David, hi it's Barry, the new guy. I also was a follower of LGF in the
early days, mostly due to Charles partnership with Robert Spencer in the
forming of JihadWatch.org. Charles was the original designer of the site
and helped Robert to make it a success.
I agree with your analysis of Charles 100%. It is too bad that he went
from being a blogger with something to say to a clown with a few fanatical
followers. I too have been banned from his site, and I say his slow death
is none too quick in coming.
If you want a real treat go to jihadwatch and look at the archives on the
war he waged against a former close friend and partner.
Barry
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> <font face="Lucida Sans Unicode">OK, a personal story here. I will get
> to the bottom line faster than the other guy, I promise. <br>
> <br>
> I was (yes, WAS) a registered member of Little Green Footballs. The
> Penultimate pro-Israel site, and the breaker of the Dan Rather MEMOGATE
> story. Invitations to speak in Belgium at a political meeting with a
> party that Mr. Johnson deemed RACIST and FASCIST were delivered to two
> other prominent pro-Israel bloggers: Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer.
> Johnson agitated to get them to decline to go and when they refused.
> Johnson then blacklisted them on LGF and any commenter who used the
> same handle on his blog and the other two were promptly bounced from
> his blog. Nothing like a good blacklist, eh, Josef, I mean Charles? <br>
> <br>
> Creationists soon got the same treatment, as did many Christians in
> general. Disagree with Charles on atheism and Darwinism, and you would
> get "flounced" out of his registration database. It won't let you sign
> up the same e-mail again. As I posted in a comment on Protein Wisdom "I
> don't really understand what is going on there." I returned to find my
> account blocked and membership terminated after being gone about two
> weeks. Obviously Charles and his minions scour the blogosphere for
> heretics so that they may be purged from LGF. The KGB and the SS would
> be proud of this crew. BIG BROTHER LIVES, and one of his names is
> Charles Johnson. <br>
> <br>
> I now no longer visit. The only better echo chambers that I can think
> of are The Daily Kos and The Democratic Underground. Ideology and
> content aren't much different than the last time I visited the other
> sites. Johnson appears to be the only pro-Israel blog on the left.
> Michelle Malkin's Hot Air site moved him from Right to Left and has
> lately dropped him completely from their blogroll. Good riddance. <br>
> <br>
> He was replaced by Robert Stacy McCain, whose Virginia heritage seems
> to make him an automatic RACIST from the likes of Charles and Patrick
> Frey-also a Californian and main writer of Patterico's Pontifications.
> What is in the water in California? Patrick Frey has also attacked
> Radley Balko, now of Reason Magazine, and blogger Jeff Goldstein, the
> proprietor of Protein Wisdom. <br>
> <br>
> Johnson is not right-wing. He was a left-winger shocked by 09/11, but
> now that shock appears to have worn off he has returned to his nutty
> leftist California roots. So this isn't a Right Wing Flame War. This is
> Johnson stirring up shit and simpletons believing him, largely on the
> strength of MEMOGATE. But since when are people expecting the TRUTH
> from the New York Slimes? <br>
> <br>
> David<br>
> <br>
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> <p class="MsoNormal"><span
> style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";
> color: maroon;">"Suppose
> you were an idiot; and suppose you were a member of
> Congress...ah, but I repeat myself."<b style="">Mark
> Twain<o:p></o:p></b></span></p>
> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
> </div>
> </div>
> <br>
> On 1/26/2010 12:23 PM, <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated"
> href="mailto:[email protected]";>[email protected]</a> wrote:
> <blockquote cite="mid:[email protected]" type="cite">
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> size="3">
> <div>Apologies for the length of this article, a good copy editor
> would have cut</div>
> <div>at least a third of it, but the substance speaks for itself.</div>
> <div> </div>
> <div>===========================================================</div>
> <div> </div>
> <div> </div>
> <div> </div>
> <div class="header">
> <div class="left"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
> href="http://www.nytimes.com/";><img moz-do-not-send="true"
> alt="The New York Times"
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> </div>
> <div>
> <hr align="left" size="1"></div>
> <div class="timestamp">January 24, 2010</div>
> <h1><nyt_headline version="1.0" type=" ">Right-Wing Flame War!
> </nyt_headline></h1>
> <nyt_byline version="1.0" type=" "></nyt_byline></font>
> <div class="byline"><font id="role_document" color="#000000"
> face="Times New Roman CE" size="3">By JONATHAN DEE</font></div>
> <nyt_text>
> <div id="articleBody">
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">Charles Johnson has been writing a blog for almost as long as
> the word âblogâ 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 geekâs 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 <a
> moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/";
> target="_blank"><font color="#000066">âLittle Green
> Footballsâ</font></a>
> (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 â 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
> âPlacement of Web
> Page Elements.â It read, in its entirety:
> âHereâs a well-executed
> academic study of where users expect things to be on a typical Web
> page.â It linked to, well, exactly what it said. The
> post attracted
> one comment, which read, in its entirety, âFantastic
> article.â</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">The next 24 hours would transform his blog and, ultimately,
> his career. âI grew up in Hawaii,â
> Johnson told me recently when we
> met in his Los Angeles home, âbut 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. Iâve 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 <a moz-do-not-send="true"
> title="More articles about Osama bin Laden."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/osama_bin_laden/index.html?inline=nyt-per";><font
> color="#000066">Osama bin Laden</font></a>, whoâd
> 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</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">Those searching the Web for information on the attackers soon
> found Johnson. âMany of us felt guilty that we
> didnât even know who
> had invaded this country,â says Pamela Geller, an early
> Little Green
> Footballs reader and a former associate publisher at The <a
> moz-do-not-send="true" title="More articles about New York Observer."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_observer/index.html?inline=nyt-org";><font
> color="#000066">New York Observer</font></a>, who now writes a blog of
> her own called Atlas Shrugs. âThe 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. Thatâs where I was getting my best
> news, from Little
> Green Footballs.â</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">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 â the very model of a Los Angeles
> bohemian â 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.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">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:
> âevil.â <a moz-do-not-send="true"
> title="More articles about Glenn Beck."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/glenn_beck/index.html?inline=nyt-per";><font
> color="#000066">Glenn Beck</font></a> 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, <a moz-do-not-send="true"
> title="More articles about Rush Limbaugh."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/rush_limbaugh/index.html?inline=nyt-per";><font
> color="#000066">Rush Limbaugh</font></a>, <a moz-do-not-send="true"
> title="More articles about Sarah Palin."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/sarah_palin/index.html?inline=nyt-per";><font
> color="#000066">Sarah Palin</font></a>, 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.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">âItâs just so
> illogical,â Geller told me heatedly not
> long ago. âI loved him. I respected him. But the way he
> went after
> people was like a mental illness. Thereâs an evil to
> that, a
> maliciousness. Heâs a traitor, a turncoat, a plant. We
> may not know
> for years what actually happened. You think he changed his <span
> class="italic">mind</span>?â</font></p>
> <p><span class="bold"><font id="role_document" color="#000000"
> face="Times New Roman CE" size="3">A NUMBER OF
> SO-CALLED</font></span><font
> id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE" size="3">
> 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 â that they
> presume to write knowledgeably
> about complex subjects without ever leaving their homes
> â is mostly
> true, it doesnât mean that bloggers
> canât make things happen.
> Perhaps the defining moment in Johnsonâs 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 <a moz-do-not-send="true"
> title="More articles about Dan Rather."
> href
> ="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/dan_rather/index.html?inline=nyt-per";><font
> color="#000066">Dan Rather</font></a> and the venerable CBS News
> lacked either the patience or the skill to do themselves
> â check a
> typewritten letter supposedly from 1972, criticizing <a
> moz-do-not-send="true" title="More articles about George W. Bush."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_w_bush/index.html?inline=nyt-per";><font
> color="#000066">George W. Bush</font></a>âs military
> service, for
> authenticity.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">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 â who know as much about the technical
> workings of their
> medium as a poet is likely to know about a printing press
> â 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.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">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 â 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 <a moz-do-not-send="true"
> title="More articles about the USA Patriot Act."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/usa_patriot_act/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier";><font
> color="#000066">Patriot Act</font></a> â were
> outgrowths of the one
> concern that trumped all others: national security in the face of
> Islamic terrorism.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">If the tone of Johnsonâs 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
> âvermin.â The posthumous nickname
> St. Pancake was coined for the
> young American pro-<a moz-do-not-send="true"
> title="More articles about Palestinians."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/palestinians/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier";><font
> color="#000066">Palestinian</font></a> activist <a
> moz-do-not-send="true" title="More articles about Rachel Corrie."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/rachel_corrie/index.html?inline=nyt-per";><font
> color="#000066">Rachel Corrie</font></a>, in reference to the Israeli
> bulldozer that killed her. Discussion of U.S. foreign-policy options
> included terms like âtargeted
> genocide.â As for Palestinians,
> âthey donât need
> statehood,â offered one commenter;
> âthey need
> sterilization.â 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
> Fairâs
> James Wolcott compared Johnsonâs site to a
> âdisorganized Nuremberg
> Rally.â</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">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.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">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.</font></p>
> <p><span class="bold"><font id="role_document" color="#000000"
> face="Times New Roman CE" size="3">IN OCTOBER 2007,</font></span><font
> id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE" size="3">
> 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 â Geller was there, as
> well as Robert
> Spencer of <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://jihadwatch.org/";
> target="_"><font color="#000066">jihadwatch.org</font></a> (a Web site
> Johnson himself designed), to name two â but he did
> not go. âIâm
> just not a joiner of these things,â he says.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">The conference finished up in Brussels, and
> âthe next
> day,â Johnson remembers, âpeople
> were e-mailing me saying, âYou
> might want to cover this.â So I started looking into
> it.â He
> discovered that among the conferenceâs 90 or so
> participants â
> though not among the speakers â was a man named Filip
> Dewinter, a
> leader of a Belgian-nationalist political party called Vlaams Belang,
> or âFlemish Interest.â 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
> âdiscourage foreigners from coming to our
> country.â And as recently
> as 2004, it was condemned by the Belgian <a moz-do-not-send="true"
> title="More articles about the U.S. Supreme Court."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org";><font
> color="#000066">Supreme Court</font></a> 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 âin Flanders, the multicultural society has led to
> a
> multicriminal society,â 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.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">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
> âIslamofascism,â Johnson had come to
> believe, shouldnât 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.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">âFilip Dewinter has said some things I
> deplore,â Spencer
> says. âBut I donât consider myself
> responsible for him just because
> I was at this conference and he was, too. Thatâs 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 <a
> moz-do-not-send="true"
> title="More articles about Hillary Rodham Clinton."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/hillary_rodham_clinton/index.html?inline=nyt-per";><font
> color="#000066">Hillary Clinton</font></a>. Does that make me a
> supporter or her work, or her of mine?â</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">Regardless of whether Johnsonâs 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 isnât
> necessarily unfair
> â a speech, say, given by Dewinter
> isnât 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 â
> 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 âa 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.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">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.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">âI was such a small fish at the
> time,â Geller said. âI
> realized I was basically committing blog suicide by going against him.
> But he was wrong.â When one of
> Johnsonâs 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, âPamela Geller:
> Poster Girl for
> Eurofascism.â (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.
> âHe 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</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">Spencer says: âI have actually had people
> contact me and
> say, âI understand youâre the
> American representative for Vlaams
> Belang.â And that is because of
> Johnson.â After Spencer wrote last
> month on Jihad Watch that I interviewed him, Johnson forwarded me
> several posts by other bloggers charting Spencerâs
> unsavory
> âassociationsâ; one of them tried to
> connect him, via a chain of
> links that is too long even to summarize, to <a moz-do-not-send="true"
> title="More articles about Slobodan Milosevic."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/slobodan_milosevic/index.html?inline=nyt-per";><font
> color="#000066">Slobodan Milosevic</font></a>. 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.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">Thus in retrospect it also seems clear that the Vlaams Belang
> blog war, with its attendant scary buzzwords
> (âfascist,â
> âracist,â
> âNaziâ), 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.</font></p>
> <p><span class="bold"><font id="role_document" color="#000000"
> face="Times New Roman CE" size="3">THE QUESTIONING OF </font></span><font
> id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">Johnsonâs
> 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
> âfascistâ wasnât
> maybe an
> overreaction. Johnsonâs response, in thousands of
> cases, was to block
> their accounts and ban some of them from viewing the blog.
> âGet off
> my Web siteâ was a common farewell. (Johnson insists
> that this is not
> true â that no one has ever been banned from L.G.F.
> merely for
> disagreeing with him â 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
> othersâ records
> against his.)</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">âRunning a community is
> hard,â says Markos Moulitsas of
> the liberal Web site Daily Kos, âand I
> donât criticize people for
> the approaches they take in trying to control their sites. As I tell my
> own disgruntled commenters, if they donât like a
> siteâs comment
> policies, they can always find greener pastures elsewhere.
> Itâs a big
> Internet.â</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">A reasonable approach, which L.G.F.âs exiles
> mostly
> rejected. Comment threads all over the blogosphere were hijacked by
> people sharing stories of their banishment. Another stalker blog
> â
> this one assailing Johnson from the right â sprang up,
> administered
> by banned former âLizards,â as
> L.G.F.âs registrants are known.
> Johnson responded by posting those former registrantsâ
> real names and
> photographs on L.G.F. â an astounding breach of
> civility on the
> Internet, where anonymity is often prized above all else.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">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 Johnsonâs
> 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.</font></p>
> <p><span class="bold"><font id="role_document" color="#000000"
> face="Times New Roman CE" size="3">NO ONE SEEMS TO
> WANT</font></span><font
> id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE" size="3">
> to believe that his thinking simply changed over time
> â and in fact
> he still has that much in common with his old allies, for Johnson, too,
> insists that he hasnât really changed. His recent
> expressions of
> support for abortion rights, of contempt for creationism and the
> religious right â all these beliefs, he told me, are
> elements of the
> âclassical liberalismâ 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: âItâs not that the war on
> terror has finished,â he said.
> âItâs never going to be finished,
> but I think things have reached
> the point now where itâs 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
> itâs time
> to tell people that Iâm not onboard with a lot of this
> social-conservative agenda. And I think that I actually speak for a lot
> of people.â Though our conversation took place in the
> fall, he told
> me in a subsequent e-mail message that the failed Christmas Day
> airplane bombing âdoesnât change my
> opinion about that.â</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">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 <a moz-do-not-send="true" title="More articles about George Soros."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/george_soros/index.html?inline=nyt-per";><font
> color="#000066">George Soros</font></a>; or that he is not, in fact,
> Charles Johnson at all but some sort of cyberpirate writing the
> blogâs 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.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">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
> â an argument that has a certain <a
> moz-do-not-send="true"
> title="More articles about Yogi Berra."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/yogi_berra/index.html?inline=nyt-per";><font
> color="#000066">Yogi Berra</font></a> 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.âs 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.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">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.</font></p>
> <p><span class="bold"><font id="role_document" color="#000000"
> face="Times New Roman CE" size="3">THE SOUNDEST
> CONCLUSION</font></span><font
> id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE" size="3">
> seems to be that he has indeed changed his mind â less
> about issues
> (though there are a few, <a moz-do-not-send="true"
> title="Recent and archival news about global warming."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier";><font
> color="#000066">global warming</font></a> 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 todayâs political environment, makes you into
> some kind of
> intellectual hero. People change their minds all the time, for all
> kinds of reasons.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">No one ever said L.G.F., or any blog, had to be about the
> free exchange of ideas. âItâs his
> sandbox,â Pamela Geller says
> simply. âHe can do whatever he
> wants.â 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
> âAnimal
> Farm.â 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 commentersâ attention to yet another attack on
> him that was
> posted at some other site. </font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">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 â to delete critical
> comments and,
> if necessary, to recommend the offenders for banishment. It is a cult
> of personality â not that thereâs
> any compelling reason, really,
> that it or any blog should be presumed to be anything else.</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">âThis is one area where I did
> change,â Johnson admitted.
> âI realized you canât just let it
> be free speech. It doesnât work
> that way on the Internet. Total free speech is a recipe for anarchy
> when people canât see each
> other.â</font></p>
> <p><span class="bold"><font id="role_document" color="#000000"
> face="Times New Roman CE" size="3">IN THE LAST DAY</font></span><font
> id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE" size="3">
> 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 âWhy I Parted Ways With the
> Right.â The
> âreasonsâ
> themselves amounted to little more than laundry lists:
> âSupport for
> conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh,
> Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers,
> etc.),â 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 â calling
> readersâ attention to
> the number of times it was
> âre-tweeted,â 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 siteâs traffic spiked to about three and a half
> times what it was
> the day before. (It returned to its current levels â
> about 100,000
> page views a day â within the week.)</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">âI saw the bill of particulars he nailed to
> the door of his
> Web site,â says the author Peter Collier
> â 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. âNot exactly Whittaker Chambers, is he? I must
> say I was
> pretty put off by the profligate and kind of lame use of the word
> âfascism,â a word that has been
> systematically denuded of its
> meaning, so that now it just signifies somebody you
> donât agree with.
> I donât want to say that it didnât
> take some bravery and
> forethought and all that stuff â it just
> didnât seem like a very
> considered and certainly not a very theoretical break. More of a
> take-this-job-and-shove-it moment.â</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">Johnsonâs desk is flanked by a keyboard and
> an electric
> guitar, which he still plays, though not professionally.
> âThe touring
> thing, when youâre younger â
> itâs nice and glamorous,â he said.
> âIâve been to most of the
> continents in the world â the only big
> country Iâve missed is Russia, I think. I would
> probably still be
> doing it if the blog hadnât 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 wouldnât say no. But at this point, the blog
> is more than
> meeting my needs, financially.â (He declines to
> characterize how much
> money he makes.)</font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">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 âmale black crack
> whore.â 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. âI donât know
> why things canât just stay on
> the level of the factual,â he said.
> âI donât know why everything
> has to have a slant. I mean, The New York Times has a slant, and in the
> past Iâve called them out for
> that.â He sighed. âI miss the days
> of <a moz-do-not-send="true"
> title="More articles about Walter Cronkite."
>
> href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/walter_cronkite/index.html?inline=nyt-per";><font
> color="#000066">Walter Cronkite</font></a>.â
> </font></p>
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
>
> size="3">---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</font></p>
> <nyt_author_id>
> <div id="authorId">
> <p><font id="role_document" color="#000000" face="Times New Roman CE"
> size="3">Jonathan Dee is a contributing writer for the magazine. His
> new novel, âThe Privileges,â has
> just been published.</font></p>
> </div>
> </nyt_author_id><nyt_update_bottom></nyt_update_bottom></div>
> <center>
> <div class="footerRow" style="width: auto;"><font id="role_document"
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