(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Although reprehensible hypocrite David Brock may no longer be overseeing the propagandist Media Matters, his legacy of gay-baiting still lives on.
Brock, who began as a rare unicorn—a gay Republican critic of Bill and Hillary Clinton—became the consummate opportunist: a mercenary who flipped sides to the highest bidder and morphed into one of the most strident and unscrupulous of all left-wing operatives.
While he has written at length about the betrayal, his precise reasons remain clear as mud. Nonetheless, he went from helping to expose Bill Clinton’s past rape allegations (courtesy of victims like Paula Jones), to recanting his entire body of research and enjoying the perks of being a favored Clinton pet project.
Hillary Clinton personally “‘encourage[ed]’ and ‘advised Brock on creating’ Media Matters as ‘a liberal equivalent of the Media Research Center, a conservative group that has aggravated Democrats for decades,’” wrote reporter Glenn Thrush, who himself would later be exposed for asking Clinton campaign officials to vet his Politico articles during the 2016 election.
Thrush noted that other members of “Clinton’s extended family of contributors, consultants and friends … played a pivotal role in helping Media Matters grow”—among them, billionaire George Soros and ex-Chief-of-Staff John Podesta, who together provided some $2 million in seed money.
CIRCLE THE WAGONS
Two decades later, although Media Matters often flies under the radar, it likely plays a substantial role in supplying the talking points that ricochet around the left-wing media echo chamber, including the vast majority of those considered to be “mainstream” news outlets.
Thus, when Media Matters went on the offensive recently—in response to a bombshell investigation about an Atlanta-based gay couple accused of raping their adopted children and pimping them out to others as part of a pedophile ring—one could safely assume that they were either delivering marching orders for other media to circle the wagon around alleged groomers William and Zack Zulock, or else offering justification to ignore the story altogether.
The left showed more outrage this week because an NHL player didn’t wear a rainbow before a game than they did for two men pimping out their kids.
Disgusting.https://t.co/tO9UC3IasZ
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 21, 2023
Media Matters’s hot-take on the four-part series from Townhall detailing the gut-wrenching experiences of the two pre-teen boys: “In the year 2023, prominent right-wing commentators still have a problem with same-sex parents.”
“It’s an appalling story, but also appallingly familiar—sexual abuse by household members is unnervingly common, particularly for children who pass through the foster care system,” the so-called watchdog wrote in defense of the Zulocks, while instead attacking Fox News host Laura Ingraham and others for daring to cover it.
Despite the Left’s summary dismissal of the crime, all signs point to the fact that the Zulocks leveraged their position as outspoken LGBT activists to, effectively, hide in plain sight—knowing full well that they could use the victim card to deflect blame in the same way that accused serial predator Kevin Spacey attempted to use #MeToo scandal as his opportunity to come out of the closet.
DRAG RACISTS?
To say the least, the lines between LGBT culture and less acceptable forms of sexual deviancy are often deliberately blurred. Even within the Biden administration, ex-Energy Department staffer Sam Brinton, who was celebrated as a transgender pioneer, had a much darker side.
Brinton was on record advocating for child prostitution and was later discovered to be a kleptomaniac who stole women’s luggage from the airport.
Still more troubling, though, than the Left’s embrace of depraved individuals is its long history of trying to use sexuality to attack Republicans.
It is not a stretch to suppose that much of the Democratic ire directed toward Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., is less related to his shaky relationship with the truth—a quality that they rarely ever condemn in their own elected officials—than to the fact that Santos is openly gay, representing a serious threat to the near-monolithic control that Democrats have enjoyed within the LGBT community.
Even so, the recent allegations that Santos may have been a drag-queen in Brazil put leftists in uneasy territory as they sought to strike a balance of attacking him without undermining their latest transgender messaging.
Indeed, like it is for Brinton and the Zulocks, Santos’s sexuality may prove to be one of his best assets in defending from attacks—provided Democrats don’t succeed in floating the rumor that he is actually lying about being gay.
OUTED AND EXTORTED
Conservatives who are less candid about their bedroom behavior have no such luck.
Red-pilled billionaire Peter Thiel, a major financial backer of former President Donald Trump, was notoriously outed by the left-wing website Gawker in 2007.
Thiel ultimately got his revenge, bankrolling a lawsuit by Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea after the gossip site published an illicitly obtained sex tape of the wrestling legend.
Gawker was forced, as a result, to declare bankruptcy and never quite recovered, although it has since returned to the web targeting—who else?—George Santos.
Meanwhile, another far-left site, the Daily Beast, set its sights on a different target, CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp.
The site published a Jan. 6 bombshell claiming that the married Schlapp is a “sexual predator” based on the account of a Republican staffer who worked for Herschel Walker’s campaign.
Essentially, the staffer, who remains anonymous as of Jan. 21, accused Schlapp of “‘aggressively fondling’ his ‘genital area in a sustained fashion’ while the staffer drove Schlapp home from an evening of drinks at Atlanta bars,” wrote the Daily Beast.
However credible the account may seem, the strong implication is that Schlapp’s case resembles that of John Weaver, the co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, who resigned in disgrace after he was accused of making inappropriate advances on male staffers who were mostly college-age and younger.
But a key detail buried in the reporting about Schlapp’s alleged groping incident is that the accuser is, in fact, in his late 30s.
Clearly more context is needed to understand what really happened between Schlapp and the Walker staffer on the night of Oct. 19. Was it a case of misinterpreted or mixed signals? A drunken lapse of judgment? Or the first domino in a cascading series of accusations that could lead to Schlapp’s professional downfall.
The staffer’s own account, if true, would suggest that Schlapp felt a sincere rapport and later tried to resove the issue after the individual conveyed his discomfort in a follow-up text message.
Yet, the fact that the staffer appeared ready to sue and extort Schlapp—potentially ruining his marriage and marring the influential CPAC brand—raises valid questions about who was really victimizing whom.
DEMOCRATS DELIGHT
As far as the Daily Beast’s involvement, there is no question about where its interests lay in lobbing a salacious allegation against a powerful conservative by insinuating that he is gay.
Without the collateral damage to Schlapp’s reputation, this late-night exchange between two fully grown adults is hardly a lawsuit but more of a human-resources issue at best.
Thus far, CPAC officials have stood behind Schlapp, and his lawyer has warned that a legal response may be coming.
“The Schlapp family is suffering unbearable pain and stress due to the false allegation from an anonymous individual,” said lawyer Charlie Spies, according to DNYUZ. “No family should ever go through this and the Schlapps and their legal team are assessing counter-lawsuit options.”
Conservatives may have some soul-searching to do based on how the case plays out. Is the witness credible? Is the account plausible? And if it is, so what? Is it worth torpedoing the CPAC conference over a private matter?
But of all these questions, one may be most central: If Schlapp were a Democrat, how might this play out differently?
Perhaps David Brock has the answer.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
