Both men praised their former colleagues, and acknowledged the difficulties that National Review—which is owned by a nonprofit that relies on financial support from conservative donors—faces in navigating the Trump era. But the pressures they described reflect acute structural problems throughout the conservative-media complex. At highbrow publications, Goldberg said, once-respectable writers have abandoned their ideological convictions in favor of an incoherent Trumpism. “People are groping in the dark to find something to hold on to that reconciles their intellectual self-regard with their support for Donald Trump, and for just generalized meanness,” he told me. More populist outlets, meanwhile, have all but dropped the pretense of practicing factual journalism. “At places like Breitbart and further off into the swamplands,” Goldberg said, “you can literally just make stuff up as long as it makes people angry enough to click on it.” (A spokesperson for Breitbart responded by email: “lol.”)

French attributes the dearth of serious reporting on the right in part to the “towering presence” of Fox News. “You have one institution that is so incredibly potent as a validator of conservative personalities, and as a pathway to personal prosperity,” he told me. The success of Fox’s primetime model—grievance over substance, shouting over scoops—has shaped a generation of conservative media. And even those who disagree with the network’s approach hesitate to speak up for careerist reasons, French said: “People on the right are very wary of how they evaluate Fox.” (That’s not to say The Dispatch is boycotting the channel; Goldberg and Hayes are both Fox News contributors.)

Against this grim backdrop, The Dispatch’s editors are projecting a sense of cautious optimism (with the aid of some florid imagery). “Right now, we are a small and merry band,” they wrote in their opening letter to readers, “boarding a pirate skiff with limited provisions amidst choppy waters crammed with well-equipped battleships, barreling through the smoking wrecks of larger vessels that came before us.

“But,” they added, in an expression of faith, “we believe we are not alone.”

One afternoon earlier this month, I followed several Dispatch staffers into a sweaty makeshift studio in their downtown D.C. office. They were supposed to be recording the inaugural episode of their flagship podcast, but technical difficulties were getting in the way. As a producer fiddled with cords and flipped switches, the co-hosts bantered and bickered among themselves.

There was a certain sitcom-family energy to the proceedings. Hayes presided over the group with a calming, dad-like earnestness. Goldberg offered wisecracking comic relief. Sarah Isgur, a former Republican strategist—and the only woman in the room—played the eye-rolling spouse tasked with putting the men in their place. At one point, the producer instructed everyone to clap so as to synchronize their audio, which prompted Goldberg to make a gonorrhea joke, and Isgur to let out a performative sigh. “That’s why we have a woman on the podcast,” she said. “To make sure we don’t talk about World War II–era venereal diseases.” (“I think it’s a little older than World War II,” Goldberg muttered.)