Charles Johnson Versus the Rightosphere
Like the vast majority of progressives, I stopped paying any attention whatsoever to Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs blog some time ago. But it had a reputation as the wingnuttiest of right-wing blogs. So much so that it inspired the Little Green Footballs or Late German Fascists? quiz. But Dave Weigel reports that more recently there’s been a schism in the “anti-jihad” movement, as many bloggers have joined forces with racist far-right European political parties and Johnson’s distanced himself from that effort, in turn earning the wrath of his former friends:
“Some people at that summit in Belgium were not people we should have been associated with,” Johnson said, pointing out that since 2007 the terrorism-focused conservative bloggers have become supporters of Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who wants to outlaw Islam in his country. “Some of these people outright want to ban Islam from the United States, which I think is crazy, completely nuts. That’s not something we do in this country. These people will outright defend banning the Koran or deporting Muslims. That’s popular with the Geller/Spencer crowd.”
When they talk about Johnson today, the rest of the terrorism-focused bloggers alternate between anger and regret. He has smeared them, they say, and according to Dymphna he’s “destroyed a lot of networking that was beginning to emerge” between American and European critics of Islamic extremism. “He’s really gone off the deep end,” Geller said, pointing to Johnson’s more and more frequent criticisms of creationists, such as the attack on the anti-evolution, Glenn Beck-inspired event, which made the host angry enough to lash out at LGF on his show. “He’s a leftist blogger now.”
“Leftist” now apparently is identical to belief in uncontroversial scientific facts.
41 Responses to “Charles Johnson Versus the Rightosphere”
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April 23rd, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Steven Chu, leftist.
Joe Barton, not so much.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/04/what_thinking_folks_are_up_against.php
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Usually, political parties have a negative feedback mechanism that pushes the party back to the center when they start losing elections. That mechanism appears to be broken in the Republican Party. It used to work, they went with the fairly moderate Nixon after Goldwater got crushed. But since Ford’s defeat, the Republicans seem to have decided that the only problem with extremism is that it’s too moderate. We’re at the point now where even Goldwater couldn’t win a Republican primary. And Charles Johnson is somehow a leftie. And Bill O’Reilly is acting as the voice of reason. If they keep this up, they’ll spend more time in the desert than Moses.
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Charles Johnson is somehow a leftie. And Bill O’Reilly is acting as the voice of reason.
Just imagine if someone had told you that this is what the future would look like back in 2002. Add mention that an African American Chicago State Senator named Barack Hussein Obama was going to be elected president.
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:55 pm
This was noticable a while ago. When there’d be a flurry of LGF moonbats shrieking about Obama’s “phony” birth certificate or Michelle’s supposed long-ago fling with bin Laden in London, or a lot of gloating over Ted Kennedy’s frail health – Johnson would get very huffy and it’d stop for a while. In the wake of Obama’s election – he clearly did not want the site to be marginalized as some kind of SLC gone wild kill all the ragheads/Obama wants to kill all the Jews site. I’d say about 50% of the longtime LGFers now see him as the enemy of Zion and Liberty now.
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:56 pm
The wingnut right has way more in common with Islamic extremists than they’re prepared to realize.
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:58 pm
The GOP has taken to heart Mencken’s famous maxim: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” They have doubled down on the stupidity of the American people.
I am always a little nervous relying on the wisdom and good judgment of my fellow citizens.
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Just imagine if someone had told you that this is what the future would look like back in 2002. Add mention that an African American Chicago State Senator named Barack Hussein Obama was going to be elected president.
…after beating Hillary in the Democratic primary, and John McCain in the general election.
I still get that “WTF?” feeling when I look back at Obam’s rise.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:00 pm
I thought the Zionists were the enemy of the Liberty.
Ba dum bum.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:03 pm
…after beating Hillary in the Democratic primary, and John McCain in the general election.
I still get that “WTF?” feeling when I look back at Obama’s rise.
So do Hillary Clinton and John McCain.
Usually, political parties have a negative feedback mechanism that pushes the party back to the center when they start losing elections. That mechanism appears to be broken in the Republican Party.
Unfortunately, ideology doesn’t matter much to the average voter. I’d much rather have a sane Republican Party that won some of the time and governed competently than a batshit insane party that wins occasionally and proceeds to run the country into a ditch.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:08 pm
“Leftist” now apparently is identical to belief in uncontroversial scientific facts.
Gravity: just a theory.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Usually, political parties have a negative feedback mechanism that pushes the party back to the center when they start losing elections.
I’m not sure about that. There’s also the death-spiral, in which defeat means the only people with power/influence who survive have the benefit of an electorate that skews their way. If the GOP were reduced to 50 members in the House, chances are that Michele Bachmann would be one of them. Plate Tectonics Joe Barton would be there.
But this doesn’t have much to do with Chuckie Johnson, who was sent batshit by 9/11, and has eight years of rabble-rousing to atone for before anyone takes him seriously.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Usually, political parties have a negative feedback mechanism that pushes the party back to the center when they start losing elections.
Sometimes, but also sometimes what happens is that so many moderate officials lose elections and so many moderate voters leave the party ranks that there is insufficient leadership and support within the party to create this push.
What happens then is that the party spirals further and further out of the mainstream. And when a party is purging the likes of Johnsen, I think it is fair to say that might be the path they are heading toward.
By the way, in such a case it could literally take a generation for the party to begin its path back. And it may well go the way of the Federalists and the Whigs, meaning it may eventually be replaced.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:18 pm
I never, ever thought I’d say this about the five-time winner of the Amanda Terkel Award for Clear Thinking Award, but MattY is engaging in sloppy thinking. Shocking! Incroyable!
Let’s go to Wikipedia – MattY’s favorite source for facts – for a discussion that might help MattY avoid repeating what for him is a once-in-a-millenium mistake.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:21 pm
This guy Johnson is going to end up switching sides like John Cole at Balloon Juice.
The Republican belief system is like the pile of oranges at the supermarket. It’s stable, incredibly so, and can withstand all sorts of outside force, but if just one of those oranges gets plucked out, the next one falls, then the next four, and the whole pyramid comes down.
Once a Republican recognizes the nonsensical assumptions, faulty logic and wishful thinking behind one of their cherished beliefs, he suddenly starts seeing those things all over the place, until finally his whole system of belief comes down. It doesn’t matter if the first realization is about torture, or Iraqi WMDs, or Social Security privatization, or the Laffer Curve, or any other core principle of the Batshit Insane Party. Johnson’s now seen the folly in one area of his party’s belief system, and it’s only a matter of time before he’s forced to acknowledge that these same intellectual and moral failures can be found wherever he looks.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Gravity: just a theory.
I’m not saying the schools should teach intelligent falling, just that they teach the controversy. Newton’s theories have some significant flaws.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:30 pm
this doesn’t have much to do with Chuckie Johnson, who was sent batshit by 9/11, and has eight years of rabble-rousing to atone for before anyone takes him seriously.
It strikes me that unlike John Cole who had a come-to-jesus moment, Charles Johnson realizes that he can’t ride the wave of crazy whackos to fame and fortune now that Barack Obama is president. Back under Bush, he could just hide under the excuse that his site just had a bunch of enthusiastic supporters of the president. Now it’s fairly obvious that he runs a breeding ground for whacko extremists, birthers, and racists, and he’s going to end up paying the social and professional consequences of that if he doesn’t distance himself really quickly.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:34 pm
http://peekurl.com/zno4316
I don’t know what LoneWacko is peddling now, but I’m not touching that link!
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:38 pm
“There’s also the death-spiral,”
Yeah, but it doesn’t happen very often. Aside from the Federalists and Whigs, I can’t think of any other times. But this may very well be one of those times. The Republican Party seems to enjoy being in the minority now. We’ll see how they feel when the Democrats have a filibuster-proof majority in Senate. If that doesn’t turn them around, then yes, they are in a death spiral. What the Republicans don’t seem to realize is that there is a point of no return in politics. You’ve reached the point of no return when the opposing party’s primary is the important election and the general election is merely an afterthought. The Republicans crossed that point here in Boulder.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I’m not really poking Matt, because I generally like the idea of a more parliamentary system in the US.
But the fact we have the system we do really works against the Geller freaks in America. Whatever success Wilders has is because fringe parties in a small country governed by a parliamentary system can actually get enough lunatics to support them, and to gain actual influence in the goverment.
But idiots like Pam Geller don’t understand that by driving Republicans further to the right, they are sacrificing any chance for continued representation of their views in the American government. They will go the way of the Whigs if they keep this up.
And I say good riddance. A healthy political debate in America would be between Clintonism and Kucinichism or Sanderism, not between Gingrichism and Clintonism.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:49 pm
First, thanks to pseudonymous in nc for beating me by a minute to the point I was making.
Anyhoo . . .
Aside from the Federalists and Whigs, I can’t think of any other times.
I think it can be argued that the Republicans went into such a negative spiral in 1932. Obviously it technically didn’t end in their death, but they were greatly diminished in power for 36 years, and it took the Civil Rights Era breaking up the Democratic coalition to give them a way back in.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:55 pm
What the Republicans don’t seem to realize is that there is a point of no return in politics.
I think that can happen on a local level where interests are more homogenous and party machines more entrenched, but I suspect that once Cornyn, Inhofe, and Bachmann retire, there will be a new generation of rising Republican stars who actually care about winning elections instead of ideological purity. One could say that what will happen is that they will die, but the party that replaces them will keep the brand identity and the rights to the Republican® brand name.
I don’t think we’ll see a Whig-like scenario. It took slavery to make them irrelevant.
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:22 pm
I suspect that once Cornyn, Inhofe, and Bachmann retire, there will be a new generation of rising Republican stars who actually care about winning elections instead of ideological purity.
David Cameron was elected in 2001, replacing a retiring MP, in an election where the Tories made no headway at all against Blair. They’d been treading water for four years, as the rump parliamentary party worked with what they had left. You could also look at Canada, where the western Reform bloc basically took over the reins on the right after the blowout election of 1993.
The election cycle (and the parallel strand of state politics) means that party evolution can come faster in the US, but the future of the Republicans in elected national office may belong to people who haven’t yet been elected.
The problem that the GOP faces is actually a take on the whole “create our own reality” line. Obama and the Dems are in a position to change a lot of facts on the ground that undercut the ideological underpinnings of the GOP. There’s not the same freedom of movement that FPTP parliamentary systems tend to grant governments, and the Senate will be a big sticking point, but a party that kicks up a fuss on issues where the executive branch has its greatest flexibility, such as torture or negotiations with foreign countries, can be left looking like a safety who misses the jump on the wide receiver.
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Fencedude: the link above goes to Wikipedia as others no doubt have already determined. PeekURL.com is a URL shortening service I run; what sets it apart from others is that it always shows an intermediate screen so you can decide whether you want to visit the destination link or not.
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:29 pm
“Leftist” now apparently is identical to belief in uncontroversial scientific facts.
Reality does have a well-known liberal bias.
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Sadly enough, he isn’t actually the fringy-est of the Islamophobes. More extreme (and more popular) is Robert Spencer, who runs Jihadwatch (which is listed on the David Horowitz Freedom Center website as an ‘ongoing project’). He has come out on more than one occasion for banning the Quran as hate speech.
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:38 pm
PeekURL.com is a URL shortening service I run
…to ensure that Lonewacko’s blogwhoring links outrank the ones he occasionally posts to other sites.
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Is there a left equivalent of this kind of ideological purity enforcement?
Sure, we all hate the DLC and Broderism, but is there a part of the left blogosphere that throws hissy fits over recognizing uncontroversial facts? Or do I just not recognize hissy fits as such, because I usually agree when Atrios calls someone a wanker?
Most of us recognize when someone from the “other side” is an honest, intelligent person (douthat, cowen, posner, et cetera), what are the lousy blogs on our side? Is there some secret crazy eco-anarchist blogosphere I don’t know about?
April 23rd, 2009 at 5:07 pm
For those of you who wish to benefit from Lonewacko’s erudition without providing him with traffic, he posted a link to the following page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_as_theory_and_fact
In other words, Lonewacko is correcting Matt’s “mistake” of referring to evolution as an uncontroversial scientific fact by posting a link that explains that evolution…is an uncontroversial scientific fact. Genius!
Also, according to this site, Lonewacko owns about 360 other domains. It seems to me that if he didn’t spend so much time creating an ever-denser maze of links to blogwhore, he wouldn’t need to exhort people to ask politicians tough questions and post the videos on Youtube. He could do it his goddamn self.
April 23rd, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Chris D’s comment is hilarious. However, while I didn’t review the WP article in depth, AFAIK it makes the distinction between small instances of observed evolution (i.e., fact), and the Theory of Evolution. The latter is how MattY meant it; he’s calling a theory a fact. The smart “liberal” (if he still visits this site) will note that simply because something is widely considered to be a fact – especially due to ideological reasons – that doesn’t make it a fact. That doesn’t make it false. That just makes it not proved or not disproved.
I’m sure this was just a mistake on MattY’s part, since “Intellectual Honesty and Rigor” is his middle name.
April 23rd, 2009 at 5:39 pm
“I think it can be argued that the Republicans went into such a negative spiral in 1932.”
Yeah, but it was fairly mild. The did elect Eisenhower twice when they were lost in the desert. And Eisenhower’s nomination shows that they were at least trying to get out of the spiral. He was basically a moderate. Of course when Nixon lost, they went right back into the spiral with Goldwater. But these days, the Republicans seem determined to be an ideologically pure but irrelevant party.
April 23rd, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Yeah, but it was fairly mild. The did elect Eisenhower twice when they were lost in the desert.
After twenty years they allowed themselves to nominate a moderate whose resume happened to start with “Liberated Europe.” That was mild?
April 23rd, 2009 at 6:07 pm
My only comment is, if your site’s name is going to reference a Roger Miller, why not go for “The Moon is High And So Am I” or “My Uncle Used to Love Me But She Died.” And that’s my only comment even knowing that Miller didn’t actually write “Little Green Apples.”
April 23rd, 2009 at 6:07 pm
song
April 23rd, 2009 at 6:22 pm
After the 1932 election, the GOP nominated Landon, Wilkie, and Dewey (twice) as their presidential nominee. Each of these candidates were from the moderate to liberal wing of the party.
I don’t think the GOP spent such a long time in the wilderness because it failed to adapt. It took them that long to recover from the unprecedented tsunami of the Great Depression, followed by the equally unprecedented national mobilization of WWII.
April 23rd, 2009 at 7:51 pm
However, while I didn’t review the WP article in depth
LOL, that’s for sure. You see, as the article explains at great length, evolution is both a fact and a theory. Let me break it down for you Barney-style. That evolution (defined as the change in gene frequency in population over a period of time) occurs is not subject to serious dispute. In other words, the phenomenon of evolution is a fact. The “theory of evolution” explains how evolution occurs (i.e., through natural selection, mutation, genetic drift). Got it?
April 23rd, 2009 at 8:20 pm
I don’t think we’ll see a Whig-like scenario. It took slavery to make them irrelevant.
The Federalists, however, pretty much just faded away. Of course you could identify how they got on the wrong side of too many issues of the day, but no more so I think than today’s GOP.
April 23rd, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Look 24AheadDotCom, in science a theory means something totally different than in vernacular english. In science it means that it is the accepted explanation of how something works. The theory of gravity, for example. Or the theory of special relativity.
According to the National Academy of Science:
(http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11876#toc)
Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature supported by facts gathered over time. Theories also allow scientists to make predictions about as yet unobserved phenomena.[
Understand? The reason MattY called it a fact, is because, to scientifically trained people, it is a fact. There is excellent evidence for evolution.
What does 24AheadDotCom mean, anyway?
April 23rd, 2009 at 8:52 pm
When I think about the Republican party going the way of the Whigs or Federalists, I start to drool a little.
April 24th, 2009 at 12:49 am
24Ahead, it’s time to give up on this one. You cited a site to support your opinion that actually refutes it. I have a degree from Caltech in Geology and, yeah, “scientific theory” does not mean what you think it means.
April 24th, 2009 at 11:19 am
[...] What you have is a group of people who are upset at America’s use of torture, and a second group of people who have decided that the first group is a threat to the GOP. The latter group knows it will be a huge black mark on their party if anyone bigger than Lynndie England goes down over this, and they are trying everything they can to make sure that never happens. They’re the right. And they’re convinced that anyone who questions the GOP is a leftist. [...]
April 24th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
“What does 24AheadDotCom mean, anyway?”
I believe it’s a synonym for “hopeless fucking idiot.”