Thread by @mattsheffield

The national press is so obsessed with DC gossip that it mostly ignored the years-long effort to overturn abortion access in the states.

flux.community/fair/julie-hol…

Unfortunately, this keeps happening. Why? Because media executives and editors for NY and DC outlets hold very antiquated views of politics, wrongly supposing that ideas flow from elected officials down to the grassroots. But this is untrue and has been for some time.

I can't tell you how many times people have remarked to me in recent months that they're astonished how quickly the Christian supremacist political insurgency that's unavoidably obvious now was able to assemble.

My response is that this story has been out there for years.

Secular urban journalists who live among non-religious or progressive faithful mostly have no personal exposure to right-wing religious radicalism.

Thus, they myopically think it's insignificant. That the Religious Right collapsed along with the Christian Coalition in the 1990s.

Talk to literally any journalist, scholar, or historian who writes about this movement for more than a few minutes and they will all say the same thing: Editors at elite publications *even now* don't think this stuff is important.

It's a huge reason I started @DiscoverFlux.

Many editors would rather be slinging gossip with shady campaign consultants than doing some real work learning history and sociology about religious cults.

This dereliction needs to end. Right-wing politics is activist-driven and it must be covered as such.

DC Republican politicians do not actively pursue policy agendas. They are perpetually trying to manage the anger and rage of their voter base and their extremist donors.

Thus, to cover the right based on a "here's what's going on in Congress today" model is grossly inaccurate

Unfortunately, when the national press has covered extremist organizing, it has done so poorly. When the "alt-right" was being nurtured by Steve Bannon, instead of covering the connections he was encouraging, most outlets did profiles of the Nazi Next Door.

Even now, very well-sourced Capitol Hill reporters are not investigating the numerous connections between extremist Republicans like Paul Gosar & Marjorie Taylor Greene & outright white nationalists.

We'll soon be in for another "surprise" in this regard soon, I'm sure. /end

PS: If you liked this thread, please follow @DiscoverFlux and @HollarJulie the author of the article in the first post. Thanks!

Nice addition here

https://twitter.com/jennycohn1/status/1395817930953170944?s=20

Please see here as well:

https://twitter.com/dil_maz/status/1395828141625679873