Brent Bozell, anti-LGBTQ+ activist and father of January 6 rioter, to head U.S. media agency

Author: Trudy Ring

Donald Trump has nominated L. Brent Bozell III, a longtime anti-LGBTQ+ activist and father of a convicted January 6 rioter, to head the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

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The agency oversees the Voice of America, which provides news to a global audience in about 50 languages via television, radio, and online platforms. It has “an estimated weekly audience of more than 354 million people,” according to its website. It was founded in 1942, during World War II. The agency also handles news services from the U.S. to Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. It is taxpayer-funded but independent of the federal government, and Bozell’s nomination requires Senate confirmation.

Bozell is founder and president of the Media Research Center, which monitors the media for supposed anti-conservative bias. It has numerous online offshoots, and Bozell has a syndicated column.

He has often raged against positive LGBTQ+ inclusion in the media. In 2013, he wrote a column denouncing GLAAD’s tracking of LGBTQ+ characters in TV and film, saying for one thing that with 4.4 percent of characters being part of the LGBTQ+ community, that was “at least double their actual percentage of the population” — which is not true. In 2022, a Gallup poll found that at least 7.1 percent of U.S. adults identify as LGBTQ+, and the percentage was higher than Bozell’s estimate even 10 years earlier.

“Gay characters never face any real opposition to the gay agenda on these so-called ‘inclusive’ programs,” he wrote in the same column. “There is no measure of Orthodox religious inclusion and no real debates. The victory of the left is assumed without thinking. When a conservative character is created — like Ellen Barkin’s ‘Nana’ in ‘The New Normal’ — it’s a vicious cartoon, the kind that those ‘against defamation’ folks deeply enjoy.” GLAAD also wants “children indoctrinated” to become gay, he continued.

The same year, he wrote a column saying that major media outlets were biased in favor of “marriage equality,” which he put in scare quotes. “In many corners of the liberal media, the space for a social conservative to argue against ‘marriage equality’ is vanishing before our eyes,” Bozell contended. “It becomes twice as difficult the more and more anchors and reporters come out and declare themselves gay, and then the gay lobby expects those journalists to perform with perfect obedience to their agenda.”

In 2016, in a column coauthored with Tim Graham, he took fact-checking site PolitiFact to task for calling out U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign ad saying, “Should a grown man pretending to be a woman be allowed to use the women’s restroom? … Donald Trump thinks so.” This came when Cruz and Trump were both seeking the Republican presidential nomination and Trump said Caitlyn Jenner, who had recently come out as transgender, should be allowed to use whatever restroom she wanted. Trump then walked back his support for trans people, saying the issue of restroom access should be left to cities and states (and later became intensely anti-trans), and Cruz, despite being frequently insulted by Trump, eventually went all in to support him.

PolitiFact said it’s inaccurate to describe trans women as men, and that got under Bozell and Graham’s skin. “Gender isn’t simply wished away,” they wrote. “Surgeons can amputate body parts, but even then, gender assigned at birth remains a biological fact that can’t be overruled by psychological-wishful thinking or political intimidation.”

Those instances form just the tip of the iceberg of Bozell’s anti-LGBTQ+ ways, and he’s far-right on all other issues too. His son, L. Brent Bozell IV, was convicted of 10 felony counts, including destroying government property and assaulting police, in the January 6 insurrection and sentenced to 45 months in prison. He was released Monday after Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of those involved in the riot, or dropped pending charges against them.

The Bozell family has a long history with far-right politics. Bozell III is one of 10 children of L. Brent Bozell Jr., the brother-in-law and close associate of conservative pundit William F. Buckley. They defended Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who in the 1950s falsely accused many liberals of being communists, ruining many lives in the process (and in any case, communism had not been outlawed), and they founded the conservative magazine National Review. Bozell Jr. was the ghostwriter of right-wing Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative. Goldwater, while remaining deeply conservative, at least took issue with the Republican Party’s antigay stances late in his life.

Bozell Sr., an advertising man in Omaha, Neb., “was nominally a Democrat but also fiercely anti–New Deal and anti-labor,” according to a profile of the family in The Nation.

Bozell III was once a Trump critic. He “had written in a National Review essay in 2016 that ‘Trump might be the greatest charlatan of them all,’ but by 2019 he had counted himself as a convert,” The New York Times reports. He and Graham coauthored a book titled Unmasked: Big Media’s War Against Trump, published that year.

“Trump’s decision to tap Bozell for the post echoes his choice of conspiracy theorist Kari Lake to head Voice of America,” Daily Kosnotes. “These selections make it clear that Trump intends to infuse the government’s media infrastructure with extremist right-wing values and talking points.”

Original Article on The Advocate
Author: Trudy Ring