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.
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.