Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

When Drudge speaks, it’s clear that he’s attempting to be understood.

He’s a person asking to be taken seriously.

His exchanges with his fellow panelists are, effectively, Patient Zero diagnosing his own disease, and its symptoms, to aging doctors who don’t read the new research.

And they hate him.

The loathing is palpable.

During the last ten minutes of the video, there’s an audience Q&A.

The only question is asked by a future psychotic named Andrew Breitbart.

Breitbart would go on to be Matt Drudge’s assistant, handling the afternoon shift of the Drudge Report .

In the Q&A, Breitbart asks why the mainstream media gave Hunter S. Thompson free reign to lie and distort the truth while not allowing Drudge any latitude in his own reporting. Breitbart suggests that this lack of latitude derives from Drudge’s conservative-leaning politics.

One doesn’t like to praise the devil, but this isn’t the stupidest path of inquiry.

But here’s the real significance: Breitbart is the only person, throughout the entire event, who doesn’t insult Drudge or treat him like a child who’s been caught stealing cookies.

Breitbart went on to found the Breitbart News Network, a website which by the Year of the Froward Worm had become the dominant voice of the Far Right in America.

When Breitbart died in 2012 AD, presumably from a toxic mix of being both a drug freak and a huge fucking asshole, a guy named Steve Bannon ended up in control of the Breitbart News Network.

In August of 2016 AD, he became Chief Executive Officer of Donald J. Trump’s Presidential campaign.

When Trump assumed the Presidency, Bannon went to the White House.

When Blumenthal sued Drudge, Drudge didn’t have any resources to mount a legal defense. He was on the wrong side of the Democrats. He was on the wrong side of the White House.

And this was before Lewinsky!

The only people who helped him, and assumed the cost of his legal liabilities, were people on the Far Right.

They did his case mostly pro bono with occasional donations from supporters.

The video of Drudge on The Alex Jones Show is something else.

Before Google made a gesture towards political theater by declaring Alex Jones to be persona non grata, he filmed every episode of his radio show and put the videos on YouTube. The Drudge was no different.

Because of this, as the episode is being recorded, Drudge refuses to emerge from the shadows. He lets Jones interview him, but the image remains fixed on Jones.

Matt Drudge, the only genius of the new century, has hijacked another forum.

For the first, and only, time in the history of The Alex Jones Show , Alex Jones shuts the fuck up.

Drudge talks about many of the same ideas that he expresses in the USC video, but now he’s less nervous, and now he’s embittered.

If, back in 1997 AD, he was Matt Drudge, who was just, like you know, this guy, now he’s MATT DRUDGE, GOD OF ALL NEW MEDIA.

He’s still talking about citizen reporting, but he’s dispirited by the rise of the corporate groupthink and the way that it’s influenced the homogeneity of the news. In a moment of sounding uncomfortably like the present author, he denounces social media.

He boasts of his independence from everyone.

And then it gets depressing.

Drudge sings the praises of Alex Jones. He sees the radio host as a lonely man who wages war against that corporate homogeneity, which is true from a certain perspective, but which ignores the true insanity of Alex Jones, a person who believes that the late singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley was a robot built by Muslims.

At first, it feels like maybe Drudge is being polite.

But then he starts throwing out his own crazy ideas.

He suggests there’s a cover-up of Hillary Clinton’s lovers, with the implication being that there’s scores of women who’ve had the former Secretary of State’s tongue in their birth canals.

He says that Clinton is old and sick and that there’s a cover-up about her impending death.

He claims there are 80 million illegal immigrants living in the US.

Things are different than back in 1997 AD.

The coherent worldview has changed and encompassed some very dubious thoughts.

There’s an edge in this interview that’s nowhere to be seen in the early days.

This is a person who knows that he’ll never be understood.

While Michael Kinsley sneered at Drudge for an hour in 1997 AD, he was wrapped in a delusion about the nature of his job. He thought that he was a person who offered the world a valuable service, but actually, all he did was lure people into looking at advertisements.

In the video, he can’t imagine that, within about twelve years, it’ll turn out that the Internet is better at advertising than newspapers, and that his colleagues in journalism, all the hallowed practitioners of the art, are going to be chasing Patient Zero’s vision of the future, reducing institutions of sober judgment into op-ed factories that, try as hard as they might, will never be able to compete with the sheer entertainment psychosis of a seventeen-year-old denouncing Jews on YouTube.

Another thing that he can’t imagine: by the Year of the Froward Worm, anonymous and unsupported allegations on the Internet will be the backbone of his entire industry.

And the last thing that Kinsley can’t imagine is that he’s insulting the one person who could have helped.

Drudge was, and is, the only person who understands the Internet.

And he was insulted so badly that he sought refuge with the scum of the world, and he took all of that genius and all of its attendant power, and he befriended the people who were nice to him.

That’s how history works.

That’s how politics work.

You figure out how to get along with people you find unpalatable. You figure out how to make a decent argument that convinces people who don’t agree with you. You don’t throw away people because you think they’re powerless and worthless.

Or you end up like Michael Kinsley.

Totally forgotten and left behind.

Just a smug asshole no one remembers in a video that no one watches.

Here’s a pro-tip for the Democrats.

If you want to win Presidential elections, there’s a very simple thing that you can do.

It’s too late to harness Matt Drudge’s unbelievable influence over the national dialogue.

He’s an autodidact and you insulted him.

You can’t make friends now.

But you could always kill him.

Call out the Clinton death squads!

To understand how I ended up being sexually harassed in front of 280 people by a woman who pens New York Times opinion pieces on the topic of sexual harassment, you have to understand what my career was like before the success of my novel I Hate the Internet .

It was non-existent.

I’d published a novella called ATTA , which was a psychedelic biography of the lead 9/11 hijacker.

It had moved a surprising amount of copies for a short work published on an independent press, and generated a great deal of secondary academic writing, but for a variety of reasons, no one noticed that any of this had happened.

After ATTA came out, I worked on another book, which would eventually turn into The Future Won’t Be Long. I wasted two years trying to get the thing published.

None of it came to anything.

When I wrote ATTA , I was living in Los Angeles.

By the time that it was published in 2011 AD, I had moved to San Francisco.

In 2014 AD, I moved from San Francisco and ended up back in Los Angeles.

While I lived in San Francisco, the only positive thing that had happened, career wise, was that I ended up doing a writer’s residency in rural Denmark.