Catching Up With NeverTrump

Bill Kristol pushes the Democrat Media lie that the conservatives leaked the Dobbs draft opinion so that they could be terrorized by antifa luantics:

@BillKristol ·

It's become pretty clear the leaks about internal Court deliberations (if not the draft opinion itself) are from the Thomas-Alito camp, and are designed to weaken the Chief Justice and intimidate any of the newer justices from joining him for fear of seeming weak or unprincipled.

Like the other NeverTrump grifters, Jen Rubin used to pretend to be opposed to abortion, as in this 2013 tweet, celebrating Americans' cooling on abortion:

Jennifer Rubin
@JRubinBlogger

Over 14,000 late term abortions per year, for decades... And finally Americans are having second thoughts http://washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/07/25/abortion-polling/

Or this 2012 one:

Jennifer Rubin @JRubinBlogger Replying to @RichardGrenell

is Obama still for abortion in demand up to the moment of birth, at tax payers expense?

Like AllahPundit, she's gained all sorts of fans on the hard left. Like the Senate's stupidest man (man, I said; I'm aware of Maizie Hironu and the one from New York and the one from Washington) Sheldon Whitehouse:

Professional Size Queen Tom Nichols believes that Joe Biden is ignoring the Twitter Left, whereas the rest of the world sees that Joe Biden's handlers take their daily dictation from the Twitter Left:

From Matt Taibbi had some thoughts about Max Boot a couple of weeks ago, and Max Boot being one of the few absolute bootlickers in the corporate media willing to -- nay, eager to -- say that it's time to repeal the First Amendment.

Many detractors went the [Ellen] Pao route, suddenly getting religious about concentrated wealth having control over the public discourse. In a world that had not yet gone completely nuts, that is probably where the outrage campaign would have ended, since the oligarchical control issue could at least be a legitimate one, if printed in a newspaper not owned by Jeff Bezos.

However, they didn't stop there. Media figures everywhere are openly complaining that they dislike the Musk move because they're terrified he will censor people less. Bullet-headed neoconservative fussbudget Max Boot was among the most emphatic in expressing his fear of a less-censored world:

@MaxBoot Max Boot @MaxBoot

I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter. He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.
April 14th 2022

In every newsroom I've ever been around, there's always one sad hack who's hated by other reporters but hangs on to a job because he whispers things to management and is good at writing pro-war editorials or fawning profiles of Ari Fleischer or Idi Amin or other such distasteful media tasks. Even that person would never have been willing to publicly say something as gross as, "For democracy to survive, it needs more censorship"! A professional journalist who opposed free speech was not long ago considered a logical impossibility, because the whole idea of a free press depended upon the absolute right to be an unpopular pain in the ass.

Things are different now, of course, because the bulk of journalists no longer see themselves as outsiders who challenge official pieties, but rather as people who live inside the rope-lines and defend those pieties. I'm guessing this latest news is arousing special horror because the current version of Twitter is the professional journalist's idea of Utopia: a place where Donald Trump doesn't exist, everyone with unorthodox thoughts is warning-labeled ("age-restricted" content seems to be a popular recent scam), and the Current Thing is constantly hyped to the moronic max. The site used to be fun, funny, and a great tool for exchanging information. Now it feels like what the world would be if the eight most vile people in Brooklyn were put in charge of all human life, a giant, hyper-pretentious Thought-Starbucks.

My blue-checked friends in media worked very hard to create this thriving intellectual paradise, so of course they're devastated to imagine that a single rich person could even try to walk in and upend the project. Couldn't Musk just leave Twitter in the hands of responsible, speech-protecting shareholders like Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal?

posted by Ace at 04:18 PM

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