Notable & Quotable: The Right – WSJ
Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics in a Jan. 29 Twitter thread:
The move to allow podcasters and bloggers into the Press Corps is part of a broader shift on the Right, that really starts with @elonmusk s acquisition of X. Before that, when conservatives complained about bias and censorship on social media, the left/lib response was well go ahead and build your own social media site. Which everyone knew was very difficult. And then there would be moves to get whoever hosted the new site to refuse to host it and the response would be well build your own hosting platform and so forth.
Musk s acquisition of Twitter/X really looks increasingly like an important turning point in the conservative approach, which in the face of this became well what can you do? It was a realization no, actually we can take these institutions and make them ours.
And what you re increasingly seeing is a frontal assault on the institutions that buttress the left. So in Trump s first term, using a (pretty shaky, imo) interpretation of the 1st Amendment, we established you can t kick a reporter out for his bias. The Right s response now is ok, fine, we ll just flood the press corps with new right-of-center podcasters and bloggers. . . .
You saw trickles of it with academia with moves on tenure in WI, but it s a war in FL. You won t voluntarily diversify your faculty ideologically? We ll do it for you, and in a far more severe way in the other direction. . . . We can t fire unfriendly civil servants? Fine, but we re not going to roll over either. We re going to make life as miserable for them as possible and give them every possible incentive to leave. . . .
via www.wsj.com
I hope somebody is taking notes on all of this. It will make a great book. Or course. Or turning point in US history.