29 Facts About Ben Domenech

Benjamin Domenech was born on January 1,1982 and is an American writer, blogger, editor, publisher and television commentator.

Ben Domenech is the co-founder and publisher of The Federalist and host of The Federalist Radio Hour, and writes The Transom, a daily subscription newsletter for political insiders.

Ben Domenech is the former managing editor for health care policy at The Heartland Institute and former editor-in-chief of The City.

Ben Domenech created and hosted a daily free market podcast, Coffee and Markets, until 2014.

In 2006, Domenech was hired as a blogger by The Washington Post, but resigned three days later after verified plagiarism in prior work.

Ben Domenech was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and raised in Charleston, South Carolina.

Ben Domenech later worked as a speechwriter for Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson.

Ben Domenech subsequently worked as a contributing editor for the National Review Online, followed by two years as chief speechwriter for United States Senator John Cornyn.

Ben Domenech was an editor at Regnery Publishing, where he edited books by Michelle Malkin, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Hugh Hewitt.

In March 2006, Ben Domenech was named as a blogger for The Washington Post, hired to contribute to the newspaper's opinion pages from a conservative point of view.

On March 21,2006, only three days into his appointment, Ben Domenech resigned his position after evidence surfaced showing that he had earlier plagiarized the earlier works of others that had originally appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the National Review, and several other publications.

Ben Domenech was the managing editor of health care policy at The Heartland Institute, writing numerous columns advocating abolishing the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as "Obamacare", and defending Republican alternatives.

On February 7,2013, Ben Domenech appeared on a Heartland podcast, during which he spoke about how, in his view, smokers were being singled out for rate hikes, and other unfair treatment under Obamacare, a position long held by Philip Morris and other tobacco companies.

Ben Domenech argued on the podcast that smokers are more likely to die earlier than other people, and thus are less costly to insurance companies and the government.

Ben Domenech began to post, around this same period of time, regularly on RedState and began his own personal blog, "this is an adventure".

In early 2006, Ben Domenech was hired by The Washington Post's online arm to write a blog providing "a daily mix of commentary, analysis and cultural criticism".

Domenech launched a new website, Red America, on March 21,2006, but resigned three days later after having written only six posts, after his fellow bloggers posted evidence online that Domenech had plagiarized the work of other journalists from The Washington Post, The New Yorker, National Review, the humorist P J O'Rourke, the film critic Stephanie Zacharek, the writer Mary Elizabeth Williams, and that of several other publications and writers.

In 2013, Ben Domenech was implicated in a journalism scandal that resulted in the removal of his work from The Washington Examiner and The Huffington Post after it was disclosed that he had received $36,000 from Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit and lobbyist, in exchange for writing favorable opinion pieces about the government of Malaysia without disclosing the financial relationship.

The payments only came to light when Trevino registered as a foreign agent of the Malaysian government, and disclosed that Ben Domenech was one of several young conservative writers he paid to write articles favorable to the Malaysian regime to bolster its image in conservative media.

In 2019, following staff of other American media companies unionizing, co-founder Ben Domenech tweeted "first one of you tries to unionize I swear I'll send you back to the salt mine".

In 2020, a National Labor Relations Board judge ruled that Ben Domenech had threatened staff illegally and required the company to post notices in its offices and email employees to inform them about their legal rights.

Ben Domenech argued unsuccessfully at the time that the tweet was a joke.

In November 2017, The Federalist, the publication of which Ben Domenech is a co-founder and publisher, came under criticism from both conservatives and liberals for publishing an opinion piece by Tully Borland, an Ouachita Baptist University philosopher, defending Roy Moore, a former Alabama Supreme Court justice, and then Republican candidate for the US Senate, for dating teenagers, some as young as 14 years old, while Moore himself was in his late 30s.

On February 21,2018, Ben Domenech sparked outrage after he called survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting a "bunch of idiots".

In July 2018, on the day that the Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election indicted 12 Russian agents, Ben Domenech disseminated information from a hoax version of the indictment documents.

Ben Domenech falsely reported that "much of it [the indictment] is taken up by the numbers of times that people were posting memes on the internet", citing the fake indictment, which claimed that the 12 Russians charged had only engaged in insignificant "shitposting" and the use of memes.

Ben Domenech later deleted his tweets and apologized for "rage tweeting".

Ben Domenech published a piece, entitled "How Medical 'Chickenpox Parties' Could Turn The Tide Of The Wuhan Virus", by an individual identified as a physician in Oregon who recommended that people hold "chickenpox"-style parties for the coronavirus to build herd immunity, recommendations contrary to those of virtually all mainstream public health experts.

Ben Domenech married Meghan McCain, the daughter of US Senator John McCain, on November 21,2017.