Goodbye Little Green Footballs, Hello Powerline

The Ubiquitous Green Football

This was a difficult post to write.

Over on my recommended sites list to the right, Little Green Footballs has been replaced by the Powerline Blog. To some readers, this won't matter in the slightest. But there is a story to tell here.

First, a little history: In its prime, the Little Green Footballs website was one of the most popular blogs in the world (although in the last year readership has plunged, see chart below). It came to national prominence in 2004 when it exposed the Bush National Guard memos as fakes and eventually took down Dan Rather of CBS. It's owner, Charles Johnson, was a big inspiration for me when I first started this blog. I linked to his site often, and he returned the favor. Several times I sent him correspondence and he actually praised some of my articles and he directly referred to them on his front page (here and here for example), greatly increasing my site traffic (I was using my old url then: www.shieldofachilles.blogspot.com). I didn't always agree with him, but I greatly admired the way he unwaveringly took on the left wing media, and was one of the few powerful media voices supporting the US war against Al-Qaeda.

But times have changed, starting around October 2007 in a dispute with Gates of Vienna and Brussels Journal, among others. Since then, he has repudiated all the other blogs he was most closely associated with, accusing them all of "white supremacism". Charles never even writes about terrorism anymore; his current obsession is the evils of creationism, attacking anyone on the right (such as the tea party protesters), and defending Barack Obama. Additionally, the man who was once a great skeptic of global warming now believes in it. Yet, incredibly, he still maintains that it is everyone else who has changed, not him! Many other bloggers have written about this problem; see here, here, or here, for just a few recent examples. It's a heated topic on the sites wiki page. Some sites, like Jammie Wearing Fool, which was a spin-off of LGF, don't even link to it anymore, which is telling all by itself.

Here are Little Green Football's site stats since the "change" started, courtesy of Alexa. The effect on the web site's readership is pretty clear:


Now don't get me wrong: People have the right to change their minds (heck, I never really agreed with his skepticism of climate change anyway). But the guy can't just disagree with anybody; he's entered a phase of pure paranoia, and either you're with him or against him. Anyone who disagrees with him at his site is immediately banned. Even I didn't think he had gone that far, until I found out for myself (see down below).

Now, how does this dispute affect regular people who don't read blogs? Well, at first glance, it looks like it doesn't. But in the long run it really does, because LGF was a very large web community, one of the few places where conservative thinkers could network. A place to put out information that the mainstream media would ignore. The political left already have huge networking sites like The Huffington Post, The Daily Kos, or Democratic Underground. With LGF gone, the only large site conservatives have now is Red State, and that's only for Americans. I guess this is partly the folly of relying too much on the whims of one site administrator.

For me, this controversy came to bear in his recent dispute with the Powerline Blog. Several of the commenters there claimed that Charles Johnson had banned them from LGF for disagreeing with him, and in some cases, just for downvoting his posts or comments! I was really surprised at the number of people claiming this, and decided I wanted to try and find out for myself. I thought that it wouldn't be a problem; I'm a pretty reasonable guy, and I've never had trouble with Charles Johnson before. Boy was I wrong. The man who I considered almost a friend (I say "almost", because I had never met him in person) banned me for even asking these questions. The Charles I knew several years ago never acted like this; it's like some alien had taken over his body.

You can see the full comment thread here, although it would take a great deal of time to sift through it all. Most people would not be interested in reading it. For those who are curious enough, I made it easier by pasting the relevant portions below the jump:

Note: Of course, there were far more comments than these - many of then hurling insults at me. I pasted only the key ones here for brevity.

My comments actually started at #240, which Charles deleted too quickly for me to get a screen capture. But in it, I simply quoted several commenters at Powerline, who claimed they were banned from LGF simply for disagreeing with Charles, such as here, here and here. I then, without making an accusation, simply asked if there was any truth to what these men were alleging. Here is how the conversation went after that:

Surprisingly, Charles himself pops up right away! For perspective, keep in mind that this is a site with about 3,500 comments per day...! The post he quotes to here, is about someone who was deliberately insulting and vile. That is a straw man, and has nothing to do with what I was asking about.

He's deleting it because he can't stand criticism. Some of us welcome debate. Some of us fear it. In the past, he had no problem with linking to criticism of his site. I certainly have no problem with it at my site.

I simply asked one of my questions again. This was me being polite, and pointing out things on which we agree to help keep the conversation on a civil tone. He wasn't interested.

He sort of has a point here, but he still avoids the question. And I guess even someone asking makes him steamed. Already he sees an enemy where there is none.

I summarize my original question again. He doesn't like people asking questions...

So far, I haven't broken any of his rules - all I've done is ask questions. And already he is talking about banning me. The crazy thing is, I've had heated debates with people at The Daily Kos, Balloon Juice, and many other sites with plenty of hot-heads. I have never, ever had anyone threaten me with banning, nor have I seen anyone else threatened with it for simply asking questions.

This one was by someone else, but it is instructive. Does this guy really believe this? What, I wonder, was truly "disgusting" in any of my following comments?

Apparently (as I found out from others later), he's extremely sensitive about people downvoting anything (there are little buttons on his posts where members can vote them up or down). But he set up the system - why get so upset at people using it? I was simply downvoting his posts that were critical of me, just as other people were doing to me. That's how it works on all social networking sites. If you are so sensitive over a single vote against you, why put the system in place?

Note that if it's hard to read the above, you can click on it to make it larger.

Since I saw the way the conversation is going, I gave some history and tried to make it clear that I didn't visit today as some fly-by-night troll. I realize now that maybe this backfired - it reminded Charles of how much his site has changed in the last few years.

When I read this, I was really taken aback. Was this really the Charles I knew?? In his paranoia, he sees only the most malicious interpretation of my being there. I doubt he even read all the way through my last comment.

There were a few minor exchanges after this - I bent over backwards to be as polite as possible and clarify my intentions, and get the conversation back on track. But I needn't have tried - once someone is intent on finding an excuse to attack you, they will. And I already had my answer.

Now my last message in the thread was at 3:55 pm. After that, I absently left it up on my computer while I did some other work. Over the next 3 hours, I came back to the page two or three times to read some more responses, and upvote/downvote some new comments. But I didn't write anything more. Then I went away for awhile. When I came back later, I happened to see this new comment:


I was stunned. Note the time: more than three hours later. Even for the "new" Charles Johnson this is really, really petty and sad. Is this what the great Lizard blogger has been reduced to? Keep in mind that this is a guy with an average of 100,000 visitors a day, and 1,200 online at that time. So he is so insecure about one single dissenter that he was constantly monitoring me for three hours, watching my votes, and stalking my IP address to see if I was still on his page. Wow. How many times does he repeat this behavior every day? (And he calls me pathetic, which is really rich - I was only on for one afternoon) I really get the feeling that this is someone who needs to step away from his computer once in awhile. A long while...



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