The Media Research Center has always engaged in Heathering of conservatives who stray even slightly from right-wing orthodoxy — and this has expanded to attacking any conservative who voiced even the slightest criticism of Donald Trump’s amorality and criminality. Indeed, criticism of Trump has been strictly forbidden by the MRC, with violators subject to the Heathering treatment. It’s in that vein that we get a Sept. 23 post by Curtis Houck:
In its Sunday night media-focused newsletter, Semafor had a puff piece celebrating the faux Republican (read: progressive) site The Bulwark as “one of the breakout media successes” in 2024 with its personalities “bona fide stars” that liberal strategist and publisher Sarah Longwell declared to represent “a new center”… even though their site has a singular, crazy-ex-girlfriend-level focus on Donald Trump.
The Free Beacon’s Joe Simonson put it perfectly in mocking these tools: “The Bulwark is a rabidly partisan pro-Democratic website that nearly exclusively employs Democrats but wants its readers to believe they’re centrists. This is nothing but a marketing technique to build their liberal readership.”
“This cynical technique is common at so many outlets. You’re not a Democrat. You’re actually not even ideological. But you’re *definitely* not a Republican. You’re a reasonable person, right? It just so happens that Democrats are the party for reasonable people — forever,” he added.
But neither Simonson nor Houck provided no evidence to back up the claim that nearly every Bulwark employee is a registered Democrat — which would seem to be a major hole in their logic — and the Semafor article makes no similar claim. Still, Houck is wildly angry that the Bulwark has attracted attention outside the right-wing bubble:
Much of Max Tani’s piece centered on its explosion on YouTube, led by Tim Miller, “the floppy-haired, open-collared face of Never Trump outlet The Bulwark” who, much to his chagrin, has realized the key for his videos have to include a thumbnail with him “making the MrBeast face, the wide-eyed, open-mouthed smile.”
Miller, a darling of MSNBC for snarky takes trashing Republicians and espousing support for Democrats seemingly from president on down to township supervisor, has pulled The Bulwark’s YouTube from “50,000 YouTube subscribers last September” to “631,000 as of Saturday afternoon and counting.”
Tani sort of gave away the game by acknowledging their growth has come “in the last two months” and “[s]ince President Biden dropped out of the race” with one viral video having this comical title: “Kamala’s MOST POWERFUL AD So Far! Everyone Needs to See!”
[…]“The surge has turned The Bulwark from an anti-Trump refuge into a promising media business,” he boasted, adding Longwell’s prediction the publication could “break even this year.”
The former Daily Beast reporter claimed “The Bulwark is riding two converging trends” with one being a “tectonic realignment that’s been happening in US politics, and serves as a kind of media escort from former Republicans on their way to support for Democratic candidates.”
That’s putting it mildly.
Houck then perused the Bulwark’s various newsletters and found too much trump criticism: “25 newsletters and maybe two with headlines that, on the surface, weren’t anti-Trump or anti-Republican. How is this any different from, say, The Atlantic, The New Republic, or Slate?” Houck didn’t explain why criticism of Trump is forbidden and why people and organizations must be punished for doing so or why any criticism of Trump, no matter how mild, disqualifies one from being a Republican. It’s almost as if they’re afraid of their fellow right-wingers coming to independent conclusions about Trump’a amorality and criminality, so they must keep up a constant feed of pro-Trump propaganda.
As far as the Bulwark’s purported “singular, crazy-ex-girlfriend-level focus on Donald Trump,” does that really compare to the MRC’s singular, crazy-ex-girlfriend-level focus on, say, Brian Stelter?