Got Paranoia? More Stone

 

Brooks Brothers Riot of November 22, 2000. Photo by Colin Braley/Reuters, via Wikipedia.

A gold nugget of fact I had no idea of in a segment on my favorite radio show that was mainly about the Dominion Election Systems settlement with Fox News, but it goes back to a big New York Times report of 2019 on the whole history of the Rupert Murdoch enterprise, by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, that puts an awful lot of things together on Rupert's early days in the US, after he'd bought the New York Post:

In 1980, he met Roy Cohn — the former adviser to Senator Joseph McCarthy and a Trump mentor — who introduced him to Gov. Ronald Reagan’s inner circle. It was a group that included Roger Stone Jr., another Trump confidant and the head of Reagan’s New York operations, who said in a later interview that he helped Murdoch weaponize his latest tabloid purchase, The New York Post, on Reagan’s behalf in the 1980 election. Reagan’s team credited Murdoch with delivering him the state that year — Murdoch gave Stone an Election Day printing plate from The Post over a celebratory meal at the 21 Club — and his administration subsequently facilitated Murdoch’s entry into the American television market, quickly approving his application for American citizenship so he could buy TV stations too.

Murdoch's ability to create Fox News, in other words, in its symbiotic relationship with the Post and Wall Street Journal and so on, was an actual gift from the Reagan administration, a quid pro quo in return for the Post's gift to Reagan of New York, engineered through the intervention of old Roy Cohn by Stone, the Republican ratfucker, Cohn's protégé, Paul Manafort's business partner, and Donald Trump's—whatever he was to Trump in those days (helping him out with the permitting when he bought a yacht from Adnan Kashoggi, helping him beat out Indian tribes in getting casino concessions), by "weaponizing" the local newspaper that was already working on that same Donald's behalf (another Cohn protégé but with much simpler desires—he just wanted to be really, really famous).

And it was more about money than politics, as far as Murdoch himself was concerned; a few years later he'd be mobilizing the same techniques with the same motivation in UK on behalf of Tony Blair:

Murdoch could switch parties when it suited his purposes and ably supported Britain’s “New Labor” movement in the 1990s: Conservatives at the time had proposed regulations that would have forced him to scale back his newspaper operations in order to expand further into TV. 

Though it was about politics too, of course; Blair sealed the deal by dumping the socialist ideals that had been his party's raison d'être throughout its entire existence and turning it neoliberal, and later on Murdoch successfully moved it neoconservative, with the "over-crude" pressure he applied on Blair to join the US in the invasion of Iraq. 

(On Blair's alleged relationship with Murdoch's third wife, Wendi Deng, in around 2012-13, I will have nothing to say except that it seems pretty cringe.)

Somebody will be coming by in comments to tell me that a bunch of this stuff is common knowledge and all it means is that these are bad people, which we already understood, but they just don't know a good conspiracy theory when they see one, I mean won't even recognize it as a conspiracy theory, as opposed to a random collection of observations about individuals. They don't see the narrativium binding it together into a single story, which is the thing that enchants me about Mahler's and Rutenberg's paragraph.

The fact that we know such a lot of it already is what makes it a good conspiracy story and not the psychotic incoherence and detachment from reality of a Glenn Beck whiteboard or a Q prophecy—we know it's realistic, that it works the way things work in the world, that the fundamental motivations are clear. We can trace it back to the backstories, we can identify the quids pro quo, we can follow it forward 20 years to Stone choreographing the Brooks Brothers Riot of Republican staff workers and lawyers (including Ted Cruz) that frightened the Miami-Dade election authorities into stopping the recount before being forced to acknowledge that Gore had won, and 40 years (past the Russian effort of 2016) to the Stop the Steal riot of January 2021. Stone always works the same way, and Murdoch does too, and they work, when it's convenient, to each other's ends.