The closing of The Weekly Standard is being told as a Trump story, as all stories must be these days. This is what happens when people with a populist mind-set decide that an uneducated opinion is of the same value as an educated opinion, that ignorance sells better than learning. In that sense, the closing of The Standard resembles Chris Hughes’s destruction of the old New Republic. This is what happens when the commercial forces trying to dumb down the American media run into a pocket of people trying to resist those forces . I was on staff when The Standard was founded, by Bill Kristol, Podhoretz and Fred Barnes.

Source: New York Times December 16, 2018 00:00 UTC