The Bulwark: Where Even The Logo Screams "Lifeboat"

#BurnTheLifeboats

This one goes out my fellow, old-school Liberal bloggers. The five or six of us still standing whose Bush-era posts are full of links to bygone friends or dead blogs and transgressive, career-ending language like "fuck" and "Bush lied".

Those few of us who remember Haloscan 1.0 comment sections and the Koufax Awards.

Of course, since there's no paywall here, nor any subscription nonsense, anyone is free to read anything I write and comment as the spirit moves them, but since since my memory apparently ain't so good no more, I'm looking for some fellow veterans to assist me "True Detective Season 3" fashion in reconstructing the events of our collective past.

For example, does anyone remember America's leading newspapers or magazines or radio programs writing glowing, puff-pieces about us plucky, outmatched outsiders as we fought the good fight against the onslaught of a united, bellicose Republican Party and toxic Conservative media as they inflicted untold and possibly irreparable damage on our country?   You know, the kind of glossy coverage that Never Trumpers now routinely receive from the Beltway media?  From The Atlantic:

Charlie Sykes is sitting behind a desk in a sparse, disheveled office—blank walls lined with empty filing cabinets, windows covered with crooked blinds—as he tries to conjure the perfect metaphor for The Bulwark, the anti–Donald Trump conservative news site he recently helped start.

“We are the ultimate wilderness!” he declares to me.

Can you imagine any Liberal blogger being anything but chucked into Coventry forever by the Beltway media back in the day for writing about the Republican Party in these terms?

The modest trappings have not kept them from grandiose ambitions. In the site’s founding manifesto, Sykes wrote that The Bulwark would stand in defiant opposition to President Trump, and “push back against the moral and intellectual corruption that now poses an existential threat to conservatism as a viable political force.”

Can you imagine any Liberal blogger receiving this kind of full hot oil body massage treatment from virtually every mainstream media outlet?

Sykes, a longtime host on Milwaukee talk radio, became a national figure in 2016 after sparring with then-candidate Trump on air. Since then, he has left radio, written a book criticizing the conservative movement, and joined MSNBC as a contributor. At The Bulwark, he hosts a daily podcast that he says generated more than 500,000 downloads in its first month. By its own count, the site racked up 1.4 million page views in January with 680,000 unique visitors..

Or finding angel investors lined up and eager to underwrite our terrorist-loving, Murrica-hate trash-talk after announcing that we we planning to name-and-shame Bush Administration stooges and enablers like, say, Bill Kristol or David Brooks or Tom Friedman or Andrew Sullivan or...

But The Bulwark is pursuing a different kind of relevance. Rather than crafting coverage that aims to turn rank-and-file Trump voters against the president—an effort that would almost certainly fail—it wants to shame and stigmatize the “bad actors” in the conservative elite, as Sykes puts it. 

Scroll through the home page on any given day, and you’ll find one lively polemic after another calling out Trump-friendly politicos by name—often in witheringly personal terms. 

In recent weeks, the site has run a scornful piece on the former White House official Sebastian Gorka (“a ridiculous figure”), and another on the high-profile #MAGA activist Candace Owens (“not a serious person”). When Trump failed to secure funding for a border wall with his government shutdown, The Bulwark compiled a meticulous list of conservative commentators who had cheered on the strategy. And in a particularly biting essay, the writer Andrew Egger examined how a radio interview between Milo Yiannopoulos (a “loathsome and tiresome egotist”) and Eric Metaxas (a “pop theologian”) highlighted “the political corruption of the modern evangelical movement.”

...or Joe Scarborough or Hugh Hewitt or Erick Ericksen or Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson or Charlie Sykes...

“A lot of folks have had a free shot to get in bed with some of the most disreputable [people] out there, and they still have a veneer of respectability,” Sykes says. “We want to raise the opportunity cost.” 

Asked for examples of prospective targets, Sykes doesn’t have to think long before rattling off a list of high-status commentators (Marc Thiessen, Hugh Hewitt), think tankers (Henry Olsen, Victor Davis Hanson), and politicos (Bill Bennett).

...based not on our compelling Liberal vision of the future...

One thing The Bulwark doesn’t have is a coherent vision for what conservatism should look like after Trump. This has led some critics to dismiss the site as an exercise in myopia—focused obsessively on what it’s against instead of articulating what it’s for, 

Kristol acknowledged this view when I asked him about it, but defended the staff’s open-mindedness about the future. 

...but entirely on our access to the right cocktail parties and green rooms?

 Bulwark stories are often seen bouncing around Twitter and newsroom Slack channels. For its project to work, it doesn’t need the massive reach of a Fox News or a Rush Limbaugh—it just needs to make D.C. dinner parties and greenroom visits uncomfortable for the Trumpist elite.

So if any of you all remember any of our fellow Liberal traitors getting the kind of kid-gloves, reserved-seating-at-the-head-table treatment from the mainstream media during our heyday (back before recorded history apparently) that Never Trumpers now receive as their due every day, please let me know.

Because if not, I really feel like someone, somewhere owes us an apology and a whole lot of money.


UPDATE:  For anyone interested, I have been abruptly moved from Twitter minimum-security jail (where I log onto Twitter and at least see what was happening) to Twitter medium-security (where I now learn I will not even be allowed to log on until my sentence is completed.)

All for using a word and a context which certain Blue Check conservatives have used frequently without incurring the Wrath of Jack.

Behold, my Twitter Legal Defense Fund!