Thread by @K_Niemietz

Hard to believe now, but there really was a time when most right-wingers sort of liked Owen Jones.
Until 2015/16, I often heard people say "Sure, he's wrong about everything - but I can't help liking him! He seems like an honest, well-meaning bloke."
NOBODY says that today.

The reason they liked him was that he didn't have this typical leftie tendency to hyper-moralise everything, and assume that everyone outside of their tribe was literally Hitler.
That's very, very unusual for a leftie. And conservatives and liberals appreciated that.

The Corbo years then ruined him. He effectively became Corbo's propaganda minister, and in that role, he became incredibly dishonest, and hyper-tribal. He would say absolutely anything to defend Corbo, including for things he'd never ever let a political opponent get away with.

He turned into Squealer, the character in Animal Farm whose job it is to come up with clever-sounding post-hoc justifications for whatever Napoleon was doing on any given day (and who probably represents the Stalin-era Soviet press). Even if that meant impossible contortions.

Anyway: Why does it matter?
Because he's the nation's top-selling political author, and he has more than a million Twitter followers, that's why.
Right-wingers like to delude themselves that he's "irrelevant". He's not. He's HUGELY relevant. That's the whole problem.
/End of rant