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Indignity Vol. 5, No. 45
THE WORST THING WE READ™
The Federalist's Government
THE PUBLICATION CALLED the Federalist has always been a nasty joke—a vanity project, but an anonymous one, its public-facing named staff kept afloat by secretive extremist megadonors for the sake of pushing out aggressively hacky far-right material. "Many Twitter users have asked the website’s leaders, repeatedly, 'Who funds The Federalist?' only to be blocked by the likes of publisher Ben Domenech, co-founder Sean Davis, or senior editor Mollie Hemingway," the reporter Alex Kotch wrote in 2020, in a piece for the Center for Media and Democracy, in which he lifted the obscuring veil to find, among others, the shipping-carton magnate Richard Uihlein.
Unlike other well-funded reactionary media projects, though, the Federalist doesn't really seem to be focused on manipulating mass opinion, or even on manipulating mainstream elite opinion, the way Bari Weiss' Free Press is. It appears, instead, to exist simply to be annoying or to vent the lower impulses of the billionaire mind. Since Elon Musk broke Twitter's ability to function as a place to make fun of dumb takes, it's been possible to go months at a time without encountering a Federalist article.
