I've mostly avoided jumping on the people at the Bulwark. It wouldn't matter if I did and they get enough attention as it is.
Like a lot of people though, I never really bought into their marketing as principled conservatives who were really just against Trump and anything he did, said or stood for. Maybe there was a moment very early on where some of those folks who were put off by Trump had a kind of conviction that they wanted to conserve but I don't think that's been true for a long time now.
Here's how Wikipedia describes the creation of the site.
Following the end of publication of The Weekly Standard in 2018, editor-in-chief Charlie Sykes said that "the murder of the Standard made it urgently necessary to create a home for rational, principled, fact-based center-right voices who were not cowed by Trumpism."...
In 2021, Washingtonian magazine observed that content on The Bulwark is primarily geared toward readers seeking "serious coverage of events through a center-right filter" but that its editors have sought to attract centrist Democratic readers who may be "uncomfortable with the excesses of the progressive left".
Is it fair to call the Bulwark anti-woke? Not that I've seen, but honestly I don't read it very often. I just see what some of the principles are doing and saying on X and that's enough to convince me that they haven't been right or even center-right in a while. Here's a sampling of headlines on the site today:
- The Polls Missed the Blue Tsunami. Why Doesn’t Anyone Care?
- Trump’s Threeway with the Huangs
- One Easy Trick for Dems to Maintain Their Blue-Wave Gains
- Never Rubio
- Destroy All Monsters
Still, it's one thing to know the Bulwark is made up of ex-conservatives who are now rooting for team blue every bit as much as the staff at the NY Times or the Washington Post. It's something else to hear the founder admit that they're really all just "libs" now.
The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell at Democrat conference: "You may know us, we're the Never Trumpers. At least we were ten years ago. Now we're just kind of libs just like the rest of you." Yes, we know. https://t.co/ikdUQdUyHU
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) November 12, 2026
This is obviously true. Longwell is literally being a cheerleader here. She's the Flavor Flav for the blue wave.
@TheTexasBoomer The cringe level here is unfathomable https://t.co/gx7SO0omEQ
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) November 12, 2026
Of course there are plenty of people celebrating the blue wave this week. Members of my family are definitely in that camp, but none of them used "conservatism conserved" as a motto.
A lot of people want to argue that the people at the Bulwark were never conservatives in the first place. I won't say that because I didn't know any of them before the Bulwark. Maybe they were conservative at some point but they aren't now and haven't been in a while. The left has the Huffington Post, Vox, Talking Points Memo, MSNOW, the LA Times, the NY Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian. They have Meidas Touch, Crooked Media, The Young Turks, Zeteo, David Parkman, The Majority Report and many, many more.
And they have the Bulwark, another left-wing media outlet fighting for space in a crowded field. I'm glad Sarah Longwell cleared that up.
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