|
 |
Welcome back to False Flag! The Defense Department’s newly Trumpified press corps has descended on the Pentagon this week for events that will see the likes of Laura Loomer and conservative media personality “Black Hannity” covering briefings in place of the mainstream-media reporters who refused to sign highly restrictive new reporting rules.
A day into “New Media Week,” the new press corps seems to be much more compliant than the old one. At pro-Trump online channel Real America’s Voice, reporter David Zere complained that the old Pentagon press rules had been a “free for all” and welcomed the more tightly controlled era his channel ironically billed in a chyron as “Pentagon: All Access.”
The week’s agenda includes a meeting with the new-media reporters and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is currently facing accusations that he committed war crimes. But our new military reporters appear to have a bigger issue on their minds: Who gets to sit where?
Loomer, street interviewer Cam Higby, and James O’Keefe associate R.C. Maxwell each claimed to have taken over the Pentagon desk once used by the Washington Post. Who will triumph in the end? Perhaps the “secretary of war” can help them sort it out.
In the meantime, if you prefer journalism that doesn’t completely fawn over the people in power that it covers, consider becoming a Bulwark+ member. It’s a small step to take to ensure that the stenographers and fanboys don’t get all the perks.
–Will
FML. Here Come the Nick Fuentes Clones.
Plus: A Florida gubernatorial candidate’s luxury watch drama.
|
| |||||||||||||||
 |
Can Right-Wing Media Concoct a New Nick Fuentes?
NICK FUENTES’S EFFORTS to co-opt the MAGA movement continue to roil right-wing media, with Donald Trump Jr. becoming the latest right-wing figure to go soft when asked about the infamous white nationalist podcaster. Given Fuentes’s popularity, it was probably only a matter of time before an outlet asked itself: Rather than tying ourselves into knots about this, what if we instead just got our own Nick Fuentes?
That’s the logic at the Blaze, the right-wing media outlet founded by Glenn Beck, which has increasingly tilted towards groyperism in its programming. And given the momentum racist and antisemitic figures like Fuentes have in right-wing media right now, I don’t think this will be the last time we will see established conservative publications trying to synthesize their own Fuentes clones. If you can’t beat ’em, recreate ’em.
Beck himself all but retired from the Blaze in October, announcing that he will be devoting himself instead to building an AI version of George Washington to offer guided tours of a digital library containing copies of the contents of several “tornado-proof” historical archives Beck has had constructed across the country. The archives’ purpose, among other things, is to prove that some Native American tribes were “bloodthirsty and slave owners.” Beck’s AI Washington will set America’s families straight on that and show that most of “what you were taught in school was . . . a half-truth, or most likely an out-and-out lie.”
And yet, somehow, the Blaze has gotten nuttier without Beck. Last month, it all but accused a former Capitol Police officer of being the January 6th pipe bomber, with the argument resting on a novel investigative method called “gait analysis.” That story looks even worse now: CBS News reported last week that the officer has video evidence proving her innocence and that the FBI has ruled her out as a suspect. But the Blaze wasn’t done there. The site paid far-right commentator Matt Forney—author of sex tourist guide Do the Philippines—to write about H-1B visas, only to can him two days later over his tweets (the Blaze countered that he’d been only a freelancer). It also launched a talk show featuring anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman (alias: “Lomez”), the publisher of Passage Press, which specializes in pre-World War II fascist literature.
But the most interesting figure in the newly groyperfied Blaze has to be John Doyle, a former Fuentes acolyte who has been reinvented by the site as a slightly more palatable take on the groyper king. Last month, the Blaze launched “The John Doyle Show,” wherein Doyle holds forth on important issues, like how Thanksgiving is a “Holiday of Christ and Conquest,” while sitting in front of a statuette of Donald Trump as Buddha.
If you squint, you might think the Blaze had hired Fuentes himself. Doyle is a self-described “white nationalist” who wears a tie, and he has little Fuentes-like quips. Talking about early American colonists shooting off guns on his most recent show, Doyle