Libs can't cancel Bongino

The New Yorker did a 9,000-word profile on Dan Bongino. It's not what he says that bothers them. It is what he does. 

Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters for America, is scared.

The nut of the piece is this paragraph.

In the long run, Bongino’s most significant impact may not come from what he says on his broadcasts. “My goal is for my content to be the least interesting thing I did,” he told me. He has used his money and his influence to foster technology startups, such as Parler, Rumble, and AlignPay, that are friendly to right-wing views. These companies are intended to withstand traditional pressure campaigns, including advertising boycotts like the one that Media Matters prompted in 2019, based on old radio interviews in which the Fox host Tucker Carlson described women as “extremely primitive” and Iraqis as “monkeys.” Carusone said, “What scares me about Bongino is that this guy could end up owning or controlling or directly building the infrastructure that operationalizes a whole range of extremism.” He continued, “There used to be lines. You could say, ‘O.K., PayPal, don’t let the January 6th people recruit money to pay for buses.’ This new alternative infrastructure is not going to stop that.” If another uprising organizes online, he said, “there will be a whiplash effect. Everyone will say, ‘How did that happen?’ Well, it’s been happening.”

What Bongino has done is become self-reliant in an era when Maoists run every corporation in America. He cannot be stopped by boycotts and denials of service.

He is Rush Limbaugh on steroids. His actions speak louder than words, and his words are pretty loud. Already he is No. 4 in the talk radio rankings, according to Talkers magazine.

I admire his independence just as I admire Kane at Citizen Free Press for eschewing ads. (His annual fundraiser is still on. I mailed a check.)

Lefty Glenn Greenwald also likes it. He tweeted, "Whatever you think of Bongino or anyone else whose views you hate, it's incomparably dangerous to allow groups created by supreme DC scumbag David Brock to police our discourse, and it's good and healthy that new independent platforms deny them that power."

New Yorker titled its piece, "Dan Bongino and the Big Business of Returning Trump to Power."

Of course it is a business. New Yorker is a business. This blog is a business. A 100 years ago, Calvin Coolidge told a bunch of newspaper publishers and editors that the business of America is business. The biggest hippies in the world -- Ben and Jerry -- ran a business. Jerry Garcia and Grateful Dead were businessmen.

The difference between Bongino and New Yorker is he is more successful.

Greenwald tweeted, "One last point about the formulaic Bongino profile: it used to be that a New Yorker hit piece by a CNN writer would be harmful. Now: it doesn't matter. They've so whittled their credibility that the targets of their smears have larger audiences than they, making them impotent."

If anything, this story helps Bongino. My respect for the dude rose.

But the piece really does not say much about him. The hits aren't even slaps.

The story said, "In 1995, he entered a cadet program for aspiring police officers, while studying psychology at Queens College. He became a cop, and also earned a master’s degree in psychology. Soon, though, he was craving 'something bigger.' In 1999, he entered the U.S. Secret Service, and when Hillary Clinton ran for the Senate that year Bongino was assigned to help protect her. He received, as he put it later, 'a Ph.D.-level course in campaign management.' In particular, he appreciated the canny efforts of Clinton’s aides to insure that she was photographed travelling in a frumpy brown van, which the Secret Service agents nicknamed Scooby-Doo. (He invoked that lesson years later when he was running for office, telling his staff that campaigns come down to 'sound bites and snapshots.') Among colleagues, he was known as a skillful agent—well liked by both peers and superiors, and quick to venture out in the middle of the night if asked for help. An agent who worked with him recalled, 'Nobody knew his politics at all. He never talked politics.'" 

Of course he didn't talk politics. Secret Service agents are not supposed to talk politics. That he was willing to lay down his life to protect a woman whose politics he disliked is admirable. He was good at his job and rose through the ranks.

He said of Obama, "From what I saw, he was a wonderful father and a wonderful man, and he was very, very nice and very kind to me."

The story said he got tired of the travel and moved on. The story goes through his post-Secret Service career, which included writing a memoir.

Then it said, "In May, he started the radio show in Limbaugh’s old slot. It was not a simple inheritance; some local stations opted to fill the slot with other aspiring heirs. There was the duo of Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, a sportswriter and a former C.I.A. officer; there was also Erick Erickson, an evangelical Christian who once called the Supreme Court Justice David Souter a 'goat-fucking child molester,' and was now being positioned as the calm, mature option.

"But Bongino had an advantage: Trump, who agreed to be his first guest."

Six months later, Bongino was No. 4 ahead of Mark Levine and Glenn Beck.

But that does not bother libs.

What bothers them is he is independent. He does not need them. And that means they have no way to harm him.

He told New Yorker that if he was not doing this, he would have become a mixed-martial arts fighter.

In a way, he is a lot like Dana White who started the UFC and kicked off the MMA revolution. He took a chance on himself and created his own infrastructure. No one would book his fights in venues.

Then along came an Atlantic City casino owner who was willing to host him.

Donald Trump.