by Jarett Kobek
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.
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!
Chapter Thirteen
Routine Humiliations
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.
This was in the summer of 2013 AD.
While I was at the residency, I met the Danish writer Dorthe Nors.
In addition to being a truly lovely person, Dorthe also happens to be one of the best writers in the world. Her books Minna Needs Rehearsal Space and Mirror, Shoulder, Signal are fucking intellectual masterpieces.
But she’s a woman, which means that while she’s become very successful, her work is always reviewed in a specific way: no one pays attention to the intellect and everyone looks for the moral instruction.
Dorthe and I became friends.
She was on the cusp of becoming a literary superstar.
In 2017 AD, she was nominated for a Man Booker International.
No one deserved the award more.
In the unique case of Dorthe, I suspend my disdain for awards.
Dorthe doesn’t just deserve the Man Booker International.
She deserves every award.
She should win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
She should win Motor Trend’s Car of the Year.
Bad Sex in Fiction!
As Dorthe was transforming into a superstar, she helped me out in whatever ways that she could. This is how I ended up getting an email in the summer of 2014 AD from a guy named Adrian Todd Zuniga.
Adrian Todd Zuniga is the founder and the host of a thing called Literary Death Match.
He’d met Dorthe somewhere in Europe, at one of the ten billion literary festivals that extend invitations to Dorthe.
She told him that he should have me participate in Literary Death Match.
So he reached out.
I said yes.
Saying yes to Literary Death Match was a moral compromise of the highest order.
To understand why, I need to explain the thing.
Literary Death Match works like this: four writers are given the opportunity to read their work.
Unlike normal readings, Literary Death Match happens in two rounds.
In each round, two writers perform their work, and then their work is critiqued by three judges. These judges are often celebrities.
The judges choose one writer as the victor of each round, and then the two victors face off against one another in a final round which involves a humiliating game.
Whoever demonstrates the greatest capacity for making a fool of themselves is the winner of Literary Death Match.
This is awful shit. It’s the clusterfuck of debasement that has overtaken writing.
Everyone pretends that they’re on the same side, everyone pretends that they’re friends, and everyone makes awful pronouncements about the seriousness of their work while maintaining their aw shucks relatability, and sometimes writers are rewarded for their pomposity with badly rendered line drawings of their faces on bookshop walls.
And sometimes, if the writer is a good little boy, people will reward his pomposity with the gift of a tote bag.
Most of these tote bags have an aphorism or a logo printed on their sides.
The aphorisms and logos are always very positive about publishing.
I’ve never bought a tote bag in my life.
But I’ve still got about twenty hanging in my kitchen.
One of them says BOOKS.
I knew what Literary Death Match was.
I abhorred it.
And I still said yes.
That’s how desperate I was.
Summer of 2014 AD was particularly bad.
I’d finished writing the manuscript for I Hate the Internet and two things had become apparent: (1) it was the most significant piece of work that I’d done and (2) absolutely no one would publish it.
When I was offered Literary Death Match, these two things had left me beyond debased.
I was thinking, honestly, that if I won the thing, it’d at least give me another meaningless credential to put in query emails to agents who would refuse to represent my manuscript.
The iteration of Literary Death Match to which I’d been invited occurred on July 10th, 2014 AD, and it was held at Largo at Coronet on La Cienaga Boulevard.
Largo is one of those venues that people who aren’t from Los Angeles can’t possibly understand. It’s where the Celebrity branch of American governance entertains itself in a 280-seat venue.
If your response to the existential horror of Donald J. Trump is a desire to have your liberal pieties reinforced with a joke about Star Trek, then you should fly to Los Angeles and go to Largo.
The comedian Patton Oswalt will be waiting with your chuckles.
The other writers who were performing at Literary Death Match were Aimee Bender, Jay Martel, and Annabelle Gurwitch.
Jay Martel was the producer of Key & Peele, which was a popular sketch comedy show in which two African-American actors who’d grown up as members of the middle classes performed skits based around the hilarity inherent in the accents of poor African-Americans.
Annabelle Gurwitch was an actress who’d found some success as a writer of books about her sex drive as she approached the age of fifty.
Aimee Bender was a literary writer. She taught creative writing at the University of Sou
thern California, and was director of that university’s Creative Writing PhD program.
I’ve never read her work, but my friend Dean Smith was in the audience at Largo with his boyfriend Mike Kitchell, and Dean Smith said that he’d read Aimee Bender’s book The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.
The judges at Literary Death Match were Amber Tamblyn, Jody Hill, and Dana Gould.
Amber Tamblyn was an actor and a poet with several volumes of published poetry. She’d done a lot of good in the world, having convinced people to give money to the poet Diane di Prima when Diane di Prima had serious healthcare issues and needed help with the costs.
At the time of Literary Death Match, Amber Tamblyn was just coming off a starring role in Season Eleven of the sitcom Two and a Half Men, which was the highest-rated television show in America.
Jody Hill was a director and writer of films and television. Through the terrible magic of Los Angeles, we’d met about eight years earlier, but neither of us could remember where.
Dana Gould was a stand-up comedian and a former writer for The Simpsons.
To state the bleedingly obvious: I was the freak.
Everyone else at Literary Death Match had significant amounts of money and significant amounts of success, and with the exception of Aimee Bender, all of them were representatives from the Celebrity branch of American governance.
I was poor and I wrote psychedelic biographies of Islamic-themed terrorists.
Thanks, Dorthe!
The first round of Literary Death Match was Aimee Bender versus Jay Martel.
I was in Largo’s green room with Annabelle Gurwitch.
She was charming.
When Aimee Bender and Jay Martel stopped reading, the judges chimed in and offered opinions on their work. The judges ended up going with Aimee Bender.
I should say that I had never been to a Literary Death Match.
So I had no idea what the judges’ critiques would be like.
I certainly wasn’t expecting what I saw during the first round, which was a rah-rah all-in-together-now malice masked by a layer of bonhomie.
If you want to imagine an analogue, think about Celebrity Roasts, which are spectacles where a celebrity will attend an event that honors the celebrity by having other celebrities say cruel things about the honored celebrity.