Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

And Drudge had, accidentally, trashed the American idea of good governance, fostering an environment in which the Republicans would go on to impeach William Jefferson Clinton, and learn that the way to power was through publicity stunts and using the Legislative branch not to govern but rather to obstruct.

After the Lewinsky thing, Drudge’s fame went nuclear, went global.

He got a short-lived TV show. He got a radio show.

His newsletter evolved into a webpage that collated links to articles on other websites, and, on occasion, featured some of Drudge’s own reporting and, in times of emergency, an animated siren GIF.

The links to other websites were written by Drudge himself in an ultra-minimalist headline style. hello from sex drenched hollywood.

The webpage was three columns of black text on a white background.

There was no flash and no glut.

The design never changed.

Not once in two decades.

It was perfect in the way that Steve Jobs, a psychopath who enslaved Chinese children and made them build electronic devices which allowed American liberals to write treatises on human rights, had envisioned perfection: the absolute and seamless melding of form and function.

By the Year of the Froward Worm, Drudge’s website received ten billion visits per year.

In the late 1990s AD, there was an unbelievable amount of bullshit about how the Internet was going to offer new platforms of expression that leveled the playing field, and how computers would produce an enormous flowering of creativity and new opportunities.

What no one admitted, or perhaps even realized, was that while the Internet would indeed create a million opportunities for people to express their ignorant-ass opinions on topics about which they knew nothing, those opinions would not offer any real benefit to the ignorant-ass people who offered them.

The ignorant-ass opinions would only enrich the people who owned the platforms of expression.

And the people who owned the platforms of expression were the same old shits who ruled the world.

Here was the genius of Drudge laid bare: he understood, before anyone else, that the way to make money on the Internet was by monetizing other people’s content.

After Drudge shattered journalism, the international capitalist class gathered up the fragments and ground them into dust.

The noble profession transformed from attempts at a first draft of history into a quest for eyeballs on websites.

In the process, seasoned professionals lost their jobs and were replaced with cocaine-addled children from Brooklyn who worked for spare change.

The international capitalist class didn’t care.

Journalism had always been a pain in their ass.

What they wanted was traffic on the websites that they’d funded.

And Drudge drove that traffic.

Even though Drudge’s website consisted almost entirely of links to other websites, it provided a coherent and linear worldview. The links were like a jigsaw puzzle. If you read Drudge for a week, you could piece together who he was and what he thought.

He made sense of an era in which the world had become incomprehensible, and when the traditional arbiters of American life had given up any hope of explaining the global situation.

His website was the Internet’s unmoved mover, just about the most read news site in English, and his millions of daily readers would deluge any site that he linked.

And even more importantly, he was read by absolutely everyone who was anyone in media. He drove entire cycles with headlines that were no more than fifteen words in length.

He was literally the most powerful voice in America.

And if you think that’s an exaggeration, consider this: for all of the explanations floated as to why Donald J. Trump won the Presidency with his impossible victory, no one has ever suggested the most obvious.

Which is that Donald J. Trump won the Presidency because Matt Drudge decided that Donald J. Trump should win the Presidency, and did everything he could to cast the best possible light on Trump’s many missteps.

Donald J. Trump’s impossible victory had come via a very small margin: 77,744 votes cast in the three states had determined the Electoral College.

0.02 per cent of the US population.

By November 6th, 2016 AD, Drudge’s website received that many visitors every two and a half minutes.

If you want to know about the American Twenty-First Century AD, I recommend watching two videos.

One is available on the website of C-SPAN, which is a non-profit organization that hosts an archive of media related to the governance and affairs of public life in the United States.

The other video is on YouTube, which is an expensive attempt by Google to make copyright law irrelevant.

The first video is Matt Drudge’s appearance on November 11th, 1997 AD at the Annenberg School for Communication, which was a division of the University of Southern California, an institution of higher learning that used things like a School of Communication to cloak its relationship with the military–industrial complex.

The second video is Matt Drudge’s incredibly weird October 6th, 2015 AD appearance on The Alex Jones Show , which was a radio program hosted by the eponymous Alex Jones, a disgraceful little man who believed that poisoned water turned frogs into homosexuals, that 9/11 was an inside job, and that clouds were made of Muslims.

The USC appearance occurred several months before Newsweek and Lewinsky, which makes it a valuable document of Drudge before he broke the story that would define his life. It features Drudge on a panel with several high priests of journalism.

The first high priest is Michael Kinsley, who’d been on TV and written for the New Republic , and who was the editor of Slate.com, which was a news website funded by Microsoft with money that they’d made from ruining the West Coast.

The second high priest is Todd S. Purdum, then the Los Angeles bureau chief for the New York Times , which is the definitive American organ of sober judgment, good taste, and quality reporting.

By contrast, Matt Drudge was a guy with an email account.

He got his email from a company called L.A. Internet Inc.

He paid for his own Internet access.

He worked out of the ninth floor of the Fontenoy.

Everyone on the stage can’t imagine that Lewinsky is coming. Both Purdum and Kinsley think that Drudge has already issued the story that will define his life.

Back on August 10th, 1997 AD, Drudge sent a report to his newsletter.

The report quoted an anonymous GOP operative who said that a Clinton aide named Sidney Blumenthal had beaten his wife.

The story was untrue.

Drudge issued a retraction.

Blumenthal sued Drudge for $30,000,000.

Prior to this incident, media coverage of Drudge had been geewhiz! articles about what he was doing, about how the Internet was really strange, and about how strange it was that Drudge was a weird person doing something strange on the Internet.

The minute after the Blumenthal thing, the knives were out.

You can see it in the video of the USC panel.

Kinsley and Purdum suggest that Drudge’s methods are abhorrent, they tell him that he’s a flash in the pan, they say that he’s irresponsible, they repeatedly insult him to his face.

The smugness is unbearable.

It’s actually shocking.

Drudge, meanwhile, defends himself to the best of his abilities and talks about his ideas of what the Internet is going to do to journalism, which is create a nation of citizens who operate the news, unfiltered and without editorial interference, and unrestrained by the social mores of the upper middle class.

When he speaks, he sounds slightly naïve and a little self-righteous. But think about this: he’s a guy who makes about $3,000 a month and he’s being sued for $30,000,000 by a Presidential aide. And he’s on a stage where he is, by any conventional metric, seriously outclassed by his fellow panelists.