This Is Your Brain on Partisanship

By James Kirchick

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

 

In the summer of 2018, a Republican political communications firm named Definers Public Affairs circulated a document to technology reporters titled “Freedom from Facebook Potential Funding.” It encouraged journalists to examine the opaque financial sponsorship of an outfit called the Freedom from Facebook Coalition that was composed of a hodgepodge of liberal activist groups committed to breaking up the social media platform and regulating it like a public utility. Given how “at least four of the groups in the coalition receive funding [from] or are aligned with George Soros[,] who has criticized Facebook,” the document revealed, it was “very possible that Soros is funding Freedom from Facebook.”

 

Facebook had hired Definers the previous year to help it navigate the media and political firestorms that had been igniting around the internet giant since the 2016 presidential election, which many critics were claiming Facebook had somehow engineered in Donald Trump’s favor. The most powerful of those critics was Soros, who had delivered a speech at the 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos assailing Facebook as a “menace to the world.” When Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his colleague, then Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, testified before the Senate in July, Freedom from Facebook protesters sat in the audience displaying signs depicting them as a double-headed octopus straddling the earth.

 

Though the document was written in the style of an opposition-research memo, its content—a series of citations from mainstream media outlets demonstrating the many connections between Soros’s nonprofit Open Society Foundations (OSF) and Freedom from Facebook—was, in the words of BuzzFeed, “largely innocuous.” But that’s not how the beneficiaries of Soros’s largesse responded to it. “As you know, there is a concerted right-wing effort the world over to demonize Mr. Soros and his foundations, which I lead—an effort which has contributed to death threats and the delivery of a pipe bomb to Mr. Soros’ home,” Patrick Gaspard, a longtime Barack Obama hand then serving as president of OSF, wrote in an open letter to Facebook. “You are no doubt also aware that much of this hateful and blatantly false and Anti-Semitic information is spread via Facebook.”

 

Money is fungible, and whether the Open Society Foundations were funding protesters vilifying two Jewish business executives (Zuckerberg and Sandberg) with a hoary anti-Semitic trope directly or via cut-outs is immaterial. Gaspard’s deflection of factual information concerning his boss as the product of “tactics out of Putin’s playbook” and his imputation of bigotry to Facebook and Definers were emblematic of left-wing defenses of Soros—conservative criticism of whom, no matter how legitimate, they have long mechanically labeled as anti-Semitic. (Indeed, conservative criticism of Soros is one of the few things liberals can unanimously agree is anti-Semitic.)

 

Following intense backlash from the activist left, Facebook fired Definers and apologized for hiring them in the first place. The fall guy, a Republican communications operative named Tim Miller, happened to be a friend of mine. The insinuation that Miller was in the least bit anti-Semitic was ridiculous, but he nonetheless decided to deal with his defamers in good faith. “I understand that there is sensitivity—for very good reason—these days around making claims that Soros is behind some globalist cabal to ruin our country,” he wrote. Noting the double standard in scrutiny that attends to the political activities of conservative billionaires like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, Miller articulated his view that “pointing out to reporters that someone funds or supports a group that the organizers have admitted he funds/supports…is relevant and fair game.”

 

Miller’s explanation was insufficient for his friends Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor. The three former Obama White House communications officials and founders of the Crooked Media podcast empire were coming under enormous pressure from their listeners to dump Miller, who at the time was serving as the token conservative guest on their flagship show, Pod Save America. After wavering for several days, the trio issued a statement: “We invited Tim to contribute to Crooked because he took a public stand against Trump when most of his party capitulated. That took courage.” Alas, upon learning of Miller’s role helping Facebook “discredit its critics,” they “ultimately found it impossible to square that work with the values of our company.” First expelled from the GOP for taking a stand against Trump in 2016, only to have his reputation trashed by his new friends on the left, Miller truly became a man without a party.

 

What a difference seven years makes. Today, Miller and many others in the conservative “Never Trump” space are no longer homeless. Like many one-time political operatives, Miller now fashions himself a political analyst, and he has made himself a home at the Bulwark, a news and opinion website, alongside several other ex-Republican strategists. While it occasionally offers criticism of left-wing excesses, the Bulwark is a highly partisan outlet whose overriding purpose is to generate enthusiasm for Democrats and loathing of Republicans.

 

For political operatives cast out of their former party and working in a two-party system, becoming a Democrat in all but name makes, at the very least, economic sense. The rent, after all, must be paid. What doesn’t make sense is treating room-reading political animals like Miller as if he is an independent-minded intellectual, which is what the Bulwark’s large audience and much of the mainstream media appear to do.

 

Consider the lengths to which Miller and his colleagues at the Bulwark have gone to downplay, if not deny, the extremism of the Democratic Party’s burgeoning progressive left. In April, the publication ran a piece entitled “How Big Is the Democrats’ ‘Big Tent?’” One center-left activist quoted in the article argued it was getting too big: “If people really are arguing that the price of winning is becoming like a bigoted misogynist like Hasan Piker, then I’ll take not winning,” said Jonathan Cowan.

 

His words displeased Miller. “This seems like a bad message to me given the state of things,” Miller commented on X. It was a strange turn for a man who had once risked his career over his party’s nomination of Trump, whom he considered, not without reason, to be a dangerous bigot. Hasan Piker is a meathead Marxist anti-Semitic zealot, but he somehow has managed to escape Miller’s ire. Miller has also become a defender of Graham Platner, the Nazi tattoo–sporting Maine oysterman challenging Senator Susan Collins, the beau ideal of the moderate, northeastern Republican whose near-extinction Miller and his colleagues supposedly lament.

 

On his podcast, Miller recently hosted Gaspard, now president of the Center for American Progress, for a friendly interview in which he allowed the man who had successfully pressured Facebook to fire him make the case for Zohran Mamdani. The New York City mayor, Gaspard said, should be praised for his “position on Gaza and the permission structure he created in the Democratic primary in New York” for Democrats to become more hostile to Israel. Gaspard further castigated the “Netanyahu regime” and “people like Senator [Kirstin] Gillibrand from New York and other Democrats who used” Mamdani’s equivocating over the genocidal phrase “globalize the intifada” to “attack him.” They should, he said, be “attacking the American foreign policy that made it possible for billions of dollars in American resources to go to the starvation of communities, the bombing of children, the bombing of hospitals and a set of measures that made, I thought, Israel less safe and was responsible for eradicating Palestinian populations.” Miller allowed Gaspard to present these lies unchallenged.

 

This tacit endorsement of extremism in service to Trump-hatred is not limited to the left. Solely because Trump opposed him, Miller supported the renegade GOP congressman Thomas Massie in his primary battle against a Trump-backed challenger. Massie, for whom a political action committee ran a campaign advertisement featuring an image of Republican donor Paul Singer alongside a rainbow-embossed Star of David (Singer, a former Commentary board member, was a major giver to gay-marriage initiatives), ended his failed campaign in the disreputable way he ran it, with a jibe about his opponent celebrating his victory in “Tel Aviv.” One would have hoped that the crude gay-baiting, if not the equally loathsome Jew-baiting, would have been disqualifying for Miller, who is gay. But such is the price of all-consuming partisanship.

 

One can say the same for Miller’s erstwhile friends at Crooked Media, who have since welcomed him back into their good graces despite never having publicly apologized for smearing him as the brains behind an anti-Semitic hate campaign. On assignment for the New York Times, former Obama deputy national security adviser and Crooked podcast host Ben Rhodes traveled all the way to Maine to paint a sympathetic portrait of Platner in which he said that the highly specific SS Totenkopf tattoo Platner had inked on his chest for 18 years merely “resembled a Nazi symbol.” Favreau in particular has been vociferous in his defense of Platner, ridiculing those who find his choice of body art problematic. One does not need to imagine what these two would say were it to emerge that Senators Ted Cruz or Tom Cotton had been hiding a swastika on their chest for nearly two decades.

 

This is the problem when one’s priority is maintaining the approval of a political faction; so important is it to prove one’s partisan bona fides that you enter an escalatory spiral. One day you’re excommunicating someone as an anti-Semite for criticizing the activities of a politically active Jewish billionaire, the next you’re defending a guy with an SS tattoo. the Bulwark and Crooked are what I call “operative media,” in that they are media institutions populated not by journalists but political operatives posing as them.

 

I don’t begrudge Miller the choice he made. As the careers of the admirable politicians he worked for—among them Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush—illustrate, it isn’t easy for non-MAGA Republican political operatives to make a living these days. Political consulting, which requires articulating and ruthlessly enforcing a political line, is a valid career choice. It does not require, and in fact penalizes, independence of thought and the courage of one’s convictions. Which is why Miller’s principled decision not to ride the Trump train was, and remains, admirably rare.

 

From this break with the GOP, however, Miller did not prolong his independence streak. He just switched teams. Though most of them would be loath to acknowledge it, playing for a side is what most of the influencers who increasingly dominate our media space are doing. As long as there are politicians, there will be Machiavellis yearning to whisper in their ear and journalists whose job it is to scrutinize them. It’s crucial that we never lose our capacity to tell the difference between them.