For the past 6 years, I & a few other journalists have been trying to get the mainstream press and political elites realize the major danger posed by the radical right. Unfortunately, moderate and liberal elites deluded themselves into thinking that conservatism wasn't a cult.

Conservatives love to complain that everyone is against them: professors, journalists, intelligence officers, social media companies, and so on.

I used to as well until I considered that maybe having problems with everyone else isn't their fault, it's yours.

I was reminded of that realization when I read this important NYT article about how Facebook keeps weakening news source quality controls because conservative content gets disproportionately effected by them.

Unfortunately, this great piece of reporting by @MikeIsaac, @sheeraf, & @kevinroose didn't mention the greatest challenge in AI news signal processing: Humans can barely separate conservative & far-right content. Which means computers can't either.

This techno-semiotic conundrum originates from the fact that in the US, because there is no moderate conservative tradition, the gravitational center of the right is far removed from the political center.

More plainly, this means that almost all the energy and organizing on the right exists on the far right.

This is not the case on the US left where there is a strong moderate tradition capable of organization and force projection. Ask Bernie Sanders if you disbelieve.

As a former conservative activist and journalist, it has been so frustrating to see my former compatriots spreading wild and unchecked claims about "voter fraud." @jacknicas of the NYT took a deep look at claims of "dead" people in Michigan voting. Link in next tweet.

While examining claims made by right-wing activists who are not credible individuals is a thankless task which elite media editors despise, this is vital and important work in this age of fake news. Here's the link:

As the co-creator of NewsBusters, the most prominent anti-media website, I was part of a decades-long tradition of complaining about media elites being "unfair" to conservative views. There is still much to that argument, but eventually I saw that I was missing context.

What I did not realize until I began expanding my work into creating actual media and reporting institutions such as the Washington Examiner (I was the founding online editor) was that U.S. conservatives do not understand the purpose of journalism.

This became evident to me as I saw that conservative-dominated media outlets were MUCH more biased than outlets run by liberals. The latter had flaws that arose from a lack of diversities (note plural) but they operated mostly in good faith. That's not how the former operated.

Thread: Conservative Policy and the Trump Presidency

On the last full day of the Trump administration, I think it's useful to examine why he accomplished so little legislatively. TLDR version: American conservatism has almost no policy program.

The most important thing to know about conservative politicking is that people do not vote FOR Republicans, they vote AGAINST Democrats.

The GOP is dominated by a minority of far-right activists and wealthy donors who have views that their own voters don't support.

American conservatism is premised on the twin ideas that the New Deal & Great Society were immoral and that God himself created America and that we should honor this creation by establishing full Christian supremacism in which LGBT people, atheists, and Muslims have fewer rights.

Because God created America, this means that conservatives believe in essentially no domestic policy of any kind. If it wasn't literally in the Constitution, then the feds shouldn't be doing it is their opinion.

This is not, however, how things used to be in the GOP.

For much of its history, American conservatism was a sort of intellectual parasite on the Republican party which was run by a mix of moderates and liberals. They actually had domestic policies. Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon had many policies that actually helped America.

Thread: Rush Limbaugh and the conservative Id

On the day of his passing, it's worth doing a brief retrospective on how Rush Limbaugh's personal life almost perfectly paralleled American conservatism...

One thing that's not commonly known about Rush Limbaugh is that he began his career in sports, doing sales for the Kansas City Royals baseball team. That's significant because much of the tribalism and dumbed-down rhetoric in American TV news directly came from sports media.

Television journalism in its earliest days was a fantastic product with real investigative reporting, no filibustering live interviews, and no soundbites. This began changing in the 1970s when ABC Sports president Roone Arledge was put in charge of ABC News.

Limbaugh tried to be a conventional FM deejay but kept getting fired because his personality was too abrasive. After working with the Royals, he began a small political talk show for a Sacremento station. The Reagan repeal of the Fairness Doctrine made his show possible.

Rush Limbaugh's Sacramento show started in 1984 (he replaced Morton Downey Jr) and after 5 years, he was picked up by ABC Radio which was trying to copy some of the sensationalism that ABC News television had started. It was a perfect fit.

If journalism and the press are "the first draft of history," as many reporters and media like to say, then many more of them and their organizations need to have the temerity, intellectual honesty, and integrity to call out what happened in Washington, DC and simultaneously...

...in other places across the country on January 6, 2021, exactly what it was, coordinated domestic terrorist attack, insurrection, and rebellion. There is a constitutional break down in progress, and in some ways it seems that journalism is part of the constitutional crisis.

With all of the reportation around the Black Lives Matters marches and the violence and vandalism that was attempted to be seeded, the news media had absolutely no hesitation in reporting out the incidences while leaving plenty of space for doubt...

...even when it was crystal clear that peaceful marchers had nothing to do with the negative incidents. Sabotage was the specific goal, and the saboteurs were Proudboys and other racist, anti-government, anti-democratic elements aligned with Trump. But equivocating analysis.

...and false equivalency in reporting persists. Thus, unhelpful even harmful dialogue, discussion and propaganda has been permitted to persist to color the goals and objectives of the marchers, unfairly sway public opinion, and stunt some of the progress of that movement.

A THREAD about the history of the UK press & journalism, focusing on how the 'radical press' transformed Britain.

I believe we're experiencing something similar now, with outlets like @BylineTimes, @DoubleDownNews & many others challenging the dominant free-market narrative.

A bit of context.

The Guttenberg print press, invented in 1440, changed everything.

Ordinary people now had access to information, ideas & narratives from all sorts of perspectives, thus breaking the stranglehold on the elite's domination.

Gradually at first, there was a profound shift from oral/visual culture toward print culture – kickstart age of reason, & it was transformative, giving birth to the Renaissance & the Enlightenment, & in the17th century gave rise to early #journalism.

People gained access to local, regional, national & international self-expression.

Very early journalism focused on self-improvement, law, medicine, events & entertainment.

In 1550, only 15% of adult population can read; by 1650, nearly 50% of the adult population read.

Early on, more men than women are literate, more upper class than lower, and it takes takes until 1850 for 75% of the British population to read & write.

And this gives rise to the birth of Journalism as we recognise it today.

@StefSimanowitz wrote about Eric in 2013. Here Eric speaks about standing up for journalist

Stefan Simanowitz on Twitter on 19.3.13...thread
In 2003, as Baghdad shuddered under the onslaught that was operation "shock and awe", 75yrold Eric Levy from Camden was huddled with a dozen other peace campaigners in an air raid shelter at Dura oil refinery in southern Baghdad./

The group found themselves in Iraq at the time of the Allied invasion after travelling there from London by double-decker bus. They called themselves the "human shields" and set off with the intention of protecting Iraqi civilians from Allied bombs.

If you're over 20, or were a precociously politically aware five-year-old in 2003, you might remember the human shields leaving for Iraq in a frenzy of media coverage. “The idea behind the movement was to use the racist way in which Western lives are valued /

more than Iraqi lives to either stop the invasion or – failing that – protect crucial civilian infrastructure sites,” Levy recalls ten years on. “We may not have achieved the first objective, but none of the sites where the shields were staying were bombed.”/