This week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided to announce his 2024 presidential candidacy on Twitter Spaces, the newest feature on Elon Musk’s Twitter. Musk himself would be co-hosting the event, giving DeSantis access to Musk’s 141 million Twitter followers. Only after the Twitter launch will DeSantis begin the more typical campaigning, embarking on a series of campaign events across the nation.

DeSantis’ decision represents yet another blow to the power of the legacy media. Legacy media outlets have been fighting mad that DeSantis sees no purpose in granting them long-form interviews; while he’s happy to answer their questions – and to aggressively confront them – at press conferences, he simply does not trust that legacy media will ask decent questions or edit him fairly. Instead, DeSantis has merely ignored them.

That strategy has resulted in extraordinary hew and cry from our supposed journalistic establishment. This week, Tara Palmeri, senior political correspondent for Puck News, for example, attempted to confront DeSantis with a series of obtuse questions. “I am also Italian American like you,” she said, “if that makes any difference to you at all. Why are you against Disney characters? Which one is your favorite one?” When DeSantis declined to engage, she then called him a “paper tiger – a superficially perfect test-tube Republican candidate who, on closer inspection, is probably not ready for prime time.”

But perhaps primetime is entirely the problem. After all, it is primetime television that made glitz and glamour the center of our presidential politics, gave Donald Trump billions of dollars in free media coverage in 2016, then proceeded to label Trump a threat to the republic and a probable Russian asset. It was primetime television that elevated lies about covid, turning DeSantis into the Enemy of the People while championing disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as a hero; that endlessly trumpeted the false narrative that black Americans are at dire daily threat from police, resulting in billions of dollars of damage from race riots; that ceaselessly promotes the notion that boys can be girls and vice versa.

The same legacy media that pushed those lies now pushes a bottomless well of lies about DeSantis as well: that his wife Casey is like Lady Macbeth; that Florida has banned gay Americans by passing a “Don’t Say Gay” bill that, in reality, merely prevents the sexual indoctrination of children; that black Americans are at existential threat in the state; that books are being banned at scale.

Why, precisely, should a politician like DeSantis trust them?

He doesn’t. And now, thanks to the open forum provided by Musk, he doesn’t need to use them to promote his candidacy. He can simply go directly to the people. This is merely an extension of the strategy Donald Trump used so successfully in 2016 when his Twitter account became the most magnetic media property on the planet – only now Trump has relegated himself to Truth Social, even after Musk reinstated his Twitter account. 

In any case, the legacy media – instead of re-examining their own biases and asking just why candidates of the right refuse to appear on their air – have decided to target Musk and Twitter. They suggest that Musk is the newest threat to the republic – after all, if he weren’t, would DeSantis be using Twitter for his launch? 

Conservatives no longer need the approval of reporters at The New York Times. They no longer need to suffer the indignities of skewed grilling at the hands of partisan hacks who work for the alphabet networks. Times have changed. And DeSantis’ Twitter launch is just the latest evidence.

Daily Wire podcast host Michael Knowles on Wednesday said his call to eradicate transgenderism from public life over two months ago was to regain ground on the issue that liberals thought they had conquered.

“If we don’t have the courage to stand up for the basic nature of our humanity and the basic political unit, then we’re not going to stand up for anything,” Knowles told audience members during a TPUSA Faith Pastors Summit in Nashville, Tennessee. “We might as well close up the churches, throw it all in, and let the liberals run the country.”

During an interview with TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, the two conservative thought leaders discussed how the transgender ideology presents an affront to objective truth and the harmony of existence; they also encouraged faith leaders to care for their church congregation.

Knowles touched off a firestorm in March when he called for an end to the ideology of transgenderism at a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), especially after several left-wing media outlets misquoted his statement and published erroneous claims misrepresenting the podcaster.

“For the good of society and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely, the whole preposterous ideology — at every level,” Knowles told the gathering in Maryland.

Within hours of his statement, several outlets falsely reported that Knowles called for transgender people to be “eradicated,” even though he was targeting an ideology, not a group of people.

“I chose my words very carefully because I knew that the libs were going to run with it,” Knowles said. “But I wanted to make the point as clearly as I possibly could.”

Some publications, including Rolling Stone and HuffPo, edited their headlines and stories to acknowledge that Knowles never called for the “eradication” of any group of people. When Knowles pointed out that such outlets committed libel, the editorial departments retracted the claims.

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“These liberal media sites will run the lie on page one, and then they’ll maybe issue the correction on page 2,000 three weeks later, and nobody sees it,” he said.

However, Knowles said the issue resonated with the audience and why left-wing media and ideologues lied about his words was because he “endeavored to take back the ground that the liberals thought they conquered.”

“The liberals thought that they had already won on the issue of transgenderism,” he said.

“And so on these issues that are so fundamental — who are we? What is a man? What is a woman?” he said. “If we cannot take a stand and enshrine that stand in law, enforce that standard through our civil society, and yes, impose reality on people, then we simply cannot have a society at all.”

TPUSA Faith Pastors Summit kicked off its three-day event on Wednesday evening for over 30 Biblical faith leaders and other subject matter experts nationwide to speak about cultural and spiritual issues facing modern-day America.

Other speakers include former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Pastor Rob McCoy, and American author James Lindsay. The event also listed former All-American swimmer Riley Gaines, former NFL offensive tackle Michael Oher, and Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial artist Michael Chandler.