Let the Madness Begin!

Matt Drudge infected mainstream conservativism with conspiratorial nonsense from a crackpot source

"File:Matt Drudge 1996.jpg" by John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Matt Drudge was an unknown right-wing populist when he set up his weekly subscriber-based news aggregation and gossip mailing list in 1995. He came to national attention in 1996 when he broke the story that Republican Bob Dole was about to pick Jack Kemp as his running mate. He then became an international sensation in January 1998 when he broke news that President Bill Clinton had had sexual encounters with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The Drudge Report said that Newsweek was sitting on the story.

Of course, we now know that Lewinsky had nine sexual encounters with Clinton between 1995 to 1997, when she was 23/24 and he was 49/50. The President lied under oath about the affair, but finally acknowledged an “improper physical relationship” with the intern in August 1998. He was impeached but not convicted.

Breaking the scoop made Drudge a star of the right. The Drudge Report features hyperlinks to selected news stories, with a headline written by Drudge and his editors. In mid-2011, the newsletter started featuring Infowars, a conspiracy theory site run by Alex Jones. He later proclaimed that 2013 would be Jones’ year.

Around this time, the Drudge Report was one of the top five media publishers in the US, consistently drawing more than a billion page views a month. Right-wing talk radio hosts paid particular attention to the material that Drudge highlighted, giving him lots of influence over the narratives that conservatives would consume.

Jones believes that 9/11 was the result of a government plot; has suggested that the US government may have been behind bombings in Oklahoma and Boston; has repatedly claimed that a shooting at Sandy Hook was a hoax; and thinks that the government wants to turn children gay. He has claimed that Clinton’s wife, Hillary, is “a demon from Hell.”

A repentant conservative commentator, Charlie Sykes, has argued that Drudge’s decision to promote Jones “broke down the wall that separated the full-blown cranks from the mainstream conservative media, injecting a toxic worldview into the right’s[*] bloodstream. The conservative movement never recovered.” Donald Trump told Jones that his “reputation is amazing” and that he wouldn’t let him down while he was preparing his presidential run. Of course, Trump later tried to smash liberal democracy.

It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that Jones was seriously unprepared for prime time. He appears to have never taken legal advice about the risks of defamation before broadcasting his unhinged and paranoid fantasies to the world. He has lost multiple defamation cases. Most recently his attempt to file InfoWars for bankruptcy has been dismissed and he has been told to pay millions in damages to families that he defamed,

People on the left shouldn’t feel too smug at this point. In 2015, the Labour Party lost a general election in the UK. Its leader, Ed Miliband, resigned. The party had a two-step process to select a new leader. Members of Parliament (MPs) voted on candidates. Any who got the backing of 35 MPs were then presented to the party membership for a final vote.

As is usual in these occasions, the three main candidates were ambitious and well-educated career politicians with front-bench experience. A number of MPs, including Jo Cox (later tragically murdered by a fanatical supporter of Brexit) and Neil Coyle, said that they gave their votes to Jeremy Corbyn, a fringe left-wing figure, because they “wanted a genuine debate within the Labour Party.” Cox and Coyle later said they regretted lending him their support after a flood of hard-left members handed him a suprise victory.

Sadly, Corbyn - a lifelong backbencher without a university degree - was almost as unready for prime time as Jones. In 2011, he had openly spread antisemitic conspiracy theories about “the hand of Israel” allegedly being being Islamist terror on Iranian state TV - a strong clue that he shouldn’t have been on the ballot. His unsophisticated anti-imperialism might have seemed convincing to hard-left activists, but left ordinary people cold.

Of course, during his disastrous time as Labour leader, Corbyn mishandled Labour’s opposition to Brexit, lost two general elections in a row and exposed the party to a report saying that it had broken anti-discrimination laws. He has now been expelled from the party.

Ordinary people might not have as much influence as Drudge or the Labour MPs who put Corbyn on the ballot, but we all take regular decisions on what information to share on social media. If you see something that triggers a strong emotional reaction, please stop and consider whether it is from a credible source before sharing it. Are other news sources running the same angle? Is the article defamatory? Have you checked the date?

Exposing yourself to diverse views is good, but it is always worth bearing in mind the thin line between being a contrarian and being a crackpot. Sadly, crackpots, who combine sloppy work with a sense of utter certainty in their conclusions, ruin everything they touch. A little extra research before sharing their content is always going to be a good idea. The comments are open. See you next week!

Further Reading

How the Right Lost Its Mind by Charles J. Sykes

*Sykes capitalizes the R in right, but I think this is silly and have changed it in the quote above.

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