The Bulwark: Never Trumpers Still at War

So, there's a relatively new website founded by Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol.

I had no idea of its existence until Vicki McKenna posted this tweet on Friday.

Lonely #NeverTrumper ex-GOP elites try to feign relevance by bashing conservatives like the brilliant @VDHanson. https://t.co/foYoJ57AG7 @forcedexit

— Vicki McKenna (@VickiMcKenna) February 22, 2019

From The Atlantic:

Naming and Shaming the Pro-Trump Elite
The Bulwark’s writers are the new outlaws of conservative media.

McKay Coppins
Feb 22, 2019

Charlie Sykes is sitting behind a desk in a sparse, disheveled office—blank walls lined with empty filing cabinets, windows covered with crooked blinds—as he tries to conjure the perfect metaphor for The Bulwark, the anti–Donald Trump conservative news site he recently helped start.

“We are the ultimate wilderness!” he declares to me.

But that doesn’t sound quite lonely enough for the political niche they’re occupying, so he tries again: “We’re on a desert island.”

Sykes continues to riff like this in his chirpy, midwestern accent, comparing The Bulwark’s writers to a band of “Somali pirates,” and then to a contingent of “guerrilla fighters.” He’s so enthusiastic about the exercise that before long I am tossing out my own overwrought suggestions. Perhaps, I muse at one point, they are soldiers on the final front of the Republican Civil War—making one last stand before the forces of Trumpism complete their conquest.

Sykes nods eagerly, and for a moment he seems caught up in the romance of this imagery. But then reality reasserts itself.

“The analogy [I’m] really afraid of,” he confesses, “is that we’re the Japanese soldiers who don’t know the war is over, and we’re still hiding out in the cave.”

Perfect analogy. Nailed it. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

From the "About Us" page of The Bulwark:

A Note to Our Readers from editor-in-chief Charlie Sykes:

George Orwell once observed that “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” And what is in front of our nose at the moment is that the president of the United States is a serial liar, a narcissist and a bully, a con man who mocks the disabled and women, a man with no fixed principles who has the vocabulary of an emotionally insecure 9-year-old.

Lots of Republicans, even the ones who defend him publicly, say these things quietly.

Our mission will be to say them out loud and encourage others to do so as well. We’re long past the time for anonymous op-eds, or sotto voce complaints. The task now is not to continually degrade and adjust our standards to accommodate Trump, but rather to push back against the moral and intellectual corruption that now poses an existential threat to conservatism as a viable political force.

These writers are the "new outlaws of conservative media"?

They certainly take an adversarial stance, attacking, bullying.

Back to The Atlantic:

Scroll through the home page on any given day, and you’ll find one lively polemic after another calling out Trump-friendly politicos by name—often in witheringly personal terms.

In recent weeks, the site has run a scornful piece on the former White House official Sebastian Gorka (“a ridiculous figure”), and another on the high-profile #MAGA activist Candace Owens (“not a serious person”). When Trump failed to secure funding for a border wall with his government shutdown, The Bulwark compiled a meticulous list of conservative commentators who had cheered on the strategy. And in a particularly biting essay, the writer Andrew Egger examined how a radio interview between Milo Yiannopoulos (a “loathsome and tiresome egotist”) and Eric Metaxas (a “pop theologian”) highlighted “the political corruption of the modern evangelical movement.”

Sykes admits that some of these early targets have constituted “low-hanging fruit.” But in the coming months, he tells me, The Bulwark will home in on a specific class of “grifters and trolls”—those opportunistic Trump enablers who still get invited on Meet the Press and write for prestigious newspapers. To Sykes, these are the true sellouts, and he wants to ensure that their public flirtations with Trumpism leave a stench on them.

“A lot of folks have had a free shot to get in bed with some of the most disreputable [people] out there, and they still have a veneer of respectability,” Sykes says. “We want to raise the opportunity cost.”

Asked for examples of prospective targets, Sykes doesn’t have to think long before rattling off a list of high-status commentators (Marc Thiessen, Hugh Hewitt), think tankers (Henry Olsen, Victor Davis Hanson), and politicos (Bill Bennett).

“The Sean Hannitys to me are not that offensive,” Sykes says of the Fox News Trump booster. “Because Sean Hannity is dumb as a box of rocks—he doesn’t know any better.” (Through a spokesperson, Hannity responded, “If Charlie and the rest of the sore-loser, establishment Never Trumpers had their way, Hillary would be president … I wish them well supporting the next radical socialist that runs for president.”)

That's pretty brutal, born of desperation.

It appears their tactic is to go low to get noticed.

Here's the thing: If the Never Trumpers pummel the President of the United States and conservative commentators and no one is around to hear them, do they make a sound?

If the Never Trumpers at The Bulwark consider themselves to be outlaws, I guess that's one way of perceiving what they're doing.

I think they're simply in denial.

They are the World War II Japanese soldiers still fighting a war they lost.