LIVE NOT BY LIES:

As I write this, the most powerful establishment conservative media outlet in America is being sued for defamation because some of its hosts were too eager to entertain theories that the 2020 election was stolen. Increasingly, the two tiers aren't so neatly distinguished.

Too much of conservative media defines big media by its worst episodes of ideological bias and information suppression and resolves to live down to that standard. When forced to choose between the truth and the cause, most right-wing sites now unfailingly choose the cause--to the extent there remains any "cause" beyond defending the authoritarian impulses of Donald Trump and his disciples. Many have become the propagandists they once undertook to expose, a facet of the Trump-era ethos that conservatives can succeed only by behaving as badly as their opponents have in their most depraved moments.

But here's the worst part. Many of their readers want it that way.

Not everyone who caters to a Trump-worshiping audience does so out of ardor. Many do it for grubby reasons of audience capture, because they fear losing the adulation (and remuneration) of their fans. There's a certain, not uncommon type of activist who reads partisan political sites simply to sate their desire for total war against the enemy. To them, if you're not fighting dirty, you're not trying to win. War is war, after all. Alienate that sort of rage-junkie and you might find that any relevance you had within your media niche disappears with them.

Conservative media needs better authorship and better readership. Which is why I'm here.

Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg have built a precious thing in The Dispatch, a publication with the right kind of writer and the right kind of reader. One of the few hopeful notes in conservative media over the last five years is that a new site that prioritizes the truth over the cause might find enough of an audience to grow quickly into the success that this one has become. As a Dispatch reader, I appreciate that the writers on this team aim above all to inform, not to own the libs. (Although lib-owning is often a natural consequence of better information.) And I admire them greatly for having resisted the vogue of illiberalism, the ends-justifies-the-means logic of "better an autocrat than a Democrat." In a populist age, they've held populism to account for its most toxic excesses.

As a Dispatch writer, I'll do the same.

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