Great Sources #1: The Bulwark, Bill Kristol, and Charlie Sykes

I keep saying that I want my dear FB friends to search out and support good solid news sources, so here’s the first installment in my endeavors to share information along those lines. These articles will be short but helpful, I hope.

If I had to choose the absolute top conservative news outlet in the country right now I’d have to pick The Bulwark. It has a very interesting origin story and great writers. Let’s start with the origin:

During our time at Capitol Hill Baptist Church from 1999-2009 we were acquainted with a member named Claudia Winkler. I was vaguely aware that she was some sort of editor at some sort of newspaper called The Weekly Standard which was said to be conservative. As my interest in any type of news not contained in the Style section of The Washington Post or on National Public Radio was pretty minimal, I never investigated. Indeed, I didn’t do any reading online of any news sites. We actually got, like, a newspaper delivered every morning. I read the aforementioned style section and Jim read the front pages. That was pretty much it for me.

When 2016 hit and it began to dawn on me that Donald Trump might actually be the Republican nominee, I started getting interested in politics. As I pursued Google searches with the keywords “conservatives against Trump” I saw articles from The Weekly Standard (hereinafter TWS) pop up. ‘Hey, that’s the paper Claudia worked for,’ I thought. They had some really good stuff, but my word! Their website was so cluttered with ads that it was hard to make your way through the thicket to get to the actual content. I did note, however, that someone named Bill Kristol had good articles, including this one: “A Populist-Nationalist Right? No Thanks!” (If you’d like to read a full examination of his career, the Wikipedia entry on him is quite thorough. He’s held some controversial positions, notably on the Iraq War, some but not all of which he has changed.)

Well, TWS did not long survive the election of Donald Trump. Two years later it had been killed by its pro-Trump publisher, Clarity Media Group, owned by Philip Anschutz. (A Denverite. Sigh.) Bill Kristol, editor-in-chief of TWS, had become known as one of the adherents to the loosely defined political philosophy known as “NeverTrump conservatives” (a group to which I also proudly belong to this day). Not a man to sit still for very long, he and other NeverTrumpers wasted no time in founding a new news outlet, The Bulwark. Originally planned as simply a news aggregator à la The Drudge Report, it quickly grew into a purveyor of original and excellent news stories by a stable of great writers. Kristol is one of those. Another one is Charlie Sykes (not, not, not to be confused with Charlie Kirk. Puh-leeze!) Sykes is an all-too-rare-these-days example of someone who put his money where his mouth is. He also ended up at TWS and was out of a job when it ended publication, ending up The Bulwark. His articles are fabulous, but even more so is his five-days-a-week podcast to which you should definitely listen. The episodes are fairly short, around half an hour, and he has great guests. As I keep on a-sayin’ and a-sayin’, subscribe, subscribe, subscribe. The Bulwark has no ads and is supported by donations only. We’ve given them some money but need to do more.

That’s it for now. I could go on and on about other great writers at TB, but you’ll be discovering them for yourself, won’t you? Because you’re going to sign up for the newsletters and read the articles and all that good stuff. Right? (If you’d like to read some brief bios of those others, go to this page. I may do a further post about Mona Charen.)

Next up, whenever I get around to doing another one of these, will be The Dispatch, founded by another TWS casualty, Steve Hayes. But this is enough for today.