Charles Johnson has been writing a blog for almost as long as
the word “blog†has existed. A bearish, gentle-voiced, ponytailed
man who for three decades enjoyed a successful career as a jazz
guitarist accompanying the likes of Al Jarreau and Stanley Clarke,
Johnson has always had a geek’s penchant for self-education, and in
that spirit he cultivated a side interest, and ultimately an expertise,
in writing computer code. His Web log, which he named “Little Green Footballsâ€
(a private joke whose derivation he has always refused to divulge), was
begun in February 2001 mostly as a way to share advice and information
with fellow code jockeys — his approach was similar in outlook, if
vastly larger in its reach, to the guiding spirit in the days of ham
radio. His final post on Sept. 10, 2001, was titled “Placement of Web
Page Elements.†It read, in its entirety: “Here’s a well-executed
academic study of where users expect things to be on a typical Web
page.†It linked to, well, exactly what it said. The post attracted
one comment, which read, in its entirety, “Fantastic article.â€
The next 24 hours would transform his blog and, ultimately,
his career. “I grew up in Hawaii,†Johnson told me recently when we
met in his Los Angeles home, “but I was born in New York. After I
moved away at age 10, I would read the news stories about how the World
Trade Center towers were getting closer to finishing. When they were
attacked that day, that really hit home for me in a way that reached
back into my childhood. I’ve always been kind of a voracious reader,
and when I saw the attack happen, I was probably one of the first ones
to make a connection with Osama bin Laden, who’d declared war on
America a few years earlier. It was like a huge light bulb going on
over my head about this stuff, and I wanted to really learn about it,
so I started posting everything I could find.â€
Those searching the Web for information on the attackers soon
found Johnson. “Many of us felt guilty that we didn’t even know who
had invaded this country,†says Pamela Geller, an early Little Green
Footballs reader and a former associate publisher at The New York Observer, who now writes a blog of
her own called Atlas Shrugs. “The media had been, I think, somewhat
derelict in terms of describing our mortal enemy. Charles Johnson was
covering the global jihad in an in-depth and comprehensive fashion that
nobody else was. That’s where I was getting my best news, from Little
Green Footballs.â€
By virtue of his willingness to do and share research, his
personal embrace of a hawkish, populist anger and his extraordinary Web
savvy, Johnson quickly turned Little Green Footballs (or L.G.F., as it
is commonly known) into one of the most popular personal sites on the
Web, and himself — the very model of a Los Angeles bohemian — into
an avatar of the American right wing. With a daily audience in the
hundreds of thousands, the career sideman had moved to the center of
the stage.
Now it is eight years later, and Johnson, who is 56, sits in
the ashes of an epic flame war that has destroyed his relationships
with nearly every one of his old right-wing allies. People who have
pledged their lives to fighting Islamic extremism, when asked about
Charles Johnson now, unsheathe a word they do not throw around lightly:
“evil.†Glenn Beck has taken the time to denounce
him on air and at length. Johnson himself (Mad King Charles is one of
his most frequent, and most printable, Web nicknames) has used his
technical know-how to block thousands of his former readers not just
from commenting on his site but even, in many cases, from viewing its
home page. He recently moved into a gated community, partly out of
fear, he said, that the venom directed at him in cyberspace might jump
its boundaries and lead someone to do him physical harm. He has turned
forcefully against Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, nearly every conservative icon
you can name. And answering the question of what, or who, got to
Charles Johnson has itself become a kind of boom genre on the Internet.
“It’s just so illogical,†Geller told me heatedly not
long ago. “I loved him. I respected him. But the way he went after
people was like a mental illness. There’s an evil to that, a
maliciousness. He’s a traitor, a turncoat, a plant. We may not know
for years what actually happened. You think he changed his mind?â€
A NUMBER OF SO-CALLED
warblogs were born out of the post-9/11 moment, when hanging a shingle
in the still relatively frontier-like blogosphere was a way of, if not
doing something exactly, at least establishing a rallying point for the
considerable fury of all those who longed to do something. But even if
the cliché about bloggers — that they presume to write knowledgeably
about complex subjects without ever leaving their homes — is mostly
true, it doesn’t mean that bloggers can’t make things happen.
Perhaps the defining moment in Johnson’s new career came in 2004,
when he was able not just to follow but to drive a major story: he was
the central blogger behind what came to be known as Rathergate, in
which a few citizen journalists did what Dan Rather and the venerable CBS News
lacked either the patience or the skill to do themselves — check a
typewritten letter supposedly from 1972, criticizing George W. Bush’s military service, for
authenticity.
There is some dispute, even today, as to who was the first to
expose the fraud behind the so-called Killian documents, but Johnson
will forever be associated with the episode because, unlike most other
bloggers — who know as much about the technical workings of their
medium as a poet is likely to know about a printing press — he had
the wherewithal to create, almost instantly, an animated .gif image
that toggled between the original letter and that same letter typed in
Microsoft Word 32 years later, illustrating the issue in a way that no
500-word blog post could have done.
The Rathergate era was the golden age of L.G.F., at least in
terms of traffic. Johnson says that the peak was somewhere around half
a million page views per day. (Over the past year or so, it has
averaged about one-fifth that many.) But even after its peak, L.G.F.
remained one of the most influential blogs in cyberspace, certainly at
the conservative end of the political spectrum. It would be going too
far to say that L.G.F. was a single-issue blog in those days, but even
those issues on which it branched out — for instance, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Johnson, an agnostic and a Gentile, is a
fierce supporter of Israel, mostly on account of the affection he
developed for it as a touring musician), or the 2004 presidential
election, or the Patriot Act — were outgrowths of the one
concern that trumped all others: national security in the face of
Islamic terrorism.
If the tone of Johnson’s writing on the blog sometimes
bordered, as his detractors claimed, on hate speech, that of his mostly
anonymous commenters was reliably worse. A popular blog like L.G.F.
functions as a kind of cloud-sourced id. It is not uncommon for a
simple, 200-word post to accrue upward of a thousand written responses
from readers. The question of how responsible he is, or should be, for
these expressions of uncensored reader sentiment is one that Johnson,
like many bloggers, has struggled with; but in the middle years of the
last decade, whether for free-speech reasons or simply because he
enjoyed being the popular focal point of such strong nationalist
feeling, he did very little to rein it in. Muslims were described as
“vermin.†The posthumous nickname St. Pancake was coined for the
young American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, in reference to the Israeli
bulldozer that killed her. Discussion of U.S. foreign-policy options
included terms like “targeted genocide.†As for Palestinians,
“they don’t need statehood,†offered one commenter; “they need
sterilization.†And on and on. A so-called stalker blog, called
L.G.F. Watch, sprang up to document instances of what it considered
hate speech on the part of Johnson and his followers. Vanity Fair’s
James Wolcott compared Johnson’s site to a “disorganized Nuremberg
Rally.â€
But enemies themselves are a kind of currency on the
Internet, and for every attack L.G.F. provoked as a place that
permitted and even fostered bigotry against Muslims in particular, new
allies rose up to link themselves to Johnson and his causes. Those
links were both spiritual and literal; allowing (or preventing)
less-successful sites to post a link to yours, and maybe offering them
a link on your own site in return, turns you into a kind of taste
maker, a locus of tangible power. L.G.F. was, by 2007 or so, at the
heart of a vast, amorphous grid of right-wing sites of every
description, an interdependence that Johnson himself had become, in a
way, too popular to control.
That concept of the link, in all its permutations, is the key
to what happened next, both to Johnson and because of him, and it says
something enlightening not just about blogging but also about the
nature and prospects of citizen journalism. Whatever you think of him,
Johnson is a smart man, a gifted synthesizer of information gathered by
other people. But just as for anyone in his position, there is an
inevitable limit to what he can learn about places, people, political
organizations, etc., without actually encountering them. Instead of
causes and effects, motivations and consequences, observation and
behavior, his means of intellectual synthesis is, instead, the link:
the indiscriminate connection established via search engine.
IN OCTOBER 2007,
Johnson was asked to take part in what was billed as a Counter-Jihad
Conference in Brussels, a gathering of fewer than a hundred politicians
and opinion leaders from around the world who convened to share ideas
and strategies for combating the spread of militant Islam. Johnson was
not the only writer invited — Geller was there, as well as Robert
Spencer of jihadwatch.org (a Web site
Johnson himself designed), to name two — but he did not go. “I’m
just not a joiner of these things,†he says.
The conference finished up in Brussels, and “the next
day,†Johnson remembers, “people were e-mailing me saying, ‘You
might want to cover this.’ So I started looking into it.†He
discovered that among the conference’s 90 or so participants —
though not among the speakers — was a man named Filip Dewinter, a
leader of a Belgian-nationalist political party called Vlaams Belang,
or “Flemish Interest.†Vlaams Belang, which has a history that
reaches back to the wrong side of World War II, has an unabashed record
of inflammatory rhetoric and hateful, opportunistic verbal viciousness
of all sorts; a few years ago, for example, the party announced an
advertising campaign in Moroccan newspapers and magazines to
“discourage foreigners from coming to our country.†And as recently
as 2004, it was condemned by the Belgian Supreme Court for incitement to
discrimination and racial segregation. (The party responded by changing
its name.) Even to most right-wing sensibilities, Vlaams Belang is
certainly beyond the pale. Still, whether or not Dewinter, who has said
that “in Flanders, the multicultural society has led to a
multicriminal society,†is more extreme than the commenters who
appeared regularly on Little Green Footballs seems like a subject on
which right-wing minds might reasonably disagree. Perhaps that still
happens somewhere. Gray, however, is not a popular shade on the
Internet.
It seems borderline ridiculous that the political character
of an extremist Belgian party, which in the last parliamentary election
captured just 17 seats out of 150 in the Chamber of Representatives,
should become the issue over which a kind of civil war among American
conservatives broke out, but that is what happened. Opposing
“Islamofascism,†Johnson had come to believe, shouldn’t require
identification with fascism of the older sort. Johnson began taking
shots at not only Vlaams Belang, an organization it seems safe to say
the vast majority of his readers had never heard of, but also at
formerly favored colleagues like Spencer and Geller, to whom, by
attending the same conference, the European neofascist movement was now
. . . linked. Johnson first hinted, and eventually demanded, that they
publicly distance themselves from both Vlaams Belang and the conference
itself, and when they demurred, he publicly distanced himself from them.
“Filip Dewinter has said some things I deplore,†Spencer
says. “But I don’t consider myself responsible for him just because
I was at this conference and he was, too. That’s an outrageous kind
of guilt by association. Let me ask you this: a few years ago I spoke
at a Yom Kippur service, and one of the other speakers was Hillary Clinton. Does that make me a
supporter or her work, or her of mine?â€
Regardless of whether Johnson’s view of Vlaams Belang is
correct, it is notable that the party is defined for him entirely by
the trail it has left on the Internet. This isn’t necessarily unfair
— a speech, say, given by Dewinter isn’t any more or less valuable
as evidence of his political positions depending on whether you read it
(or watch it) on a screen or listen to it in a crowd — but it does
have a certain flattening effect in terms of time: that hypothetical
speech exists on the Internet in exactly the same way whether it was
delivered in 2007 or 1997. The speaker will never put it behind him.
(Just as Johnson, despite his very reasonable contention that he later
changed his mind, will never be allowed to consign to the past a blog
post he wrote in 2004 criticizing that judicial condemnation of Vlaams
Belang as “a victory for European Islamic supremacist groups.â€) It
may be difficult to travel to Belgium and build the case that Filip
Dewinter is not just a hateful character but an actual Nazi (and thus
that those who can be linked to him are Nazi sympathizers), but sitting
at your keyboard, there is no trick to it at all. Not only can the past
never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present,
and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that
intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern
political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized
between hypocrisy and changing your mind.
Johnson broke off relations with blogs that claimed openly to
owe their own existence to him. He called the syndicated columnist
Diana West and the investigative reporter Richard Miniter fascist
sympathizers. He threatened to take down Michelle Malkin. In some ways,
it was an exploration of the limits of his own influence: all over the
blogosphere, you were either with him or with the fascists.
“I was such a small fish at the time,†Geller said. “I
realized I was basically committing blog suicide by going against him.
But he was wrong.†When one of Johnson’s posts about the conference
was picked up and incorporated in a press release by the conservative
bête noire Council on American-Islamic Relations, Geller called him
out on Atlas Shrugs; he responded with a series of posts about her, the
most memorable of which was titled, “Pamela Geller: Poster Girl for
Eurofascism.†(Not that Geller herself, who posted a Photoshopped
picture of Johnson in Joker makeup, was exactly on the high road.)
Traffic at her site, she says, went down about 75 percent. “He really
did put a knife in the trans-Atlantic counterjihad movement, for a long
time. People were running for cover. Nobody wanted to go against him
then. He was the king.â€
Spencer says: “I have actually had people contact me and
say, ‘I understand you’re the American representative for Vlaams
Belang.’ And that is because of Johnson.†After Spencer wrote last
month on Jihad Watch that I interviewed him, Johnson forwarded me
several posts by other bloggers charting Spencer’s unsavory
“associationsâ€; one of them tried to connect him, via a chain of
links that is too long even to summarize, to Slobodan Milosevic. The more creatively
defamatory the whole dispute becomes, the further it moves from the
issues around which Johnson and Spencer and many others have supposedly
reframed their lives. But I never got the sense that any of it was put
forth by Johnson, either in person or on the blog, in anything other
than perfect earnestness. He came of age, as a writer and as a public
figure, in the culture of damnation by link, and he does not exempt
himself from its logic.
Thus in retrospect it also seems clear that the Vlaams Belang
blog war, with its attendant scary buzzwords (“fascist,â€
“racist,†“Naziâ€), gave Johnson the intellectual cover to do
something he wanted to do anyway, which was to conduct a kind of public
self-purge of the alliances he acquired on the road to fame.
THE QUESTIONING OF Johnson’s
tactics started to come not just from without L.G.F. but also from
within. Readers both casual and loyal spoke up in the comment threads
to ask, sometimes diplomatically and sometimes not, whether all this
casual flinging of epithets like “fascist†wasn’t maybe an
overreaction. Johnson’s response, in thousands of cases, was to block
their accounts and ban some of them from viewing the blog. “Get off
my Web site†was a common farewell. (Johnson insists that this is not
true — that no one has ever been banned from L.G.F. merely for
disagreeing with him — but the anecdotal evidence to the contrary is
voluminous, and the fact that the offending comments were instantly and
permanently deleted makes it impossible to check others’ records
against his.)
“Running a community is hard,†says Markos Moulitsas of
the liberal Web site Daily Kos, “and I don’t criticize people for
the approaches they take in trying to control their sites. As I tell my
own disgruntled commenters, if they don’t like a site’s comment
policies, they can always find greener pastures elsewhere. It’s a big
Internet.â€
A reasonable approach, which L.G.F.’s exiles mostly
rejected. Comment threads all over the blogosphere were hijacked by
people sharing stories of their banishment. Another stalker blog —
this one assailing Johnson from the right — sprang up, administered
by banned former “Lizards,†as L.G.F.’s registrants are known.
Johnson responded by posting those former registrants’ real names and
photographs on L.G.F. — an astounding breach of civility on the
Internet, where anonymity is often prized above all else.
It was a kind of orgy of delinking, an intentionally set
brush fire meant to clear the psychic area around Johnson and ensure
that no one would connect him to anyone else, period, unless he first
said it was O.K. No one would define Johnson’s allegiances but
Johnson. Of course, much of this was accomplished by the very methods
he felt so threatened by: a kind of six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon approach
to political rectitude, in which the existence of even a
search-engine-generated connection between two people anywhere in the
world implied a mutual back-scratching, an ideological partnership. It
was unfair and simplistic and petulant, but it also seems to have
achieved its goal. Very few people on the right want to be linked with
Charles Johnson anymore.
NO ONE SEEMS TO WANT
to believe that his thinking simply changed over time — and in fact
he still has that much in common with his old allies, for Johnson, too,
insists that he hasn’t really changed. His recent expressions of
support for abortion rights, of contempt for creationism and the
religious right — all these beliefs, he told me, are elements of the
“classical liberalism†he has always believed in but previously
opted not to write about. Why now? The answer is so heretical it seems
destined to raise the tizzy-level among his former followers to new
heights: “It’s not that the war on terror has finished,†he said.
“It’s never going to be finished, but I think things have reached
the point now where it’s not as pressing as it was. Some of the
measures we took to protect ourselves against extremists have been
pretty effective. And so I realized, you know, that maybe it’s time
to tell people that I’m not onboard with a lot of this
social-conservative agenda. And I think that I actually speak for a lot
of people.†Though our conversation took place in the fall, he told
me in a subsequent e-mail message that the failed Christmas Day
airplane bombing “doesn’t change my opinion about that.â€
The flip side of the fact that his acolytes felt so close to
him without ever actually knowing him is that he serves now, just as
credibly, as a sort of blank screen upon which to project conspiracy
theories. It has been suggested online, with a gravity that is hard to
overstate, that he is a convicted child molester worried about public
exposure; that he is a closeted homosexual threatened with blackmail;
that he is in sexual thrall to an unnamed woman; that he is being paid
by George Soros; or that he is not, in fact,
Charles Johnson at all but some sort of cyberpirate writing the
blog’s posts from an undisclosed location. Anything, apparently,
seems if not more credible then certainly less hurtful than the opinion
that the threat of terrorism on American soil is no longer so imminent
that other disputes should be subsumed by it.
Many on the Internet cite as evidence that Johnson is in some
dire need of money the fact that his blog is rife with advertisements
— an argument that has a certain Yogi Berra quality to it, as most blogs can
only dream of attracting his levels of revenue. Also popular is the
theory that he did it only for the traffic, that he believes in nothing
but the centrality of Charles Johnson and thus, seeing which way the
political winds were blowing, that he betrayed his principles in order
to remain in the spotlight. The problem with that theory is that the
long-term decline in L.G.F.’s traffic, which its detractors delight
in pointing out, began almost exactly at the moment two years ago when
Johnson started turning on his allies and banning skeptical readers. If
he was indeed panicked about loss of traffic to the site, blocking
individual computers from being able to load his home page seems like
an extraordinary way to reverse that.
But perhaps I am, as many suggested to me, just another
liberal dupe. Perhaps I even fell for the pretense that Johnson lives
in the modest home where I visited him, which bore none of the
trappings his supposed sellout would suggest. The U.P.S. man who
delivered packages to his door while I was there, and his truck, may
have been hired for the day just to snow me; the decidedly
un-Mata-Hari-like woman he introduced to me as his fiancée, who
brought us water and fruit as we talked in his small home office, may
have been a member of the Trilateral Commission. It would be just like
a representative of the Mainstream Media to get caught believing his
eyes like that.
THE SOUNDEST CONCLUSION
seems to be that he has indeed changed his mind — less about issues
(though there are a few, global warming chief among them, on which
he will admit to having gradually reversed positions) than about the
people with whom he is willing to share the stage, or, perhaps, about
his willingness to share the stage at all. Not that changing your mind,
even in today’s political environment, makes you into some kind of
intellectual hero. People change their minds all the time, for all
kinds of reasons.
No one ever said L.G.F., or any blog, had to be about the
free exchange of ideas. “It’s his sandbox,†Pamela Geller says
simply. “He can do whatever he wants.†Still, if you read L.G.F.
today, you will find it hard to miss the paradox that a site whose
origins, and whose greatest crisis, were rooted in opposition to
totalitarianism now reads at times like a blog version of “Animal
Farm.†Johnson seems obsessed with what others think of him, posting
much more often than he used to about references to himself elsewhere
on the Internet and breaking into comment threads (a recent one was
about the relative merits of top- versus front-loaded washing machines)
to call commenters’ attention to yet another attack on him that was
posted at some other site.
On the home page, you can click to see the Top 10 comments of
the day, as voted on by registered users; typically, half of those
comments will be from Johnson himself. Even longtime commenters have
been disappeared for one wrong remark, or one too many, and when it
comes to wondering where they went or why, a kind of fearful
self-censorship obtains. He has banned readers because he has seen them
commenting on other sites of which he does not approve. He is, as he
reminds them, always watching. L.G.F. still has more than 34,000
registered users, but the comment threads are dominated by the same two
dozen or so names. And a handful of those have been empowered by
Johnson sub rosa to watch as well — to delete critical comments and,
if necessary, to recommend the offenders for banishment. It is a cult
of personality — not that there’s any compelling reason, really,
that it or any blog should be presumed to be anything else.
“This is one area where I did change,†Johnson admitted.
“I realized you can’t just let it be free speech. It doesn’t work
that way on the Internet. Total free speech is a recipe for anarchy
when people can’t see each other.â€
IN THE LAST DAY
of November, Johnson delivered the final blow to his old alliances. In
a post that he said took him about three minutes to write, he listed 10
reasons “Why I Parted Ways With the Right.†The “reasonsâ€
themselves amounted to little more than laundry lists: “Support for
conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh,
Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.),†for
instance. In the voluminous comment thread attached, Johnson was
characteristically interested less in discussing the break itself than
in discussing the reaction to it — calling readers’ attention to
the number of times it was “re-tweeted,†linking to attacks on him,
citing praise from quarters that not long ago would have considered him
toxic. Anticlimactic as this moment might have seemed to right-wingers
who broke with Johnson a year or more earlier, it caused a sensation:
the site’s traffic spiked to about three and a half times what it was
the day before. (It returned to its current levels — about 100,000
page views a day — within the week.)
“I saw the bill of particulars he nailed to the door of his
Web site,†says the author Peter Collier — himself a survivor of
the special vitriol directed at those who change sides in the
ideological wars, after he and David Horowitz, his fellow former
Ramparts editor, publicly leapt from far left to far right in the late
1980s. “Not exactly Whittaker Chambers, is he? I must say I was
pretty put off by the profligate and kind of lame use of the word
‘fascism,’ a word that has been systematically denuded of its
meaning, so that now it just signifies somebody you don’t agree with.
I don’t want to say that it didn’t take some bravery and
forethought and all that stuff — it just didn’t seem like a very
considered and certainly not a very theoretical break. More of a
take-this-job-and-shove-it moment.â€
Johnson’s desk is flanked by a keyboard and an electric
guitar, which he still plays, though not professionally. “The touring
thing, when you’re younger — it’s nice and glamorous,†he said.
“I’ve been to most of the continents in the world — the only big
country I’ve missed is Russia, I think. I would probably still be
doing it if the blog hadn’t taken off the way it did. If someone were
to come to me and offer me a couple million dollars to go tour for six
months, I wouldn’t say no. But at this point, the blog is more than
meeting my needs, financially.†(He declines to characterize how much
money he makes.)
Sitting at his desk, he read me an e-mail message he received
that day from a stranger who wished upon him a series of unprintable
misfortunes involving a “male black crack whore.†He closed the
e-mail message and shook his head. Incivility, at least of the F2F
variety, clearly makes him uncomfortable; in fact, he can be downright
squeamish about it. “I don’t know why things can’t just stay on
the level of the factual,†he said. “I don’t know why everything
has to have a slant. I mean, The New York Times has a slant, and in the
past I’ve called them out for that.†He sighed. “I miss the days
of Walter Cronkite.â€
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jonathan Dee is a contributing writer for the magazine. His
new novel, “The Privileges,†has just been published.
