You may be familiar with Rick Wilson from his work with the Lincoln Project. Up to the day before the election he was loudly predicting a blowout for Harris.

Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson (the day before the election):

“Trump's going to lose. He's going to lose badly. He's going to be wrecked. I don't know what the Electoral College count's going to be at the end of this, but it's going to get loud and it's going to get hard… pic.twitter.com/jRYnXVvpIC

— Proud Elephant 🇺🇸🦅 (@ProudElephantUS) November 7, 2024

Obviously things didn't work out but Wilson has a solution for that. The NY Times reports he's now circulating a business proposal to wealthy Democrats for a new group which will do "military grade" oppo research aimed at the Murdoch family and Elon Musk.

Democrats have a growing belief that their efforts must extend beyond the political sphere, trying to go on offense in a splintered media environment where conservatives have amassed more influence. One new liberal dark-money group began prospecting for donors with a pitch that it would unearth unflattering revelations about the Murdoch family and Elon Musk — both pro-Trump media magnates.

The group, called the Two Plus Two Coalition, plans to “target the hidden sources of disinformation and expose them for what they are,” according to a donor prospectus being circulated this past week. The group asked donors for a minimum investment of $1 million, and was aiming for an annual budget of $10 million to $15 million.

The group’s senior adviser, Rick Wilson, a former Republican operative who was a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, said in an interview on Thursday that his organization would operate as an opposition research firm but with a military-grade intelligence-gathering operation that went far beyond the document vetting typical of a political campaign.

“A lot of people in the center and on the left have for a long time sort of bemoaned Fox, but they haven’t done anything about it,” Mr. Wilson said.

Doing something about Fox News? Isn't that Media Matters core pitch? I guess the difference here is that Media Matters goes after what Fox News publishes. Wilson's group sounds like it will be aimed at the Murdoch family (and Elon Musk) in a more personal way. Wilson also gave an interview to the New Republic in which he described what his new group would be doing.

I’m still doing the Lincoln project course, but I’ve been talking with a lot of folks who have looked at the infrastructure problem on the left and the center. That infrastructure problem is real and it is highly problematic, and the other side is ahead of us all the time on things they shouldn’t be ahead of us on. Part of it is that they know what the targets are. They’re after them from the very beginning of the day.

They wake up in the morning and say, How can we wreck X or Y person or movement or organization? You’ve got groups like Fox with this massive disinformation overhang that they’ve gotten away with for so long. And Two Plus Two is going to try to mitigate some of that and to go out and give the center and the center-left some tools to face up to this frankly grotesque movement that’s out there.

Sorry, but isn't that exactly what the Lincoln Project was set up to do, target one person day in and day out? So is this just the Lincoln Project aimed at Elon Musk or is it a new version of Media Matters?

Sargent: By the way, this has been something you’ve talked about before, but the propaganda apparatus on the right exerts heavy gravitational pull on the “MSM,” which also is a major problem.

Wilson: Absolutely. They play the refs great. They play the refs brilliantly and they do it every day of the week. And I can say this folks because I was one of the people that played the refs for a long time. I admit it, that’s my past life. That idea of being out there to manipulate the outcomes of an election by screaming into the faces of mainstream media every day and saying, You’re liars. You’re distorting everything. You’re liberal. You’re biased. You’re terrible—even though they know it’s not entirely true, it’s really tough to resist it. It’s really tough to push back on it after a while. And Republicans have relied on just pure fatigue on the part of reporters for a long time. And they’ve been so, so good at breaking their spirit, that it’s important at this point that we recognize how to mitigate that.

Two Plus Two—part of our goal is to go out there and provide allies and reporters and other folks that are fighting these cases and fighting these forces with information, with intelligence, with media, with communications assistance, with context for what’s happening. Because a lot of folks just get worn down; they just get exhausted, worn down, flattened out. And it’s really tough for them to start from scratch every day, have to get up every day and say, OK, now we got to fight this battle again. Meanwhile, you’ve got hundreds of right-wing outlets screaming bloody murder every minute of the day about bias, about deception, about prejudice. It’s all playing the ref. It’s all a game to them.

Providing "allies and reporters" to the MSM so they can withstand the right's claims about media bias? Now this is sounding more like Media Matters to me again. Isn't that what they claim to do?

Media Matters was founded two decades ago by a Republican-aligned author (David Brock) who changed sides and created Media Matters to combat what he called "the Republican noise machine," which was basically a term to cover right-leaning media. 

Now we have Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist who has also moved left and is hoping to start a new group to combat the right wing "disinformation overhang" which again sounds like it will target right-leaning media. It may not be exactly the same thing but it sounds similar enough that there will probably be some overlap.

It's worth noting that Media Matters announced some layoffs earlier this year in response to a lawsuit by Elon Musk.

Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, said in a statement, “We’re confronting a legal assault on multiple fronts and given how rapidly the media landscape is shifting, we need to be extremely intentional about how we allocate resources in order to stay effective. Nobody does what Media Matters does. So, we’re taking this action now to ensure that we are sustainable, sturdy and successful for whatever lies ahead.”

Elon Musk, the owner of X/Twitter, sued Media Matters last year, alleging that the organization “manipulated the algorithms” of the social media platform so that racist images and incendiary content appeared next to blue chip advertisements.

So, Media Matters went after X by targeting its advertisers and Elon Musk sued them. The lawsuit led MM to lay off about a dozen people. And now Rick Wilson is pitching a new group that would target Elon Musk. It kinda, sorta sounds like he's angling to replace a group that is currently struggling (Media Matters) with a similar group (Two Plus Two Coalition) under his control. I guess we'll see if Democratic donors go for it.