Now that man was legend.

The first time I heard Rush was probably 1992. I was a teenager, and on a long road trip with my dad. There were radio stations we didn’t get at home, and there was some guy talking politics, only it was funny and entertaining. We enjoyed it and talked about those topics the rest of the ride. (Me and my dad bonded over very few things, so that memory kind of hit me hard yesterday).

After I moved to Utah, Rush was on the radio. I remember getting one of his books from the Delta Utah library and reading it on my breaks at the crappy factory job I was working. That’s 29 years I’ve been listening or reading Rush off and on. When I told my wife he’d died, she got choked up. She’d been a fan since she lived in California as a teenager and he’d had a TV show.

There are a lot of haters out there saying vile things today. But they’re idiots with sad pathetic lives looking for validation from their tribe. What would Rush do about their hate? Use them as a teachable moment and then mock them in an amusing way for the audience. There’s a valuable lesson there for all of us.

The man was brilliant and could articulate things in a way that most people simply can’t. He had that gift where he could take the things that many people were feeling but couldn’t put into words, and then give them a voice. That’s a rare talent. Some might even say on loan from God.

Rest in peace, Mr. Limbaugh.

Oh man. I laughed my ass off when the notification popped up. I’ve been almost entirely off Facebook for a month. I went back on to signal boost because of the cancel culture attack on Baen. I lasted less than 24 hours before catching a 30 day ban for “bullying.”

Damned right. My only regret is that I didn’t bully them harder while I had the chance.

I’m glad though. Facebook is soul sucking garbage. I’m telling you guys, after going cold turkey for a month and then jumping back into the thick of something controversial, the nastiness of that place becomes abundantly clear. I checked the threads of people sharing my blog post, and that place is the perfect environment for snide morons to drive by and guilt shame their “friends”. There’s no meat to what they say. It’s just vapid sound-byte level hot takes from low information dipshits designed to cow people into line. (and these “friends” are usually meaningless nobodies who would be safely ignored in your real life, but people grant them importance online). Facebook is designed to make you put up with their shit, and when you fight back they report you. I ended up in a dozen separate arguments in one afternoon. It was only a matter of time before one of them snitched me out to the bots.

Groovy. Now I’ve got to get back to work. Unlike the wannabes and has-beens I fight with I’ve actually got lots of fans waiting to read my books.

EDIT: I’ve added the responses from Toni Weisskopf, David Weber, and Eric Flint at the end.

Baen Books is a sci-fi/fantasy publishing house that has been around since the early 1980s. They’ve published thousands of titles from hundreds of authors. Baen is notable in our current time period because it is one of the only traditional publishers who does not bend the knee to the woke mob. Our publisher, Toni Weisskopf, truly believes in free speech. Baen’s Bar is one of the oldest forums on the internet. It’s a place for authors and fans to hang out and talk. Today Toni is shutting down the Bar in order to stave off a Parler style cancel culture attack against Baen’s service providers.

Yesterday some nobody, wannabe writer, social justice twit released a hit piece “expose” about how posters on Baen’s Bar were fomenting insurrection or some such nonsense. It was the usual bullshit hit piece (the sad part is, by saying the usual, half the country immediately knows exactly what I’m talking about). It was lots of pearl clutching over regular people not toeing their arbitrary political lines, misquotes, errors, quotes taken out of context, and some flat out lies.

However, this was clearly part of a coordinated attack in order to materially harm our business, because immediately after the hit piece was released complaints were filed with the various internet companies Baen uses for services to pressure them into kicking us off the internet. This hit piece was presented as “evidence”. Without going into details the companies then contacted Baen about these “serious allegations” so last night Baen temporarily took down the Bar forum to protect the rest of the company from being deplatformed.

I’m not going to talk about the moronic loser or go through all the nonsense in his ridiculous hit piece. Other people are going through it now and carefully cataloging his bullshit. In typical leftist fashion he’s already pretending to be the victim and claiming he’s getting death threats. Maybe he can get in touch with Anita Sarkesian and Arthur Chu for tips.

However, lying hit pieces from lefty activists aren’t anything new. We’re used to those. The real issue here is the complaints to the internet companies so they’ll deplatform anyone who doesn’t fall in line. The woke left saw what Big Tech did to Parler and they learned from it. This is a new weapon in their arsenal to beat America over the head with. The nail that sticks up must be hammered down.

Toni Weisskopf is a strong believer in free speech. She publishes books by republicans, libertarians, democrats, and socialists, it doesn’t matter what we believe as long as we entertain our readers. Toni doesn’t tell us what we can or can’t speak about. She is a rarity in the bland oatmeal world of traditional publishing. Most of the publishing world adheres to a rigid left-wing monoculture, and those who work there who don’t believe that way have to keep their heads down or face repercussions. Professionally she is a brilliant editor, personally, she’s a single mom with a special-needs daughter, her family were Jews who escaped the Soviets, her great-uncle was THE Weisskopf on the Manhattan Project, and she’s my friend.

But of course the commenters over at the hit piece and other cesspools are already plotting about how they’re going to get her banned from everything in society for hosting all this dangerous hate speech.

I’ve tried to warn people about the growing danger of Cancel Culture for years. Too many people who are nominally on my right side of the political divide are still debating philosophy and pontificating about moral equivalence things like the Red Scare from decades ago, while right now the left is actively mastering how to weaponize technology in order to crush the free exchange of ideas. You need to wake up and catch up.

The Bar isn’t a hotbed of extremism. It’s not a hotbed of anything. It’s an old forum that was mostly kept around because of tradition. It was created at the dawn of internet forums. I haven’t used it in years (I had already built up my online presence elsewhere when I started writing for them). But that isn’t the point. Anything that can be a target, will eventually be a target. They’re coming for your business next.

If you would like to help out, please spread the word. Go buy some Baen Books and help support publishers who don’t give in to bullies. Everyone needs to stand up to these dirtbags.

EDIT: Here is Toni’s official response:

To Whom It May Concern:

What is it we do at Baen Books? We publish books at the heart of science fiction and fantasy.

Science fiction has traditionally been a unique kind of intellectual pleasure, a process of glorious intercommunication and inspiration, with ideas flowing from scientist and engineer to writer and artist, to reader and viewer, back and forth, in a delightful mélange of shared thoughts, wild speculation, cautionary tales, reality checks, and the sheer fun of playing with boundaries and ideas. It is not for everyone. But those who enjoy it, take great pleasure in the dialogue.

When the modern form of SF began, with Hugo Gernsback and the other pulp magazines of the early 20th century, the publishers fostered that interaction through letter columns in the magazines and by encouraging science fiction readers to organize in clubs and meet in conventions. Baen Books continued that tradition with Baen’s Bar, a kind of virtual convention and on-line conversation that has been around in some form for over 20 years.

The moderators are volunteers. The readers, editors, and writers post and interact on the Bar at their own desire. Some conversations have been gone over so many times, they’ve been retired as simply too boring to contemplate again. Sometimes the rhetoric can get heated. We do not endorse the publication of unlawful speech. We have received no complaints about the content of the Bar from its users.

That said, it has come to our attention that allegations about the Bar have been made elsewhere. We take these allegations seriously, and consequently have put the Bar on hiatus while we investigate. But we will not commit censorship of lawful speech.

It is not Baen Books’ policy to police the opinions of its readers, its authors, its artists, its editors, or indeed anyone else. This applies to posts at the Bar, or on social media, on their own websites, or indeed anywhere else. On the Bar, the publisher does not select what is allowed to be posted, and does not hijack an individual’s messages for their own purposes. Similarly, the posts do not represent the publisher’s opinion, except in a deep belief that free speech is worthy in and of itself.

Most sincerely,
Toni Weisskopf
Publisher

EDIT 2: And here is what bestselling author David Weber had to say about this idiotic hit piece. Just like I said above. “The usual.” David is probably our most famous author currently working and a lot more of a statesman than I am.

So, Jason Sanford thinks that Baen’s Bar, the online discussion forum that Baen Books has maintained for its readers for around twenty years, is “Being Used to Advocate for Political Violence,” to quote the title of his self-righteous, biased, and intellectually dishonest hit piece.

Which, in case you haven’t already deduced this, is in my opinion — I realize I am sometimes guilty of a certain lack of clarity — a pile of horse shit.

I haven’t been on the Bar regularly in quite some time, and when I have been there in the last few years, I’ve tended to lurk rather than posting myself. Mostly, that’s because I do not have the time to engage with readers there the way that I would if I didn’t just lurk. There’s way too much conversation back and forth, too many fascinating rabbit holes to dive down, too many “oooooh, shiny!” moments. And there is enough online interconnectivity — now, as opposed to when Jim Baen demonstrated his forward thinking yet again by creating the Bar — that I have manifold other ways to reach people.

But there is no way in hell that the Barflies, as they are affectionately known, are advocating for political violence. Opinions are expressed, especially in the politics forum, and tempers are running high on both sides of our current political divide, so there’s a certain degree of venting. And there are a surprising number of historians, who can be relied upon to summon up historical examples to back their points. And there are heaps of independent thinkers, who aren’t going to hew to any particular party’s line and can be trusted to step upon any sore political toes in the vicinity. And there are quite a lot of veterans, who know what violence is REALLY like — unlike the vast majority of people who are currently hyperventilating about it in this country — which means the LAST THING they would want would be to instigate violence that is anything except defensive.

But once upon a time, back when there was genuine free speech in this country, one was ALLOWED to vent, to express opinions, to worry publicly about current political trends WHOEVER YOU WERE. You didn’t have to be on the “right side” of some self-appointed Guardian of Public Morality™ or the Currently Correct Way to Think.™ All you needed to be was an American citizen exercising your right to state an opinion. There are times when I regret closing in on 69 as opposed to 19 at this particular time in history for reasons that have nothing to do with age, because I remember how it’s SUPPOSED to work. I remember how we were SUPPOSED to have the right to disagree with one another without having hateful labels — Libtard, Commie, White Supremacist, Racist, Nazi, Whatever-The-Fuck-I-Hate-Worst — applied to us by people who simply don’t want to hear what we have to say and make the monumentally arrogant assumption that they KNOW what we are REALLY thinking, no matter what we SAY. Or what we actually DO, for that matter. And if we don’t prove that we Agree with Them™ by worshiping — publicly — at THEIR altar of who must be canceled or silenced, we must be evil, corrupt, VILE human beings out to overthrow All That Is Right and True™. I wish that my kids, who are CURRENTLY 19, would be in a position to remember the same “how it’s supposed to be” that I do, but how likely is that, really, in a world where politically motivated hit jobs like this have become the norm?

Baen Books is frequently characterized as a “right wing publisher.” That’s as stupid as the notion that the Barflies are plotting a violent coup. Baen Books doesn’t care what the political orientation of its writers — or their fiction — may be as long as the stories are good, as long as they engage and entertain the reader, and as long as there is a market for them. If Baen has a deep bench of conservative readers, that’s because so many other publishers are avoiding the kinds of stories they want to read and Baen is filling that void. Well, that of the fact that Baen Books tries really hard to publish GOOD stories that reasonably attract readers on their merits, as well. But Baen publishes conservatives, libertarians, socialists, and everything in between.

That doesn’t mean that Toni Weiskopf, as an individual, doesn’t have political views or that she — personally, not as an editor and publisher — doesn’t prefer some “flavors” of stories over others. But Toni is also a businesswoman, and she understands that her job as a businesswoman is to provide the best quality stories to ANYONE who likes a good SF/fantasy story, regardless of political orientations. And she understands — unlike some people — that that means publishing stories and allowing opinions to which some people might take exception. Well, as far as I’m concerned, anyone is entitled to take exception to anything he or she chooses to take exception to. That doesn’t give him or her the right to cherry pick, use partial quotes, take things out of context, or resort to all the other filthy, underhanded, unscrupulous, contemptible tactics people who produce hit jobs like this routinely reach for.

I know Baen Books. I know Toni Weiskopf. I’ve known her for 33 years, when she was barely old enough to drink. I knew Jim Baen. I knew his philosophy. I know his legacy, and the way both that philosophy and that legacy continue in the publishing house that he founded. And because I know all of that, I know one other thing, as well —Baen Books is not allowing the Bar to advocate for violence. The notion would be laughable, if it were not so vile, so politically motivated, and so contemptibly calculated to “deplatform” a publisher of whom the moral pygmy behind the hit piece disapproves.

EDIT: And here is another response, from way over on the opposite side of the political spectrum, bestselling author Eric Flint, who also recognizes this hit piece smear for what it is. He goes into a lot of details about just how slimy it is.

https://ericflint.net/information/controversy-about-baens-bar/

I disagree with Eric A LOT. (heck, even in this one, the Sad Puppies didn’t just collect quotes from nobodies, because we also got lots of big editors, and authors up to GRRM, saying stuff that validated my claims! ) but this is an honest stand up piece (and too long to cut and paste here, so go read it) and Eric goes into a lot of detail about just how sleazy and dishonest the “investigator” is.

This was fun. I talked a little about my latest book, some writing philosophy, and how artists can deal with cancel culture.

https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/larry-correia-gun-runner-cancel-culture/

Sorry. My title is misleading. The mafia has more honor and dignity than the American news media.

Darn it. I have a book deadline. I should be working on that instead. Only Mike sent me this article last night telling me that it was so goofy I’d have to fisk it. And damn it, he was right. This is one of the most pretentious articles I’ve ever read. I’m actually in awe of what a piece of shit this guy is. As usual the original is in italics and my response is in bold.

It’s from here: https://archive.is/vrFAY#selection-361.0-683.204

Washington Post public editor: the powerful have realized they don’t need the Post

Correction. Nobody needs the Post.

By Hamilton Nolan

OCTOBER 20, 2020

I’m actually bummed I missed this back in October, but at the time I was too busy writing about things like Crackhead McStripperbang (aka Hunter Biden) being a complete piece of shit taking massive bribes from Communist China, because illustrious news publications like the Washington Post weren’t covering that story for baffling and inexplicable reasons.

THIS MONTH we learned that Tesla, a $400 billion public company run by one of the richest people in the world, has done away with its media relations department—effectively formalizing an informal policy of ignoring reporters.

Now marvel as this reporter provides a perfect illustration of why everyone should follow Elon Musk’s lead in ignoring reporters.

Though we should all be grateful for the chance to hear less about Tesla,

Behold his Power Snark!

 we should also recognize this for what it is: one more glaring data point showing that powerful people no longer think they need the mainstream press,

It isn’t just the rich and powerful. Everybody should ignore you lying ass bastards.

especially critical and ethical outlets like the Washington Post. 

Hahahahahhahhaahhahahahaaaa
ahaahaha aahahahhhaaa
hhahaahaaa aa
aaaaaa
snort.
Oh shit.  Wait. He’s serious?

This presents a problem.

For you.

 Because the mainstream press still needs powerful people—quite literally, in the case of the Post, as it’s owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, who is no fonder of difficult stories about his companies than any other billionaire.

Our wannabe Bond villain boss is better than yours! (sorta like how vote by mail is great for you peasants, but not secure enough for Amazon!)

We are living through a historic, technology-fueled shift in the balance of power between the media and its subjects.

Personally, I prefer the word citizen.  

The subjects are winning.

Good. Because you guys suck at your job.  You deserve to fail.

The internet in general—and social media platforms in particular—have destroyed one of the media’s most important sources of power: being the only place that could offer access to an audience.

Insert Jeremy Clarkson “Oh no.. anyways” meme here, because this entire article is some tone-deaf reporter lamenting the fact that reporters no longer hold an absolute monopoly on information, even though it’s their own damned fault that nobody trusts them anymore.

 When Musk can say whatever he wants to 40 million Twitter followers at any time with no filter, it is little surprise that he does not feel compelled to listen to unpleasant questions from some reporter who wants to know why he busts unions and wildly accuses people of pedophilia. 

Jeff Bezos’ union busting is fine however, and the accusations of pedophilia don’t seem so wild when they keep coming true… Hmmm… How much glowing praise did the WaPo heap on the “principled conservatives” at the Lincoln Project back when they were useful for getting democrats elected? Oh wait, that was before the election. NOW they’re pedophiles!

As journalists, we all view this as a horrifying assault on the public’s right to know

-whatever we want them to

and on our own status as brave defenders of the public good.

This motherfucker is a self-licking ice cream cone.

There’s a lot of lies packed into that one line. Swap out “public good” for “DNC good”. Their defense is painfully lopsided in that it only protects the left. And the only time they’re brave is when they’re crushing the little guy. Oh look, that teenager smiled wrong. We’d better ruin his life.

And that is all true, for what it’s worth.

The words of a liar ain’t worth shit.

But this is about power.

Indeed. Except you are missing the point as to why yours is waning.

We need to take some back, lest the rich and powerful run away from one of the last forces restraining them. 

That ship done sailed. The media is only powerful as long as the public trusts them. You blew that, and you have no one to blame but yourselves. The rich and powerful on the left already get a pass from you anyway. At most you might give them some mild chiding, but then you’re back to running interference for them.

Because journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power.

That’s your problem right there. It should be about telling the TRUTH. You gave up being journalists to become cheerleaders for one group of political elites. You don’t tell the truth, you spin whatever narrative the cabal of connected want you to. And as your use to the elite tapers off, they are happy for you to fade into irrelevance and obscurity. Reap your fucking whirlwind.

It is about bringing important people to heel, on behalf of the public.

Quit lying. The only “important people’ you bring to heel are the ones your masters want you to. You do nothing but make excuses for the important people on your side, no matter how egregious their sins. You are attack dogs for the left. Nothing more. Don’t try and cloak your bully bullshit in fake righteousness.

Politicians and officials and business leaders don’t want to talk to the press, subjecting themselves to the possibility of being made to look bad; they do it because they have always felt they had no choice.

Because you guys don’t tell the truth. You twist reality to suit your whims.  You’re the masters of “so what you are saying is (insert complete nonsense here)” and fucking over whoever you want with near total impunity.  You’re utterly fucking useless and getting worse at an accelerating rate. Just when America thinks you can’t get any lower, you keep digging.

I do however love how you keep saying “politicians” like we’re gullible enough to think that you treat them all the same. The only democrats you bring the heat on are the ones who have strayed from the narrative and need to be punished, or the ones who have used up their usefulness who can be safely tossed under the bus. The rest of the democrats you cover for the most flagrant crimes so hard it would make Joseph Goebbels blush.

Not that the republicans don’t suck too, but we’ve all seen how you only praise them when they’re convenient to your goals, but then trash them when they’re not. Like squishy Mitt Romney is a principled statesman when he’s screwing over his fellow republicans, but he was a woman and dog hating maniac who was gonna put us all back in chains right before that. And the problem is that republicans like that are gullible enough to keep kissing your ass in the hopes that the media will say nice things about them.  

They felt that way because papers like the Post could offer the carrot of great exposure to those who needed it, but also, always, the stick of negative coverage to those who spurned it.

So the Post is basically a mafia guy standing in your business saying “it’s a real nice place you’ve got here, it’d be a real shame if something bad were to happen to it”. And then if you don’t pay your protection, they trash your place. Accurate.

There is nothing devious or ignoble about this; a powerful press, for all its flaws, is good for democracy, and tends to promote equality by holding the big shots in check.

That assumes you are doing your actual job and telling the public the truth. Instead, you do the opposite. Your propaganda isn’t helping democracy, it’s destroying it. Or as would be revealed a few months after this mealy-mouthed article was written, they were “fortifying” democracy.

The denial of “devious” is interesting, because you fucks are like the dictionary definition. You’re slanted and biased on your best day. On your worst you’re outright liars. You hammer some points while ignoring the ones that make your chosen look bad. And in an article talking about how it sucks you don’t get to bully as many people as you used to, you’ve got the fucking audacity to say that it’s not “devious”?

Anyone who has ever negotiated to land a contentious interview with a famous person knows that you only get those interviews when your subject fears what will happen if they don’t do the interview.

I can confirm this is true, and I’m only a little bit famous. When I’ve done interviews with the mainstream lefty media about a controversial subject it was only because I knew if I didn’t they’d just publish whatever bullshit they felt like. I felt like I needed to get my side out there. So then I’d do an hour-long interview so that they could still get everything ass backwards, quote one sentence from me and ten from my detractors parroting whatever the agreed upon lefty narrative was. So that was fucking useful.

Today, that fear is disappearing.

Fantastic. Only bullies want people to live in fear. You corrupt losers shouldn’t be feared, you should be mocked. Most of you are shit tier writers and your hot takes are vapid nonsense. The sooner you end up bankrupt and unemployed the sooner your rotting institutions can be replaced by actual journalists.

We all need to figure out what to do about that. 

Maybe you could try telling the truth? Maybe you could investigate and expose issues regardless of political affiliation? Maybe if you did this for a while you could earn the public’s trust, and then you would actually matter again.

Naw. That sounds like work.

Trump’s incredible accumulation of power in the face of countless well-documented scandal stories is a proof of concept that will surely be used by smarter characters in the future.

Here’s a perfect example and our intrepid reporter is too dense or dishonest to grasp. All the public hears for years is Trump, Trump, Trump, even though while he wrote this there was a scandal story involving Joe Biden accumulating piles of bribe money through his family. Places like WaPo actively squashed the story, while BigTech labeled everything about it Fake News and kicked independent journalists off the internet. A couple of months later when it could no longer sway an election it magically turned into Real News, but our remarkably incurious mainstream reporters are happy to let it languish in obscurity.  

The Washington Post and its competitors—the elite level of national news,

Lol

the places that have traditionally set the agenda—

The fact you think that’s a good thing is telling. Your job is to report. Not to “set agendas”.

are the most vulnerable to this shift.

That’s because you’re only valuable if the public trusts you. But in your obvious public fellating of the DNC you threw that away. You’re only useful to the cabal of elitists when you can produce results. As you slide into irrelevance they’ll just use Big Tech instead, and you have no one to blame but yourself.

They are the relatively small portion of the media that is able to command both access and editorial independence.

Seeing the boot licking WaPo bark about “independence” while actual independent journalists routinely get deplatformed and demonetized is amusing. You can tell what they fear by who they try to silence.  

Politicians feel that they must deal with the Post, but the Post still feels like it can say what it wants, critical or otherwise.

We all know that’s a lie. I feel like I’m getting repetitive in my Fisking here, but that’s because this article is basically the reporter whining about the same points over and over again.

That state of affairs, which has been taken for granted for decades, is evaporating. 

You saying that actually gives me a little bit of hope for America. You took it for granted. The public got wise to your scam. You coasted on the rep of your predecessors, thinking that you could milk that goodwill while you blatantly covered for your friends. Except the well is dry, asshole.

Donald Trump, unfortunately, looms large in this.

That’s because he lives rent free in your heads.

His imperviousness to the usual blows from the press was evident five years ago.

The single best thing Trump did was show half the country that the only way to deal with you dishonest twerps is to say damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. We all know that you’re just going to lie and make shit up no matter what, so we might as well just get it over with. If nobody believes you, why should we care what you say about us?

Now, insert obligatory Orange Man Bad story here:

(One of my colleagues at Gawker got so exasperated with Ted Cruz’s accusation that the media was sitting on secret Trump scandals during the Republican primary that, in 2016, he wrote a story listing the many scandalous Trump stories we had already published—to no effect—with the headline, “Ted Cruz, Please Help Us, We Have No Idea How to Stop Donald Trump.”) It turns out that being utterly shameless and muttering the words “Fake News” nonstop, while having an entire right-wing media ecosystem amplify your message, really works. Trump himself, a pure creature of the New York tabloids, is too vain and dumb to realize that he could probably ignore the normal elite press altogether. But his incredible accumulation of power in the face of countless well-documented scandal stories in the Post and the New York Times and elsewhere—stories that would have brought down earlier presidents—is a proof of concept that will surely be used by smarter characters in the future. 

I’m pretty sure this editor stuck that utterly pointless and boring story in because they have a word count requirement of Orange Man Bad for every single thing they’ve written for the last four years. These goofy bastards still haven’t realized that Trump isn’t the disease, he was a symptom.

Our intrepid reporter also left out the part about how the media gave Trump insane amounts more coverage than the other republican candidates during the primary because they were dumb enough to think that Trump would be the easiest one for their anointed Saint Hillary (She Who Was Without Scandal) to beat. How’d that work out for you dorks?

The question for the Post is: What are you gonna do about it?

Learn to code.

When the fear that was instilled in generations of politicians by Watergate wears off,

Will you morons ever quit fapping to Watergate? That was almost 50 years ago. During the ensuing decades you’ve managed to ignore a bunch of democrat scandals that are way fucking worse, and you quisling fucksticks are still patting yourselves on the back for exposing Watergate? You say Watergate, and America says “what have you done for me lately?” The answer is NOTHING.

You are pathetic.

 and the federal government becomes ever more populated by officials who have discovered that no matter how meticulous David Fahrenthold’s reporting is, it won’t move the needle that much on entrenched public opinion?

Unfortunately for you, your credibility is ruined. Half the country knows you’re perpetually full of shit. The other half knows too, but they pretend you’re honest because they think your propaganda helps their team. The scary part is even when you occasionally tell the truth, you’ve got such a history of dishonesty that the knee jerk assumption is you’re lying about that too. This country has reached the point where all of the institutions we traditionally trust for information have turned out to be untrustworthy. That’s a recipe for disaster.  

When the full flowering of the social-media age turns even the most prestigious papers into just another mid-sized Facebook page struggling to catch up to the reach of Dan Bongino? 

It already has. You’re just too stupid to realize it.

I must admit I do not know the answer.

You do, you’re just too cowardly to admit it. That would require humility and introspection, traits which are rare among our self-proclaimed intellectual and moral superiors.

Naw. The problem can’t be you. It’s us. We “subjects” are supposed believe whatever you say, and comply with your demands out of fear of your wrathful word.

 All I know is that there is only one way the press maintains its power in society: By metaphorically putting the heads of powerful people on pikes.

Except we all know none of those heads will belong to useful democrats.

Hell, we just had a scandal far worse than Watergate and the result was one fed getting a year of probation. Where were all the heads on pikes, Mr. Big Talk?

We all know who those severed heads will belong to. It’ll be regular people who got out of line. It’ll be the regular dude who questioned a democrat politician. It’ll be the teenager who “smirked”.

You chickenshits give a pass to powerful democrats up to their eyeballs in fraud, bribes, scandals, and corruption, but you’ll fucking crush regular Americans who don’t toe your arbitrary line.

Because you’re bullies, and bullies are cowards.

If the Post and all the other respectable media outlets lose their ability to do that, powerful people will, by extension, stop caring what the well-informed segment of the public thinks.

I don’t even have a funny response to you at this point because as you have self-righteously gone on and on, I’ve become increasingly disgusted. You’re nothing but propaganda shills wearing a rotting corpse, play acting at being reporters.

Democracy dies in dumbness. 

And you’re the one who dug the grave.