Some thoughts on Liberal Sliming, or as it's known on the Left, rightwing accountability. Prompted, of course, by that Ben Shapiro mea culpa/mea fuck you.
My most uncharitable thought first: Conservative pundits, get used to it. You've welcomed a lot of monsters into your ranks and given a lot of jerks a platform. Search your feelings. You know it to be true. Beck/O'Keefe/Milo/Coulter/D'Souza -- it's not a fluke. It's a pattern.
The thing is, that kind of lifestyle is exhausting. So sooner or later, most of these folks will try to give up the life and go legit. And hell, I don't blame them. I blame YOU, the respectable conservatives who should have known better than to indulge them in the first place.
But you did it anyway. In fact, you're doing it right now with Charlie Kirk. I will stake my Internet Reputation, @baseballcrank style, that he's going to try to go mainstream sometime in the next five years. 100% guarantee. And he'll probably get away with it.
Genuine accountability almost never happens. You think it happens constantly, but you're wrong. The exception is Milo, and that proves the point. Look at what he had to do to get called out: literally endorse pedophilia. Absent that, he'd still be in good standing.
Or Derbyshire. After the "talk with my son" piece, you couldn't fall over yourselves fast enough to denounce him, as if it were a facet of his personality that up till then had been carefully hidden. Pathetic.
Don't believe me? Then explain to me why @EWErickson gets to write piece after piece for the Times, or gets gently profiled in the New Yorker? After all his garbage (and you know what I'm talking about), how many 2nd/3rd/4th/5th chances is that guy going to get?
It's why all the so-cons who said reprehensible things about gays and lesbians in the 2000s are now respected elder statesmen. It's why O'Keefe is still raking in the bucks. And it's why Breitbart is a secular saint.
Hell, D'Souza is still on the NR masthead, much as @RichLowry would prefer to ignore that fact or pretend it doesn't matter.
Whatever it is you've said, it will be forgotten. Whatever it is you've done, you'll be forgiven. That's the sum total of what I've learned from observing how conservative media is held to account. Everything else is mythology.
