Confessions of a Right-Wing Conspirator

An old writer friend of mine called the other day to say that he had been advised by a senior editor of the New Republic not to have anything to do with my partner, Peter Collier, and me because we were “Nazis.” The reason? We had organized a fund to defend Matt Drudge, the Internet gadfly who broke the Monica Lewinsky story and is being sued by White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, the architect of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” charges.

Every day now, I get calls from the press about my connections to two points on Blumenthal’s chart of right-wing conspirators, Drudge and philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife. And in the Nation recently, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, the institution that Collier and I created, is itself featured as a point on that chart.

How does it feel to be the focus of a witch hunt? Actually, it feels familiar. I grew up in the Cold War 1950s in a family of American Communists. The FBI used to linger on the streets of our neighborhood in Queens, charting people’s comings and goings. My parents lost their jobs as high school teachers because they would not answer the famous question “Are you or have you ever been . . . ? “ Once, in a junior high school auditorium when I was 13, a group of toughs whom I didn’t know put a drape cord around my neck and started shouting, “String him up, he’s a red!”

Most people agree that Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt was a smear campaign that injured some people who were innocent of any connection to the actual Communist conspiracy and others who, while connected to the conspiracy, were guiltless of any criminal deeds. McCarthy’s true target in any case was not Communists, whom the FBI was already watching, but his political opponents in the Democratic Party.

Why, then, the seeming tolerance for the current White House witch hunt, whose only purpose is to smear and destroy its political critics? As anyone can see, there was no conspiracy in the events leading up to the first lady’s accusation. There is no Communist Party of the right with secret codes and top-down discipline that possesses the ability to give marching orders to anyone. If Monica Lewinsky was planted in the White House, she was planted by Democrats. It was Newsweek, no conservative institution, that developed the story that Drudge only made public. Scaife, who is villain No. 2 in the conspiracy theory, funded investigations that suggested the suicide of White House counsel and Clinton confidant Vince Foster might have been more sinister. But Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, who is villain No. 1, issued a summary report refuting the speculations that Scaife had funded, while supporting the original suicide report. What kind of a conspiracy is this?

As for my minuscule role in this matter, I had hardly been aware of Drudge’s existence when I first heard of the Blumenthal suit and offered to introduce Drudge to a lawyer. The lawyer I chose, Manny Klausner, is a widely known civil rights advocate with deep (and very public) ties to the Libertarian Party. The Center for the Study of Popular Culture long has been interested in free speech issues and has defended feminists and Afrocentrists as well as conservatives on 1st Amendment issues. Its legal arm spearheaded the battle against speech codes on college campuses some years ago. So we were in the field of free speech well before the punitive White House operative’s suit against Drudge.

We do get funds from Scaife, in addition to 20 other foundations and 15,000 individuals. Why is Scaife, whom I have met and talked to twice, being demonized as though he were the mastermind of a plot to get the president? Why is the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which has sought only to defend a journalist from what it perceived as a punitive and chilling attack, dragged into the plot?

The answer is obvious from witch hunts of the past. It is to deflect attention away from the real issues; it is to conjure fantasy demons in order to smear and then cripple real opponents. The question that should be asked is why, given the black record of witch hunts of the past, is the country so tolerant of this latest attack.