Re: [RC] Little Green Footballs / the inside scoop from a NY Timesperspectiv

[oregonjake]

Aw shoot!

Barry





> Barry, who has virgin ears (LOL ),  should be told that David
> occasionally
> misspells "shirt."
>
> ===================================================
>
>
> In a message dated 1/26/2010 9:18:27 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,
> david.r.bl...@verizon.net writes:
>
> OK, a personal story here. I will get to the bottom  line faster than the
> other guy, I promise.
>
> 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?
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?
>
>
> David
>
>   _
>
> "Suppose  you were an idiot; and suppose you were a member of
> Congress...ah, but I  repeat myself."—Mark Twain
>
>
>
> On 1/26/2010 12:23 PM,  bil...@aol.com_ (mailto:bil...@aol.com)  wrote:
> Apologies for the length of this article, a good copy editor would have
> cut
> at least a third of it, but the substance speaks for itself.
>
> ==========================================================
>
>
>
>  (http://www.nytimes.com/)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ____________________________________
>
> January 24, 2010
> Right-Wing Flame War!
> By  JONATHAN DEE
>
> 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  Footballs”_
> (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/)  (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.”
> 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_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/osama_bin_laden/
> index.html?inline=nyt-per) ,  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.”
> 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_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_observer/index
> .html?inline=nyt-org) , 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.”
> 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_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/glenn_beck/index.html?inli
> ne=nyt-per)  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_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/rush_limbaugh/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
>  , _Sarah Palin_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/sarah_palin/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
> , 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. â
> €œI 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?”
> 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_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/dan_rather/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
>  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_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_w_bush/ind
> ex.html?inline=nyt-per) ’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_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/usa_patriot_act/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier)
>  — 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 â
> €œvermin.” The posthumous nickname St. Pancake was coined  for
> the young
> American pro-_Palestinian_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/palestinians/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier)
>  activist
> _Rachel Corrie_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/rachel_corrie/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
> , 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.”
> 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_ (http://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_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/index.html?inline=nyt
> -org)  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 mul
> ticriminal  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_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/hillary_rodham_clinton/index.html?i
> nline=nyt-per) . Does  that make me a supporter or her work, or her of
> mine?”
> 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.”
> 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 “associations”;
> one of them tried to
> connect him,  via a chain of links that is too long even to summarize, to
> _Slobodan Milosevic_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/slobodan_milosevic/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
> .  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,”
> “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.”
> 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.”
> 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_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/george_soros/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
> ; 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_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/referen
> ce/timestopics/people/b/yogi_berra/index.html?inline=nyt-per)  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_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/t
> opics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier)  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.”
> 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,â€
>  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.”
> 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
> hadnâ
> €™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. â
> €œI 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_
> (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/walter_cronkite/index.html?inline=nyt-p
> er) .”
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> -----------------
>
> Jonathan Dee is a  contributing writer for the magazine. His new novel,
> “
> The Privileges,”  has just been  published.
>
>
>
>
>
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