MURDOCH REJECTS HIS OWN MONSTERS

When I saw this Rolling Stone story, I thought it was just a standard piece of political journalism:

Murdochs Start to Sour on DeSantis: ‘They Can Smell a Loser’

... Since the beginning of the Biden presidency, the powerful Murdoch family has favored the Florida governor in the 2024 presidential primary, largely due to a conviction that DeSantis would be a more electable, and less chaotic, evolution from Donald Trump. But in recent weeks, the Murdochs have grown increasingly displeased with the DeSantis campaign’s perceived stumbles, lackluster polling, and inability to swiftly dethrone Trump, multiple sources tell Rolling Stone. They have also seriously questioned whether the governor is capable of defeating Trump in the 2024 GOP presidential primary.

Billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch in particular has been voicing his doubts and frustrations, in private discussions and calls, at times wondering if a DeSantis “comeback” is possible at this point.

Then I saw a New York Times story with the headline "DeSantis Confronts a Murdoch Empire No Longer Quite So Supportive" and I understood what's really going on: Rupert Murdoch is breaking up with Ron DeSantis in public. Ouch! Poor Meatball.

Here's the most hilarious aspect of this, as reported by Rolling Stone:

According to two of the sources, Murdoch has privately winced at DeSantis’ nonstop cultural-grievance strategy.... In his repeated attempts to outflank the already hard-right Trump on the right, DeSantis and his team have waged an aggressive messaging operation to paint the Florida governor as a much more extreme culture-warrior as compared to the former president — most recently via a bizarre, bigoted video lauding the governor for his anti-LGBTQ attacks.

In other words, Murdoch is upset at the DeSantis campaign for being exactly like Fox News.

The nerve of this guy -- Murdoch generates a 24/7 toxic spew of the lowest, nastiest demagoguery, then he's upset when candidates is his party sound like the hosts on his TV channel. We've been told for years that Murdoch doesn't like Trump either, even though Trump's worldview is largely built from Fox News talking points. Murdoch wants us to believe he's just the piano player in the multi-billion-dollar whorehouse he owns, a guy who has no idea what goes on in the other rooms. In 2015, just after Trump announced his presidential candidacy with a gutter-level attack on immigrants, Murdoch -- whose channel had been a safe space for dozens of anti-immigrant racists, including Trump, who'd been a Fox & Friends regular since 2011 -- tut-tutted that Trump's message on his immigration, which was Fox's party line, was tacky and de trop:

Mexican immigrants, as with all immigrants, have much lower crime rates than native born. Eg El Paso safest city in U.S. Trump wrong.

— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) July 12, 2015

Now Murdoch is treating DeSantis the way he treated Trump. The Murdoch empire is obsessed with trans people -- a search for Dylan Mulvaney's name at FoxNews.com yields 13,600 hits, and the New York Post is similarly obsessed. Murdoch Land is a haven for anyone who denounces what the right calls "gender ideology." But when the DeSantis campaign retransmitted an over-the-top LGBTQ-bashing video that wouldn't have seemed at all out of place on Tucker Carlson's old show,d Murdoch was appalled.

Murdoch doesn't like Trump or DeSantis, but he built these monsters in his own lab. And unlike Dr. Frankenstein's monster, Trump and DeSantis didn't escape -- Murdoch released them into the wild. And now he's renouncing his own handiwork.