Axios reported this morning that doofy failson Jonah Goldberg and former Weekly Standard editor Stephen F. Hayes are coming together to unleash a new beast upon the media landscape: a “reporting-driven, Trump-skeptical” media company. What a novel idea!
Per Axios:
Hayes tells me about the startup, which doesn’t have a name now: “We believe there’s a great appetite on the center-right for an independent conservative media company that resists partisan boosterism and combines a focus on old-school reporting with interesting and provocative commentary and analysis.”
Apparently, having this deeply outdated and unpopular perspective wildly overrepresented in the op-ed pages of every major newspaper (and on the panels of all of the worst political shows on cable news) isn’t good enough anymore. No, we need a Weekly Standard 2 that does the hard, necessary work of the American center-right: agitating for war with whatever country seems convenient at the time and whining incessantly about the goings-on at college campuses while also making a big stink face when Trump does a bad tweet.
The authors of the time-tested classics The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America and Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change are reportedly currently “seeking investors” for the project. Knowing how the right-wing grift works, they’ll likely get their money this weekend at DC’s largest annual gathering of reactionaries.