-Caveat Lector-
by Justin Raimondo
> August 30, 1999
>
> ADVENTURES IN CYBER-POLITICS
>
> It was an entirely innocent impulse that got me thrown off Lucianne.com, really
> it was. I mean, how was I to know that I had run aground on the ideological
> shores of the Internet, marooned and then ambushed! in the cyber-country of
> the New York Neocons?
>
>
>
> MOMENT IN THE SUN
>
> For those not In the Know and for all you readers outside the United States
> Lucianne.com is the site run by the infamous Lucianne Goldberg, a New York City
> literary agent and bit-player in Monica-gate, who held the Linda Tripp tapes
> and, for a moment there, the fate of the Clinton presidency in her hot little
> hands. From Clinton's point of view, those hands might just as well have been
> around his neck.
>
> A STAR IS BORN
>
> If more than Clinton's lower lip trembled at the thought of it, it is no wonder.
> For the redoubtable Lucianne's politics are unabashedly and even combatively
> conservative. It was rumored that she had been a Nixonian spy on McGovern's
> campaign plane back in '72. If the Clintonians could play rough, then Lucianne
> proved more than their match: as a real Republican fire-breather ensconced in
> the urban liberal wilderness of Manhattan, she was battle-hardened and ready to
> rumble. Her tough-gal persona and unapologetic rightism thrilled grassroots
> conservatives, and she was a hit on the television talk show circuit. It wasn't
> long before she became a hot item on the short list of right-wing celebrities,
> sought after as much for the charming authenticity of her abrasiveness as for
> her value as a newsmaker. During that long interregnum in which no news was
> permitted unless it had something to do with the Presidential libido, La
> Goldberg was much sought after. But Lucianne, smart girl that she is, never let
> it go to her head: she knew there would come a time, and soon, when her fifteen
> minutes of fame had long since passed. With stunning swiftness, she managed to
> parlay her notoriety into a radio talk show and a website, Lucianne.com.
>
> CONSERVATIVE CYBER-POLITICS
>
> In the wild and wacky world of the Internet why do you think they call it WWW?
> politics takes on an immediacy and intensity that seems to exaggerate the
> foibles and conceits of the human species. Political "chat rooms" are noisy and
> often noxious places, filled with the smoke and flame of cyber-political
> sloganeering, all too often IN ALL CAPS and in sentences invariably ending in at
> least three exclamation points!!! A more sophisticated form is the posting site,
> where champion posters show off their research skills in uncovering the most
> informative news articles on current events: but it is more than a collective
> clipping service. For anyone who is a registered member can comment on the
> article, or on the last comment, or on anything at all. At its best, a posting
> site is a combination political salon and "Crossfire" segment, in which cute
> one-liners intersperse serious political analysis. For some reason, this is a
> cyber-phenomenon that as far as I know is purely a creature of the Right.
> The best and most famous site of this kind is, without a doubt,
> Freerepublic.com, run by Jim Robinson out of his living room somewhere out in
> the California boonies. And therein lies a tale . . .
>
> IN THE LAND OF THE FREEPERS
>
> In spite of many premature pronouncements of its death, Freerepublic is
> flourishing with more visitors and more activity than its heavily-subsidized
> rival and nemesis, the ultraliberal Salon.com online "magazine" that since its
> founding has really functioned as a virtual Clinton.com. While Salon's stock is
> falling, its seems as if Freerepublic's is rapidly climbing, with almost as much
> activity as at the height of the Clinton scandals. The discussions are spirited,
> but usually civil, or at least no less civil than out in the "real" world. But
> most impressive of all is the consistently high quality of the postings: there
> are some real champions out there (are you reading this "Hamiltonian," and
> especially 'StandWatchListen"?) whose research skills are truly awesome, to say
> nothing of the speed at which they work. If it's on the Internet, they'll find
> it and you can be sure they all have an opinion about it. The unique sense of
> community that came out of shared politics and the new technology created a
> virtual movement: and the "Freepers," as they call themselves, continue to
> thrive. But like all movements, especially new ones, the new cyber-populism soon
> began to differentiate itself into various tendencies: it was almost inevitable
> that a split would come. When it finally did, all hell broke loose.
>
> THE EXPLOSION
>
> As L'affaire Lewinsky oozed to halt, Lucianne and her son Jonah Goldberg, who
> had been two of the brightest stars in the Freeper firmament, announced, with
> great fanfare, that they were leaving Freerepublic.com forever. They chose to do
> it in a manner and in a place that caused a sensation it was the
> equivalent of a supernova in the cyber-political universe.
>
> DEFECTING TO THE ENEMY
>
> In the pages of none other than Salon.com, Lucianne and her son Jonah accused
> the denizens of Freerepublic of having committed verbal hate crimes against not
> only homosexuals, but also against Jews. In an article by Jeff Stein, "Free for
> All at Free Republic," Lucianne let loose at the Freepers. And the special
> cruelty of it was that she was given a platform to do it by the same people who
> had excoriated the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy out to get the President and
> mercilessly mocked Lucianne, Linda Tripp, and other "Clinton-bashers" as its
> headline-writers invariably described people they didn't like. Salon gleefully
> reported that Freerepublic's hits were down to half of what they had been a year
> ago (maybe, but still higher than Salon!) and more seriously gave vent to
> Lucianne's viperish charges, uttered in her characteristically "salty" manner.
> As Salon "reported":
>
> A MEAN BITCH
>
> "He's a mean shit," says Goldberg of Robinson, once her partner in exposing
> Clinton crimes. She launched her own Web site, Lucianne.com, taking "2,000"
> Freepers with her, she says. "I am not anti-abortion, I am not Y2K either. I'm
> not a homophobe, I'm not an anti-Semite Christ ... I have a Jewish husband ...
> I have four people who work for me and half of them are gay. I mean, this is
> ridiculous."
>
> A BARREL OF MUD
>
> Yes, it's true: the poison of political correctness so permeates our culture
> that even the conservative movement is saturated with it. Of course, many on the
> Right are not "antiabortion," but they take pains to point out that neither are
> they pro-abortion either. Such subtleties are lost on Lucianne, however, who
> merely slings the whole barrel of mud at her former friends and allies without
> making too many fine distinctions. She isn't Y2K? This may or may not mean that
> Lucianne.com will be down as the new millenium dawns. Perhaps it means that she
> has complete faith in the assurances of Clinton/Gore that Everything is Under
> Control.
>
> THE ART OF THE SMEAR
>
> But it is not hard to miss the meaning of the ugly charge of anti-Semitism,
> hurled without proof, context, or any reference to a particular individual. This
> is the traditional smear technique, which has always been used against
> conservatives by the Left, here employed by the Respectable Right against
> allegedly dangerous radicals. It was a cheap and slimy trick, a reckless charge
> offered without a shred of evidence or documentation, just the baldest of
> accusations. What is going on here?
>
> LOOKING IN A FUNHOUSE MIRROR
>
> The cyber-split in the conservative movement is a funhouse mirror reflection of
> a fissure that has long threatened to divide the Right into two camps. The issue
> is who and what is the Respectable Right, but the key question is really where
> is it: outside the Washington-New York-California corridor, the favorite (and
> only known) breeding grounds of that fabulous sect known as the
> Neoconservatives, is considered an ideological no-man's-land. Ex-lefties who
> gravitated toward the Right as the failure and evil of Stalinism unfolded, the
> neoconservatives (or neocons, for short) ensconced themselves in the
> Washington-and-New York-based institutions that made up the conservative
> movement, taking over existing organizations and creating a plethora of new
> ones. Loaded down with foundation money, and corporate sponsorships, they
> triumphed in the eighties. But it was only by mistake, or for the sake of
> convenience, that this cosmopolitan coterie of publicists and activists, many of
> them writers and academics, became known as conservatives: for really they were
> Mensheviks, or Right-wing Social Democrats, who were content to give "two cheers
> for capitalism," as neocon godfather Irving Kristol put it, but three or perhaps
> even four or five cheers for the Cold War. The glorification of war soon
> overwhelmed the earlier conservative "isolationism," and an openly militarist
> authoritarianism displaced the old libertarian anti-statism of Robert A. Taft
> and John T. Flynn. For a while the neocons had the Right in their vise, indeed
> for as long as the Cold War lasted: but now that the Kremlin is fallen, the
> bottom has fallen out of their ideological bandwagon. Their great crusade to
> make the world safe for "democracy" is not nearly as popular as the fight
> against Communism: instead of looking to right every wrong in every country, the
> American people want to right the wrongs committed by their own government in
> their own country against their own countrymen. Or can we expect that the
> International Tribunal in the Hague will take an interest in who killed the
> children of Waco?
>
> THE LUCIANNE-SALON AXIS: MORE THAN A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE
>
> This scares the neocons, who don't like populist movements, and especially rural
> white Protestant movements which they claim have been traditionally prone to
> anti-Semitism. Of course, since such sentiments as opposition to the Federal
> Reserve, the belief in a ruling elite analysis of events, and the view that U.S.
> foreign policy in the Mideast should be neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian
> conflict are all considered "anti-Semitic" according to the sociological
> ruminations of neocon scholars, whole sections of the Right are declared
> off-limits, the "extremist" "fever swamp" that must be avoided and isolated at
> all costs. This was the whole point of the Salon article and a point of
> agreement between the Luciannites and their ostensible enemies in Clintonia.
>
> THE ART OF THE SMEAR, PART II
>
> As framed by Salon, which labels Robinson an "extremist" the favorite epithet
> of the Smear Brigade, in which anyone to the right of William F. Buckley, Jr. is
> portrayed as a potential Timothy McVeigh the charge of "anti-Semitism" blends
> naturally into the general background of calumny. Again, it is a charge offered
> without proof or even some sense of the need for any. A charge, repeated often
> enough, becomes its own truth, as any liar or gossipmonger knows. It is only
> natural that people who started out as spreaders of rumors evolved effortlessly
> into political gossip columnists and smearers of the reputations of their
> perceived enemies on the Right as well as the Clintonian Left.
>
> LEFT AND RIGHT
>
> What is especially revealing is that Salon quotes one Robinson Giles, a partisan
> of Lucianne's, as calling Robinson "a stinking mackerel in the garbage can of
> truth." Giles lets slip out the real politics of the split when he continues
> ranting on about how "Robinson allowed the site to become 'a hate group open to
> all sorts of off-the-wall stuff conspiracy theories that really come from the
> left."
>
> THE MANHATTANITE RIGHT
>
> Now this is a very curious remark to have made, and it wasn't just casual but
> packed with political meaning. Aside from the usual smokescreen thrown up by the
> phrase "hate group," here we have the self-proclaimed pro-choice Y2K-skeptical
> "moderates" who have a lot of gay friends or so they say and live in the Big
> City and don't mind an abortion or two every once in a while, claiming that the
> "extremists" really "come from the left." Just what could this mean, I wondered,
> as I read the Salon piece. I soon decided to find out for myself.
>
> CLOSE CYBER-ENCOUNTERS OF THE WORST KIND
>
> I had never been able to decipher the somewhat arcane and cumbersome process by
> which Lucianne.com readers could go from being "lurkers" to participants in the
> posting process: they seem to have a lot of rules and "guidelines," but very
> little instruction. At one point, however, in an idle moment, I went lurking on
> Lucianne.com, researching my column, but didn't find anything. I hadn't really
> explored the site all that much after my initial curiosity over the brouhaha in
> Salon, because it wasn't really very interesting. The posts, I noticed, were
> nearly all from East Coast newspapers and a selected list of British papers,
> whereas on Freerepublic you could find everything from the New York Times to the
> South China Morning Post and everything in between, including all sorts of
> miscellaneous and very interesting documents. What is more, there didn't seem to
> be many posters: it looked staff-driven, rather than spontaneously-generated
> like a real conversation.
>
> THE CYBER-CULTURAL GULF
>
> The difference between the Freeper experience and spending a few minutes in
> Lucianne's World is the difference between a free-wheeling beer-bust in small
> town America where any topic is likely to come up, and a snooty somewhat subdued
> (if not downright dead) cocktail party on the Upper West Side of Manhattan,
> where everybody knows everybody else and what isn't said is rigidly defined and
> brutally enforced as I discovered to my surprise.
>
> MY DEBUT
>
> Well, I thought, this place is kind of boring: I mean look at all those articles
> from the New York Times, for god's sake, no wonder none of the lurkers are
> talking: what are we supposed to talk about? Out of sheer boredom, I registered
> under the name of "Garrett: after Garet Garrett, my favorite writer and
> starting posting articles from Antiwar.com. I genuinely thought that this would
> give the roster of posted articles some balance: there were almost no articles
> dealing with foreign policy, whereas Freerepublic has a whole section devoted to
> it. I posted my column on George Dubya's foreign policy advisors, ("Dubya Dubya
> Dubya Dot Warmonger Dot Com") and the last one on Iraq ("Is Iraq Next?"). There,
> I thought, proud of myself that I had finally mastered the art of posting, I
> have made my contribution. Now let's see what kind of conversation develops.
> Boy, was I in for a shock . . .
>
> THE THOUGHT POLICE
>
> With blitzkrieg-like swiftness, the shock troops of the Lucianne.com Thought
> Police weighed in with their interdiction: "Thread closed"! What? What can this
> mean? I thought. Right below the "thread closed," a graphic of a gate x-ed
> out, as if to explain the inexplicable, a Thought Cop who called himself "ij
> south" posted the following message: "This is not a legitimate news source, it
> is an advocacy site."
>
> LOL
>
> I couldn't help laughing out loud. Here is a website that advertises Lucianne's
> radio talk show interview with a Washington Times correspondent as "getting the
> dish from Washington" ruling that Antiwar.com is not "legitimate." (Gee, weren't
> we profiled on the Lehrer News Hour? If that doesn't makes us legitimate, then
> nothing short of canonization will work!) And wait a minute, I thought: doesn't
> that line about "legitimacy" sound familiar?
>
> A CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY
>
> This is the very same argument made about Matt Drudge, when he broke the story
> that became Monicagate. The President's henchmen worked overtime denigrating the
> venue, disdaining the Internet as inherently unreliable or more unreliable
> than the "mainstream" print and television media and getting egg on their
> faces when it turned out Drudge was not only first but the story was right. If
> you read his famous speech to the National Press Club, available on his site,
> you can catch the flavor of the conflict between the cyber-media and its'
> jealous and vengeful opponents. Drudge points out trenchantly that this is a
> very political conflict, and that the fight to delegitimize the Internet (and
> specifically him) as a news source reflects a larger battle: the struggle
> between the populist anti-Big Government masses and the entrenched elites, in
> the news media as well as the White House.
>
> LUCIANNE COMES FULL CIRCLE
>
> It was therefore with some surprise that I encountered this statement from
> Lucianne's cyber-Praetorian Guard, a Mr. "ijsouth" (what is it with the
> "monikers," doesn't anybody have a good old-fashioned name anymore?) Here was
> Lucianne, a prime beneficiary of Drudge's success her site would be completely
> empty if not for the link he provides making the very same argument made by
> Drudge's enemies in the White House (and they make it to this day): "You're not
> legitimate."
>
> CYBER-POLITICS IN ACTION
>
> If this was bizarre, it was more maddening than anything else: and I determined
> to do something about it. Nothing unethical, mind you: just something to provoke
> discussion and make my point. I then posted an article from Investor's Business
> Daily that was about Antiwar.com along with an announcement: the administrators
> of Lucianne.com had unfairly and arbitrarily ruled out Antiwar.com or anything
> originating on it as a "legitimate" news source, when other "advocacy" sites
> routinely have their material posted, including the Heritage Foundation (surely
> an "advocacy" group) and the Center for Popular Culture. But this raises the
> question, I wrote, of what is a legitimate news source, a question I though
> interesting enough to provoke quite a discussion amongst the lurkers. I added:
> "Email the administrators of this site and let them know what you think."
>
> PURGED!
>
> Well, the lurkers came out in record numbers: a site that seemed previously
> comatose, if not actually dead, came to life all at once, with seven or eight
> postings, all of them sympathetic and several saying that they would immediately
> check out Antiwar.com. It was getting pretty lively there for a while, with an
> interesting discussion going on about the proper management of a website
> until, in a sudden burst of smoke and a thunderous burst of anger, Lucianne
> Herself stepped in to put a stop to it and announced that anyone and everyone
> associated with Antiwar.com was permanently banned from posting anything on
> Lucianne.com: "You guys have your own website," she hissed, "now shoo and go
> there!" "It's not your politics," she claimed, "but your attitude."
>
> INTO THE OUTER DARKNESS
>
> We were banished, exiled, purged, not to mention Cast Into the Outer Darkness
> and don't you believe it wasn't for our politics. Good old "ij south" no doubt
> learned his lesson at the knee of Mr. Giles: "Antiwar.com, huh? Probably one of
> those extremist, conspiracy-mongering hate groups that really come from the
> left" which just about sums up the opinion of this Manhattanite grouplet of
> anyone to the right of Rudy Giuliani. If you aren't for "gay rights," and don't
> take your political cues from the editorial page of the New York Post, then
> you're probably one of those terrible Freepers whom we wouldn't want to sully
> our site with.
>
> YOU REALLY NEED TO GET OUT MORE
>
> For Lucianne and her gaggle of gay neocons to attack the Freepers or anyone else
> as "extremists" who "really come from the left" is a case of the pot calling the
> kettle black. For in reality that is, outside New York and environs their
> big hero Giuliani is a liberal Republican, at best, far to the left of the GOP
> mainstream. And as for their antipathy to anyone who says that we should put
> America First, and disdain the idea of a global empire, it is hardly shared by
> the rest of the conservative movement and especially not by the Republican
> congress. It was the Right that took the lead in opposition to Clinton's war for
> "human rights" in Kosovo, and any future interventions will meet popular
> resistance from grassroots conservatives as well as their representatives in
> Congress.
>
> NO FUTURE
>
> So let Lucianne stew in her own juice for a while: her Draconian methods are
> sure to strangle what little life there is on her site. But more importantly,
> the neocons are losing their intellectual and political stranglehold over the
> conservative movement as a whole, not just in cyberspace. As a closed-off little
> sect, dependent on buying influence with money and finagling it through their
> liberal friends, they have no future. They can only temporarily try to stem the
> rising tide of rebellion against the status quo, not only against the globalist
> foreign policy of both parties but against the ruling circles in this country.
> They are now pushing Bush, furiously posting articles that put him in a good
> light and denigrating everything that points to the fact that we are in for more
> of the same but the lack of enthusiasm is so obvious that it is embarrassing.
> And naturally, in true neocon style, they will no doubt continue to try to
> control what little discussion there is, ruthlessly purging anyone who raises
> fundamental questions. What is fatal for a posting site such as Lucianne.com, is
> that fundamental questions are always the most interesting ones. Lucianne's
> online Thought Police can close off all the threads they like, but in doing so
> they open themselves up to the greatest enemy of all: boredom. The market will
> soon take care of Lucianne.com unless they can get a grant from some big
> neocon foundation, if they haven't already and never was such a fate so richly
> deserved.
>
>
>
> Check out Justin Raimondo's article, China and the New Cold War
>
> Behind the Headlines appears Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with special
> editions as events warrant.
>
>
>
> Archived Columns
>
>
>
>
>
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> 4/1/99 3/31/99 3/30/99 3/29/99 3/28/99 3/27/99
>
>
>
>
> Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is also the author
> of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement
> (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (1993), and Into the Bosnian
> Quagmire: The Case Against US Intervention in the Balkans (1996). He is an
> Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, in Auburn, Alabama, a
> Senior Fellow at the Center for Libertarian Studies, and writes frequently for
> Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is the author of An Enemy of the
> State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (forthcoming from Prometheus Books).
>
>
>
>
>
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A<>E<>R
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