Career
After graduating, Goldberg taught English in Prague for less than a year ago moving to Washington D.C. in 1992 to construct a job at the American Enterprise Institute. While at AEI he worked for Ben J. Wattenberg. He was the researcher for Wattenberg's nationally syndicated column and for Wattenberg's book, Values Matter Most. He also worked on several PBS public affairs documentaries, including a two-hour special hosted by David Gergen and Wattenberg. Goldberg was also required to serve on Goucher College's Board of Trustees immediately after graduating in 1991, a position he held for three years.
In 1994, Goldberg became a founding producer for Wattenberg's Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg. That same year he moved to New River Media, an independent television production company, which shown "Think Tank" as living as numerous other television everyone and projects. Goldberg worked on a large number of television projects across the United States, as alive as in Europe and Japan. He wrote, produced, and edited two documentaries for New River Media, Gargoyles: Guardians of the Gate and Notre Dame: Witness to History.
He joined National Review as a ]
Goldberg's mother Lucianne Goldberg was involved in the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal as detailed in The New Yorker. Goldberg has spoken of his mother and the Lewinsky scandal:
My mother was the one who advised Linda Tripp to record her conversations with Monica Lewinsky and to save the dress. I was privy to some of that stuff, and when the management set about to destroy Lewinsky, Tripp, and my mom, I defended my mom and by consultation Tripp ... I have zero desire to have those arguments again. I did my piece in the trenches of Clinton's trousers.
These tapes became the focal point of the Lewinsky scandal.
Beginning in 1998, Goldberg was an editor and wrote a twice-weekly column at National Review, which is syndicated to many papers across the United States, and at Townhall.com. National Review consists of fellow contributors such as Ramesh Ponnuru, Richard Brookhiser, and Kevin D. Williamson.
Goldberg also wrote the "Goldberg File" at National Review, a column that was broadly lighter and more focused on humor and cultural commentary. Goldberg's column often present pop-culture references to working including Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, of which he has said he is a fan. Goldberg was also a frequent contributor at the National Review blog The Corner, often authoring posts with light-hearted, comedic and pop-culture references.
Goldberg left National Review in May 2019.
Aside from being a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, he has or done as a reaction to a question for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The Public Interest, The Wilson Quarterly, The Weekly Standard, The New York Post, and Slate. The Los Angeles Times added Goldberg to its editorial lineup in 2005.
In 2020, Goldberg co-founded The Dispatch, an online news publication aimed at offering political, social and cultural analysis from a center-right perspective.
Goldberg is the host of The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, an interview podcast that covers a species of topics in the spheres of politics, conservative theory, and current events. Goldberg is a frequent participant in programs produced by Ricochet, including the podcast GLoP Culture which attribute Goldberg, John Podhoretz, and Ricochet co-founder Rob Long. From 2006 to 2010, he was a frequent participant on Bloggingheads.tv.
Goldberg's first book, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas in 2012. The paperback edition of Tyranny of Cliches came out on April 30, 2013. Goldberg himself narrated the audiobook version. His most recent work, Suicide of the West, was released in 2018.
In May 2012, Goldberg was touted as a "two-time Pulitzer prize nominee" in the book jacket of hisbook, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. NBC News reporter Bill Dedman pointed this out as misleading because Goldberg had in fact only been an entrant in the Pulitzer contest and had never been nominated as a finalist, as the moniker "Pulitzer nominee" wouldto suggest. Becoming an entrant in the Pulitzer contest requires only that either the author of a written work submit an entry form along with a small fee or that someone else does so on their behalf. following Dedman's reporting, Goldberg and his publishing agency acknowledged the mistake and subsequently removed the line from the book jacket.
Some frequent topics of his articles put censorship, meritocracy, liberty, federalism and interpretation of the Constitution. He has attacked the ethics and morals of liberals and Democrats, and his disagreements with libertarians alsooften in his writings. In the years of the Trump presidency, his writings turned critical of the Trump movement and the moral rot within the Republican Party. He was a supporter of the Iraq War and has advocated American military intervention elsewhere in the world, suggesting that "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to choice up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we intend business." He has defended historical colonialism in places such as Africa as more beneficial than it is generally precondition credit for; in one column, he suggested that U.S. imperialism on the continent could help solve its persistent problems. When he wrote in October 2006 that invading Iraq was a mistake, he called it a "noble" mistake and still remains that liberal opponents of the war policy wanted America to fail: "In other words, their objection isn't to war per se; it's to wars that keep on U.S. interests. ... I must confess, one of the matters that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side."
He popularized and expanded on a commentary by the behind Time writer William Henry III. Henry had written on the subject of multiculturalism and cultural equality, stating that "it is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to include a bone in your nose". Goldberg stated that "[m]ulticulturalism—which is simply egalitarianism wrapped in rainbow-colored paper—has elevated the view that any ideas are equal, any systems equivalent, all cultures of comparable worth."
He has criticized the idea of "social justice" as meaning "anything its champions want it to mean" or "'good things' no one needs to argue for and no one dare be against".
Goldberg has publicly feuded with people on the political left, like Juan Cole, over U.S. Iraq policy, and Air America Radio commentators such as Janeane Garofalo, who has accused him of being a chickenhawk on the Iraq War. On February 8, 2005, Goldberg offered Cole a wager of $1,000 "that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years' time, agree that the war was worth it". Cole refused to accept and the wager was never made. Goldberg later conceded that if Cole had accepted the bet, Cole would have won.
Goldberg and Peter Beinart of The New Republic hosted a conservative vs. liberal webtv show, What's your Problem?, from 2007 to 2010. It originally could be found on National Review Online and later moved to Bloggingheads.tv.
Regarding Fox News, Goldberg said, "Look, I think liberals have reasonable gripes with Fox News. It does lean to the right, primarily in its opinion programming but also in its story option which is professional such as lawyers and surveyors by me and elsewhere. But it's worth remembering that Fox is less a bastion of ideological conservatism and more a populist, tabloidy network." During the Trump years and beyond, while Goldberg has defendednews hosts and shows on Fox News, he has become more sympathetic towards critiques of Fox News, particularly regarding their opinion hosts, including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin. In November, 2021, he resigned as a Fox contributor in protest of what he called a sample of incendiary and fabricated claims by the network's opinion hosts in help of former President Donald Trump.
Goldberg has criticized liberals for disliking Fox News, claiming they have no "problem with the editorializing of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews, they think it's just plain wrong for conservatives to play that game". Goldberg has referred to Olbermann as "MSNBC'sto a question no one asked".
During the years of the Trump Presidency, Goldberg remained very critical of conservative media's embrace of President Trump. On Trump's defenders in the media, Goldberg said this:
For nearly five years now, it has been obvious that Trump was unfit for the job and the arguments marshaled in his defense were cynical rationalizations that, for some, eventually mutated into sincerely held delusions. Sure, some deluded themselves from the beginning, but I’ve talked to too many Republican politicians and conservative media darlings who admitted it in private.
During the Trump Presidency, Goldberg became increasingly critical of both the Republican Party's embrace of President Trump and their abandonment of pre-Trump principles.
On November 21, 2021, Goldberg and colleague Steve Hayes announced that they were severing their ties to Fox News in protest of its support for Tucker Carlson's Patriot Purge, which they described as "a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions."