This endless fanfare of grievance, innuendo, and motivated misprioritization colors most of the content you’ll find on the most popular conservative news and opinion outlets: vast edifices of bullshit constructed atop small kernels of verifiable information. But this ongoing victim narrative is undermined by the plain fact that, far from being marginalized and undervalued, by most available metrics, right-wing news and opinion is very popular and profitable. Fox News consistently tops the cable news ratings. Conservative radio shows and podcasts top the leaderboards in their respective disciplines. Right-wing Facebook pages are consistently among the most popular issues-based Facebook pages. Substacks dedicated to the proposition that divergent political opinion has no home in the American media earn their proprietors better livings than they ever would have made at the publications they once called home. We are literally living in the Golden Age of Getting Rich and Wielding Influence by Pretending That Your Voice Has Been Silenced—which brings us back to the Twitter Files, and the people to whom they were handed by the wealthiest man in the world.

What went wrong? There are many answers, but one is that we have become too enthralled by the eureka myth and, more to the point, too inattentive to all the things that must follow a eureka moment. The U.S. has more Nobel Prizes for science than the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and Austria combined. But if there were a Nobel Prize for the deployment and widespread adoption of technology—even technology that we invented, even technology that’s not so new anymore—our legacy wouldn’t be so sterling. Americans invented the first nuclear reactor, the solar cell, and the microchip, but today, we’re well behind a variety of European and Asian countries in deploying and improving these technologies.