In its Sunday night media-focused newsletter, Semafor had a puff piece celebrating the faux Republican (read: progressive) site The Bulwark as “one of the breakout media successes” in 2024 with its personalities “bona fide stars” that liberal strategist and publisher Sarah Longwell declared to represent “a new center”... even though their site has a singular, crazy-ex-girlfriend-level focus on Donald Trump.
The Free Beacon’s Joe Simonson put it perfectly in mocking these tools: “The Bulwark is a rabidly partisan pro-Democratic website that nearly exclusively employs Democrats but wants its readers to believe they’re centrists. This is nothing but a marketing technique to build their liberal readership.”
“This cynical technique is common at so many outlets. You’re not a Democrat. You’re actually not even ideological. But you’re *definitely* not a Republican. You’re a reasonable person, right? It just so happens that Democrats are the party for reasonable people — forever,” he added.
Much of Max Tani’s piece centered on its explosion on YouTube, led by Tim Miller, “the floppy-haired, open-collared face of Never Trump outlet The Bulwark” who, much to his chagrin, has realized the key for his videos have to include a thumbnail with him “making the MrBeast face, the wide-eyed, open-mouthed smile.”
Miller, a darling of MSNBC for snarky takes trashing Republicians and espousing support for Democrats seemingly from president on down to township supervisor, has pulled The Bulwark’s YouTube from “50,000 YouTube subscribers last September” to “631,000 as of Saturday afternoon and counting.”
Tani sort of gave away the game by acknowledging their growth has come “in the last two months” and “[s]ince President Biden dropped out of the race” with one viral video having this comical title: “Kamala’s MOST POWERFUL AD So Far! Everyone Needs to See!”
Tani also gave away the game by showing places like downtown Washington D.C. and an event hosted by The Atlantic where Longwell and Miller are treated like royalty (click “expand”):
Now, he and his Bulwark colleagues are bona fide stars of political media.
During a lunch last week with this Semafor reporter in downtown D.C., a young woman stopped to ask for a selfie with Miller and Bulwark Publisher Sarah Longwell (“I can’t wait to send this to my mom,” she remarked). Backstage at the Atlantic Festival that day, staffers for Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) posed for pictures with The Bulwark duo before they took the stage to raucous applause. Panel moderator Evan Smith, the senior adviser to Atlantic owner Emerson Collective, pointed out that The Atlantic doesn’t often prefer to host other non-Atlantic media personalities at its events, but made an exception for The Bulwark crew, a sign of their influence and popularity.
(....).The publication launched in 2018 out of the ashes of the Weekly Standard, founding editor Bill Kristol’s conservative magazine, which found itself in an ideological no man’s land as one of the few right-leaning publications that failed to bow to Donald Trump. Originally, founders Kristol, Longwell, and Charlie Sykes conceived it as a conservative news aggregator, a place to share the views of Republicans in media and politics who had been alienated by Trump’s rise.
For Longwell, a former Republican staffer, The Bulwark began largely as a side project to her primary gig as a survey researcher and strategist. Early after The Bulwark’s launch she approached two of her political clients — Kathryn Murdoch, the wife of the Fox News owner’s son James, and liberal megadonor Reid Hoffman, who founded and sold LinkedIn. They were both readers and fans of the site, and she asked if they’d chip in to help cover the initial shortfalls of about $400,000 and keep the publication going.
The outlet’s subsequent growth happened almost by accident.
(....)
This sometimes produces surreal scenes: Last week, a room full of 400 liberal and center-left Atlantic Festival guests erupted in applause for remarks by Kristol, once best known as the most committed media promoter of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
“The surge has turned The Bulwark from an anti-Trump refuge into a promising media business,” he boasted, adding Longwell’s prediction the publication could “break even this year.”
The former Daily Beast reporter claimed “The Bulwark is riding two converging trends” with one being a “tectonic realignment that’s been happening in US politics, and serves as a kind of media escort from former Republicans on their way to support for Democratic candidates.”
That’s putting it mildly.
Before Longwell’s comical conclusions that The Bulwark seeks to “build a new center” and “community” across “the country that sort of refuses to engage in extreme sides of politics” and they’re “not pursuing big investment dollars,” Tani argued The Bulwark has been “fueled by the antipathy towards Trump and alienation from the current conservative movement.”
Let’s go through the headlines of the five most-recent editions of their five political newsletters. First, The Triad:
- Mark Robinson Proves—Again—That the Republican Party Is a Failed State; The GOP is an impotent institution.
- The Kamala Prediction Accountability Project; JVL needs your help.
- Who Will Republicans in Springfield, Ohio Vote For?; What happens when partisans find out that their presidential nominee is lying about them and hurting their community?
- The Ballad of Byron York: Meet Conservative Media’s Saddest Stenographer; One man’s journey from normie Republican apologist to MAGA evangelist—and (sort of) back.
- Trump Is the Main Character of 2024. Again.; How to take over the news cycle with this one weird trick.
Now, Morning Shots (featuring Bill Kristol):
- This Is an Emotional Rollercoaster; Harris is Up! No, Trump is Up! No—
- How Dumb Do They Think You Are?; Mark Robinson is barely even trying to beat the allegations. He thinks his voters won’t notice.
- Suffering in the Service of Trump; The former president is fine with shutting down the government or delaying interest rate cuts so long as it helps his political chances.
- The Miles Davis of Tax Policy; Trump’s just making it up on the fly.
- You’re Allowed to Call Trump a Threat to Democracy; Political violence is an intolerable threat to our nation. It isn’t the only one.
Third, Press Pass with the description of “[i]n-depth reporting on Congress, campaigns, and the way Washington works”:
- The Trump Assassination Conspiracies Have Reached the Capitol; Plus: Five minutes to midnight on the government shutdown clock.
- Senate Republicans Did Not Follow the Fertilization Leader; “This is just another show vote for Schumer trying to make an issue out of something that isn’t.”
- Ted Cruz Has Suddenly Gotten Quiet on Abortion; Plus: Republican lawmakers are frantic after Trump’s debate.
- Republicans Are Losing the House Fundraising Battle; Plus: How do GOP senators feel about Dick Cheney now?
- GOP Lawmakers Also Follow Tucker Carlson’s Favorite Nazi Apologist; Plus: Are you getting a different “I Voted” sticker this year?
Four, MAGAville:
- The North Carolina “Black Nazi” Who Could Cost Trump the Presidency; Will Mark Robinson’s gross posts drag down the other Republicans on the ballot?
- Ex-U.S. Attorneys Rip DeSantis’s Trump Assassination Probe; ‘This governor likes to stick his nose into federal matters for political purposes.’
- Trump Team: ‘We’ll Take The Hit’ on Cat Eating to Keep Immigration in the News; The ex-president’s team, led by JD Vance, would rather talk about migration than abortion. And Springfield allows them to.
- Laura Loomer Looms Over Trump Land; Factionalism is breaking out over her newfound prominence within the ranks.
- ‘Trump Blew It’: Cat Scratch Fever on The Debate Stage; “He was supposed to make her own the Biden record. That didn’t really happen.”
And, finally, Overtime:
- How a U.K. Firm Helped China Crack Down on Hong Kong Democracy; Plus: Mr. Biden Goes to Moscow
- What a Second Trump Term Would Look Like; Plus: The GOP Scheme That Could Bring Our Electoral System to Its Knees
- Trump Attacks the Post Office—and Democracy; Plus: Trump and Vance Are Hypocrites About Political Violence
- Here’s How Harris Should Respond to Putin’s Nuclear Saber-Rattling; Plus: The Violence Will Get Worse
- The Five Counties to Watch in 2024; Plus: Laura Loomer Is the Symptom, Not the Disease
25 newsletters and maybe two with headlines that, on the surface, weren’t anti-Trump or anti-Republican.
How is this any different from, say, The Atlantic, The New Republic, or Slate?
