Okay, a serious question re: people insulting admin staffers

[dixiegrrrrl]

7. Yes...it did happen before.

Nixon sent Spiro Agnew to publicly criticize protesters and people who criticized Nixon, esp. attacking the press.

The context of this is important to know, because it led to where we are today.

Agnew, while speaking to the California Republican state convention on September 11, 1970: “In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club — the ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.'”

While the phrase is generally attributed to Agnew, it was actually written by White House speechwriter William Safire.

Will Bunch: “The words that William Safire penned and that Spiro Agnew mouthed actually had enormous impact that has lasted until this day. They helped foster among conservatives and the folks that Nixon called ‘the silent majority’ a growing mistrust of the mainstream media, a mistrust that grew over two generations into a form of hatred. It also started a dangerous spiral of events — journalists started bending backwards to kowtow to their conservative critics, beginning in the time of Reagan, an ill-advised shift that did not win back a single reader or viewer on the right. Instead, it caused a lot of folks on the left and even the center to wonder why the national media had stopped doing its job, stopped questioning authority.”

https://politicaldictionary.com/words/nattering-nabobs-of-negativism/

That anti-press attitude is what led to the WaPo publication of the Pentagon Papers and to the press investigation of Watergate.