My Day Trip into Right-Wing Media

I read a lot of news online. Sometimes the stories come from aggregation pages, such as the Yahoo or Google News pages. One day in September I saw a World News Daily headline on Yahoo news that I foolishly clicked on. The headline said something along the lines that only 5% of the money donated to the Clinton Foundation actually went for charitable causes.

I knew that this was false. It was a right-wing zombie myth that had been debunked numerous times but simply refused to die. After reading the predictably unhinged and fact-challenged article, I decided to post in the comment section. Since this was  a conservative site, I got a lot of negative response, but I persevered and responded. One of my critics ended his response (twice) with the cryptic remark "How is David?" I am deep enough into the weeds of the culture wars to know what he meant. He was referring to David Brock, the founder of Media Matters, a web site dedicated to the defense of Bill and Hillary Clinton and the unmasking of what it sees as a right-wing conspiracy to destroy their political standing.

The first time this poster offered this statement, I ignored it. The second time he did it, I decided to end my post in a way that I thought would annoy him. I wrote "David says Hello."

All along I assumed that this was just some random right-winger who was trying to get under my skin. It turns out that it was more than that. After my "David Says Hello" post, I discovered that I had been banned from the site which would no longer accept any of my posts. Whomever this guy was, he was clearly tasked with challenging those comments that offered a reasonably articulate defense of anything resembling liberalism and getting them booted off the comments section lest it be polluted with non-conforming ideas. He apparently took my "David says Hello" comment literally, seeming to believe that I was some semi-official representative of Media Matters. Or, maybe he just didn't like what I had to say. In any case, I was out of there solely for offering a political opinion they didn't like.

The paranoia, pettiness, and propagandistic aspects of this were stunning, and yet I fear that it represents a large slice of the conservative media world. The idea that someone from a not-very-well-known political web site would spend time banning people from posting in the Comments section because they failed to repeat the party line is deeply weird. Comments sections are generally moderated, but usually to prevent people from being abusive, using profanity, or soliciting business. Not in Rightwingistan. The rules there are different.