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Why shouldn’t conservatives ‘build their own Twitter’?
The left built our chains; it’s all fun and games until someone else builds their own.

“Right wing builds its own echo chamber,” warns the headline from a short piece in Axios about conservatives creating their own media outlets and other institutions like publishers and cryptocurrencies and social networks. ...

Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review wrote a piece focused on the media’s mocking response to conservative efforts to shape their own institutions. “Is it too much to ask,” Cooke wonders, “if and when [conservatives do build their own], they aren’t mocked for it?”:

If conservatives are outnumbered on the existing services, and if they can’t use the government to force those services to be neutral, the only choice remaining is for them to create their own. One gets the impression from the piece that, for some at least, “if you don’t like what’s out there, build a new one” was more of a taunt than an earnest suggestion, and that now that it’s been taken literally, those who promulgated the advice so liberally aren’t quite sure what to do next.

Cooke gives too much credit. It is a given that those who inspired the “build your own” meme intend to taunt conservatives. It’s one thing that smirking figures like Stelter cannot be expected to give a fair shake to conservative points of view. It’s another that they decry conservative efforts to make their own spaces after pushing conservatives out. They warn against conservative echo chambers because they believe that only they should be allowed to construct them. When the other guys do it, it’s polarization, a threat to “our democracy.”