Trevino’s No Good, Very Bad Day
The lulz are thick today, with the revelation that a true “son” of Texas, and one, as you can see above, who would “never forsake Texas or her cause”, was part of an elaborate messaging campaign on behalf of the oppressive Malaysian government.
From the above linked article from Buzzfeed :
A range of mainstream American publications printed paid propaganda for the government of Malaysia, much of it focused on the campaign against a pro-democracy figure there.
The payments to conservative American opinion writers — whose work appeared in outlets from the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner to the Washington Times to National Review and RedState — emerged in a filing this week to the Department of Justice. The filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act outlines a campaign spanning May 2008 to April 2011 and led by Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit, who received $389,724.70 under the contract and paid smaller sums to a series of conservative writers.
And more :
According to Trevino’s belated federal filing, the interests paying Trevino were in fact the government of Malaysia, “its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with either.”
Also in that article, Trevino attempts to defend his position, as do a few others he apparently roped into this strange scheme. Most of their time and effort seemed to be aimed at discrediting an opposition leader named Anwar Ibrahim. Credited as being the only seeming hope for democracy in Malaysia, Ibrahim has faced, according to media reports, an unfair prosecution over sodomy charges, charges which, as the Buzzfeed article noted, Trevino defended.
Good times.
Curiously enough, Trevino truly seemed to be defending a government full of hateful anti-Semites, an irony that’s not lost on those of us here at The Trenches. (Remember that time when Trevino attacked Trenches founder Brooks Bayne as a virulent anti-semite for using the word Jew a handful of times in a post that was over 1,000 words long?) Well, let’s see what some sources have to say about Malaysia’s ruling government:
In Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, politicians and civil servants devote a surprising amount of time to thinking about Israel, 7,612 km away. Sometimes they appear to be obsessed by it. Malaysia has never had a dispute with Israel, but the government encourages the citizens to hate Israel and also to hate Jews whether they are Israelis or not.
Few Malaysians have laid eyes on a Jew; the tiny Jewish community emigrated decades ago. Nevertheless, Malaysia has become an example of a phenomenon called “Anti-Semitism without Jews.” Last March, for instance, the Federal Territory Islamic Affairs Department sent out an official sermon to be read in all mosques, stating that “Muslims must understand Jews are the main enemy to Muslims as proven by their egotistical behaviour and murders performed by them.” About 60% of Malaysians are Muslim.
In Kuala Lumpur, it’s routine to blame the Jews for everything from economic failures to the bad press Malaysia gets in foreign (“Jewish-owned”) newspapers.
The leaders of the country assume that Jews and Israelis deserve to be humiliated as often as possible. In 1984, the New York Philharmonic cancelled a visit because the Malaysian information minister demanded that a composition by Ernest Bloch, an American Jewish composer who died in 1959, be eliminated from their program. In 1992, an Israeli football player with the Liverpool team was refused permission to play in Malaysia; the team cancelled the visit. The government banned Schindler’s List, calling it anti-German and pro-Jewish propaganda. The same government later decided it could be shown if seven scenes were cut. Steven Spielberg refused, so the government removed all his films from Malaysia’s screens.
Now, I don’t know about you, but that’s about the most stinging criticism of a government I can remember reading in quite some time. Also, let’s do just some basic reasoning: Getting paid to write puff pieces about a government that’s virulently anti-Semitic means one, by proxy, is anti-Semitic, no? As opposed to using the word “jew” a handful of times in an extensive piece regarding the intersection of Judaism and Socialism in America.
But, yannow, smart-set conservatism for the win!
While we’re at it, we figured we’d share some tweets that have started rolling in since this delicious little story broke earlier today.
Say what you will about @andrewbreitbart but to the best of my knowledge he wasn’t a paid propagandist for the government of Malaysia.
— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 1, 2013
the last paragraph of @jstrevino‘s payola article on Malaysia is something to behold. twitter.com/WeeZieInc/stat…
— Walid Zafar (@WeeZieInc) March 1, 2013
it is almost like @jstrevino and other RW media coordinated a message. #journolist
— P2 (@flounder_MA) March 1, 2013
“Projection” RT @markadomanis funniest part: Trevino is particularly prone to insinuating people who disagree w/him are being paid to do so
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 1, 2013
The “cause of Texas” is astroturf. @jstrevino will never forsake it. He is astroturf’s son.
— Al Javieera (@AlJavieera) March 1, 2013
And fer EFF’s sake, if ur going to take money, DON”T take it from the Malaysian Gov lol How dumb are these people??
— DanRiehl (@DanRiehl) March 2, 2013
This last tweet is the winner.
To his credit, @jstrevino turned down a very lucrative offer from Friends of Hamas.
— Tom Gara (@tomgara) March 1, 2013
Hate us all you want for pointing out the flaws on the right. But, to put it bluntly, we’re sick of the intellectual dishonesty that seems to run so rampant for the aforementioned smart-set. Not only does this man try to claim the great state of Texas’ history as his own, he also claims to be a conservative. Not sure where in the definition of “conservatism” it says “actively shills for a foreign Muslim government and lies about it on the record… TWICE,” but if that’s changed, let us know!
Bellum Letale.
