Brett Stephens, writing in the NYTimes:

Fox was always about influence, as much as money, for Murdoch. But, executed well, it could have elevated conservatism in the direction of Burke, Hamilton and Lincoln, rather than debase it in the direction of Andrew Jackson, Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan. …

The shame of Rupert Murdoch is that he wasn’t the man to do it. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

The shame of conservatives is that not a single one of them is the man or woman to do it.

That Rupert Murdoch failed doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

That the GOP as a whole has no interest in denouncing insurrection and open invitation to sedition means it can’t be done.

When you have zero congressional Republicans moving to expel MTG for her “soft secession” plan, or any of the other Republicans for their various secession plans (:cough: Texit :cough:) it should be obvious to everyone that there is no conservative voice that is not an echo of Father Coughlin: all the rest have gone silent.

We are told that this is a mere case of laryngitis among the ethical and reasonable Republicans — told again and again by people like Bret Stephens.

But this is not that. Whatever the conservatives who consider themselves ethical and rational tell themselves to comfort each other in the night, they have traded their voices to Orange Ursula and are desperately afraid of even attempting to get them back.

There will be no conservative voice of reason, much less intelligence, until the left destroys the new movement for secession and/or fascism.

At that point, voices freed from their magical confinement, Stephens will swoop in and declare victory on behalf of conservative values and lament that trans people don’t pay more honour to the heroes who can hate us even while not quite taking to the streets to murder in the cause of installing a government who would shatter our souls, end our lives, and then blame us — using our deadnames over our dead bodies — for our own genocidal victimization.

Lamenting the imperfections of Murdoch does not make you the man of principle you wish the world to see. Hell, it doesn’t even cause us to see a fragment, a shadow of that man in you.

Go home, Stephens. Hide beside the lintel of your door, one hand on a shotgun, never certain until the conflict is over whom you would shoot if you emerged, but too terrified ever to place yourself in the position where you might have to make that choice. Demonstrate all the bravery and heroism of the white Citizens’ Councils of 1963’s Mississippi, before Newt Gingrich could destroy the party you seek to praise, but we seek to bury.