The New York Times Magazine has an interesting story that follows the ephiphany of Charles Johnson, author/editor of the blog, Little Green Footballs, which for a time was an avatar of the American right wing. Like many others, Johnson ultimately broke with the far right as it hate laced insanity became increasing delusional and, in my view, down right dangerous. While the Republican Party has made recent gains, if it does not distance itself from the most lunatic core of the party base, a long term recovery may be difficult to achieve. Too many people, myself included, find the Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck crowd to be outright scary. It's one thing to be a conservative, it's something else entirely to be a foaming at the mouth bigot who hates everyone who doesn't look and believe just like one's self. In any event, by 2007 or so Johnson found his blog at the heart of a vast, amorphous grid of right-wing sites of every description. Johnson himself had become, in a way, too popular to control and, as a result, when he came to disavow the hate emanating from the far right, the reaction from those who thought him an ally was nearly violent. Here are some highlights from the Times article that look at Johnson's change in direction: *
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 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 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]n retrospect it also seems clear that the Vlaams Belang blog war, with its attendant scary buzzwords (“fascist,” “racist,” “Nazi”), 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.
*
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.
*
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.”
*
ON 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 “reasons” 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.
*
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.
*
Where the right will go is any one's guess. Personally, I believe Johnson made the right move and I agree with him that comments should be fact based and not personal attacks on the blog author - something I experience frequently from far right and Christianists commenters who, for the life of me, I don't know why are reading a gay blog in the first place. Obviously, I do not publish such comments - most of which are by "anonymous," but they nonetheless can make one shiver at times. Especially the ones that talk about physical violence like one that greeted me this morning.
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 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 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]n retrospect it also seems clear that the Vlaams Belang blog war, with its attendant scary buzzwords (“fascist,” “racist,” “Nazi”), 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.
*
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.
*
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.”
*
ON 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 “reasons” 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.
*
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.
*
Where the right will go is any one's guess. Personally, I believe Johnson made the right move and I agree with him that comments should be fact based and not personal attacks on the blog author - something I experience frequently from far right and Christianists commenters who, for the life of me, I don't know why are reading a gay blog in the first place. Obviously, I do not publish such comments - most of which are by "anonymous," but they nonetheless can make one shiver at times. Especially the ones that talk about physical violence like one that greeted me this morning.
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