Ouroboros: Evan Urquhart Becomes the Anti-Trans Propagandists’ Muse

It’s a fair cop, guv. The National Review reports on the ban of Mike Pesca and Parker Molloy from journa.host.

by Evan Urquhart

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The National Review is fundraising, and that means taking cheap shots at trans people whenever and wherever they can, because of course it does. We normally wouldn’t bother covering this, but the pretext chosen happened to directly involve our founder, Evan Urquhart, so we just couldn’t resist.

NR summarizes and quotes a New York Times story about the Mastodon instance journa.host, where Evan has been volunteering some time to help sort their moderation policies out. A little before Thanksgiving, the Times covered the creation of a Mastodon instance for journalists, and summarized a bit of drama over podcast host and former Slate employee Mike Pesca, a transphobe, and trans woman journalist Parker Molloy. The National Review, which did zero independent reporting on the story themselves, quotes a gigantic section of the Times piece in its fundraising appeal explaining to readers why they should give money to the National Review. (An interesting choice!)

The real story is a bit more complicated (though nothing in the Times piece is untrue). If you’re curious, Evan posted a thread that went a little further into the details of who got banned (both Molloy and Pesca) and why. But basically all this is just a pretext for the National Review to raise money based on the idea that real journalists are silly (even though they’re relying on real journalists at the Times for the reporting here), and the National Review is worth supporting. As evidence they cite the false story that COVID-19 is not of natural origin, the false story that Joe Biden is suffering from dementia, and of course the false stories about gender affirming care.

This is the very best of what the National Review has to offer its readers when it pleads for their support. Misinformation dressed up as truth-telling, packaged with shallow mockery based on a story reported by others they know nothing about. You almost feel bad for conservative readers, and then you remember, they want this. They have rejected responsible journalism that tells the truth as best it can and corrects itself when a mistake is made, in favor of lies told with a sneering tone. So, good job, National Review. Your really showed us libs! We’re absolutely devastated over here.