“God has used imperfect people all through history. King David wasn’t perfect. Saul wasn’t perfect. Solomon wasn’t perfect, and I actually gave the president a little one-pager on those Old Testament kings about a month ago and I shared it with him. I said, ‘Mr President, I know there are people that say, You know, you said you were the chosen one, and I said you were. I said if you’re a believing Christian you understand God’s plan for the people who rule and judge over us on this planet in our government,’” then-Trump Administration Energy Secretary Rick Perry said on Fox News in November 2019, telling Evangelicals how they should be able to sleep at night when supporting a pornstar-fucking, racist hate-mongering, criminal degenerate for the presidency.
This was after Perry announced he was stepping down because House Democrats started asking why he was pursuing corrupt energy deals in Ukraine while Trump was about to be impeached for trying to torpedo Joe Biden’s candidacy by coercing President Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing a fake investigation into Hunter Biden pursuing corrupt energy deals in Ukraine.
Rick Perry isn’t in the picture above. This isn’t about him. He is useful however to introduce that collage of Donald Trump, Vince McMahon on top, and – from left to right – of former WWE wrestler Steven Richards, Brent Bozell IV, and Brent Bozell III after a verdict was read in a DC court on Friday.
The story begins much earlier with the June 26, 2000 debut of the new persona of punk-ish backbencher WWF (now WWE) wrestler Michael Stephen Manna, stage name Stevie Richards, as Steven Richards, leader of the “Right to Censor” (or “RTC”) faction, a satire of the moral crusade by Evangelical thought leaders putting pressure on advertisers to drop the WWF’s weekly shows.
The satire was a hit even if the joke may’ve been lost on much of the WWF’s fanbase. Audiences really truly hated the RTC for interrupting stunts like lingerie pillow fights between female wrestlers and when the “pimp” wrestler “The Godfather,” the “pornstar” wrestler “Val Venis,” and others were brainwashed into Richards’s cult to help him bring down the WWF from within.
If you watched the WWF and read up on pro wrestling news sites around the time, the “RTC” was plain as day of a mockery of the “PTC” – the Parents Television Council – led by “family values” activist L Brent Bozell III. For years they dogged the WWF and its chair Vince McMahon with their crusade against the not-really-exaggerated cries that the fake fighting circus inspired violence and degeneracy among its younger viewers. While the fake Richards crusade was getting laughs from WWF viewers who were in on it and boos from those who weren’t, McMahon decided Bozell had finally crossed a line, suing the PTC for defamation over “various statements made by PTC and its representatives linking the deaths of four children to the WWE SmackDown! television program and on statements claiming that certain advertisers had stopped advertising on SmackDown.”
McMahon won a $3.5 million settlement and a personal letter of apology from Bozell. In the announcement to their shareholders, then-WWE CEO Linda McMahon, Vince’s wife said “We have always maintained that certain statements made about us by the PTC went beyond fair comment or criticism, and were false, defamatory, and very unfair. We feel vindicated by this settlement.”
Which spelled the end of Bozell’s war with the McMahons and WWE, where the show went on…
…and by 2016 Bozell had found himself a greater enemy in McMahon’s fake nemesis and real friend.
On February 15, 2016 conservative spank mag the National Review published their infamous “Against Trump” feature in which conservative “thought leaders” like future Trump supporters including Glenn Beck, Michael Mukasey, Dana Loesch, Eric Erickson, and Andrew C McCarthy, as well as some those who are still “RINOs” like Bill Kristol, made their desperate, and ultimately failed, last attempt to derail the Orange God Emperor’s GOP primary momentum. Here’s Bozell’s bit:
Longtime conservative leader Richard Viguerie has a simple test for credentialing a conservative: Does he walk with us?
For the simple reason that he cannot win without conservatives’ support, virtually every Republican presenting himself to voters swears so-help-me-God that he is a conservative. Many of these politicians are calculating, cynical charlatans, running as one thing only to govern in a completely different direction. See: McConnell, McCain, Hatch, Boehner, et al. And for decades it’s worked. Conservatives look at the alternatives — Reid, Pelosi, Obama, Clinton, et al. — and bite the bullet. We so often “win” — only for nothing to come of it.
The GOP base is clearly disgusted and looking for new leadership. Enter Donald Trump, not just with policy prescriptions that challenge the cynical GOP leadership but with an attitude of disdain for that leadership — precisely in line with the sentiment of the base. Many conservatives are relishing this, but ah, the rub. Trump might be the greatest charlatan of them all.
A real conservative walks with us. Ronald Reagan read National Review and Human Events for intellectual sustenance; spoke annually to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Young Americans for Freedom, and other organizations to rally the troops; supported Barry Goldwater when the GOP mainstream turned its back on him; raised money for countless conservative groups; wrote hundreds of op-eds; and delivered even more speeches, everywhere championing our cause. Until he decided to run for the GOP nomination a few months ago, Trump had done none of these things, perhaps because he was too distracted publicly raising money for liberals such as the Clintons; championing Planned Parenthood, tax increases, and single-payer health coverage; and demonstrating his allegiance to the Democratic party.
We conservatives should support the one candidate who walks with us.
Bozell also ripped Trump as a “huckster” and “shameless self-promoter” in a Fox News appearance, adding, “God help this country if this man were president,” brimming with all the same righteous fury he had pursued his fight against the McMahons and the World Wrestling Federation years earlier.
You already knew where this was going. Bozell’s transformation from apostate to believer was gradual as at first he was “Anti-Anti-Trump” before going full MAGA and “sufficiently thrilled with the president’s policy achievements,” per a 2018 Politico profile. The “Unmasked” book above came a year later, laying out a “Top 10 list of ‘the biggest Trump bashers in the press'” with CNN’s Jim Acosta taking the numero uno. Tied for fourth was “Every late-night talk show host.”
If Bozell and Trump ever met it wasn’t caught on camera. The “Unmasked” book appears to be the only one of Bozell’s that specifically centers on Donald (or a top ten list of his enemies, really) and didn’t make much waves outside of the MAGA media circuit. There’s no clear answer on how many copies it sold, which should tell you that it wasn’t impressive if Bozell wasn’t promoting it.
We don’t know if Bozell became a welcome presence in that obnoxious if efficient media sobriquet “Trump World.” If he did, maybe he might’ve crossed paths with top Trump donor Vince McMahon and his wife Linda who, just two months before “Unmasked” hit stores, had left her cabinet post in the Trump White House as Small Business Administrator to lead Trump’s “America First Action” PAC.
Must’ve been awkward if they did. “Hey Brent, let’s shake on it. We’ve got a powerful mutual friend here,” maybe the steroid-abusing septuagenarian Vince said as he squeezed the nebbishy right wing “intellectual” man’s hand hard enough to cause pain, and extra “fuck you” on top of the televised mockery of his values and the $3.5 million settlement, not to mention the knowledge that McMahon was the one who was “right” about Trump for far longer than Bozell was.
What isn’t up to the imagination is that Bozell’s son, L Brent Bozell IV, is now a convicted felon, found guilty in a bench trial on Friday of five felonies and five misdemeanors for being among the saracens who sacked the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, shoving cops and smashing through two windows on his way to the Senate chamber. Bozell IV had texted a friend before the attack, saying he was going to “take the Capitol and hang those pedo-satanistic [sic] traitors,” per Politico’s Kyle Cheney, who added that the court found Baby Bozell had tried to find Adam Schiff’s office with the specific intent of trashing it. This guy was a teacher at a Christian school in Pennsylvania before his arrest in 2021.
We already wrote this, several times actually, but it still bears repeating: The story of the Bozells, Trump, and the WWE might be the purest distillation of the selling out of “Christian values” to the crass Wrestlemania-style showmanship and degeneracy of MAGA. You can already see Trump honing his skills at how to sell himself to a crowd of white trash idiots in that clip of him with McMahon in the ring. There is zero doubt whatsoever that dozens, maybe even hundreds of the people in the audience later found themselves at a Trump rally in the years since.
L Brent Bozell IV thought he was better than them and their indecent entertainment, trying to turn them toward Biblical values. Fitting then that he gave his first born son to the Pharaoh.