I’m not doing so badly compared to the moral abominations that are trying to revive Human Events because it was once Ronald Reagan’s favorite publication.
“It’s Trump as a philosophy, not Trump as a man,” said co-founder Raheem Kassam — the posh, bespectacled, former editor of Breitbart London — of the publication’s guiding light. “Where is the movement going after Trump? How do we keep the good — the pugilism? How do we tie up the fraying ends? Because remember: This was not supposed to happen. Trump was not supposed to get elected.”
Kassam’s publishing partner, Will Chamberlain, a 33-year-old former litigator turned activist — also bespectacled, with a no-nonsense demeanor — bought the moribund publication for $330,000 this winter, announcing the purchase during the Conservative Political Action Conference.
I haven’t seen the final bill, but it is going to wind up costing me about $8,000-$9,000 to convert Booman Tribune into Progress Pond. No one is about to pay me $330,000 for this project.
We each launched our sites at around the same time.
Since launching at the beginning of this month, the new publishers are claiming some modest early success. Ten days in, the group had amassed roughly 600,000 pageviews and more than 750 paying members, or “Founding Fathers.” The early ranks of members — who pay $17.76 a month — include Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney. Kassam ran into Giuliani at the Trump Hotel last week and helped the former New York City mayor purchase a membership on his iPad.
They have 750 paying members. I have about 180. They have 600,000 page views, and I officially have somewhat more than a tenth of that. I didn’t start tracking it until about a week in, so it could be more like a sixth. They’re charging people $17.76 a month. I’m offering a plan (Yearly Bronze) that averages out to $3.75 a month. They have cretin subscribers like Rudy Giuliani and I have outstanding subscribers like you. They write the worst kind of bullshit, and I hopefully write stuff that is a little better than that.
I can only hope that these two assholes fail miserably:
The new Human Events aims to fuse Kassam’s sense of flair with Chamberlain’s aggressive style of argumentation. Chamberlain came to Washington to attend law school at Georgetown in 2012. He went on to practice law for two years before calling it quits in 2017 to focus on politics — a shift that led him to devote a great deal of time to joining culture war squabbles on social media, where has a amassed a sizeable-for-politics Twitter following…
…Chamberlain and Kassam first became aware of each other online. They met in person at at the Northwest D.C. townhouse of Catharine O’Neill, an heiress to the Rockefeller fortune who works for Trump’s State Department and regularly throws parties that draw a young, Trump-leaning crowd.
Kassam has been on a bit of a roll. He was briefly banned from Facebook and fired from his job with Steve Bannon trying “to create a pan-European nationalist front.” Now he has a new gig to go along with his new friend from the Rockefeller clan.
Truthfully, he and Chamberlain probably don’t have to worry about failure. If they operate at a loss, some heiress or oil baron will throw money at them. Conservative rags only fail when they deviate from their donors’ party line.
If you’re looking for reasons to support Progress Pond and become a subscriber, the fact that progressive voices don’t have sugar daddies as a backstop is not a bad place to start.
