8

MEET THE VULTURES

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

—W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”⁷⁷

—Eric Hoffer

To begin, it’s important we set something straight. There’s the conservative movement, and there’s the Con$ervative Movement. The conservative movement is rooted in a proud intellectual heritage and is committed to protecting fundamental freedoms. The Con$ervative Movement has turned the cause into a profiteering venture, and, in the process, exploited some of the worst impulses of grassroots conservatives. For the conservative movement to survive and thrive, we need to excommunicate the hucksters and scoundrels who are running the Con$ervative Movement.

If you’re unfamiliar with the problem, in May of 2015, I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal titled “The ‘Conservative’ PACs Trolling for Your Money.” In the column, I reported on a group called the Conservative Action Fund who wanted to draft former Florida representative Allen West to run for the US Senate there. “With Marco Rubio running for the White House, this seat is even more vulnerable,” the April 17, 2015, solicitation said before asking recipients to “make a generous gift of $15, $25, $35, or even $50” to circulate a petition. There was just one problem: West was unlikely to run for the Florida Senate seat, because, as I noted in the column, he had moved to Texas.

The same group also sent out a fund-raising e-mail asking people to donate money and sign a petition to draft Condi Rice to run for California’s senate seat (it’s unclear which African American Republican—West or Rice—was less likely to run for senate in 2016). Around the same time, Conservative America Now, yet another group with an innocuous sounding name, was raising money to “draft Arizona representative Matt Salmon to challenge Senator John McCain.” In February of 2015, Salmon’s spokesman suggested the e-mail “appears to intentionally mislead potential donors.”

But the problem isn’t limited to groups raising money ostensibly to support hypothetical candidates. According to FEC reports, the Conservative Action Fund (a group we referenced earlier), spent less than 20 percent of funds they raised during the 2014 cycle supporting candidates and campaigns. As is often the case, most of the money went to consultants and overhead. Again, these findings are not unique.

In 2013, Ken Cuccinelli,78 a staunch conservative who now heads the Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF), narrowly lost his gubernatorial race in Virginia. Rather than sit idly by, he filed a lawsuit alleging that much of the $2.2 million raised in 2013 by an outside group called Conservative StrikeForce PAC was the result of using Cuccinelli’s name—yet the political action committee (PAC) contributed “less than one-half of one percent” of that amount to his campaign. The PAC’s treasurer, Scott B. Mackenzie, responded to a request for comment in my Wall Street Journal column and conceded the group “fell short of our expectations and we were unable to spend as much on the race as we would have liked.” In May of 2015, a settlement was reached between the parties that appeared to observers to be very favorable for Cuccinelli. Only time will tell if this has a chilling effect on this kind of activity.

Sounding the Alarm

The good news is that several media outlets—mainstream as well as ideological—have begun sounding the alarm. In February 2015, conservative blogger John Hawkins published a study of seventeen political action committees. His RightWingNews website found that the bottom ten PACs he examined contributed less than 10 percent of the money they raised on independent expenditures or direct contributions to campaigns. Hawkins then asked a series of depressing rhetorical questions: “How many conservative candidates lost in 2014 because of a lack of funds? How many of them came up short in primaries, lost winnable seats, or desperately tried to fight off better-funded challengers? How much of a difference would another $50 million have made last year? That’s a very relevant question because the ten PACs at the bottom of this list spent $54,318,498 and only paid out $3,621,896 to help get Republicans elected.”

So why do they do it? In some cases, we need to understand that fledgling groups require a lot of overhead to get started. But that excuse certainly doesn’t account for all of this. Another answer might simply be incompetence. But it’s also likely that some of these groups are simply bad actors whose work is a net negative for the conservative movement. Some might have started with bad motives. But many, I suspect, began with noble intentions and were seduced into the dark side. (If you’re looking to make money and can’t cut it in the business world or as a candidate or political operative, then this is a pretty good gig.)

And for former politicians, who says cashing in at some lobbying firm is the only way to go? Creating your own gig in the Con$ervative Movement is a great way to build a retirement nest egg. Consider the case of former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who was essentially forced out of his position as chairman of the Tea Party group FreedomWorks in late 2012. Armey lost an internal power struggle with then FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe, a bespectacled libertarian known for his ridiculously long sideburns, after Armey raised concerns over royalties paid to Kibbe for his ironically titled book Hostile Takeover. (Armey argued FreedomWorks’ resources were used to write and market Kibbe’s book and that Kibbe was personally profiting at the expense of the organization.) But it’s hard to feel sorry for Armey. He landed softly thanks to a golden parachute. As ABC News reported, “Under the terms of the deal, Armey will receive $400,000 a year until he is 92—a total of $8 million—to be a consultant.”

Interestingly, It’s Almost Always Legal

Even though the examples I’ve cited undoubtedly harm the conservative cause, sucking up resources that might otherwise be spent on electing conservative candidates, few are illegal. And it’s not just the Tea Party groups, either. Conservative consultants and vendors have aroused suspicion, too. In July of 2014, a Fox affiliate in Detroit, WJBK-TV, ran an investigative report package on conservative direct mail firms that were raising money from elderly and often ill conservatives, in some cases to fill the coffers of candidates who weren’t even running for office. “Campaign finance experts say there’s no law against raising money for people who don’t end up running for office, and it’s okay for fund-raisers to pay themselves almost all of the funds they raise as long as they fill out the proper paperwork,” the report said.

Nobody should begrudge conservative candidates or organizations for paying their employees well, and it’s impossible to eliminate all overhead (it takes money to make money, as they say). Nor should we criticize political consultants for earning a living. (Disclosure: As mentioned earlier, my wife is a political fund-raiser who has consulted for conservative candidates such as Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, and Ken Cuccinelli. She’s damn good, and worth every penny.) But judging appropriate behavior from inappropriate behavior is sort of like the old line about pornography: you can’t define it, but you know it when you see it.

The question is, at what point do these things become a net negative for the conservative movement? If you’re adding value, you should, by all means, be compensated well. But the problem is that, as the Eric Hoffer epigraph at the start of this chapter suggests, this has gone from a “movement” to a “business” to a “racket” for far too many people.

And it’s a racket with consequences. Even if you put aside the moral and ethical questions of lining your pockets by taking the last twenty-five dollars from an old lady who just wants to defend the life of an unborn baby, consider the possible bottom line consequences for a conservative movement whose resources are going to enrich political operatives. These groups and consultants are taking points off of the scoreboard. It’s hard to quantify how much money is wasted—money that could have been used to fund an ad for a conservative candidate or to keep the phones turned on at a pregnancy crisis center. But as the aforementioned study conducted by RightWingNews suggested, the worst ten PACs alone cost the conservative movement $50 million in just one election cycle.

The Pander and the Damage Done

In order to raise money from the masses, organizations and consultants are also helping dumb down conservatism. In some cases, this consists of rhetoric about taking down the establishment and the “ruling class.” In other cases, it is accomplished by stirring up paranoia and anger among the base, often to get them to sign petitions (and almost every online petition is a ruse to get you on e-mail lists that can then be sold) or to clog the phone lines of House members so that reasonably conservative Congressmen can be lectured to about why shutting down the government is, in fact, a good idea that will work “if only they have the guts and courage to try.”

The irony is that the people who tell the base what they want to hear are characterized as courageous, while the people willing to stand up to them are labeled cowards. And some of us have our conservatism questioned and are labeled RINOs (Republicans In Name Only).

But it’s not just outside groups and venders pocketing money that should be spent on candidates. In 2013, a reporter for ProPublica, a nonprofit organization that specializes in investigative journalism, alleged all sorts of unethical practices by a group ostensibly set up to help support the troops. According to reporter Kim Barker, “an examination of its fund-raising appeals, tax records, and other documents shows that Move America Forward79 has repeatedly misled donors and inflated its charitable accomplishments, while funneling millions of dollars in revenue to the men behind the group and their political consulting firms.” One of the men behind the group is Sal Russo, a longtime political consultant who is chief strategist for the Tea Party Express.

When You’re a Celebrity

If grifters, shysters, and flim-flam men are a problem for conservatives, love of celebrities is another. Perhaps it is because A-list conservative celebrities are so scarce that we fawn so much over the washed-up actors and musicians who end up among our ranks (sometimes seemingly after having explored every other option for resuscitating their careers). Michael Brendan Dougherty put it this way at TheWeek.com:

The conservative movement has an odd, barely admitted infatuation with celebrity. The resentment conservatives aim at Hollywood and the entertainment industry is really a backhanded way of acknowledging Hollywood’s power. And so you have these odd spectacles of denouncing celebrity while craving proximity to it. See Sean Hannity dedicating so much of his show to Arnold Schwarzenegger during his first campaign for governor, rather than the eminently more conservative Tom McClintock. Or the way conservative institutions have indulged Donald Trump’s fake presidential ambitions. Or Sarah Palin decrying “Hollywood leftists” on her Facebook page but having no problem joining SNL’s fortieth anniversary special a month later. Or Clint Eastwood’s infamous conversation with a chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

For all the talk about “Hollyweird,” conservatives go gaga over celebs. Even Marco Rubio, one of the more thoughtful conservative candidates, was boasting an endorsement from Pawn Stars’ Rick Harrison in the spring of 2015. And for their part, A-list celebrities rarely come running to conservatives when their careers are in their primes, but instead sometimes experience a conservative political awakening as a last-ditch effort to remain relevant. In other cases, conservatives come to a celebrity’s defense—not because he or she has done something noble, but because this person has done or said something stupid or controversial, angering the PC thought police. Sensing they had the right enemies, conservatives reflexively and predictably come running to the celebrity’s defense.

Don Imus, the shock jock who finally crossed the line when he referred to a female basketball team as “nappy-headed hos,” fits this description. He lost his MSNBC simulcast and was forced to apologize for making a joke that, while unchivalrous and impossible to defend, was nothing out of the ordinary for the crotchety old cowboy. Imus had spent years as an equal opportunity offender and contrarian, but he was never a conservative. Still, it was mostly conservatives who came to his defense, arguing that he was engaged in satire, that this was political correctness run amok, that he was victim of an organized campaign to take him down.

A similar eruption occurred when Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson gave an interview to GQ that some deemed homophobic. “It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus,” he told them. “That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”

In this instance, even I became embroiled in the debate, defending Robertson during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program. But I have an excuse: at the time, Robertson had been placed on indefinite hiatus from his show, A&E’s Duck Dynasty, and there was talk that he might actually be terminated. In this regard, I was objecting to the notion that someone holding politically incorrect views (and expressing them in an admittedly coarse manner) would lose his job over it. My fear was that there was a trend whereby people expressing unpopular political views are being punished, and that this would have a chilling effect on free speech (a few months after the Duck Dynasty dustup, the CEO of Mozilla, the web browser developer, was fired for supporting an initiative that defined marriage as an institution between a man and a woman). While I am happy to defend the principle of free speech, the notion that conservatives would hold Robertson up as some sort of hero—at least partially based on his celebrity status—was also problematic. And this, too, is a pattern.

In May of 2015, it was revealed that, as a teenager, Josh Duggar was accused of sexually molesting several girls, some of whom were his sisters, when he was a teenager. The revelation prompted the Duggar scion and costar of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting to resign his position as executive director of FRC Action, the political arm of the socially conservative Family Research Council. Duggar was just twenty-seven years old when he resigned his leadership position. But it was a line from a May 22 Washington Post story that struck me as especially telling: “Duggar was running a used-car lot before he became the new face of the Family Research Council.” Celebrity infatuation syndrome had bitten conservatives yet again—but one could have said that before the molestation allegations surfaced. Duggar had no business being the face of a political activist organization without any qualifications save for being almost famous.

But you don’t have to be a fresh, young face to reap the benefits of the Con$ervative Media Complex. Conservatives have long embraced seventies rocker Ted Nugent. Nugent has always been a loose cannon, but his February 2014 comments about Obama being a “subhuman mongrel” finally earned him the rebuke of some prominent conservatives like Senator Rand Paul and Texas governor Rick Perry. Nugent didn’t become controversial or uncouth overnight, but conservatives embraced him because he had all the right enemies. They do this because they hate double standards (liberal celebrities are held to lesser standards). They do this because, to them, coverage of comments like his feels disproportionate. They do this because conservatives love lost causes.80

Sometimes celebrities even run for office. Such was the case with former Saturday Night Live cast member Victoria Jackson, who lost her 2014 bid for the County Commission in Tennessee’s Williamson County. When I talk about “immigrants” to the conservative movement—the activists who join the cause, but struggle to assimilate—Jackson’s story serves a microcosm. According to a March 19, 2014, USA Today story, “Jackson said she stumbled into political activism in 2007 after spending most of her life oblivious to government and politics.” After leaving Saturday Night Live in 1992, “she struggled to find steady work as an actress, landing roles in films that went mostly unnoticed and working stand-up comedy gigs with former SNL cast members.” It has been noticed that some people only “find Jesus” when they hit rock bottom. Celebrities could say the same thing about “finding Reagan.”

Almost Famous

But it’s not just the real celebrities conservatives have a problem with. It’s also that we have a penchant for making ordinary people who (to paraphrase Saturday Night Live) aren’t “ready for prime time” into folk heroes. Who could forget Kim Davis, the then Democratic Kentucky county clerk who gained national attention in 2015 for defying a court order to issue same-sex marriage licenses? She became so famous that, fearing another politician might overshadow his candidate, an aide to Mike Huckabee physically blocked Ted Cruz to keep the Texas senator from appearing onstage with her. Depending on your perspective, Davis was either a staunch defender of religious liberty or someone who flaunts the rule of law. Either way, she made for an unlikely spokesperson for a conservative movement hoping to win the twenty-first century.

This happens because we believe the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It happens because buying into a cult of personality is easier than developing a coherent political philosophy. The moment someone stands up to our enemy, we welcome them with open arms—no vetting necessary. This is a problem. Just because someone has the right enemies doesn’t make them an appropriate spokesperson for your cause. The three most obvious examples of this in recent years have been that of Joe the Plumber, George Zimmerman, and Cliven Bundy.

As you might recall, Joe Wurzelbacher (aka Joe the Plumber) gained attention when he challenged then candidate Barack Obama during a campaign stop in Ohio. Wurzelbacher acquitted himself quite well—so well that Obama’s defenders started digging into his past, raising questions about whether he was even a licensed plumber. The McCain-Palin campaign started bringing him out at rallies, and McCain mentioned him during a televised debate. And then, Joe the Plumber jumped the shark. Seeking to parlay his fifteen minutes into a career, Wurzelbacher became an activist, motivational speaker, and congressional candidate. And—because anyone can do what I do—he’s also a political commentator. After one mass shooting, he penned an open letter to the victims’ parents, telling them, “As harsh as this sounds—your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”

Why yes, Joe, now that you mention it, that does sound harsh.

Some conservatives likewise made the mistake of building up, and reflexively defending, George Zimmerman after he shot and killed Trayvon Martin,81 an unarmed African American teen. After an altercation in which Zimmerman sustained head injuries, Martin was shot and killed. Zimmerman, of course, said he was acting in the capacity of a neighborhood watch volunteer. He argued he killed Martin in self-defense, and he was ultimately acquitted. It’s entirely possible to believe that Zimmerman made a lot of stupid moves that night, but that he did not break the law. Having said that, I got the sense that at least some conservatives were rooting for him—that this case essentially became an example of tribalism and identity politics, with white conservatives reflexively lining up on one side, while liberals and African Americans were reflexively on the other. But whether or not Zimmerman was technically innocent, the situation should not bestow hero status on Zimmerman any more than death should automatically bestow martyrdom on Martin. Zimmerman may well have been innocent, but that did not make him a good person. The fact that he was subsequently arrested for allegedly pointing a shotgun at his then girlfriend increases the odds that he’s not. Most conservatives have moved on.

Another example was of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher embroiled in a decades-long standoff with the Bureau of Land Management over grazing rights and for refusing to pay grazing fees. In early 2014, tensions heightened, and an armed standoff with the Feds ensued. Playing to type, conservatives embraced Bundy, turning him into a sort of folk hero. In fairness, Bundy did represent a legitimate argument. As MSNBC’s Adam Serwer wrote, “It’s perfectly consistent to believe the federal government owns too much land and also believe Bundy’s remarks are offensive.” It’s also fair to say that Fox News, and especially Sean Hannity, gave Bundy a huge platform, and that Bundy—who was shown on TV riding a horse while waving an American flag—exploited that opportunity.

The episode also tapped into something more deep-seated than grazing rights. As Josh Barro of the New York Times noted, “The rush to stand with Mr. Bundy against the Bureau of Land Management is the latest incarnation of conservative antigovernment messaging.” This “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” philosophy is dangerous, and yet we find conservatives trapped in a cycle of abusive relationships. It usually goes like this: Government or the media oversteps its bounds, conservatives embrace the unvetted victim, who—once feted (but not vetted) on cable TV and talk radio—says or does something stupid. Then, liberal media outlets spend weeks covering the boomerang part of the story. What may start out as a boon for conservatives leaves them with egg on their face.

In the case of Bundy, not only was he technically wrong to think he could graze his cattle for free on someone else’s land, but his desire for media attention ultimately got the better of him. He decided to quit talking about cattle, and instead wax not-so-eloquently about the state of race relations in America at a press conference attended by a New York Times reporter. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton,” Bundy said, referring to African Americans, according to the Times. “And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom,” he continued.

In the grand scheme of things, should it matter to us that some random rancher in Nevada is a bigot? Probably not. But it’s hard to make that argument after you’ve spent weeks building him up just so someone else can tear him down. So why did conservatives get caught up in this lost cause? Here’s a theory: when the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff resulted in the death of Randy Weaver’s wife and son—and when the disastrous 1993 Federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, took place—the fallout had a negative impact on the Clinton Administration, despite the fact that the Ruby Ridge standoff occurred in 1992, during President George H. W. Bush’s watch. Both events were tragic, but they also (understandably) fed an antigovernment sentiment that was very good for the nascent Con$ervative Entertainment Complex. Could it be that conservatives are still fighting the last war? Like the aforementioned examples, Cliven Bundy had an “armed militia of supporters.” (As the New York Times recalled in 1995, “The Ruby Ridge confrontation involved an armed separatist brigade. The Davidians were also well equipped with weapons.”)

If you were a conservative talk radio host, would you not look at Bundy through the prism of Ruby Ridge? In the beginning, it might have been easy to assume Bundy would also go out in a blaze of glory, becoming some sort of martyr. And in this scenario, it would have been important to stake out a pro-Bundy position before the government turned him into a real folk hero. Instead of killing him, the Obama Administration gave him enough rope to hang himself.

Playing the Game

While the Cliven Bundys of the world do damage to the conservative brand, they are arguably not as culpable as the politicians who use the primary process as a résumé builder for a future TV show, or the conservative talking heads who, despite knowing better, play to the worst aspects of our human nature.

Whether the scoundrels are looking to line their pockets by fund-raising off hypothetical candidates for their PAC or outside group, jumpstart their fledgling acting careers by reinventing themselves as conservative pundits, or boost their talk radio or cable TV ratings (or book sales) by saying incendiary things sure to harm the conservative cause, one thing’s for sure: it almost always comes down to money for these hacktastic con$ervatives.