I did this graphic twenty years ago. Back in September of 2006. And boy howdy, if you wanted to enjoy the good opinion of the legacy media back in 2006, you did not want to be a Liberal blogger, no sirree. You wanna talk about cancel culture? If you were a Liberal blogger in the early 2000s, you automatically became a media and cultural pariah, permanently caricatured as soft-headed, terrorist-loving, Murrica-hating lunatics.
In the good, gray pages of America's Newspaper of Record, we were compared to Tom Fucking DeLay, as the nation's premier depraved and unhinged danger to democracy.
But the experience of [the malignant Tom] DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people.
Andrew Sullivan warned that we may become "a fifth column". On the now-defunct Chris Matthews Show, a near-hysterical David Brooks cast us as even crazier than the crazies on the Right. Charles Krauthammer invented the term "Bush Derangement Syndrome" just for us.
Charles Krauthammer: Bush Derangement Syndrome is spreading.
Published: Dec 7, 2003
For the unpardonable sin of writing truthfully and accurately about the state of the Republican party and the catastrophic trajectory it was on, by the legacy media and conservative media, we were nearly universally loathed and dismissed. And the more it became clear that we had been right about the Right all along, the more establishment institutions wanted us to shut the fuck up and go away, because we were not telling the story they wanted told.
Thirteen years later, in 2019, I wrote this:
And on that day I will butter my humble bread with schadenfreude as I watch the stunned indignation of my Liberal allies who were damn-fool enough to lend their credibility to their Never Trumper pals in exchange for nothing -- watch as they wake to find that their pals have not only turned on them, but have used the credibility my Liberal allies gave them as patents of nobility to stake a permanent claim in the mainstream media as the new Reasonable Center of American politics.
I shall uncork a fine, vintage "I fucking told you so" when Brian Williams and Joe Scarborough and Don Lemon and on and on and on welcome Rick Wilson and Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes and on and on and on as heroes. Brave truth-tellers who stood out as one of the few, clear, sane voices on either the Left or the Right during these past few crazy years.
Never Trumpers in conversation with each other. From The Bulwark, two days ago:
Sarah Longwell: And I... I think that... I don't know if you're familiar with the phrase people uh will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right.
Oh my yes, Sarah. We Liberal bloggers are very familiar with that phrase. People who have been writing about the catastrophic trajectory of the Republican party since the days when the ink on your Kenyon College diploma was still wet? Since before you joined the Log Cabin Republicans? People who were slandered, mocked, and ignored by the same people who now staff The Bulwark and take victory laps for "being right"?
Yes, we are very, very, very familiar with that phrase.
But please continue.
Longwell: Um, and I also think as Trump demonstrates what a threat he is to liberal democracy in this moment that a lot of the people who said "Kamala? Trump? They'll probably be about the same." are mad at us at how right we were about the threat he presented.
This has become a consistent, predictable feature of every Bulwark podcast.. Or, rather, a key marketing and branding slogan of every Bulwark podcast as they ask for new subscribers. Reminding everyone not only how right they were and how the Right despises them for it -- but let's let David Frum explain...
Frum: Well, The Bulwark is indispensable and brave and your present amazing success should not cause people to forget the incredible chanciness and riskiness of the enterprise at the beginning. And so you all deserve tremendous honor. You made sacrifices. So did your colleagues, by the way, or your counterparts at The Dispatch. Many of them made tremendous individual sacrifices and again it's worked out but no one knew that at the beginning...
From Capital Research, May 14, 2025
The Bulwark: From Nonprofit to Profits
...According to the DDT Institute’s 2021 report to the IRS, the nonprofit sold The Bulwark to Center Enterprises in August 2021 for $100,000. The report also notes the firm is “more than 35%” owned by Sarah Longwell. (The DDT Institute also reported more than $1 million in expenses for The Bulwark for the months preceding the sale.)
The Bulwark website now states that it is owned by “Center Enterprises, Inc.”
The funding model is now advertising and reader support, via the Substack subscription platform, and a lot of content is behind paywalls. The basic membership is $100 annually, with a “Founding” level that provides access to additional content for $300 per year.
As of March 2025, The Bulwark reported nearly 90,000 paid Substack subscribers, which at a minimum of $100 each equates to $9 million annually (Substack takes roughly 10 percent of that.) An additional source of revenue is a YouTube page, “bringing in between $150,000 to $300,000 a month,” according to New York magazine. So that’s an additional $1.8 million or more per year.
“After several years of breaking even,” noted the New York report, “The Bulwark had its first profitable year in 2024.”
It's funny to hear people who were given millions in startup capital by angel investors, limitless promotional hits on cable news amounting to tens of millions in free advertising, op-ed gigs, book deals, speaking engagements and uplift by other A-list podcasters -- all of which is a million times more support than any Liberal bloggers and podcasters were ever offered by the same wealthy individuals and institutions -- talking about what a tremendous sacrifice it was quitting Team Evil 20 years too late.
Every time I hear this kinda talk -- which is a near-constant refrain from every Never Trumper -- I get notes of Henry Hill bitching at the end of Goodfellas --
-- about how far his station in life was reduced once he was forced to get out of the mob and turn on all his old cronies.
Funny old world.
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