Look, we get it: Bill Kristol, Max Boot and a whole bunch of the other ‘neo-conservatives’ don’t like President Trump, mostly personally but also for most of his policies. It was Mr Kristol’s personal hatred of Mr Trump which helped bring the once-flourishing The Weekly Standardto its end. David Brooks, the (supposedly) moderate conservative columnist for The New York Times, could not conceal his scorn for the market forces which meant the end for the Standard:

The closing of The Weekly Standard is being told as a Trump story, as all stories must be these days. The magazine has been critical of Trump, and so this is another example of the gradual hegemony of Trumpism over the conservative world. That is indeed the backdrop to what happened here.

But that’s not the whole story. In reality, this is what happens when corporate drones take over an opinion magazine, try to drag it down to their level and then grow angry and resentful when the people at the magazine try to maintain some sense of intellectual standards. This is what happens when people with a populist mind-set decide that an uneducated opinion is of the same value as an educated opinion, that ignorance sells better than learning.

In that sense, the closing of The Standard resembles Chris Hughes’s destruction of the old New Republic. This is what happens when the commercial forces trying to dumb down the American media run into a pocket of people trying to resist those forces.

The peasants, it seems, were revolting! Heaven forfend, but the voters were not quietly taking their orders from their betters.

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The real question is why Mr Kristol, knowing as he most certainly does that, absent an unexpected health crisis, President Trump will leave office peacefully on January 20, 2021 — or January 20, 2025! — and knowing that all of the neo-conservative’s tweets won’t change that, tarnish his own image and reputation with idiocy such as his tweet above?…

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