James Kirchick

Career

Born to a Jewish family, Kirchick attended Yale University, and wrote for its student newspaper, the Yale Daily News. He is a fellow with the Foreign Policy Initiative in Washington; prior to this, he was writer-at-large for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

For over three years, Kirchick worked at The New Republic, covering domestic politics, intelligence, and American foreign policy. While he remains a contributing editor for TNR, Kirchick’s reportage has appeared in The Weekly Standard, The American Interest, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Columbia Journalism Review, and Prospect. He writes frequently for newspapers including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and Ha'aretz.

Kirchick has worked as a reporter for The New York Sun, the New York Daily News, and The Hill, and has been a columnist for the New York Daily News and the Washington Examiner. He is a regular book critic and reviews frequently for Azure, Commentary, the Claremont Review of Books, Policy Review, and World Affairs, among others. Kirchick is a contributing writer to the Advocate, and has received the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Excellence in Student Journalism Award and the Journalist of the Year Award.

Ron Paul newsletters

In 2008, Kirchick wrote about newsletters that contained homophobic and racist material, published under the name of Texas Congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. The story became prominent in the 2012 presidential election. Sam Stein of The Huffington Post also wrote in an article on the newsletters that there is evidence from old interviews with Ron Paul that he was writing for the newsletter during the period of time that the racist language was being published in his newsletter.

It was later claimed by television station WXIX that Ron Paul was not the author of the newsletter segments which contained the material in question. In their second newscast on the scandal in January 2012, based on information provided by Lew Rockwell, who had also worked on the newsletter, WXIX's Reality Check claimed that the offending articles may have been written by one of the freelance writers who were said to have been employed at the time.

Erik Wemple for The Washington Post wrote an article that included Kirchick's response to WXIX's second newscast, where Kirchick implied that the writer of the WXIX article, Ben Swann, was incorrect in his naming of the supposed writer of the "Special Edition on Racial Terrorism".

Ron Paul did not initially deny authorship of the offending material, though he had begun denying it by 2001. He has accepted responsibility for the content regardless of its author, as it was published under his name.

August 2013 RT appearance

After advocating the death penalty for Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning on 30 July 2013 in the Daily News, Kirchick was invited to appear on Russia's RT TV network live panel discussion awaiting Manning's sentencing on Wednesday, 21 August 2013. He accepted; however, once it was his turn to speak, Kirchick refused to discuss Manning's sentencing, instead choosing to protest the Russian LGBT propaganda law. When asked by RT news editor Ivor Crotty if he was ready to have a conversation about Manning with the assembled panel, Kirchick retorted angrily: "RT has been Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden 24/7. I haven't seen anything on your network about the anti-gay laws that have been passed in Russia and the increasing climate of violence and hostility towards gay people." That account was objected by one of the program's hosts who said they had a panel discussing it only the day before. Tweeting shortly after the segment, Kirchik claimed RT "just called taxi company that took me to studio to drop me off on the side of the highway on way to Stockholm airport".

Later that day, Politico reached out to both Kirchick and RT for comment. Kirchick called for a "boycott" of RT, calling its employees "not journalists, they're propagandists". RT responded in an e-mail, calling Kirchick's protest "unrelated to the subject of the panel. Regretfully, RT had no other recourse but to continue the discussion without him". The Washington Post PostPartisan blogger Jonathan Capehart commended Kirchick for his "heroic" action; The New Republic's Julia Ioffe praised Kirchick's "trolling of RT"; and the next day, Kirchik's opinion piece titled "Why I ambushed Russia's news network with rainbow suspenders" got published by The Washington Post. In it, Kirchik further denounces RT as broadcasting "sophisticated conspiracy theories and anti-establishment attitudes to push a virulently anti-American and illiberal agenda", while relying on "a pool of talking heads, including 9/11 truthers, anti-Semites, and other assorted extremists, who espouse the sort of views found where the far left and the far right converge". A day later, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell invited Kirchick into his show where they discussed related concerns and controversies at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia.

2016 presidential elections

Kirchick was one of a number of neoconservatives, along with Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, who supported Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton, over the Republican Party candidate Donald Trump, for the presidency during the 2016 American presidential elections. He stated that while Clinton stands for the "status quo", Trump was instead a "brashly authoritarian populist".

On August 15, 2016, The Daily Beast published an article by Kirchick which listed Jill Stein, Rania Khalek, Corey Robin, Glenn Greenwald, Ishaan Tharoor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and others as "Hillary Clinton-Loathing, Donald Trump-Loving Useful Idiots of the Left". Salon's Ben Norton contacted all of those who were mentioned in the article. All of them, except for Christopher Ketcham, stated they did not support Trump.

Books

Awards