.' If I were forced to paint with a broad brush—and at 36,000 people, a broad brush would be the instrument of choice—I'd say the crowd was a coalition of aging hippies and entertainment industry millennials. It was a massive crowd, to be sure, but nobody in the throngs surprised me by their presence. I did manage to find one woman who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 before voting for Biden in 2020. Prior to the rally, she confessed to me, 'I'm so thankful [Bernie] is doing this kind of thing.' This was a message I heard repeatedly from attendees: Those gathered were hoping for hope itself. Maybe even a determination to hope. Noah, a 28-year-old software engineer, told me while waiting in line, 'I'm hoping for some answers about how to stay encouraged … I'm hoping this is a positive day and adds some clarity to the situation.' Moments later, his friend Amir chimed in, 'Hope has to be cultivated, kind of. And so I think this is, I don't know—maybe therapy?' There were plenty of therapeutic aspects to the rally, like Joan Baez crooning 'Imagine' or Neil Young, Maggie Rogers and Baez singing 'Keep on Rocking in the Free World.' But, despite Sanders's promise that 'We're going to make our revolution with joy. We're going to sing and dance our way to victory,' it was hard to characterize the crowd as hopeful, much less joyful. Nevertheless, there was a determination among these 36,000 people. A 32-year-old screenwriter named Brett told me: 'The only way I know how to go on is to hope and believe—and certainly it won't happen if we don't come here and try to work together and listen to each other.' And there was that other kind of determination as well—the determination to unite a left wing in the place of an official institutional party organ that feels incapable of much at the moment. This was not the hardened Bernie crowd of 2016. I saw far more Harris-Walz shirts than Bernie 2020 shirts. That determination to hope has seemingly expanded the tent. With that in mind, there's a precarious challenge that Sanders—and, more importantly, his younger proteges who will carry this movement into the post-Trump era—are going to have to face. They have to unite a defeated half of the political spectrum and turn all of these determined sparks of hope into a structured movement. Congressman Maxwell Frost, who spoke before Sanders, told me, 'When something big happens in the country and people feel like something's wrong, they'll pick one of two things—sometimes it drives them further into apathy, sometimes it drives them into action. Organizers stand at that crossroad and we help give people a political home. That's what's going on. We see this billionaire takeover of our country and now as organizers, we have to stand at that crossroad and try to get people into something. Because there's also a lot of people in this moment who will fall more into apathy and our job is to make sure that doesn't happen.' Naturally, this crowd was far from apathetic; indifference isn't a strong enough force to get the average person to stand in the Los Angeles sun all day. Here, the heat was punishing: Sanders had to stop his speech several times to call medics into the crowd, as did several of the other speakers. At one point the nurses' union rushed off the stage to help. And their assistance was limited to the people they could see: If there really were 36,000 people at this thing, only about 10,000 of them were visible from the stage; the rest were on the other side of a treebank and the press riser. That crowd stood in a dirt lot watching a jumbotron. Beyond them, the streets were filled with people too, just standing. The mood became more vague as you worked your way through the outer reaches; in the further orbit, there was less of that sense of passion and determination. Still, even at the margins there was a consensus among the furthest-flung that this was, for reasons they couldn't articulate, the place to be. Here on the periphery you'd encounter a hollowed-out dumpster with a younger group perched on the rim, just sitting, watching the event unfold on the big screen. Again, 36,000 people—from the dumpster sitters to the gleeful crowd in the front bouncing a beach ball—is a hard number to do much but generalize. But this crowd showed up for something, and you could hear that among them. On stage, you could see that something taking shape. During her oration, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez connected local action—last week, an LA school superintendent turned away DHS officers attempting to enter his school—to the billionaire takeover of the government. 'This moment did not come out of nowhere,' she said, 'the destruction of our rights and democracy is directly tied to the growing and extreme wealth inequality that has been growing for years in America.' This was where the nerve was most visibly touched: Attacks against the encroaching oligarchy received noticeably louder responses even than attacks against Trump. One union leader's remark lambasting a 'bone-spurred chicken-hawk commander-in-chief' didn't receive quite the same boos as her line hitting the 'one percent and the corrupt politicians who got richer out of the market manipulation we saw last week.' There is a definite cohesiveness here. I got the feeling, as I did during the nascent stages of the Trump movement, that enough of these people are pissed off about the same things that they might actually do something. With enough cultivation, they might even do that radical thing where they all get together and vote. But what do they vote for? On stage, there was a clear passing of the torch and a message taking shape. Sanders's argument was broad, he bashed 'a corrupt campaign finance system' and Elon Musk generally. Both of those were ripe objects of criticism, but Ocasio-Cortez had a more finely tuned message. Like Sanders, she criticized the Democratic Party. While he criticized them for listening to 'their billionaires,' she attacked specific practices like congressional stock trading and corporate lobbying, both of which are unpopular. Sanders attacked Trump's billionaire coterie, but AOC proposed a longer game, telling the crowd, 'If we are here to defeat [Trump], we must defeat the system that created him.' The day before AOC appeared on stage in Los Angeles, I talked to Saikat Chakrabarti, who, with his group Justice Democrats, first supported AOC for Congress in 2018 and is now running against Nancy Pelosi, who is perhaps the loudest defender of congressional stock trading. Chakrabarti told me that Sanders has recognized that 'there's a lot of energy in this country for an economic populist, anti-corruption party' and pointed out that specific measures like banning congressional trading are overwhelmingly popular. If that energy becomes a movement, and if that movement becomes a tent big enough to win elections, anti-corruption is the tentpole propping it up. Our present shitshow of a healthcare system can be tied to billionaire healthcare CEOs, which, in this ideology, are corrupt by virtue of their obscene wealth alone. The horror of the Gaza genocide can be tied to AIPAC's influence in Washington, which so often feels like naked corruption. The housing crisis too can be blamed on billionaires—again, corrupt by virtue of their wealth alone—buying up property just to drive up the price of living. Corruption is quickly becoming the through line, and the message from the Los Angeles stage hammered this home: Your life feels more difficult, more stressful today as a direct result of a deeply entrenched plutocratic perfidy. Naturally, Elon Musk took his share of stick from the speakers; the president's sidekick has spent the past few months slashing the social safety net and attempting to buy a Wisconsin Supreme Court election all while his own businesses gobble up billions from the government. Musk is an animating enemy in this scene—vendors outside the rally were selling buttons reading DEPORT ELON TO MARS—but Elon's role here is twofold. First, he's a wildly unpopular poster boy for corruption. But more importantly, he's gutting the very programs that keep Americans alive. As more and more Americans fall into despair, they're going to go looking for hope and camaraderie with people who share these common enemies. This energy—this determined hope that 36,000 people had in Los Angeles on Saturday—is beginning to seem like the only thing on the market.
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
EXCLUSIVE: ‘Shady trial lawyer pipeline' funneling millions to Democrats according to report
EXCLUSIVE — One of the country's leading consumer protection firms released a report today exposing a "shady lawyer pipeline" of politicians handing out lucrative public contracts to trial lawyers, who in turn contribute millions of dollars to liberal political campaigns, including $1.4 million to the Harris-Walz campaign in 2024. The report – released by Alliance for Consumers (AFC) – highlights the deep Democratic ties of eight major consumer protection law firms - Morgan & Morgan, Lieff Cabraser, Motley Rice, Baron & Budd, Grant & Eisenhofer, Berger Montague, Cohen Milstein and Simmons Hanly - which it dubs the "shady eight." According to AFC, these firms hold profitable public contracts across the country and contributed around $25 million in political donations from 2017 through 2024. In 2024 alone, the firms collectively donated $4 million to political campaigns, 99% of which were for Democrat candidates or Democrat-allied committees. Exclusive: Gop Firebrand Dares Dems To Condemn Attacks On Elon Musk's Tesla During the 2024 presidential election, the firms contributed $1.4 million to former Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign. Read On The Fox News App The shady eight also prioritized midterm Senate races, the report found, with Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., and former Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Bob Casey, D – Penn., and Jon Tester, D – Mont. receiving the largest contributions next to Harris. Five of the firms — Lieff Cabraser, Motley Rice, Grant & Eisenhofer, Simmons Hanly, and Baron & Budd – showed a 100% commitment to Democrats and their allies, generating more than $2.5 million in federal donations in 2024. "The consumer should never be on the losing side of a left-wing political money game like what is on display in the Shady Trial Lawyer Pipeline," AFC says in its report. "This partisan political giving is supported by money from public contracts signed by politicians and public officials; money that belongs to the taxpayers and consumers." Tesla Hypocrisy: Dems Continue Investing In Elon Musk Company Despite Painting Him As Villain AFC said "the 'Shady Eight' are stark examples—although far from the only ones—of how the Shady Trial Lawyer Pipeline works, with politicians feeding sweetheart contracts to trial lawyers who give 99% of their political donations to liberals and will happily turn around and pump millions of dollars into left-leaning candidates, committees, and allied organizations." O.H. Skinner, executive director of the Alliance for Consumers, told Fox News Digital the report "shows how left-wing trial lawyers have turned consumer protection efforts into a political game." He urged states to move to end their contracts with these "shady" law firms. Dem Candidate Caught On Camera Applauding Notorious Antisemite's Violent Rhetoric: 'You Break His Neck' "The contracts that states have with these firms make some sense if the goal is funding left-wing political campaigns, but, for many reasons, they are exactly the wrong way to protect consumers," he said. "Ending the Shady Trial Lawyer Pipeline is one of the strongest steps public officials can take to protect consumers and the rule of law." This comes as Republicans in Congress move to rein in "out of control" rulings by activist judges that have inhibited some of the most highly-prioritized aspects of the Trump administration's agenda, such as immigration enforcement and the deportation of criminal migrant gang article source: EXCLUSIVE: 'Shady trial lawyer pipeline' funneling millions to Democrats according to report
Fox News
02-04-2025
- Business
- Fox News
EXCLUSIVE: ‘Shady trial lawyer pipeline' funneling millions to Democrats according to report
EXCLUSIVE — One of the country's leading consumer protection firms released a report today exposing a "shady lawyer pipeline" of politicians handing out lucrative public contracts to trial lawyers, who in turn contribute millions of dollars to liberal political campaigns, including $1.4 million to the Harris-Walz campaign in 2024. The report – released by Alliance for Consumers (AFC) – highlights the deep Democratic ties of eight major consumer protection law firms - Morgan & Morgan, Lieff Cabraser, Motley Rice, Baron & Budd, Grant & Eisenhofer, Berger Montague, Cohen Milstein and Simmons Hanly - which it dubs the "shady eight." According to AFC, these firms hold profitable public contracts across the country and contributed around $25 million in political donations from 2017 through 2024. In 2024 alone, the firms collectively donated $4 million to political campaigns, 99% of which were for Democrat candidates or Democrat-allied committees. During the 2024 presidential election, the firms contributed $1.4 million to former Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign. The shady eight also prioritized midterm Senate races, the report found, with Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., and former Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Bob Casey, D – Penn., and Jon Tester, D – Mont. receiving the largest contributions next to Harris. Five of the firms — Lieff Cabraser, Motley Rice, Grant & Eisenhofer, Simmons Hanly, and Baron & Budd – showed a 100% commitment to Democrats and their allies, generating more than $2.5 million in federal donations in 2024. "The consumer should never be on the losing side of a left-wing political money game like what is on display in the Shady Trial Lawyer Pipeline," AFC says in its report. "This partisan political giving is supported by money from public contracts signed by politicians and public officials; money that belongs to the taxpayers and consumers." AFC said "the 'Shady Eight' are stark examples—although far from the only ones—of how the Shady Trial Lawyer Pipeline works, with politicians feeding sweetheart contracts to trial lawyers who give 99% of their political donations to liberals and will happily turn around and pump millions of dollars into left-leaning candidates, committees, and allied organizations." O.H. Skinner, executive director of the Alliance for Consumers, told Fox News Digital the report "shows how left-wing trial lawyers have turned consumer protection efforts into a political game." He urged states to move to end their contracts with these "shady" law firms. "The contracts that states have with these firms make some sense if the goal is funding left-wing political campaigns, but, for many reasons, they are exactly the wrong way to protect consumers," he said. "Ending the Shady Trial Lawyer Pipeline is one of the strongest steps public officials can take to protect consumers and the rule of law." This comes as Republicans in Congress move to rein in "out of control" rulings by activist judges that have inhibited some of the most highly-prioritized aspects of the Trump administration's agenda, such as immigration enforcement and the deportation of criminal migrant gang members.
