How OC Weekly’s founding editor turned conservative libertarian firebrand

Two years ago, a former colleague phoned Will Swaim with bad news: By Thanksgiving, OC Weekly, the alternative newspaper he founded in 1995 and headed until 2007, would halt the presses for good.

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By chance, he drove by Coppertree Business Park in Costa Mesa, site of the Weekly’s first official office, and mourned.

“The tragedy of being human is that everything ends,” said the 61-year-old. “I just didn’t see it coming.”

Swaim now looks back at those days as nostalgia. He’s currently president of the California Policy Center, a Tustin-based conservative nonprofit that rails against public-sector unions and promotes charter schools. It’s a post that has left many who knew him from his OC Weekly days feeling similarly blindsided, if not downright confounded or betrayed.

From his perch, Swaim co-hosts the National Review’s “Radio Free California” podcast, writes opinion columns for outlets like Fox News and found himself at the center of controversy last year over a white paper that inspired the Orange County Board of Education’s symbolic vote to return to in-person schooling without masks or social distancing.

“I was a lefty when the county was conservative and I’m a libertarian or a conservative now that the county is moving the other way,” Swaim explained. “I simply had to confront that I was wrong. Individuals are best positioned to understand their own needs, dreams and desires.”

Swaim grew up in a devout Catholic household in Mission Viejo split among party lines. He considered becoming a priest before studying journalism and theology at USC. “I used to tell people Jesus led me to Marx,” Swaim said. “I still was going to church and joined the Communist Party.”

He earned a master’s degree in history at UC Irvine and helped start “The County,” an underground newsletter on O.C. politics during the late ‘80s that served as a precursor to the Weekly. The effort revealed to Swaim just how many compelling stories went untold by the existing papers of the day. When offered the opportunity to start OC Weekly as a sister paper of LA Weekly, Swaim pounced on it.

As editor, Swaim imbued his leftist outlook into the Weekly from the start. He greeted reporters at every newsroom meeting with a robust “Comrades!” and made conservatives of every stripe — political, economic, religious — the target of his paper’s ire. It took down a pair of Huntington Beach mayors, hounded O.C. Sheriff Mike Carona all the way to federal prison, unleashed the “Ask a Mexican” column on the county’s xenophobes and shined a light on subcultures long ignored.

Swaim also hired Rebecca Schoenkopf as a 22-year-old cub reporter who became a cult figure in early-2000s Orange County with a nightlife-cum-politics column called “Commie Girl.”

“He was urbane, elegant and erudite,” said Schoenkopf, who’s now the owner, editor and publisher of Wonkette, a saucy site of liberal commentary on national politics. “I just completely admired him.”

.https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/entertainment/story/2021-11-24/how-o-c-weeklys-founding-editor-turned-conservative-libertarian-firebrand

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How OC Weekly’s founding editor turned conservative libertarian firebrand

How OC Weekly’s founding editor turned conservative libertarian firebrand

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