What happened to Matt Drudge?
This columnist asks the question but doesn’t have an answer.
I don’t have an answer either. I’ve never been a big Drudge reader to begin with. I barely was a small one; only looked in occasionally. But I did notice at one point that the site had become very anti-Trump. Very.
I don’t know when it happened, and I don’t know why. I can’t say I even care, to be honest, although I’m mildly curious. But for those of you who do care, I’ll hazard a guess. Maybe Drudge doesn’t like to march with the crowd; maybe he’s a contrarian. Or maybe there’s money in it, somehow.
That was two guesses, wasn’t it?
I’ve been a daily Drudge reader since 1999. So, two decades. It’s been one of my go-to daily reading sites for all this time.
However, in the last few months, I’ve found that it’s stopped being my daily go-to. Not necessarily because of the anti-Trump turn that it’s taken in the last several months, but because there are other great sites out there that give me the information I need.
I don’t know what turned Matt Drudge. Perhaps it’s a mixture of contrarian and ad revenues. I don’t know.
The answer is, of course, quite obvious.
Matt Drudge is not a conservative. He never has been. It’s always personal with him, never political. He hates the Clintons, and he thinks that Obama is a snob. He was pro-Trump because it served him in being anti-Clinton. Then, once Trump had served his purpose and defeated her, he was kicked to the side. Probably Trump did something to rub him the wrong way too, but turning against him was almost inevitable, regardless.
The only incumbent President he didn’t really turn against was GWB, and even then he soured on the GOP around 2006, and really soured on them after the whole 2008 financial crisis.
Just remember this and you’ll never get fooled by Drudge again. It’s always personal.
It has been long rumoured that Drudge is gay and it is likely that with a openly gay candidate in the form of Buttigieg running, Drudge is supporting him.
I quit checking his sight daily a year or two ago. I find it a bit of a puzzle and it could be that he switched preferences about the time he started smelling Trump bloos in the water. It will be interesting to see what his take is after Trump’s victory in 2020. (From my keyboard to God’s ears.)
Lucianne.com and the morning links at American Greatness and PJ Media give me all the quick news I need, and I can click on links if I want to. Drudge used to do that, but with his changed focus, I don’t bother with him.
David Brock, the consultant/commentator, started out professionally on the right, then after writing brutal take-downs of Bill Clinton and Anita Hill, he switched to the left while writing a book on Hillary Clinton. He became an attack dog for the Clintons.
I’ve never seen a persuasive explanation for how that happened. Brock claimed in his research of the Clintons he could find no real wrongdoing. Which I find hard to believe.
Occam’s Razor-wise, I suspect the Clintons got to him somehow.
My AV popped a virus warning at Drudge once, quite a while ago, and I quit stopping by there. The slant of the coverage was becoming evident anyway.
Occam’s Razor-wise, I suspect the Clintons got to him somehow.
I seem to recall a full and frank assessment of him in the Podesta e-mails.
Occam’s Razor suggests he was always for sale, and got a better offer.
I second KyndyllG.
Many months ago, I removed a virus 3 or 4 times. The same one. Then right after a removal once, as a test I went straight to Drudge and immediately got infected again. The more surprising aspect was that I had been dealing with those infections for a few weeks or more. So the site wasn’t dealing with it in a timely fashion. That ended my viewing of the site.
Inferring beyond the above is anybody’s guess.
Drudge has been my home page since he broke the media embargo on Slick Willy’s adultery. The change has indeed been obvious, and I find myself clicking on fewer and fewer links there.
I have never been a Drudge reader, so I have no guess, but about 15? years ago Little Green Footballs was an early, political commentary/ news aggregater blog I read daily. It had a neocon slant and was pro-GWB. I think it was run by 2, Jewish (Orthodox?) brothers. One of the brothers started hinting at conspiratorial stuff, and it didn’t take too long before he went full, tinfoil hat and alienated most all of the regular readership. He did a drastic 180 and never explained it rationally to the readership.
Drudge used to be a daily read for me, but I deleted the link at least a year ago and pretty forgot about the place.
It became just another typical corporate media site, raving about climate change!!!!!!!!!, and the Bad Orange Man.
Thus, worthless. But at least I never got any computer viruses, so there’s that.
I used to click to Drudge, not to read him, but because he posted so many other links on his site, like to UK papers I wanted to read. No more, dropped Drudge from my computer.
Maybe Hillary found some dirt on him, and he’d rather live than support Pres. Trump.
Well, just did some web searching. Most of what I remembered about Little Green Footballs was accurate, except at least one of the brothers, and almost certainly both, was raised Roman Catholic. The site was (is still?) very pro Israel, which is one of the things I liked about it. I had forgotten that it was instrumental in uncovering the forged nature of the GWB National Guard memo.
Rufus:
Little Green Footballs was Carles Johnson’s site. Not Jewish. I never heard anything about a brother.
huxley:
I read Dabid Brock’s book Blinded By the Right long ago My impression is that he is 100% opportunist. He never had conservative principles or a conservative philosophy. His thinking is extremely shallow. It was so when he was supposedly on the right, and it is the same now that he’s on the left.
My impression is that he is 100% opportunist.
neo: So if the Clintons got to Brock, they probably got him cut-rate.
Back in 2015 as the Hillary email server crisis broke, Jonah Goldberg (he does write well) got off a fun cinematic fantasy of the message, “Cankles is down,” going out to her team of operatives:
The silent whistle has been blown. The sleepers activated. The old timers have been notified. I like to imagine Lanny Davis right in the middle of a meeting with an African dictator when, suddenly, his assistant hands him a note. All it reads is “Cankles Is Down.” Lanny abruptly terminates the meeting, pushes back a briefcase full of krugerrands, and races to some hellish Third World airport, telling his aide, “Let the Redskins know they’re on their own. The Clintons need me.”
Flash to a canoe on the banks of the bayou. James Carville has just caught a catfish with his bare hands and proceeds to tear apart the wriggling fish, Gollum-like. He eats the entrails first. Then, suddenly, a flare goes off above the tree line. That’s the signal. He throws the bulk of the carcass into the river, where gators churn the water to grab it now that the apex predator has departed. He makes his way to the shoulder of a dirt road where a limousine is waiting to get him to an MSNBC studio as fast as possible. His suit and tie, neatly pressed, are waiting for him along with as many hot towels as he may need to remove the fish viscera.
David Brock slinks out of his leather onesie and races to his command center, bustling with Dorito-dust frosted 20-somethings at computer terminals. “This is a level-one-alpha scenario. Cancel all leave. Turn off all X-boxes . . .”
https://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/its-hillary-all-way-down-jonah-goldberg/
What explains so much which is inexplicable, blackmail.
Whoever Drudge is sleeping with is a TrumpHater, and good sex is more important than a good set of web site links.
That’s my low-knowledge guess. I didn’t actually like his ugly links, so seldom went there – preferred Instapundit & Michael Totten; and then Neo, often som PJ Media.
Plus Kling at Askblog and other econ sites like Marginal Revolution.
Bongino Report coming soon.
I don’t know if it’s relevant, but several years ago I started noticing that Drudge was posting a lot of links to Infowars and other wacko sites. For me, that was the first real sign of the site’s decay into irrelevance.
Tom Grey: I never got the appeal of Drudge. The site design looked like it had been frozen since the early 90s. The links seemed selected by an angry and not very bright person.
Between aggregators like InstaPundit, RealClearPolitics and PJM plus custom blogs like neo I was exposed to just about everything and more than Drudge offered.
Ann Althouse had a thing for analyzing the juxtaposition of Drudge items. As a fan of subliminal persuasion, I should have enjoyed that analysis, but Drudge didn’t seem worth it.
I have always been a fan of the Drudge Report. The tone has changed since Trump was elected. But that doesn’t make Drudge any less valuable. I want to know what the people who are opposed to my ideas and opinions are thinking and how they’re processing the Trump presidency. The most painless way I can follow their reactions is through the Drudge Report.
huxley,
Always so good to hit the hay with a smile on your face and a laugh in your heart. Thanks for Jonah’s column. :>))!!
With Julie’s recommendation, I check out Jonah (whom I used to read more often, too) and who is he joking about second? The guy who didn’t kill himself:
As Bill Clinton said when the harem girls on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane finally announced they were over international waters: “Where to begin?”
I still think Barr, or Durham, or somebody at DOJ / FBI could make a good name for themselves by doing more Clinton email investigation, including recommending indictments based on what Comey already publicly stated.
Won’t be until after election 2020, if ever.
Power corrupts. I think it’s that simple. If he wants to peddle bullshit, that’s fine. I don’t care about the why. Go ahead, join the rest of the herd of sheep. Good bye. It was very easy to drop Drudge off my reading list. Didn’t miss it. Urge everyone else to do the same.
Didn’t miss Jonah Goldberg and National Review either.
I already know what the oppo is all about and don’t feel any need whatsoever to waste time on the corporate conservative perspective.
I think Charles Johnson went the same way. He had this huge following and thought he could influence them to follow his developing personal views. Nope. He got left, hard. The right does not worship its media and obey their commands.
Matt Drudge is not a conservative. He never has been. It’s always personal with him,
If what’s been written of him is accurate, he’s a social and cultural oddity. As a youth, he apparently had no talents in any realm, just an odd hobby: he’s a news junkie. There is scant indication of any interest in ideas and policy. He made a name for himself quite by accident sending e-mail blasts which morphed into newsgroup postings which morphed into a website. He never owned a computer prior to 1994 and had had only desultory jobs in retail. He’s never married, has no children, and people who’ve worked for him for years on end say for attribution that they’re hardly acquainted with him as a person. He’s made this huge cash cow for himself with no more liberal education than you get in a suburban high school, with no business training, and with no technical training. Not clear as to where his servers are located. Word has it that he lives in Miami and that the leg work is now done by others (in Los Angeles?).
It has been long rumoured that Drudge is gay and it is likely that with a openly gay candidate in the form of Buttigieg running, Drudge is supporting him.
It’s a reasonable wager there’s something off about him. There’s no indication he has any views on any subject other than a liking for warm weather. He may find sodomy pleasurable, but he’s never elected to make a public point of it and has no previous history of having a demonstrable affinity for any known homosexual you might read about in the papers.
Here’s a good article for anyone interested on how Charles Johnson, blogger of “Little Green Footballs,” changed:
“Right-Wing Flame War!”
https://web.archive.org/web/20100128064107/http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/magazine/24Footballs-t.html
For the “NY Times” the article was surprisingly even-handed. (The Times has changed a lot too since 2010.)
My take is that Johnson is basically not conservative and is quite thin-skinned. He is combative and likes to do things his way, to put it mildly.
My take is that Johnson is basically not conservative and is quite thin-skinned.
You had the impression 20 years ago that if those working in tech had any politics, it was a libertarian orientation. Nowadays, what you read about the major tech companies makes it seem as if they’re collecting pools of very loosely-wired adherents to the ideology of the deputy dean of students at a liberal arts college. Perhaps the shift is generational, but I cannot help thinking that people drawn to that trade have an understanding of their social world that is protean and responsive to stimuli in an odd way. My own impression of Johnson is that he’s a leftoid with an idiosyncratic antagonism to Muslim societies that you don’t commonly find on the left (whose religio-cultural antagonisms are commonly reserved for domestic evangelicals). For a modest run of years, the conflict with various antagonists abroad took precedence. Note Christopher Hitchens, and adherent of the red-haze left for most of his career.
Remember when Little Green Footballs went over to the dark side? One day it was solid on The War On Terror, the next it was exclusively dumping on Christians. Weird.
My guess: Some peevish reason which may or may not be related to gayness or injured feelings.
Or maybe it’s just traffic related.
Looks like a lot of folks dropped off checking in at about the same time.
As long as he was an alternate-view aggregator I was interested in looking in.
I don’t need him for a daily dose of Trump Derangement, though. It’s 24/7 everywhere else.
Here is one new site:
https://bonginoreport.com/
Edward Wagner