Ben Domenech

Benjamin Domenech (born January 1, 1982) is the Editor at Large of The Spectator World.

He is also a television commentator, radio host, and publisher of The Transom, a daily subscription newsletter for political insiders.

Domenech attended the College of William & Mary from 1999 until 2002, leaving school before his senior year, whereupon he went to work for the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

Domenech's NRO column recapped political talk shows on television.

Domenech was the youngest ever political appointee of the George W. Bush administration.

His father, Douglas Domenech, had held several mid-level positions in the Bush administration.

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

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 (R-TX).

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

In March 2006, 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.

Liberal and left-of-center bloggers protested Doemenech's appointment, citing what they regarded as inappropriate comments on his blog.

Among other things, Domenech had called cartoonist Ted Rall a "steaming bag of pus"; described Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of former Secretary of State John Kerry, as an "oddly shaped egotistical ketchup-colored muppet"; and called Pat Robertson a "senile, crazy old fool".

The Post, however, vowed to stand by Domenech.

On March 21, 2006, only three days into his appointment, 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.

The Post said it had not known about his plagiarism when the newspaper hired him, and had editors known, they would never have offered him the job in the first place, they said.

Jim Brady, the-then executive editor of washingtonpost.com, said he would have fired Domenech had he not first offered to quit because the allegations of plagiarism made it necessary to "sever the relationship".

During the 2008 election, Domenech wrote numerous columns for both Human Events and for The Washington Times.

During the 2012 election, Domenech commented extensively on social and economic issues related to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

for the Heritage Foundation.

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.

The Heartland Institute itself, during this time, was funded in part by Philip Morris and other tobacco companies, which at the time were working behind the scenes to defeat Obamacare.

In 2013, he co-founded The Federalist, where he served as publisher and hosted The Federalist Radio Hour. He also co-founded the RedState group blog.

He joined Fox News as a commentator in 2021.

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

On February 7, 2013, 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.

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.

In September 2013, Domenech, along with Luke Sherman and Sean Davis, co-founded The Federalist; senior editors include David Harsanyi and Mollie Hemingway.

Domenech said at the time that The Federalist was inspired by the mission and worldview of the original Time magazine's editor, Henry Luce, which he described as, "[leaning] to the political right, with a small-c conservatism equipped with a populist respect for the middle class reader outside of New York and Washington."

The Federalist is owned by a private company and thus has not been required to disclose the identities of its financial backers.

Domenech and the other founders of the conservative website have refused to do so.

BuzzFeed News has reported that the website's funding has prompted "a considerable amount of speculation in the political media world".

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

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

He is the son of Douglas Domenech, who served as the United States Department of the Interior's White House Liaison and the Secretary of the Interior's Deputy Chief of Staff during the George H.W. Bush administration, and as Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Insular and International Affairs during the Trump administration.

Domenech's career in punditry began as a teenager when he began a column, "Any Given Sunday", for National Review Online (NRO), in addition to his personal blog.

By the age of 15, The Washington Post noted, Domenech had already "accumulated a pile of clips from the Washington Times, Human Events, Reason magazine, the American Conservative and The Washington Post".

Even though Domenech was only 18 at the time, the Post assessed, "Domenech is a sharp writer with an obvious command of his national politics beat.'

In Politico, Reid Cherlin wrote in 2014 that The Federalist deserved praise for "seek[ing] to go deep on the issues and sway the conversation in Washington".

Matt K. Lewis wrote in The Week that conservative online media was sharply divided between "staid, august publications" and "a new generation of irreverent sites", and that "[s]ites like The Federalist try to bridge the gap by providing serious commentary that is typically written by young, pop culture–savvy writers."

BuzzFeed further pointed out that "the Federalist has been resolutely opaque about its finances. The site is owned by a private company and doesn't have to disclose its ownership or funding structure; its parent company, FDRLST Media, was incorporated as a limited liability company in Delaware in 2016."