ACCUSED CAPITOL RIOTER BRENT BOZELL IV COMES FROM RIGHT-WING ROYALTY
The fourth Brent Bozell is carrying on the centurylong tradition of
far-right provocation by the first three Brent Bozells.
Jon Schwarz The Intercept
February 17 2021, 12:27 p.m.
The FBI identifies Brent Bozell IV, right, in this screenshot, in an
affidavit in support of a criminal complaint for crimes related to the
Capitol breach by Trump supporters in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.
Photo: Department of Justice
WHEN THE NEWS broke Tuesday that Brent Bozell faces three federal charges in
connection with the January 6 assault on the Capitol, students of the U.S.
right's past might have wondered: Which one?
It turns out that this particular Bozell was Brent Bozell IV, a Brent Bozell
who previously had not made as much of an impact on politics as his father,
grandfather, and great-grandfather - all also named L. Brent Bozell. But now
Bozell IV - accused of obstructing an official proceeding, engaging in
disorderly conduct at the Capitol, and entering a restricted government
building - takes his place in the family tradition.
If the Bush family is the top GOP family dynasty, one that has produced
several kings, the Bozells are a few rungs down the ladder - dukes always
prepared to ride off to battle in defense of their liege lords. It's
tempting to see the progression of the Bozells as a tale of the devolution
of U.S. conservatism, from intellectuals debating over ideas to street
brawling. In reality, it's a largely a story of stasis, one that shows that
the mainstream of American conservatism has always been extreme and
reactionary.
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The Bozell saga begins with Brent Bozell Sr., born in Kansas in 1886. After
working as a reporter and becoming city editor of the Omaha Daily News, he
took a prototypical conservative path, moving from penurious journalism into
the lucrative world of advertising and public relations. He co-founded a
firm that still exists today and is still named after him: Bozell. It's
famous for coming up with such marketing slogans as "Pork. The other white
meat" and "rich Corinthinian leather," which is a made-up term for regular
leather. His first wife died in 1918, almost certainly from the Spanish flu.
Bozell Sr. fought in World War I and on his return become a prominent member
of the Omaha branch of the American Legion. In 1925, he helped bring the
Legion's national convention to Omaha, where President Calvin Coolidge was
the keynote speaker.
While it's considered impolite to mention it, the American Legion has always
been extremely right-wing. At the 1925 convention, the program declared that
the Legion's purpose was "to maintain law and order [and] to foster and
perpetuate a one hundred per cent Americanism." Alvin Owsley, who'd been
head of the Legion just a few years before, explained that "the Fascisti are
to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States." Bozell Sr. later
became a director of an Omaha streetcar company, which hired 390 private
guards and paid for guns, ammunition, and tear gas for the Omaha police to
crush a strike in a particularly ugly way in 1935.
Next up was Brent Bozell Jr., born in 1926. He would become, as National
Review editor Rich Lowry puts it, "central to the founding of the
conservative movement."
Bozell Jr. attended Yale, where he became best friends with William F.
Buckley Jr. and eventually married Buckley's sister Patricia. After college,
Buckley and Bozell Jr. wrote a stirring defense of Wisconsin Sen. Joseph
McCarthy, the leader of an anti-left crusade so intellectually bogus it
generated its own noun, McCarthyism. "It is still only Communist ideas that
are beyond the pale," Buckley and Bozell Jr. explained. "Some day the
patience of America may at last be exhausted and we will strike out against
Liberals."
Bozell Jr. then joined McCarthy's staff on Capitol Hill. After McCarthy's
death, he worked for Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater and ghostwrote Goldwater's
famous 1960 book, "The Conscience of a Conservative." Around this time
Bozell Jr. began to go off the rails, to the degree the conservative
movement had rails to start with.
In 1962, Buckley and others around Goldwater tried to gently nudge the John
Birch Society out of the GOP coalition - over Bozell Jr.'s opposition. For
Birchers, communists were everywhere. Dwight Eisenhower was a communist,
Richard Nixon's dog Checkers was a communist, and Pat Nixon's cloth coat was
probably a communist too.
Bozell Jr. then moved his family to Spain, a land where men could breath
free under fascist dictator Francisco Franco. While there, Bozell Jr., who
suffered from manic depression, eventually denounced the U.S. conservative
movement, the United States itself, and capitalism. He did eventually return
to America, where he died in 1997.
Then came Brent Bozell III, currently the most famous Brent Bozell. Bozell
III was born in 1955 and founded the Media Research Center in 1987. The
MRC's core mission is to uncover the natural liberal bias of multinational
corporate news outlets. One of its main financial backers is Robert Mercer,
a hedge fund billionaire who has also supported President Donald Trump and
an Oregon scientist who is stockpiling huge amounts of America's precious
bodily fluids.
A representative sample of the MRC's work can be found here. It's a study of
coverage of the Iraq War on the nightly news for the first nine months of
2005. It found that 61 percent of the stories about Iraq "focused on
negative topics or presented a pessimistic analysis of the situation."
The unsophisticated might suspect this reflected reality in Iraq, and that
most journalism about the war was pessimistic because there was little to be
optimistic about. But the MRC realized that reporters were concealing the
good news, probably because of their hatred for America. We can see now how
right the MRC was, given that the Iraq War was soon wrapped up as a total
success.
The MRC used the same tactic in a report that found that news networks
presented an "overwhelmingly one-sided picture of the global warming
debate." This showed the obvious bias of the news, rather than representing
the fact that evidence about global warming is overwhelmingly one-sided. MRC
has received at least $50,000 from ExxonMobil.
Bozell III also founded the Parents Television Council, which adheres to the
same intellectual standards as the MRC. In 2002, the PTC was forced to pay
$3.5 million to World Wrestling Entertainment for falsely claiming that the
WWE caused the deaths of four children when their friends imitated moves
they saw on WWE shows.
Finally, Bozell III sometimes expresses his more personal insights, as when
he said that President Barack Obama looks "like a skinny, ghetto crackhead."
According to public records, Bozell III was paid $488,000 in 2018.
That bring us to today. After the attack on the Capitol, Bozell III did
strongly condemn it. It remains to be seen whether he will specifically
condemn his son or realize that in fact Brent Bozell IV is merely carrying
on the family legacy of far-right provocation.
There is currently no sign of a Brent Bozell V, but it seems inevitable that
one will eventually spring into being, if only due to momentum.