Chris Wallace, Jonah Goldberg, CNN, Jeff Zucker and Moral Clarity

By Rich Kozlovich, Tags:

On February 6th Paul Bois posted this piece, Report: Chris Wallace Upset over Jeff Zucker Ouster at CNN, Uncertain About His Future saying:

Former Fox News anchor Chris Wallace is reportedly “irate” over the ouster of CNN president Jeff Zucker and now feels uncertain about his future at the network.  Speaking with Radar Online, a TV insider said Wallace has been “second-guessing his decision” to leave Fox News for the upcoming CNN+ streaming platform in the wake of Zucker’s resignation for his undisclosed affair with his subordinate, Allison Gollust. “Chris is the type of person who makes it known if he doesn’t like something,” the source told the outlet. “He went over there for Zucker and now Zucker is gone. Wallace feels that he has been stiffed. He’s got no staff, no Executive Producer and the guy he gave up a prized gig for has just walked out the door.”............Wallace has no protection. ...............“I am thrilled to join CNN+. After decades in broadcast and cable news, I am excited to explore the world of streaming”

And he's all upset now.  Schadenfreude, Zucker was the guy who ran CNN into the ground over the last nine years.  This is the guy he praises!  Well, let's face it, Wallace is a self-absorbed arrogant snot who somehow thought he was really special, and better than all the others at Fox, all of whom were beneath him, including the audience who watched Fox, but fewer and fewer watched him.  He's even worse than his father.  

And now it turns out another arrogant snot, Jonah Goldberg, along with Steve Hayes who left Fox is going to NBC, acting like great moralists as they marched out from Fox claiming Fox's Patriot Purge series was:

 "a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions” ..........."the release of 'Patriot Purge' wasn’t an isolated incident, it was merely the most egregious example of a longstanding trend."....accusing them of amplifying "the false claims and bizarre narratives of Donald Trump" for the past five years.

So he went to CNN for moral clarity?  

CNN, a network that's totally recognized (outside the leftist echo chamber of irrational head nodders) for lies, conspiracies, misinformation and blatant Democrat and leftist partisanship, so they left Fox because these two think CNN and NBC are more "honest and moral" than Fox?  Do I understand that correctly?

Yet the nation is watching Fox and abandoning CNN, so what does America see these false conservatives don't?    Do these people live in an alternate universe? 

"Fox News ratings have dominated for a remarkable twenty years.  It is actually CNN that festers in an alternate universe awash with toxic radiation; in fact, the network is imploding into a fake news black hole".  

Or, are they nothing more than false conservatives who are in reality leftist hypocrites?

I read Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism and was totally impressed.  I don't know what happened to him after that, but he's lost his mind, and his audience.  Will leftists embrace him?  Maybe, but being embraced by the left is like being embraced by a bone crushing anaconda. 

Now it's being reported that there's an effort to pay hush money to Chris Cuomo to the tune of $9 million, presumably to prevent more exposure of what Zucker and CNN have been up to.  So while attempting to attain the moral high ground and "graciously" acknowledging:

"Fox News still does real reporting, and there are still responsible conservatives providing valuable opinion and analysis," they wrote. "But the voices of the responsible are being drowned out by the irresponsible."

And just who are these "irresponsible" voices on Fox?  Most likely he's referring to Hannity, Carlson, Ingraham and Janine Pirro, all of whom are all very outspoken conservatives and who keep being shown to be accurate and correct in their views.  Truth and Time are on the same side, and they're carrying the day with America, Chris Wallace and his views are going to become meaningless. 

Okay, so let's take a look at the network Wallace and Goldberg joined over moral considerations.  

On February 5 John Nolte published this piece, CNN’s Pantheon of Creeps, making a great comparison between them and the people at Fox for moral clarity, and we already know about Zucker and his mistress, to then we have Jeffrey Toobin who was caught masturbating on a Zoom call. Allison Gollust, Zucker's paramour who rose right to the top (but it wasn't because she was sleeping with the boss) while both were married to other people.  

Then there's Chris Cuomo who Nolte describes in this way:

Chris Cuomo, the dilettante little brother of Andrew Cuomo,  encouraged political violence, physically threatened his critics, grabbed a woman’s ass, sought to destroy the credibility of his brother’s dozen or so accusers, ran around New York while infected with COVID (when New York was Pandemic Ground Zero), lied to CNN viewers about remaining in his basement quarantine, staged a phony exit from that basement quarantine, and was repeatedly caught not wearing a mask after shaming others to wear masks. 

Don Lemon is accused of "stuffing his hands down his pants and shoving his stink-filled fingers under a man’s nose" and  Michael Avenatti, who CNN promoted over and over again is now a felon for his criminal activities.   Then there's John Griffin, a former producer at CNN.  He's facing "sex-trafficking" charges involving minors along with anther former producer, Rick Saleeby, who has been accused of having sex with a minor. 

Then there's Andrew Cuomo who CNN worked to cover "up his scandals, demonized his critics, and blatantly sought to mythologize him into a 2020 presidential contender. Then, in August of 2021, it all came crashing down when Cuomo was forced to resign after an investigation by New York’s attorney general (and fellow Democrat) found that he sexually harassed 11 women.

And this is the network these people are going to for moral clarity!

Polishing Jonah Goldberg

“American Greatness,” as all things Trump in general, has gotten under his skin.

Ed Morrow December 29, 2018

Jonah Goldberg wrote a column for National Review before departing for his Christmas holiday in Hawaii. Was it a retelling of a long ago night before Christmas, when a tiny Jonah in footy PJs couldn’t sleep for hope of a pony under the tree? No. It was a screed titled “Conservative Facts.” What set off Goldberg was a column in American Greatness by Chris Buskirk titled “Death of The Weekly Standard Signals Rebirth of the Right.”..............He bitches.

Buskirk’s column applauded the failure of the Weekly Standard.........like many conservatives, sees neoconservatism as an ism that through “titanic hubris and priggish moralism” failed conservatism..............They believe that while America was trying to build democracy in foreign lands with our blood and treasure, America, at home, was being transformed into something unrecognizable.......... Good motives don’t guarantee good results..............Neocon-endorsed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.......... but there appears to be no end to the bloodshed.

Neocons also failed to reduce Big Government, the target they explicitly reviled in their foundling days. .............during the heyday of neoconservatism “a new generation of careerists, sycophants, and know-nothings flooded Washington eager to find a Beltway sinecure. The legacy conservative media began to change. Step by step it abandoned historic American principles and ultimately came to despise the American people.............If Hillary Clinton had won the presidency, she would have sent America far down the road to something appalling............. Millions of Americans understand this but Goldberg doesn’t and disregards their concerns............ Kristol says that he piously prefers democratic and constitutional politics “But if it comes to it, [I] prefer the deep state to the Trump state.” That’s a shocking remark................To Read More.....

Jonah Goldberg and Cardinal Newman

By Roger Kimball | December 29th, 2018

My friend Jonah Goldberg has prompted me to think a bit about the issue of character as it relates to public service. Jonah thinks that Donald Trump is a man of bad character. He’s written this several times, most recently, I believe, at National Review where he puts it negatively: it is an “obvious truth,” he says, that “President Trump is not a man of good character.”

In August, on Twitter, Jonah issued a challenge that, he noted, he had been pressing for three years: “Please come up with a definition of good character that Donald Trump can clear.”...........

My question is this: what is the character that Jonah wants us to champion and that he stipulates Donald Trump lacks? Let us grant that the president is an imperfect man. What betokens worse character: tweeting rude things or having sex with your intern in the Oval Office? What’s worse, insulting Bob Corker or using the Department of Justice and the IRS to harass and persecute your political opponents?...........To Read More......

Why We've Let Actors Become Our Moral Guides

Jonah Goldberg  Posted: Jan 12, 2018

There's a great scene in the wonderful 1982 movie "My Favorite Year," which is set in 1954. Peter O'Toole plays a semi-washed-up actor named Alan Swann, famous for swashbuckling roles. For reasons too complicated to explain here, Swann tries to shimmy down the side of a building using a fire hose. He ends up dangling just below a cocktail party on a balcony.

Two stockbrokers are chatting when one of them notices Swann swinging below them. "I think Alan Swann is beneath us!" he exclaims. 

The second stockbroker replies: "Of course he's beneath us. He's an actor."

It may be hard for some people to get the joke these days, but for most of human history, actors were considered low-class. They were akin to carnies, grifters, hookers and other riffraff.......

Watch the TV series "Inside the Actors Studio" sometime. It's an almost religious spectacle of ecstatic obsequiousness and shameless sycophancy. Host James Lipton acts like some ancient Greek priest given an audience with Zeus, coming up just shy of washing the feet of actors with tears of orgiastic joy. I mean, I like Tom Hanks, too. But I'm not sure starring in "Turner & Hooch" (one of my favorite movies) bestows oracular moral authority...............

The most recent Golden Globes ceremony has already been excoriated for being a veritable geyser of hypocritical effluvia, as the same crowd that not long ago bowed and scraped to serial harasser and accused rapist Harvey Weinstein, admitted child rapist Roman Polanski and that modern Caligula, Bill Clinton, congratulated itself for its own moral superiority.......To Read More....

Dear Jonah Still Doesn't Get It

By Christopher Chantrill December 12, 2017

I feel for Jonah Goldberg and the rest of the #NeverTrumpers at Conservatism Inc. The awful truth is that their Resistance to the leftward ratchet has failed, and the world has moved on.

So last week Jonah’s G-File is “ Against One-Thingism complaining that we are becoming like our lefty friends for whom politics is everything, what with Republican and Trump support for Roy Moore, candidate for United States Senator in Alabama and all.

Okay, Jonah, so what is Baldrick’s cunning plan for dishing the left?

Let’s do the Eisenhower thing and make the problem bigger. What do you do when you are faced with a millennarian movement for which politics and power and cultural hegemony is indeed the holy One Thing.

The truth is that you have to come pretty close to your own One Thing. Otherwise you just go under the knout and bend the knee to the One Thingers and their political and cultural commissars, and your children go with the New World Order, as taught by regime thugs in the schools and in entertainment.

That is why the Reformation inspired a Counterreformation, the French Revolution inspired various anti-French Coalitions, the Bolshevik Revolution inspired a movement of anti-Communism, and it wasn’t pretty.

And that is why lefty progressivism has inspired Trumpism. It is no use complaining about life narrowing down to One Thing. We are in another big fight with the left, whether we like it or not........To Read More....

My Take - Tomorrow I'm posting an article about what's wrong with National Review.  Goldberg is an example of what's transpired there.  I read a couple of his books and was thoroughly impressed.  As the years have gone by - not so much any longer - to the point I no longer read his G-File.