Author: Ellen

Wentworth Miller Wants to Be Honest With You

Ellen

The former Prison Break star talks candidly about coming out, the strange place that is Hollywood, and his return to acting.

Details    Interview By David Hochman, Photograph by Van Sarki

DETAILS: After Prison Break ended in 2009, you walked away from acting to write screenplays—eventually writing last year’s Stoker under the name Ted Foulke. Why?
Wentworth Miller: I knew I needed a change. I was fried after four years on an intense network drama. The body-tattoo makeup alone took four hours every day. So the idea was to see what was behind that other door. I hadn’t thought of myself as a writer, but when I wrote Stoker, the feedback was very positive. I used a pseudonym because I didn’t want other actors thinking I’d written the part for myself only to decide I didn’t want to play it.

DETAILS: If nothing else, it must be easier maintaining a screenwriter’s physique.
Wentworth Miller: True. There’s a lot of pressure on actors to have a six-pack and everything that goes with it. But that’s never been an obsession of mine. I like being heavier sometimes. It feels like you’re a force to reckon with. Then again, at one point I was about 45 pounds heavier than I am now. I was looking to food as a fix for something missing inside. It was about putting layers of protection around me.

DETAILS: You’ve admitted to struggling with serious depression all your life. What got you through?
Wentworth Miller: I’m part of a group called the ManKind Project. It’s a circle of men I sit in with every week that’s a safe sounding board for whatever’s up for me: good, bad, ugly, really ugly. We know how to respond to someone coming out now—we’ve had that training—but admit you’re sad or that you’ve thought about suicide and people don’t know what to do. With sadness, particularly with men, that conversation is unfamiliar.

DETAILS: Last year you also publicly came out as gay. Was a burden lifted?
Wentworth Miller: I feel more fully expressed. After Prison Break, I came to grips with the fact that my public persona was in misalignment with how I actually felt. I was out to a handful of people in my twenties, and once I hit 30, I was out to family and friends. But professionally, I was feeding a fantasy. I created this air of “We don’t address that thing.”

DETAILS: Do you ever regret lying in interviews by saying “I’m not gay”?
Wentworth Miller: My face was on billboards, and I thought it was my job to act a certain way. But I think audiences knew to a certain degree.

DETAILS: Really? Crowds of women used to scream for you. Did you worry about alienating that demo?
Wentworth Miller: No. The people onscreen aren’t the characters they’re playing. They’re our projection of who we want them to be. I think it’s possible to have a man-crush if you’re not gay or to have a crush on a guy you know to be gay if you’re a woman. Attraction is fluid, and I think our imaginations are strong enough to hold a container for all of this complexity, even if we know on a subconscious level something’s not what it appears to be.

DETAILS: Later this year, you’ll be back in front of the camera in the thriller The Loft, about a group of men who find a dead body inside the secret apartment they keep for their mistresses. Did being a screenwriter change your perspective on acting?
Wentworth Miller: You have to accept that everything’s a collaboration. I’m not entirely responsible for everything I write, just like I’m not entirely responsible for my performances. Anything I do should say “By Wentworth Miller and the people in Editing Room C.”

DETAILS: You once said that you’ve been on more than 450 auditions. What was the worst job you’ve had to take to make ends meet?
Wentworth Miller: My first job in the business was as an office manager at a small company that made movies for TV. My boss called me in for what I thought was a promotion. Turned out, his toilet was broken. I spent an hour drawing a diagram of the inside of the toilet tank to show the guys down at Plumbers Depot, so that I could go back and spend four hours with my hands in the bowl fixing the thing. I must have flushed that toilet 200 times.

DETAILS: Any life lessons to share from the set of the Resident Evil franchise?
Wentworth Miller: People like zombies. Playing zombies is more fun than being an accountant. Finally, zombies get you paid.

DETAILS: You graduated from Princeton with a degree in English in 1995, then landed your first acting gig as a fish monster on Buffy the Vampire Slayer four years later. Did you ever go, “I went to Princeton for this?”
Wentworth Miller: Honestly, I was completely out of my depth and doing whatever I could to keep up. They glued this prosthetic piece covered with scales to my chest. Then there was a piece over it that looked like human skin. I had to peel through the top layer to reveal the beast within. Deep into the third hour of this, the makeup artist says to me, “We only have one of these pieces to tear through, so you need to get this right.” Hollywood can be a deeply strange place.

 

http://www.details.com/culture-trends/movies-and-tv/201408/wentworth-miller-prison-break-actor-stoker-screenwriter-the-loft/

6 Rules on How to Write — And How NOT to Write — a Biopic (Guest Blog)

Ellen

12/3/2014   The Wrap   By Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski

“Big Eyes” and “Ed Wood” writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski offer their anti-biopic commandments

Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski are responsible for some of the most entertaining and strangest fact-based films of recent years, writing, producing or handling both jobs on movies about hapless director Ed Wood, porn king Larry Flynt, comic Andy Kaufman, TV star and amateur sextape pioneer Bob Crane and, with Tim Burton‘s “Big Eyes,” artists Margaret and Walter Keane.   

As the American Cinematheque prepares to kick off a three-day series devoted to the Alexander/Karaszewski biopics on Wednesday (details at the Cinematheque website), the duo agreed to come up with a list of their own half-dozen biopic commandments for TheWrap. They call it “Scott and Larry’s Anti-Biopic Rules.”

NO OLD-AGE MAKE UP
Never start with an actor sitting on a porch in old-age makeup telling a journalist how it all began. “I remember…” Ugh!

KEEP IT SHORT
Why are biopics always three hours long? Treat it like a regular film, with a tight three-act structure. In our bios the content might be strange, but the form is friendly. We try to hit pages 10, 30, 90, then get out with a rousing climax.

EMBRACE THE WEIRD
Truth is stranger than fiction…so use it. Movies have become cookie-cutter, and true events are a Trojan horse for sneaking in arcane, interesting material. Exploit the opportunity!

KNOW WHEN TO GET OUT
Pick an end point that ties up all the themes and plots in a satisfying manner. Uplifting is nice, but bittersweet and ironic is good, too. We always ask the question, “Why will this person be remembered?” The answer is usually where we put our ending.

THEME, THEME, THEME
You need more than an interesting life. What are the larger ideas? What’s the context for the character’s passion? Why will someone who knows nothing about the subject matter be interested?

JUST BECAUSE IT HAPPENED DOESN’T MEAN IT GOES IN THE MOVIE
Turning someone’s life into a two-hour drama means you have to omit a lot. First wives, college days, beloved Grandma … nothing is sacred. Only include the people in your character’s life who propel your story. Cover as little time as possible — only use the years that really matter.

And for God’s sake, don’t include their death. Unless they have a really interesting death, such as dying in the Hindenburg or faking their demise as a piece of performance art, you don’t need it. It’s irrelevant. Indiana Jones didn’t die in his movie. What’s good enough for Indiana is good enough for us.

 

http://www.thewrap.com/6-rules-on-how-to-write-and-how-not-to-write-a-biopic-guest-blog/

The TV Industry As We Know It May Really, Finally Be Entering A Death Spiral

Ellen

12/3/2014   Business Insider   by

In the past six months, something has changed with the TV industry, according to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong.

On stage at our Ignition conference, Armstrong said he recently heard from an advertiser who said he got a rebate for his TV ad budget because the ads weren’t going to be filled. The advertiser needed to spend the extra money digitally as quickly as possible.

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Tim Armstrong breaks the news at Ignition.

It’s unclear whether this was just a one-time blip or the start of something different. Armstrong seemed to believe the latter. He thinks digital video advertising is finally starting to suck dollars from TV advertising.

New data from Nielsen explains why this is happening. Last quarter, TV viewing was down 4%, while video streaming was up 60%.

Off stage, Armstrong pointed us toward an interview Daryl Simm, CEO of Omnicom’s media operations, participated in with The Wall Street Journal in October. In the interview, Simm recommended advertisers shift 10% to 25% of their budgets away from TV to digital.

When an agency is telling people to shift their budgets, it’s a big deal. It means the money that’s been supporting traditional TV is going to go towards digital properties. As that money flows out of traditional TV, the traditional TV industry is going to struggle to do what it’s done for years.

As for whether this is just a blip or a long-term thing, Armstrong told us that he recently hosted Thanksgiving at his house. He had a bunch of kids over, from teenagers to young adults in their 20s. He saw them all sitting around in the living room watching video on their phones instead of looking up at the TV.

Are those kids going to suddenly change and start watching regular TV when they get older? Probably not.

 

http://www.businessinsider.com/aol-ceo-something-has-changed-2014-12

Parents revise 19-year-old’s birth announcement for transgender son

Ellen

12/2/2014   Mashable  by Andrea Romano

Birth announcements are happy occasions to celebrate — even when they come 19 years after one’s actual birth.

Yolanda Bogert of Jimboomba, Australia, printed a retraction on Monday to the original birth announcement for her 19-year-old son, Kai, who was born female, according to the Courier-Mail,

Kai had come out to his mother and father as a transgender man a few days earlier, and his parents agreed they needed to show a sign of support — both to their son and to the world. Yolanda Bogert told the Courier-Mail that writing the retraction was “a no-brainer.”

Mashable has reached out to Kai Bogert.

 

http://mashable.com/2014/12/02/transgender-birth-announcement/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link

A Win for Transgender Students You May Have Missed

Ellen

12/3/2014   Slate   By Ian Thompson

K-12 students have rights, too.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Education released a long-awaited, much-needed guidance document for elementary and secondary schools that offer or want to offer single-sex classes.

Included within the document was an important protection for transgender students that should not be overlooked. The guidance states clearly that transgender students must be allowed to participate in single-sex classes consistent with their gender identity. (In other words, consistent with who they are.) This latest positive breakthrough builds on guidance released earlier this year that made it explicitly clear, for the first time, that Title IX extends to claims of discrimination based on gender identity.

The need for this clarifying direction to schools across the country could not have been clearer.

As the ACLU has repeatedly documented, and fought, far too many single-sex programs are based on discredited “science” that is rooted in outdated and harmful gender stereotypes. For example, teachers have been instructed that girls should not have time limits on tests because, unlike boys, girls’ brains cannot function well under these conditions. On the flip side, teachers have been told to firmly discipline boys who like to read, do not enjoy contact sports, and do not have a lot of close male friends by requiring them to spend time with “normal males” and to play sports.

These kinds of sweeping generalizations are especially harmful to students who do not conform to rigid gender stereotypes, including LGBTQ students. Indeed, such generalizations and stereotypes are precisely the sort of discrimination that Title IX was intended to eliminate more than four decades ago, and they should have no place in our public education system today. The guidance released on Monday is clear that schools cannot rely on these kinds of harmful stereotypes.

These recent actions from the Department of Education are important steps forward, but there is still more to do. The Department of Education should release comprehensive guidance for schools nationwide explaining how Title IX protects transgender and gender nonconforming students from discrimination and what steps schools need to take to be in compliance with the law and meet their obligations to these students.

All students deserve the opportunity to attend school free from discrimination because of who they are, including stereotypes about how “normal” boys and girls learn.

 

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/12/03/u_s_department_of_education_comes_out_in_support_of_transgender_students.html

For gay country singers, it was time to face the music

Ellen

11/21/2014   MSNBC   By Joseph Neese

Billy Gilman photographed in 2012 in Nashville, Tenn.

For former Nashville heavyweight Ty Herndon, Thursday was finally time to face the music. The country singer who sang in a recent single “some lies I told myself I’m glad I didn’t believe,” admitted he’d been keeping a very big secret of his own for years.

Despite being married to women twice, the singer told People magazine that he was, in fact, an “out, proud and happy” gay man, and he’d known it since he was 10 years old.

“I realized I had an incredible story that could possibly help someone’s son or daughter or grandchild’s life not be as difficult as mine has been,” Herndon told People about his revelation. “Maybe they wouldn’t have to go through as much pain and suffering.”

Within hours, former country star Billy Gilman also came out in a YouTube video, saying Herndon inspired him to tell the truth. But while Gilman celebrated his new-found freedom, he also admitted his fear of being open about his sexuality in a historically intolerant genre of the music industry.

“It’s difficult for me to make this video, not because I’m ashamed of being a gay male artist, or a gay male, or a gay person,” he said. “But it’s pretty silly to know that I’m ashamed of doing this knowing that because I’m in a genre and in an industry that’s ashamed of me for being me.”

Herdon’s mentor during the coming out process was Chely Wright, the first prominent Nashville vocalist to come out. In an appearance on “The TODAY Show” in May 2010, Wright famously recalled the moment when John Rich of country music duo Big & Rich confronted her about her sexuality. If it was true, he told her, it would be sick, deviant, and unacceptable to fans. The next thing Wright knew, she was trying to commit suicide.

“I had a 9-millimeter gun in my mouth,” Wright said on “TODAY.” “I was living a secret life, and I was very much a country-music celebrity … I gave up hope, and I was ready to take my own life.”

The need Herdon felt to hide his secret also took a considerable personal toll. He was charged with indecently exposing himself to an undercover cop after a drug-fueled incident in 1995. And he admitted on Thursday that his two marriages to women were shams.

“I had a lot of people around me that I trusted at a time and I was like, ‘Hey, you know this about me but the world doesn’t. So I’m gonna need to call on your services for a little while,’” he told “Entertainment Tonight.” “It was unfortunate that I had to do that, but I felt that’s what I had to do to have my career. Standing on some pretty solid legs today, so I get to tell my truth today.”

Since then, country music has made some notable steps toward equality. This year, singer Kacey Musgraves won the Country Music Award for LGBT-friendly ballad “Follow Your Arrow,” in which she tells fellow women to “kiss lots of girls if that’s something your’re into.” She co-wrote the song along with two openly gay musicians.

“There’s never been a song more affirmative of that in country music, and it’s our CMA Song of the year,” Herdon said to People.

“I realized I had an incredible story that could possibly help someone’s son or daughter or grandchild’s life not be as difficult as mine has been. Maybe they wouldn’t have to go through as much pain and suffering.”
Ty Herndon
In another recent development, country music’s reigning queen Dolly Parton very publicly called out those who are intolerant of the LGBT community.

“I think everybody should be allowed to be who they are, and to love who they love. I don’t think we should be judgmental. Lord, I’ve got enough problems of my own to pass judgment on somebody else,” Parton said to Billboard magazine.

But as progress remains slow, time will tell how these two men’s brave revelations will affect the bigots within the country music world – and their own careers.

Herdon, who burst onto the scene in the mid-90s with a string of three No. 1 hits – “What Mattered Most,” “Living in a Moment,” and “It Must Be Love” – is sober, touring, and busy prepping a new album. Gilman has returned to Nashville to shop new music. But he says that no major record label showed up at a recent showcase.

“Being a gay male country artist is not the best thing. You know, if people don’t like your music that’s one thing,” he said. “But after having sold over 5 million records, having a wonderful life in the music industry, I knew something was wrong when no major label wanted to sit down and have a meeting and listen to the new stuff.”

Gilman’s debut single, “One Voice,” was a Top 40 hit when it was released immediately after his twelfth birthday in 2000. In the song, Gilman sings about the impact one voice can have on the rest of the world. Now that he’s also faced the music, will his revelations will make it easier for young gay men and women to do the same?

 

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/gay-country-singers-it-was-time-face-the-music?CID=SM_TW

 

Winning the Breakup in the Age of Instagram

Ellen

12/2/2014   The Cut   By

“Brett was there,” I Gchatted my friend Holly after running into a man who’d broken my heart six months earlier. “We ­actually had a nice chat. He was a mess though. Like, unshowered, smelled weird, was carrying an iPad in the waistband of his pants because he had nowhere to put it.” She asked me what I’d been wearing. Lipstick and heels, I replied. I’d been waiting for my new boyfriend, who picked me up and briefly met Brett.

“Oh my God,” Holly replied. “That is the ultimate ex encounter? He’s nice but looks like a mess. You look awesome and are with a new guy. You won.”

“Winning the breakup” may be a petty concept, but everyone who exits relationships regularly (or maybe just exited one very memorably) knows exactly what it means. The winner is the ex whose career skyrockets after the split; whose new wife is a ­supermodel; who looks better; who dates better; who has bouncier hair. It’s getting over your ex before she gets over you and leading a demonstratively successful life without her — but doing so in ways that at least look casual, just for yourself, definitely not just to rub it in her face, because you’re so over her, remember? And therein lies the Catch-22 of winning the breakup: To care about winning, you are forced to care about not caring about someone. Asked about her weekend plans, my 26-year-old friend Sam once replied, “I’m assembling a team of hotties to torture my ex on Instagram.”

Dating actively is to be in a perpetual state of breakup. (Even in a best-case scenario, you are spared the breakup only once.) I’m 30, but already I feel like I’ve surpassed my lifetime limit for breakups — starting at age 18, hooking up in the dorms, I was already cohabitating with my significant others. In the past decade and change, I’ve had multiple multiyear relationships, which among my peers is a typical track record. For a time, social theorists believed my generation’s defining romantic feature was the hookup. But as hooking up rapidly expanded into a series of miniature ­marriages — and miniature divorces made more confounding by social-media omnipresence and cell-phone butt dials — I’ve come to think millennial romances are defined not by their casual beginnings but their disastrous ends. We aren’t the hookup generation; we’re the breakup generation. Today I find myself entering each subsequent relationship already anticipating its end — but is breakup dread a sign that the relationship is doomed, or does the dread actually cause the doom?

Inevitably, no two people ever can desire a breakup exactly equally. Which means at least one person comes out of it feeling like a loser — and as any résumé-padding overachiever knows, where there are losers there are also winners.

“You’re familiar with the term success theater?” Sam asked when I brought the topic back up. The term gets tossed around the tech start-up world to describe the difference between presenting the image of a successful-sounding company and actually running one (tech reporter Jenna Wortham has used it to describe the act of showing off on social media). “I’m eightish months out of my last relationship and very concerned about winning,” Sam said. She then walked me through a timeline of the breakup, as illustrated through Instagram links. First, a period of silence. Then, a sexual war of attrition: pictures of Sam cavorting with new love interests, partying in a rooftop swimming pool, posing with a semi-nude actress at “Queen of the Night.” “Before that one I actually said, ‘Let’s make my girlfriend jealous,’ ” she recalled with a sort of nostalgic pride, as though she were an aging football star fondly remembering a game-winning touchdown.

But what if the whole game is rigged? “Winning is complicated for me because I want to care less, but I also want to see the validation of me being cool and over it in his eyes,” my friend Maya explained in a Gchat. (Since caring in public is a loss, her name and some others have been changed.) “But that’s not really winning, because really I just want to see him again, but am excusing it by pretending I am merely showing up to ignore him. I guess the problem is when, instead of trying to win the breakup, you’re actually just trying to win him back.” Put another way: Does caring about “winning” the breakup mean you’ve lost?

Placed on the Kübler-Ross scale of loss and grief, “trying to win him back” might be aligned with stage one, “denial.” Whereas “trying to win the breakup” could be an expression of stage two, “anger.” (How dare you stop loving a girl who looks this good in a bikini?!) Or stage three, “bargaining.” (If I look good enough in a bikini, someone will love me.) And though neither attitude seems particularly healthy, the masquerade does have a certain “fake it till you make it” quality. In the success theater of breakup grief, “winning” is about reaching stage five, “acceptance,” before your partner does. Even if you’re going on Instagrammable dates just to spite your ex, ultimately you are still, you know, going on dates. You’re dragging yourself out of bed, brushing your hair, and putting your freakum dress on. A recent study found that 23 percent of recently broken-up college students reported “revenge motives” when sleeping with a new partner post-breakup; the worse they felt about the breakup, the more likely they were to seek sexual revenge. Although, one male friend noted, “if you’re looking to ‘win’ breakups like they’re UFC cage matches, where the person who climbs out of the cage with the least blood on them wins? Well then, you’re definitely a crazy bitch.” I have yet to punish him for saying that, but I’m sure it will involve some sort of holier-than-thou social-media vengeance. Once a petty cyber-winner, always a petty cyber-winner. “I mean, in a good breakup, everyone wins,” he concluded. “Ultimately it boils down to, ‘Did I fuck up?’ and ‘Was I better off before?’ The ultimate win on both sides is if you can be legitimately, unconditionally happy for the other person when they find love again.” At the time, I teased him for sounding like Gwyneth Paltrow, boasting about ­“conscious uncoupling.”

“I consider lots of sex winning,” said my friend Eric, age 31. “Back when I was young and crazy, I needed to have better first-rebound sex. So I would legit-stalk: asking friends of friends, keeping windows to each of their social-media accounts ­permanently open in Google Chrome. ­Checking the locations of their posts. Checking the events they RSVP-ed on Facebook and then showing up.” But the brokenhearted make terrible detectives: “I remember my ex had his Twitter account linked to his GPS, and he sent a tweet that showed up three or four blocks from his apartment, and I was like, ‘Well, looks like he already found some guy on Grindr who lives next door.’ When in reality it was probably just some GPS fluke.”

“Wait, GPS shows down to the block?” I asked in horror. The dangers of Big Data had never really hit me until I saw social media through the eyes of an ex-boyfriend scorned.

“Thank God my last breakup was with someone who had no social media,” Eric continued. “It took literally just a week to get over that guy.”

Of course, winning is subjective. Though memorializing my victory over Brett in this magazine could be a bald-faced bid for a win, the event is now so long in the past that even acknowledging that I remember it is definitely a loss. Even the best breakup victories tend to be Pyrrhic. Or, as Holly said when I described my new boyfriend’s reaction to his predecessor: “The only drawback to winning that hard is that then you want to be like, He used to be so much better!” Except, well, he wasn’t. And neither was I.

*This article appears in the December 1, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

 

http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/12/winning-the-breakup-in-the-age-of-instagram.html?mid=facebook_nymag

A Not-So-Modest Plan To Save Bookstores From The Grim Reaper That Is Amazon

Ellen

Physical bookstores have no chance if they try to compete against Amazon’s selection and price. There must be another way.

11/10/2014   Fast Company   By

I have a love affair with bookstores: the search, the smell, the tactile sensation of turning pages. I know I’m not alone: There are lots of customers who still love bookstores.

And yet, bookstores keep shutting their doors. Is the bookstore doomed? Yes, I‘m afraid it is—if it continues to compete with Amazon on price and volume. That’s a losing battle. But if bookstores compete on qualities that Amazon will never be able to duplicate, I believe there’s hope! (Provided Amazon doesn’t open too many physical stores.)

But first, a quick trip to Milan’s Malpensa Airport. Because it was there that I noticed how passengers were directed through the airport by a system of different colored lines. Transit: red. Exit: green. Shopping: yellow. As soon as I figured out the system, I never looked up anymore; I merely followed the red stripe on the floor.

What does this have to do with bookstores?

Amazon introduced the concept of mass-reader reviews. Bookstores have the ability to take this even further. Reading the right book gives us a sense of power, influence, and newness. It makes us interesting, gives us a reason to talk, and puts us in the center of things. That’s the role a bookstore should assume.

Once the scourge of Democrats, former Republican plays tough for Hillary Clinton

Ellen
Media expert David Brock, once an enemy of the Clintons, is now using his experience to help their party
11/29/2014   The Guardian by

David Brock speaks at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, Arkansas in March.

It’s a case of poacher turned game-keeper. US Democrats, reeling from losses in the midterm elections, are turning to a former Republican media hitman to boost their chances of taking the White House in 2016.

David Brock is the name; his trademark, a silver pompadour and Trotsky-style wire-rimmed glasses; his political ethos, to beat Republicans by using an apparatus of quick-response law, ethics groups and journalism groups, a strategy pioneered, naturally, by the Republicans.

“I know from experience that, over a 30-year arc, rightwing conservatives came to dominate American political discourse in the media, and it needs to be countered,” Brock told the Observer last week. “And I know how something like it would work on the progressive side.”

In the culture wars of the mid-90s, Brock, 52, was a far-right hero. He wrote a book casting doubt on the credibility of Anita Hill, the aide who accused supreme court justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. Then, as part of the conservative-funded Arkansas Project, Brock broke the story of “Troopergate” and identified a woman named Paula, aka Paula Jones, one of a string of Bill Clinton “bimbo eruptions” that would culminate in the Monica Lewinsky-inspired impeachment hearings.

Once so committed that his answering machine message said: “Hello, I’m out trying to bring down the president,” Brock has turned on his deep-pocketed former sponsors with a vengeance. First came his sympathetic biography of Hillary Clinton in 1996, followed a year later by an Esquire magazine essay, Confessions of a Right-Wing Hitman, that announced his break with the right. Brock recalled last week how in the mid-90s he began to have “huge reservations about the character and integrity of the people in the conservative movement”.

Everyone loves a sinner redeemed, and Brock is no exception. What he offers is not an ideological or political solution but a willingness to counteract a Republican political machine calibrated to find and exploiting Democrat weaknesses.

In 2004, Brock founded Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog that helped to bring down Glenn Beck, a Fox News host given to hysterical outbursts, and later helped to publicise comments about “legitimate rape” made to a Missouri TV station by Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin.

He then established American Bridge, a political action committee that has raised $12m from donors including George Soros over the past two years. With more than 80 staff, a key part of its mission is to assign people called “trackers” to tail Republicans, looking for “gotcha” moments that could derail their political ambitions.

Other weapons in the Brock arsenal include the theoretically non-partisan corruption watchdog, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew); the American Democracy Legal Fund, charged with battling Republicans in the courts; and the American Independent Institute, which provides funds for journalists investigating rightwing activities.

Liberals, he says, have failed to understand that political campaigns are constant, not only fought during election years, and require long-term funding. “We’ve basically been trying to play catch-up. There was a tendency on the progressive side to dismiss rightwing media like Fox News as not credible and therefore not important, and they were very late in understanding the nature and power of the infrastructure the rightwing had built.”

While there is residual unease among some liberal operatives that Brock’s conversion story fits into a pattern of opportunism and self-promotion rather than ideological transformation, Brock’s war on the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, coupled with rigorous defence of Hillary Clinton, has earned him growing influence in progressive circles.

Brock acknowledges only that his mission is to counter rightwing attacks, though the focus of those attacks – and thus the rapid-response resources of American Bridge – are clearly centred on preventing opponents from defining Clinton during her candidacy-in-waiting. The left-leaning publication the Nation recently described Brock’s political apparatus as designed “to put Hillary in the White House”.

That unnerves some party advisers who fear this kind of surveillance can only harm the political process. Candidates will be forced to the centre of political discourse. Surrendering principles for electoral success could turn out to be a hollow victory – or no victory at all, says a former Kennedy adviser, Andrew Karsch. “Democrats need a statesman who can articulate the issues, not someone who holds their finger to the wind on every issue. Instead of arguing something, you just mud-wrestle? That’s not an answer. It’s a complete capitulation.”

Despite Brock’s expertise, Democrats may be unsuited to adopting the well-honed tactics of Republicans. This month Democrat billionaire Tom Steyer poured tens of millions into candidates promoting climate-change awareness – a counter to Tea Party funders the Koch brothers – and received no electoral return on his outlay.

Earlier this year, Brock was invited to Arkansas to deliver an address, Countering the Culture of Clinton Hating, to the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock. He spoke of how conservatives “upended many of our long-held ways of conducting politics” and how, unless those dynamics are challenged, history could repeat itself.

Of course, it was pursuing that agenda that gave Brock his start. Several years later, Hillary Clinton distributed copies of Brock’s 2002 book, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, as proof of the “vast rightwing conspiracy” that had existed against the couple.

In addition to his other groups, Brock serves as an adviser to the grassroots outreach programme Ready for Hillary, and is on the board of Priorities USA, a fundraising operation devoted to a Clinton candidacy. He says Media Matters is already responding to “a fair amount of Clinton-related material”, while American Bridge has a group, Correct the Record, that is solely focused on defending her record. “We’re doing that because there are 10 Republican super PACs [political action committees] out there trying to tarnish her reputation in advance of her making a decision on whether she is going to run,” Brock says. “We already have our hands full in terms of media misinformation.”

He anticipates a silver lining to the Democrats’ recent poor showing at the ballot box. When the newly-elected Republicans start showing their true political colours, his group will be there to document them, and perhaps to influence Republicans’ choice of presidential candidate in 2016. Brock says American Bridge has identified 20 potential Republican candidates for president or vice-president, and put field trackers on them. “We’re way ahead of the curve,” he enthuses. “Based on our research, we’re going to be an important player in how the Republican presidential ticket is defined.”

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/29/david-brock-former-republican-hitman-hillary-clinton