The Bulwark: Birth of The Bulwark

The Bulwark: Profiting from Never Trump Media (full series)
Birth of The Bulwark | From Nonprofit to Profits
Making a Business of Trump Derangement | Take Away Trump

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Summary: The Bulwark was founded in 2019 and since then has become the main media rampart of the Never Trump movement. Bulwark was born from the ashes of the Weekly Standard, once the main media rampart of the neoconservative movement. The Bulwark and the Weekly Standard share a common founder in Bill Kristol. The through line from neoconservative to Never Trumper has become a well-worn path. This isn’t surprising, because neocons are not limited government conservatives. Today, The Bulwark is growing and—unlike nearly all previous political movement media enterprises—it is profitable. How long can they keep this up? Ironically, they probably need the very thing that they have set out to destroy.

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“Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.”

—Ronald Reagan

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Political movements develop media ramparts from which to promote and defend their ideology and allies. National Review on the right and The Nation on the left are two of the oldest surviving American examples. Beginning in the 1960s, the communist-aligned New Left’s most prominent magazine was literally named Ramparts. When Ramparts folded in 1975, its staffer refugees went on to create Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, and other media ramparts of today’s Left.

The Bulwark has emerged as the main media rampart of the Never Trump movement.

Just as Rolling Stone and Mother Jones share the DNA of Ramparts, The Bulwark is a direct descendant of the Weekly Standard, a neoconservative journal that existed from 1995 through 2018. William “Bill” Kristol, co-founder of both The Bulwark and the Weekly Standard, is the son of an original neoconservative, Irving Kristol.

The through line from neoconservative to Never Trumper has become a well-worn path, and it undermines a central argument of many Never Trumpers. They promote themselves as erstwhile Republicans protecting supposedly true conservatism from the alleged depredations of the MAGA movement. But when it comes to skepticism of big government, the neocon Never Trumpers never really believed in what they now claim to be saving.

To admittedly oversimply, neoconservatism was founded by Cold Warrior leftist intellectuals who broke with the New Left over American foreign policy. Neocons were certainly enemies of the Soviet Union’s big government. But—crucially—they did not and do not share the conventional conservative animosity toward the size and overreach of the American government.

“Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” said Ronald Reagan, moments after becoming president in 1981.

He also said: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

That’s just a sample of many examples on this theme. From his endorsement of Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 through his last days in the White House, Reagan was nothing if not relentless on this point. He may have hired neoconservative fellow travelers to help him deep-six the Soviet Empire, but he never became one.

The only recent president who arguably did become a neoconservative was George W. Bush. He exited the office with a Bidenesque 34 percent approval rating and paved the way for two years of Democratic control of the entire government.

The major differences between the limited government conservatives and the Bush-era neoconservatives was boasted of in an August 2003 Wall Street Journal essay by Fred Barnes, another neoconservative co-founder of the Weekly Standard.

“The case for Mr. Bush’s conservatism is strong,” argued Barnes.

Sure, some conservatives are upset because he has tolerated a surge in federal spending, downplayed swollen deficits, failed to use his veto, created a vast Department of Homeland Security, and fashioned an alliance of sorts with Teddy Kennedy on education and Medicare. But the real gripe is that Mr. Bush isn’t their kind of conventional conservative. Rather, he’s a big government conservative. . . . They simply believe in using what would normally be seen as liberal means—activist government—for conservative ends. And they’re willing to spend more and increase the size of government in the process.” [emphasis added]

Although this supposed praise doesn’t look pretty today, it was meant sincerely at the time. The George W. Bush administration listened to the Weekly Standard’s advice.

In March 2003, a New York Times headline proclaimed: “White House Listens When Weekly Speaks.” The gist of the report was that neoconservative priorities had become the Bush administration agenda, particularly on foreign policy. The profile credited Bill Kristol with co-founding a think tank that “issued papers supporting essentially unilateralist efforts to police the world.”

Some of the highest praise for the Weekly Standard’s influence over the Bush White House came from Eric Alterman, a left-wing journalist: “The magazine speaks directly to and for power. Anybody who wants to know what this administration is thinking and what they plan to do has to read this magazine.”

Birth of The Bulwark

“Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan,” said President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

Every movement on the team during the immensely successful Reagan presidency now claims credit for his accomplishments. The neoconservatives are no different, but their soft spot for protecting the federal superstate has always been a marketing challenge.

A September 1997 Wall Street Journal essay co-written by Bill Kristol and David Brooks argued for a new movement they defined as “national greatness conservativism.” This was also the point of “A Return to National Greatness,” a March 1997 cover story written by Brooks for the Weekly Standard.

So-called national greatness conservatism should be considered the test marketing of a message that would later manifest as the “big government conservative” praise the Weekly Standard showered upon George W. Bush six years later.

Preaching from Bill Clinton’s Oval Office more than Reagan’s, Brooks and Kristol wrote this in their 1997 Wall Street Journal essay: “National-greatness conservatism does not despise government. How could it? How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?”

“Wishing to be left alone isn’t a governing doctrine,” they claimed. “And an American political movement’s highest goal can’t be protecting citizens from their own government.”

Well, yes it can. That’s how Reagan won a pair of landslides and remains the most beloved Republican president in the memory of anyone who loves Republican presidents.

And it’s also why we’re not Canadians. The Declaration of Independence was history’s greatest “wishing to be left alone” manifesto, a divorce subpoena served on the British Empire.

In his March 1997 cover story for the Weekly Standard, Brooks lamented what America had become in the absence of his national greatness movement:

America is a more dominant power in the world than Americans a century ago could ever have imagined. Yet we have almost none of the sense of global purpose that Americans had when they only dreamed of enjoying the stature we possess today. Domestically, we have a president and a Congress whose major common purpose is . . . balancing the budget. [emphasis added]

In national debt terms, that bolded sentence was written $32 trillion dollars ago, or about $95,000 of additional debt for every American currently alive. We were at peace, the Soviet Union had been put down, and we were paying the bills for the first time in forever (another Reagan objective, it should be noted.)

The “leave us alone” vibe was so strong back then that George W. Bush thought he needed to become most isolationist candidate in the 2000 presidential race.

“We can’t be all things to all people in the world,” said Bush in a 2000 debate against Vice President Al Gore. “And I think that’s where the vice president and I begin to have some differences . . . I am worried about overcommitting our military around the world.”

The Weekly Standard helped him get over that and then went out of business in 2018.

“Kristol attributed The Standard’s demise to the hostility it faced as an anti-Trump organ operating inside the Trump-dominated right—an antipathy he said extended to its financial backers,” reported the New York Times.

Shortly after Trump was sworn in the first time in January 2017, according to that Times report, Kristol began attending an invitation-only Never Trumper gathering. It was there that he met Sarah Longwell, described by the Times as “a D.C. trade association, think tank and advocacy veteran who was a semiregular attendee.”

The pair teamed up to create Defending Democracy Together.

This must have amused the gods of revealing metaphors. DDT, the Never Trump advocacy nonprofit, shares an unpleasant abbreviation with the insecticide that nearly drove America’s bald eagles to extinction.

The Bulwark was launched in January 2019 as one of the projects of the Defending Democracy Together Institute, an educational nonprofit affiliate of DDT which now does business as Lyceum Labs. Conservative commentator Charlie Sykes, according to a New York magazine profile, was a third co-founder of The Bulwark, but no longer appears to be involved. (Note: The DDT network and its activities not related to The Bulwark are covered in a separate article in this report.)

The New York magazine profile, which posted in February 2025, described the birth of the Never Trump media rampart this way: “The Bulwark began its life as an aggregator and opinion news website but has since evolved into a full-fledged media operation, pumping out audio and video content on a variety of channels along with the traditional takes.”

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In the next installment, the DDT Institute spends nearly $1.2 million developing The Bulwark.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-bulwark-part-1/