Joe Kent has been making the rounds since resigning as director of the National Counterterrorism Center over America’s involvement in the Iran conflict. He’s appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, Mark Levin’s radio show, Piers Morgan Uncensored, The Young Turks and UnHerd’s YouTube program. But it’s an interview with the Daily Caller editor-in-chief Amber Duke that earned the ire of Laura Loomer, the rabid pro-Trump, pro-Israel loyalty enforcer.
In the Caller interview, Kent claimed FBI Director Kash Patel stopped an NCC probe into Charlie Kirk’s murder by Tyler Robinson. Loomer took umbrage with Duke’s style, which she characterized as “softball” in a lengthy X screed. Loomer also mentioned Duke’s deleted high-school tweets, which include Holocaust jokes she exchanged with her Jewish then-boyfriend. Despite the fact that the information was circulated years previously by Media Matters, a left-wing nonprofit that specializes in offense archaeology, Loomer had the temerity to claim her post was “exclusive.” Loomer accused Duke of “a history of anti-Jewish behavior” and said, “At some point, people have to stop denying the stench of Jew hate that follows Tucker Carlson and Joe Kent everywhere they go.”
Duke, for her part, had apologized for and fully addressed the tweets, in a thoughtful piece for The Spectator’s “free speech” special in February 2020, her first month as our Washington editor.
But don’t let that stop Mark Levin. The boomer Fox host gleefully shared Loomer’s thread, with the caption, “The Traitor Tucker/Daily Caller connection.”
Duke told Cockburn, “The past week a lot of pro-war pundits have been suddenly ‘discovering’ that Tucker Carlson is our co-founder as if it’s some kind of secret or vast conspiracy. His name is listed on our website!”
In fact, Levin has proved rather fond of Loomer’s perspective over the past few months. “Laura is a gem,” he tweeted this week, as well as boosting a number of her other posts with asides like “well said“ and “exactly, Laura.”
“My wife and I met Laura Loomer and her fiancé last week at the White House Hanukkah party,” Levin wrote in December. “ She was lovely. Couldn’t have been nicer. And very sharp. She’s doing great work.”
“Ditto,” he said last May, in response to Loomer’s objection to Trump receiving a plane gifted by the Qataris.
“War makes strange bedfellows,” Duke said to Cockburn. Quite.
RIP-PAC?
Grim tidings from Texas, where the Conservative Political Action Conference is taking place. CPAC is usually held in National Harbor, Maryland, in part so that it’s easier for Republican members of Congress – and presidents – to address it. This year’s move to the Gaylord Texan Resort near Dallas appears to not be paying off. President Trump will miss the conference for the first time in years, as he’s in Washington and South Florida this weekend.
“Including all the citizen iPhone types and podcasters, it honestly feels about 40 percent journalist,” one reporter said of the crowd. “No Trump, no buzz.”
“No one is here,” another longtime attendee texted Cockburn. “It’s like a tomb.”
The guest also described a sorry scene on Wednesday, where an “exclusive” event with former British prime minister Liz Truss to tease the launch of “CPAC UK” brought in fewer than 20 people. Organizers “were trying to usher people in because the numbers were so low.”
Next year’s conference will be at the Gaylord in Orlando, Florida. Could CPAC 2027 face similar problems?
On our radar
JAIL TIME A 23-year-old man in London has been sentenced to four years in prison for assaulting a woman – a crime which Barron Trump watched over video call and reported to police. “Your lack of insight and empathy was apparent at trial,” the judge said to the defendant.
FIREWORK PRIME A suspicious package was sent to the Washington Post’s office today, rumored to have fireworks inside it. Employees were evacuated from the building as a precaution.
COUNT TO 27 Florida Democrat, Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, was found guilty of 27 financial violations by a bipartisan House Ethics subcommittee for illegally moving millions of dollars through her campaign.
Better Call Marty
Longtime readers of this newsletter will recall Marty Irby, the top animal-rights lobbyist who lost a smattering of conservative clients due to his dating habits (he’s fond of porn stars and escorts). Irby has adopted a rather unorthodox – for DC – method of drumming up new business. In a move reminiscent of shady Breaking Bad lawyer Saul Goodman, he’s mounted a large billboard for his firm Capitol South on the back of a pick-up truck which has been spotted at various locations around the Hill.
Sidekick’s sidekick
New York magazine’s Casey Quackenbush spent considerable effort in recent weeks profiling Jacob Reses, the 35-year-old chief of staff to Vice President J.D. Vance. One admiring source described Reses as “the Kissinger to the Nixon,” perhaps the most powerful operative in Washington of whom few people outside the admin had heard.
The response to the piece was an anti-Semitic pile-on. “VP JD Vance’s 35-year-old chief of staff is Jewish pro-Israel strategist Jacob Reses,” read a post on X from “America First Post.” This was followed by a series of descriptions aimed at proving the fact that he is… Jewish. Daniel McAdams quoted the post by saying, “Vance’s top advisor is America Last.” Many of his friends and colleagues responded defensively. One wrote, “You can go fuck yourself. Jacob is an America First patriot who has been on the right side of countless battles in recent years from his time in the Senate to the campaign trail to working as the VP’s chief.”
The irony is that in the original New York magazine profile, Reses is described as not just a Princeton graduate, and someone who stood under a chuppah at his January wedding while Vance delivered the Jewish prayer, but also as a valuable asset in the fight to transform the Republican party into a right-wing populist movement. His worldview, per those close to him, holds that “J.D. Vance should succeed and succeed at the highest possible level, up to and including U.S. president.” He is made out to be someone who believes that liberalism is so catastrophically destructive that one must make peace with whatever company is in the lifeboat.
Reducing Reses to a pro-Israel strategist strikes Cockburn as disingenuous, considering his strategic priorities have much more to do with domestic policy. Reses was credited as instrumental to the achievements of the Trump administration, including the passage of the One, Big Beautiful Bill Act, shepherding Vance’s legislative initiatives and helping get Trump’s Cabinet nominees confirmed. Reses seemed to be someone who saw Christian nationalists as a key ally. On his private X account, he reposted Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s approving quote of a statement arguing that Jews “can no longer be squeamish about the majority’s invocation of the Christian deity” and that “the neutering of Christianity has been disastrous for all of us.” His boss, Vance, has experienced months of criticism from conservatives for refusing to condemn groypers among them.
Comments