Whither The Liberal Blogosphere?

Actually (Pro Tip: never start a story with "actually") we of the Professional Left did an extensive dive into the rise and gradual deterioration of the  Liberal blogosphere during a series of “No Fair Remembering Stuff” podcasts earlier this year.  But I was listening to a pretty fair conversation between Joan Walsh (formerly of Salon) and Tim Miller (currently of The Bulwark, MSNBC, etc) and, after fondly remembering those heady, early days of the blogosphere when we really stomped the Terra, Joan began wondered what had happened to us all, and just sort of trailed off..

Walsh:  Yeah it was... it was lonely out there [being anti-war during the early Bush administration] but the blogs took off and took over and that's what I recall.  And I don't know what's going on now I mean I, y'know, we all bet on the internet and you know Salon and Slate were gonna eat the New York Times' lunch and you know we're just... it's still a slog at Salon, God bless them, they're still slogging along. Slate's doing a little better but it's a slog.  And, y'know. Huffington Post was going to put everybody out of business.  I don't know where Arianna is now.  She's definitely got a lot of money...

So, rather than ask you to spend a few hours listening to our deep dive into that question, I offer here a summary of Whither the Liberal Blogosphere?

To start with, a few of us are still around, still doing what we've been doing for nearly 20 years.  Taking the measure of the world as it is, comparing it to the world we had hoped it would be, and writing about the delta between the two.  We bloggers were also early adopters of podcasting.  Our Professional Left podcast was up and running with weekly episodes "from the cornfield" back when the Crooked Media lads were still writing speeches for Barack Obama, and the Bulwark crew and the Lincoln Project team were just Republican hit-men, being paid to slag the shit out of us as America-hating, terrorist-loving, Libtard commie scum.

And, yes, we did a whole series about Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Liberal Blogosphere Bums...which was heard by literally dozens of people.

And there hangs a tale.

What happened to the Liberal blogosphere?

Some, like OG blogger Steve Gilliard, died young and broke because the Left has never supported its writers and speakers the way the Right does.  It's never even been close.  We were wildly outmatched from the beginning.  But that didn't matter, for our strength was as the strength of ten because our heart were pure.  And we made a real difference...for a while.  But pure hearts don't buy groceries, and many more of our comrades just plain wore themselves out trying to make a living doing political busking on the internet while being relentlessly attacked every day.  

Because, as I said, the Left has never supported it's writers and speakers the way the Right does.  

We were also always fighting a war on two fronts.  

One front was and is the Conservative propaganda machine  -- huge, loud, ridiculously well-funded, and ubiquitous with tentacles everywhere.  And to the Conservative media we always have been and will be America-hating, terrorist-loving, Libtard commie scum.  

The other front was and is the Establishment media, which was much larger than Conservative media and much more deeply-entrenched and financially secure.  And thanks to their long institutional history they had accumulated one invaluable asset that Conservative media could never replicate.  They were "credible".  They were "respectable".  They were "serious".  Which is why they are the primary target of the rising Conservative media, and the #1 pejorative that is laid against the Establishment media every day by the Right is that they are, in truth, part of a vast liberal media conspiracy.

From The New York Times, December 1994:

Republicans Get a Pep Talk From Rush Limbaugh

BALTIMORE, Dec. 10— To all the advice for the new Republicans coming to Congress, add this from Rush Limbaugh: A hostile press corps lurks inside the Beltway.

"You will never ever be their friends," the talk-show host warned most of the 73 Republican freshmen at a dinner here tonight. "They don't want to be your friends. Some female reporter will come up to one of you and start batting her eyes and ask you to go to lunch. And you'll think, 'Wow! I'm only a freshman. Cokie Roberts wants to take me to lunch. I've really made it!' " The audience laughed.

"Seriously," he added. "Don't fall for this. This is not the time to get moderate. This is not the time to start trying to be liked."

I can tell you that it never fails to crack us America-hating, terrorist-loving, Libtard commie scum right up when we hear from the Right what dangerous, Soros-paid, Liberal stooges the Establishment media is.  Because as cringe as they were during the Reagan administration --

-- they were worse during the George H.W. Bush administration, they were positively embarrassing during the Clinton administration and they so completely shit the bed during Dubya administration that in a sane, healthy media environment no fair-minded person could continue to believe that the Establishment media was trustworthy.  

Or that Conservative media was just a natural and healthy reaction to the excesses of a "liberal" mainstream press.  

Or that we crackpot alarmist Liberal hadn't been right about the Right all along.  After all, we had warehouses full of receipts, we not only remembered That Which Had Gone Before and how it had led to what we had come to, we wrote about it every day.

But we don't have a sane, healthy media environment, and we haven't had one in living memory.  In fact, the media environment has been so bent and so hopelessly compromised for so long that most people have come to think of it as "normal". 

And in that warped and hopelessly compromised ecosystem, the true story of the terrifying trajectory the GOP was on and how extreme Conservative media had become was a story that the Establishment media wasn't going to touch with a barge pole.  Frankly, it scared the shit out of them since they were already pot-committed to appeasing the Conservative media and ignoring what was really going on just below the surface of the Republican party.  

They had already larded their op-ed pages and their venerable magazines and their "serious" political opinion shows with neocons and Bush-regime cheerleaders, using them like so many sandbags to protect themselves against the rising fury on the Right, and yet the Right refused to be appeased.  Attacking the media as Soros-funded Liberal conspirators no matter what the truth was had been a part of their DNA at least since the days of Spiro Agnew and the "nattering nabobs of negativism".   And the clearer it became that the Bush Administration was shaping up to be possibly to most comprehensively awful administration in American history, the more the Right amped up its frenzy over imaginary "liberal media bias" the Establishment media

And in that environment -- no matter how much of a disaster Iraq was turning out to be, no matter how close the world teetered to the edge of a second Great Depression, no matter how grotesquely Conservative media lied or how clearly the Bush administration proved its criminal incompetence and corruption every day -- there was no chance the corporations that own the Establishment media were going to start telling the true story of how right us ShitLibs had been all along.  

Not no way.  Not no how.  

But that still left the lords and ladies of the Establishment media with a problem.  

The reality all around us had become so bad and so stark that there was no way to continue pretending that Iraq wasn't a complete disaster.  Or that the economy wasn't in free-fall.  Or that the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina had been anything other than criminally negligent and racist.  And on and on and on.  So, if you're an Establishment media decision-maker, how, then, to explain these things and a hundred other Republican atrocities large and small without, y'know, blaming Republicans?  

This was the seemingly unsolvable dilemma that the Establishment media faced, which was only getting more precarious every day as the rising chorus of raucous Liberal bloggers began to actually start to get some serious attention.

Well, it turned out that when you have your meaty, capitalist thumb on the Establishment media scale  resolving this dilemma  really isn't that hard at all, especially in an environment where the chronically uninformed general public did not want to hear that one of its two major political parties was going mad and that maybe something needed to be done about that.  And in an environment where the Republican base was frantically searching for some serviceable lie that would let them off the hook for everything that had happened during the Bush administration while at the same time letting them keep their racism, paranoia and seething contempt us America-hating, terrorist-loving, Libtard commie scum intact.

And the Establishment media found its Golden Path through this minefield -- its "Secher Nbiw" -- by first going all-in on the narcotic of "Both Sides Do It" journalism that high-status neocon grifters like David Brooks were selling and, second, by giving the entire Republican base a free pass to step through the Bush-Off Machine and be miraculously transformed from a mob of rage-drunk Republican bigots into the grass-roots, "independent" Tea Party.

Now, The Bush-Belly Sneetches

were backers of Bush...

Almost overnight, "...but the Democrats" became the all-purpose, all-occasion, "Get Out of Responsibility Free" card for all Republican atrocities while all of those millions of words of lucid, brutally accurate Liberal blogging about the depravity of the Republican party were buried under a smothering avalanche of Both Siderism.  

And, as an extra precaution, when we Liberals raised our voices to try to be heard over the belligerent and increasingly openly racist roar of Conservative media and the white-noise drone of the Both Sides Do It media,  the establishment would dispatch the Tone Police whose job it was to shift any critique of the Right away from the content of that criticism, to the terribly rude tone of that criticism.

If only we America-hating, terrorist-loving, Libtard commie scum were a little more polite.  A little less strident. Golly, our tone was so off-putting and alienating that maybe it was actually our fault that the Right was going off the deep end?  Oh, if only we were more respectful.  More open-minded...

Sigh.

Democrats then elected the most polite, reasonable, respectful, tonally-perfect Centrist candidate we could find to try and fix all the still-burning catastrophes that eight years of Republican governance had left in its wake.

And, pop quiz:  do you remember what happened next? 

That high-spirited, principled grass-roots uprising by politically unaffiliated patriots called the Tea Party responded with an eight-year-long racist primal scream.

The Conservative media went berserk.

And the Establishment media, still marching in lockstep along their Golden Path of Both Siderism, spent those eight years of non-stop Republican obstruction, lies, Birtherism, slander and sabotage demanding the answer to one question:  Why won't Obama lead? All while reassuring the disengaged general public that the GOP was just doing normal government things and they needn't stop watching American Idol or whatever and pay attention.

Then, jumping ahead a little, Trump came down the Golden Escalator, and while the Establishment media was laughing itself to death, what little was left of the Liberal blogosphere warned that *this* Orange Beast slouching towards the Republican nomination was literally the Republican base of bigots and imbeciles made manifest.  The base of bigots and imbeciles that the Establishment media still categorically refused to believe existed.

This is a snip of what I wrote on June 18, 2015 -- two days after Trump came down the escalator:

As I wrote a few years ago,the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.  

In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.

Instead, the Establishment media insisted that everybody needed to calm down, because it was gonna be Rubio.  And anyway, wasn't Bernie scary too?  Y'know, Both Sides?  

And then Trump was nominated, which troubled the Establishment media a little, but, y'know, economic anxiety and all that.  

And anyway, Hillary Clinton had a lock on it, which suited the Establishment media's agenda perfectly.  They could beat on her like a pinata all they wished, secure in the knowledge that she was definitely going to win, so what did it matter? They could maintain their Both Sides Do It bona fides by inflating trivial Hillary bullshit into a fake scandal big enough to match the actual scandals that were spilling out of the Trump campaign every day.  

ABC chief political analyst Matthew Dowd was all over the media insisting that if you're gonna talk about Trump scandals you have to talk about Hillary's emails in exactly the same way. 

And the pope of Both Sides Do It, Mr. David Brooks transitioned effortlessly from columns insisting that Bernie was as dangerous as Trump to columns insisting that Hillary was as dangerous as Trump.

Nothing mattered because Hillary was absolutely positively gonna win...and then everybody would get what they wanted.  After milking the Trump campaign for every dime and ratings point it could, the Establishment media could look forward to at least four profitable years of "Why won't Hillary lead?" bashing every day.

And Conservative media could dust off all their old Clinton-hating scripts from the 1990s and spruce them up with New Fake Outrages.  

Everyone was going to go home in limousines.

And then the terrible this happened.  The impossible thing happened. Trump won.  And I commend to your attention all the chaotic back-pedaling and fum-fuhing that passed for "journalism" after Trump won as the Establishment media scrambled for an explanation for this impossible thing.

But still, not just any explanation would do.  The Establishment media could not afford to radically update their priors, so whatever bullshit they settled on would have to comport with all the political bullshit they had already sold to the public.   

Their new Big Lie It would have to go right on pretending that the Republican base wasn't really a mob of unhinged bigots and imbeciles.  

The new Big Lie It would have to lay off at least half the blame on the Democrats. That was easy.  Basket of deplorables.  Hillary wasn't likable enough.  Uppity Liberals made Republican voters feel bad and disrespected.  You know the drill.  

The new Big Lie would also have to absolve them of their responsibility as journalists by claiming that no one could possibly have seen this coming.  

And most importantly, the new Big Lie would have to place a strict embargo on considering any events before 2016, or any notion that Trump was actually the culmination of an escalating derangement of the GOP base which had been going on for decades.  A derangement which had been fomented every day by Conservative media and, most damningly, had been been actively ignored and deflected every day by the "Both Sides Do It" Establishment media.

At this moment of seemingly impenetrable darkness, the only people holding a candle and offering a way forward were the last remnants of the Liberal blogosphere.  We were the only ones with a coherent theory of the case: a clear, factual explanation for what had happened, why it had happened, and who was responsible for it.    

But, just as had happened after the collapse of the Bush administration, that was the story the Establishment media emphatically did not want told because that story violated all of the plot points they insisted on.  

For example, Liberal bloggers and podcasters were not going to pretend this all began in 2016.  Nor were we going to pretend that the GOP base were just misunderstood patriots, or that Both Sides were at fault, or that the Establishment media wasn't deeply complicit in the derangement of the Right and the normalization of the Conservative propaganda machine.  

So once again we were shut out.  And once again faced the prospect of trying to continue to shout into the abyss while subsisting on our tips jars and our supportive readers.  And after 20 years of being right and being hated for it, that's kinda hard to take.

But in this brave new world, there were also winners.   

On the Right the wingnut welfare state has never been more lucrative.  Oceans of money are available from crackpot billionaires for almost any enterprise.  

Revenues for Charlie Kirk's Dunning-Kruger fascist project, Turning Point USA, grew from $78,000 in 2013 to $55.8 million in 2021. In 2020, Turning Point Endowment had revenues of $16,576,350.   Last year. for just a one-evening speaking engagement sponsored by the Sangamon County Republican Party, Kirk pulled down more than my wife and I make in six months of blogging and podcasting.

Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire is now a $100M a year business.  

As of this writing, Joe Rogan had amassed a net worth of around $120M.

Steve Bannon's podcast is practically minting money by vomiting plots and conspiracies from his basement.

It's a long, frightening list.

The other winners were a tiny number of recently-former and current-but-disgruntled Republicans who ran afoul of the Trump mob in one way or another and found themselves cut off from the Republican Consultant/Wingnut Welfare money trough that had been sustaining them.

And they were *perfect* for Establishment media prime time for all the reasons that we Liberal were not.

First, they all had long-established relationships with colleagues and friends in the media.  Recently-former Republicans like MSNBC hosts Nicole Wallace and Joe Scarborough have made a cottage industry out of laundering the reputations of their Republican pals and presenting them to "liberal" audiences as the true heroes of the resistance.  

It was a little rocky at first -- for example, there was a hilarious collision of egos and lies in October of 2016 when Joe Scarborough and Bill Kristol each angrily trying to lay the blame for Trump off on the other and some truth accidentally leaked out.  

Joe Scarborough and Bill Kristol -- Cannibals Fighting Over The Place Settings

However eventually everyone got their stories straight and it all smoothed itself out.  And "Bloody" Bill Kristol -- who Rachel Maddow had once spent and entire segment vivisecting as the wrongest and most untrustworthy hack in politics  -- was magically transformed into Hero of the Resistance.

And after Kristol's Weekly Standard was snuffed out during the Trumpist purges, MSNBC was invaluable helpful in helping Kristol and former Wisconsin Hate Radio veteran Charlie Sykes launch their new media corporation, The Bulwark, by putting seemingly every Bulwark employee on the air in constant rotation to talk about their new media company and to tell people that Trump was a bad guy.

Consider how different the media landscape might be today -- how different the answer the "Whither The Liberal Blogosphere" might be -- if corporate media had ever supported the Liberal blogosphere with just a fraction of the resources they poured into things like The Bulwark or The Lincoln Project.

But the story we Liberals were telling was still radioactive to the lords and ladies of corporate media, while these "Never Trumpers" fit the Establishment media's requirements hand-in-glove.  

They too were very much not interested in talking about the long road their party had traveled to arrive at Trump, or the roles they played in paving that road.  They too wanted the rise of Trump to be classified as "inexplicable":  a black swan event that no one could have seen coming.  And at least for the first few years, they too were eager to pretend that Trump didn't really represent the party.  That the loud, crazy meatheads that showed up for his rallies were a tiny fraction of the party, but the vast majority were level-headed, salt-of-the-Earth old-time Conservatives, and however imperfectly, Trump represented the legitimate grievances of this "economically anxious" party base.  

Never Trumpers could also be relied on to make sure to mention the arrogance and elitism of us America-hating, terrorist-loving, Libtard commie scum a big part of the reason for the rise of Trump.

I cannot emphasize enough how fast and unshakably this all became the conventional Beltway wisdom.  Suddenly ridiculous "Trump voter whisperers" like Salina Zito were getting a lot of attention, and safaris by Washington Post and New York Times writers to the unexplored continental interior to speak to the patrons of Ohio diners blossomed into its own genre.

It's like I took a nap in 2014 with Establishment media scolding us America-hating, terrorist-loving, Libtard commie scum for our stridence and immoderate language...and I woke in 2016 to find hard-core Republican soldiers like Charlie Sykes and Steve Schmidt and Michael Steele beginning to colonize MSNBC using exactly the same language to describe Donald Trump that we Libtard commie scum had been using for decades to explain what was happening to the GOP.  

WTF?

Then very much as had with the Iraq War and the Bush Administration, it began to become painfully obvious that the initial Establishment media estimates of the extent of the catastrophe had been grossly underestimated.  It wasn't a tiny fraction of the base that were nuts -- it was virtually all of them.  It wasn't a few Republican senators and representatives who were happily goose-stepping along with Trump towards oblivion, it was virtually all of them.  The few holdouts in Conservative media folded, and freaks like Bannon and Kirk and Shapiro and Owens prospered.  

This wasn't an anomaly or a "fever" that would break.  This was a deeply-rooted existential threat to democracy.  

So, OK, fine.   Now that it was finally clear that the Left was the only group that really had been right about the Right all along at an existential level, could I at last look forward to seeing any of the last, few remnants of the Liberal blogosphere on my teevee telling the truth?  People who were smart and eloquent and weren't afraid of a camera and a microphone?  Maybe The Rude Pundit or Digby or Brad Friedman?  Or any of the crew from Crooks and Liars?  Or Stephanie Miller?  Or Nicole Sandler?  Or my wife?  

Anyone?

Nope.  

Instead I took another quick nap and woke up in 2020 just in time to catch Republican mercenary Rick Wilson's act on CNN.  He had 'em rolling in the aisles mocking the "credulous Boomer rube demo" of the Republican base:

But...but...what about all that scolding that had been heaped on us Liberals for our rude and disrespectful language?  The endless lectures we endured about the legitimate grievances of the Republicans base that we had ignored and thus had driven the decent, yeoman farmers of the GOP base into the arms of Donald Trump?  

Why weren't the Tone Police dragging Rick Wilson off to courtesy jail?

Because Rick Wilson wasn't a minor Liberal blogger living in the middle of Middle America.  Wilson was the co-founder of an outfit called the Lincoln Project which would soon be mired in multiple scandals but which was, at that time, raising tens of millions of dollars from credulous Liberals to create YouTube ads which were basically political PornHub for lefties, but would make no difference whatsoever in the upcoming  elections.  

Wilson was also enjoying a few weeks on The New York Times best seller list, and it was all thanks to the relentless, glowing coverage that cable news was now lavishing on recently-former Republicans who were all setting up media companies which were doing literally nothing more than appropriating 20 years of Liberal blogosphere critiques of the Right, sanding off the serial numbers and passing them off as bold, new insights.  

So, whither the Liberal blogosphere?

It's right here.  It's me, typing this.  Just as I've done almost every day for going on 20 years.  

My wife is in the next room, editing content for Crook & Liars, just as she has done for decades.  

Later today we're going to finish researching, outlining, talking over, editing and recording an episode of our "No Fair Remembering Stuff" podcast, as we have been doing for a year now.  Then my wife will spend an hour or two editing out my goofs and any long, meandering tirades about David Brooks I make have slipped into.

After that, we'll jump straight into researching, outlining, talking over, editing and record an episode of our "Professional Left" podcast, as we have done every week for 13 years now.  Then my wife will spend an hour or two editing that.

After that, God willing and the creek don't rise, we'll rise from our bed out here in the the middle of Middle America and do our best to do it all over again.  

Burn The Lifeboats