Right Responds To Cancel Culture By Building Its Own Infrastructure, And The Left Goes Nuts

Margot Cleveland reporting for RedState

Last week the corrupt media’s penchant for spinning all things conservative caused a near-fatal case of whiplash.

The left began by chastising conservatives for supposedly building “its own echo chamber,” but by the next day, when news broke that Devin Nunes was resigning from Congress to serve as the CEO of Donald Trump’s new media company, the complained-of conservative ecosystem merely represented grift. Both narratives are false, however, which is precisely why leftists peddled them so hard.

Axios launched the “echo chamber” accusation with its article titled, “Right wing builds its own echo chamber.” “Conservatives are aggressively building their own apps, phones, cryptocurrencies and publishing houses in an attempt to circumvent what they see as an increasingly liberal internet and media ecosystem,” the Axios article began.

The article then highlighted plans for the YouTube alternative Rumble and Trump’s social media company, Truth Social, to expand their reach by taking the companies public. Also highlighted was the social app Gettr that former-Trump aide Jason Miller launched, as well as conservative efforts to compete in cryptocurrency, phones, cloud storage, and book publishing.

“The bottom line,” Axios closed, was that, “Conservative media has been a powerhouse for a long time, but this phase of its expansion isn’t just about more or louder conservative voices — it’s about building an entire conservative ecosystem.”

The refusal by conservatives to continue “to consume” the product of the increasingly “deranged and unaccountable lefty media” is not about building an echo chamber, however: It is about competition and choice. And branding these new business ventures an “ecosystem” and “echo chamber” merely reveal the left’s panic over their inability to control the narrative.

The corrupt media quickly put a brake on the echo-chamber attack when the day after Axios bemoaned the loosening of the left’s stranglehold over corporate America came news that Nunes would retire in January to serve as the new CEO of Trump’s Truth Social company. No longer was the story about an “ecosystem,” it was now about “grift.”

“How Devin Nunes’s new media job for Trump explains the GOP grift machine,” the Washington Post headlined an op-ed by columnist Paul Waldman. Waldman supported his thesis by pointing out that “with Republicans poised to win the House, Nunes was in line to become the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, which writes the nation’s tax laws.”

“There was a time when the Ways and Means chair was considered second only to House Speaker in prestige and power,” the Post opinion piece continued. Leaving behind that likelihood, Waldman reasoned, showed Nunes’s supposed desire to “get in on the grift.”

Leave it to a liberal to think grift is foregoing the second most powerful position in the U.S. House of Representatives to accept a position in the private sector in a fledgling organization.

In reporting on Nunes’s announcement, The New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman likewise focused on the fact that if the California representative continued his congressional career, he would “assume the help of the powerful Ways and Means Committee if Republicans took control of the House, as they are favored to do.” This move, Weisman declared, represented a signal by Nunes to “where he thinks power lies in the Republican Party and the conservative movement.”

Nunes’s decision to leave Congress to become Truth Social’s CEO does represent a signal—just not the one Weisman claims. To see the reason behind the move, the Times’ congressional correspondent need only have re-read his article, where a handful of paragraphs later, Weisman wrote:

From his perch on the Intelligence Committee, he ran interference for Mr. Trump against accusations that his 2016 campaign had collaborated with Russian intelligence. Mr. Nunes also organized a united Republican front opposing the first impeachment of the president for withholding military assistance to Ukraine to pressure its government to dig up dirt on Mr. Biden.

That a longtime congressional correspondent could pen those lines and The New York Times could unironically publish them shows exactly why Nunes left Congress to lead Truth Social.

Having lived through the heyday of the Russia-collusion hoax, as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Nunes fought to expose the truth of the Crossfire Hurricane disaster to the American public. Yet the corporate press fed the lies of the Democrat ranking member to the country instead. The California Republican saw a repeat of this ploy with the Ukraine impeachment proceedings. Hatred for Trump proved the breaking straw to the already biased establishment press.

Then came the censorship, limiting conservatives’ ability to counter the corrupt media. Again, Nunes experienced that firsthand, being shadow-banned by Twitter in 2018.

And if any more proof were needed of corporate cronies’ ability to control information, the burying of the Hunter Biden laptop story that implicated then-candidate Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scandal right before the 2020 election handed Nunes—and our country—the final piece of evidence.

So Nunes had a choice: Stay in Congress and chair the House’s most powerful committee as a Republican, limited by the Democrat-controlled executive branch, or surrender the cozy conclave and create an enterprise to counter the slant and censorship that over the last five years has grown exponentially. The left might not understand Nunes’s decision, but here’s hoping it learns his reason soon—and the hard way.