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Defining the broadly appealing mass-audience content found on Netflix and Disney Plus as simply too woke to serve their supposed silent majority of conservative and libertarian followers, Donald Trump and his media company are planning an alternative streaming service.

As detailed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing from Trump Media and Technology Group, the so-called TMTG+ will be similar in concept to Netflix and Disney Plus, but will provide a platform for conservative and/or libertarian views, and otherwise canceled content from other broadcast television and/or digital streaming platforms.

Also: Did Netflix Just Capitulate to Elon Musk's 'Woke' Criticism?

TMTG intends to produce or acquire entertainment simply for entertainments sake, the company added. TMTGs programming will thus provide a non-woke alternative to the programs offered by streaming services that operate in an increasingly politicized environment. TMTG will not censor the creators of entertainment for TMTG+, nor will it insist that its programming push some particular political ideology.

Also in the filing, TMTG said that it observes an acute need for quality programming that does not lecture its viewers or only present one acceptable approach to a topic. Entertainers and creators have frequently been agents for change in our society. Large media conglomerates become increasingly monolithic in their views, canceling those who disagree with the prevailing narrative. TMTG believes that embracing diverse perspectives will differentiate TMTG+ in the current crowded media and entertainment marketplace.

TMTG, which recently launched Twitter far-right alternative Truth Social, is in the process of merging with special purpose acquisition company Digital World Acquisition for the purpose of going public. It has raised around $1 billion through various private investors.

Read more here:
Trump Media Company Planning 'TMTG+,' a 'Non-Woke Alternative' to 'Obi-Wan Kenobi' and 'Stranger Things' - Next TV

Yoram Hazony's book outlines the religious foundations of American conservatism.

Conservatism: A Rediscovery, by Yoram Hazony (Regnery Gateway, 2022), 256 pages.

I began reading Yoram Hazonys Conservatism: A Rediscovery with the expectation that it would be an update of sorts of Russell Kirks The Conservative Mind. There are similarities between the books that have been noted elsewhere, but in some ways, Hazonys book is more comprehensive than either Conservative Mind or Kirks Roots of the American Order.

Americans use a different taxonomy for politics than Europeans do; there is a liberalism in the American founding that can make semantics blurry. Hazony, thankfully, cuts through the confusion and boldly states historical truths that are self-evident. The United States was at its formation an Anglo-Protestant nation committed to upholding the traditional pillars of human society: religion, family, the common good, and authority.

None of this is controversial, but in the post-Trump intellectual milieu, to be a historically conscious American conservative is increasingly to be labeled an integralist or a Christian nationalist, terms so imprecise that their use amounts to slander. Ideas like nationalism, conservatism, the common good, ordered liberty, and rightful authority are not merely fever dreams of a nefarious new right out to destroy the libertarian, or neoconservative, or neoliberal paradise created by the wiser minds of the post-war era. Hazony is a practicing Orthodox Jew, so the charges that he is interested in resurrecting a medieval Roman Catholic order is ridiculous on its face.

As an Israeli, Hazonys distance from the United States contemporary political cacophony allows him to see clearly what is obvious from the historical record. George Washington and the Federalists, for example, were nationalists by most measures. Moreover, the religious disestablishments of the 1780s did not secularize society. Instead, the Christian religion and the state stopped their 1,300-year-old tendency to meddle in each others affairs and became allies in the creation of the Early Republic United States. All of this is self-evident in American history, but few recent authors have dared say so. The threat of being labeled a theocrat has cowed scholars, pastors, and laypeople of goodwill into conceding the specious historical claims of neoconservatives and neoliberals as much as outright leftists.

Religions, and more specifically Christianitys, self-evident place in the history of American political and social life takes center stage in Conservatisms narrative. Political theories in the conservative tradition, Hazony rightly notes, cannot be made to work without the God of scripture. Uncharitable readers will hear a dog whistle in his claim, but Hazonys is no different than the claim of many Western thinkers. The Judeo-Christian, or Abrahamic (Muslims rightfully have a place in the narrative of conservatism) Gods presence in political life is necessary, as the knowledge of God makes man aware of human limitation and the subsequent limits on human power.

Family joins religion as an essential pillar of sustainable conservative social and civil life. Hazony unambiguously lays out the Mosaic foundations for the traditions that allow human beings to create and sustain healthy families. Traditional families, Hazony notes, are not identical to the nuclear families of the mid-20th century. They are multigenerational and religious by nature. In his view, clans and close kinship networks are not the seeds of a future cultish society, but instead are a natural, timeless part of human life.

Since societys foundations are, in Conservatism, bound up in family and religion, it is no surprise that Hazony sees creating, maintaining, and protecting those two institutions as the essential purpose of government. Again, this is not actually controversial or historically ambiguous. The Protestant intellectuals and politicians who dominated civic and social life in the United States until the middle of the 20th century were not social libertarians, or even social progressives as that term is understood today. Franklin Roosevelt and his secretary of State, Cordell Hull, gladly claimed the mantle of Christian nationalism. So did most Republicans before World War II. The idea that the American nation owed its laws and political order to Protestantism, or at least to Christianity more broadly, was not a controversial opinion. And laws oriented towards the health and prosperity of families were always prioritized over and against an individualist paradigm.

Propositions once widely accepted have nonetheless become taboo. Centrist Evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and Jews have embraced a sacralized form of liberalism shorn of biblical commitments. Hazony proposes that the Cold War bears some responsibility for this. Family and religion, however important they might be, were hard to see as important priorities in themselves in the post-war era. They became valuable because they were institutions that were anti-Communist.

Perhaps appropriately, there is very little that is new in Hazonys conservatism. Although it is not new, it is also not easy. Hazony believes that the libertarian telos of the early 21st century has valorized freedom and only freedom. Not enough is said in our contemporary politics about sources of stability, sanity, and peace, the virtues that necessarily constrain human behavior. Conservatism, in this view, is the way to heal families, communities, tribes, and the nation. And it begins at home. Conservatism in the United States is a living and breathing tradition with a history and a purpose. That history and that purpose, Hazony shows, are good and worth defending, ours, if we can keep it.

Miles Smithis visiting assistant professor of History at Hillsdale College. His main research interests are 19th-century intellectual and religious history in the United States and in the Atlantic World. You can follow him on Twitter at@IVMiles.

More:
Conservatism, If You Can Keep It - The American Conservative

The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by President Biden on Monday with the headline "My Plan for Fighting Inflation."

Biden began by acknowledging that "Americans are anxious" about inflation, which he said had been "exacerbated" by the war in Ukraine. According to a Gallup poll released Tuesday, Americans' confidence in the economy is at its lowest point since early 2009, when the Great Recession was just reaching its end.

The president also touted his achievements, which he said include a reduced federal deficit, rapid declines in unemployment, and strong economic growth relative to other developed countries.

"With the right policies, the U.S. can transition from recovery to stable, steady growth and bring down inflation without giving up all these historic gains," Biden wrote.

To achieve this goal he proposed passing clean energy tax credits to bring down gas prices, improving infrastructure, cracking down on greedy corporations, ramping up housing construction, reducing the cost of child care, and empowering Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies.

Matt Yglesias of Slow Boring tweeted approvingly that Biden's op-ed was "not a comprehensive solution to everything but certainly points the way to a possible deal on a reconciliation bill."

Brad Polumbo of the libertarian Based Politics had a different interpretation. Biden, Polumbo argued, failed to acknowledge that out-of-control government spending was also behind inflation or that the new spending he proposed would only make things worse.

Read the original post:
Biden lays out plan to fight inflation in Wall Street Journal op-ed - The Week

As the Republican party primaries play out across the US, the most sought after endorsement is still that of former president Donald Trump. But when it comes to the most vital part of any American campaign money another figure is emerging on the right of US politics who is becoming equally significant.

Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and former CEO referred to as the don of the original PayPal Mafia, a group that included Elon Musk, is establishing himself as a serious power player in American rightwing politics by wielding the power of his vast fortune.

Thiel, styled as a billionaire venture capitalist and tech entrepreneur, plowed more than $10m into a super Pac backing Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, winner of the Republican primary for an open US Senate seat in Ohio.

In August, Thiels backing will be tested again after shoveling $13.5m into supporting former employee Blake Masters in the competitive Republican primary for a US Senate seat in Arizona.

In both cases, Thiel put his money his fortune is said to be in the region of $6bn to work behind candidates aligned with Trumps rightwing agenda in 2022 midterm elections.

Earlier this year Thiel stepped down from the board of Meta, where he was an early investor, and a long-serving adviser to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He wanted to avoid being a distraction for Facebook, according to a person close to Thiel. With his resignation effective this month, the source told Forbes Thiel thinks that the Republican Party can advance the Trump agenda and he wants to do what he can to support that.

But there is a vacuum between the entire Trump political agenda and Trump himself. The former president is apt to pick candidates who promote his stolen election claims. Not all succeed, or are likely to. Trumps failed backing of David Perdue as Georgias Republican gubernatorial candidate looked like a personal grudge against incumbent Brian Kemp, who certified Bidens victory in 2020.

Thiel has so far helped Trump in that cause. By some estimates, Thiel has donated $25m to 15 other 2022 candidates for the House and Senate towing the Trump election fraud line.

Max Chafkin, author of a Thiel biography The Contrarian, recently wrote that Thiels goal is to turn Trumps ideology into a disciplined political platform.

For Thiel, endorsements of Vance and Masters follow a $300,000 donation to the campaign of far-right senator Josh Hawley, then running for Missouri attorney general in 2016. He also donated money to help elect Trump president and spoke on his behalf at the Republican National Convention.

Thiel stayed out of the 2020 presidential race, and instead donated $2.1m to a super Pac supporting Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who had proposed creating a registry of Muslim immigrants and visitors.

Thiel is one of the conservative mega donors that has the ability to shore up candidates that might need additional support. His spending is targeted, and his ability to spend millions can be impactful, said Sheila Krumholz at OpenSecrets.

Where Trump often seems a single issue political player obsessed with the 2020 election loss Thiel is more flexible in terms of what he represents, Krumholz says.

Often when youre talking about party-aligned mega donors, there are people who have been active over decades, so Peter Thiel strikes a different figure. Hes an entrepreneur, hes tech industry, super successful, seen as part of the young conservative vanguard that some see as more libertarian.

They might be Trump supporters, but their portfolio and persona waters down the connection, Krumholz adds.

Like Musk, Thiel called The Dungeon Master by the New York Review of Books because he played Dungeons & Dragons as a teenager and read J R R Tolkiens trilogy ten times presents a contradictory picture.

As an undergraduate, he founded the conservative Stanford Review and in 1995 Thiel co-authored The Diversity Myth, a book sought to question the impact of multiculturalism and political correctness at Californias higher education campuses.

In bright and shallow Silicon Valley, Thiel stands apart for having retained the intellectual intensity of a bookish undergraduate, a quality that has made him an object of curiosity, admiration and mockery, the publication noted. He stands apart amid the orthodoxy of tech-world social progressivism as much for his conservatism as for his business sense.

In 2003, he co-founded Palantir Technologies, a firm to assist US intelligence agencies with counter-terrorism operations. Last week, Palantir and global commodities trader Trafigura announced a new target market to track carbon emissions for the oil, gas, refined metals and concentrates sector. BP is among its customers, Reuters reported.

Thiels libertarian credentials, and perhaps in part his political motivation, were publicly established in 2016 when he funded an invasion of privacy lawsuit filed by Terry Bollea, known more popularly as wrestler Hulk Hogan, that bankrupted the news website Gawker. Gawker had outed Thiel in 2007.

Its less about revenge and more about specific deterrence, Thiel said of the action. I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest I thought it was worth fighting back.

Funding the lawsuit, he added, was one of the greater philanthropic things that Ive done.

Blake Masters, the 35-year-old Republican US senate candidate for Arizona, has suggested he would use the same tactics after the Arizona Mirror wrote that the candidate opposes abortion rights and wants to allow states to ban contraception use. Masters denies those positions.

If I get any free time after winning my elections then youre getting sued, and Ill easily prove actual malice, Masters wrote in a tweet. Gawker found out the hard way and you will too.

Thiel, said Masters last year, sees some promise in me, but he knows Ill be an independent-minded senator.

But the larger issue for Thiel may be intense cross-currents in the US around big tech, social media and free speech. His former PayPal Mafia consigliere, Musk, is also emerging from the tech world to have influence in US politics where he recently declared himself a Republican and free speech as he seeks to buy the social media platform Twitter.

[Tech is] an industry on the cutting edge and caught in the cross-fire between the parties, said Krumholz. There are a lot of conflicting pressures on and from within the tech industry. Tech is being scapegoated by some, and held responsible for much of the disinformation, excesses of social media, partisan division and radicalization we see.

Moira Weigel, a professor of communications at Northeastern University and a founding editor of Logic magazine, argued in the New Republic last year that Thiel does not really matter: What matters about him is whom he connects.

At the moment, Thiel is busy connecting some of the most rightwing politicians in recent US history.

Excerpt from:
Don of a new era: the rise of Peter Thiel as a US rightwing power player - The Guardian

EXCLUSIVE:

A first-of-its-kind museum dedicated to the victims of communist regimes is opening on Capitol Hill.

The nonprofit Victims of Communism Museum will throw open its doors to the public on June 13. (A press preview is scheduled for Thursday.)

Ambassador Andrew Bremberg emphasized the urgency of the museums message, noting public surveys showing a general acceptance of socialist and communist ideas among young people.

Its imperative that we teach Americans about the victims, failures and holes of communism because Americans reject communism as soon as they learn anything about it, Amb. Bremberg said in an exclusive interview with The Washington Times. The problem is that today, many young people just have no idea who Joseph Stalin was or who Mao Zedong was, and they were the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century.

The ambassador, who served as U.S. permanent representative at the United Nations in Geneva from 2019 to 2021, is president and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit authorized by a unanimous act of Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993.

Amb. Bremberg said the foundation raised millions of dollars to rehabilitate and build out two floors of its building for the museum, which is within view of the U.S. Capitol, two blocks from Union Station. Then-President George W. Bush dedicated the Victims of Communism Memorial statue at a nearby intersection in 2007.

The new museum is opening as a growing number of states have enacted laws requiring that public schools teach about the evils of communism efforts the foundation is supporting by developing a web-based curriculum.

More people are realizing that the experience of communism really hasnt gotten the heavy attention, especially here in the United States, that it needs to educate our citizenry about it, Amb. Bremberg said. A museum is a tremendous way of doing that.

The two-floor museum at 900 15th St. NW seeks to honor the more than 100 million people killed by communist regimes such as the now-defunct Soviet Union and the 1.5 billion people who still live in communist nations like China and Cuba.

The museum consists of a permanent gallery, a temporary gallery and an education space that includes an education hall with documentary videos for school groups.

It also includes a small number of historical artifacts, including photographs and personal possessions, that are a mix of reproductions and items that people in communist nations donated.

Amb. Bremberg said the permanent gallery orients visitors to the lies spread by communism in the 20th century through a digital interactive educational experience for students.

The temporary exhibit showcases more in-depth exhibits on people living and dead whose lives were ruined by communism, he added.

For most Americans growing up, anyone younger than me has no memory or experience of the Berlin Wall falling, said Amb. Bremberg, 43. Thats concerning because they havent learned about it. Thats why we see more Americans interested in communism who think it just hasnt been tried right yet.

Founded by 19th-century German political theorist Karl Marx, communism calls for a single-party, government-run economy in which private property is outlawed. During the 20th century, Marxist regimes imprisoned, tortured and executed millions of people.

Link:
Victims of Communism Museum to open in nation's capital - Washington Times