Merry Christmas, Matt Drudge

Did you flip because you were bored, you sold the site, or you feared the FBI?

Did I ever tell you about the time Matt Drudge shut down the Charleston Daily Mail and the entire Charleston Newspapers operation? He linked a column I wrote about Nancy Pelosi and the traffic overloaded the company’s lone computer system. This made me happy but this angered the rest of the people in the building. Never again did the computer room allow Drudge to link me, even as the Daily Mail held sessions on Google-baiting for links.

So much for journalistic quality and integrity. Tucker Carlson learned that lesson in April, didn’t he?

Nowadays I could not get a link to Drudge if I paid him. It is just as well. He has gone to the dark side.

Drudge made his mark on the world in 1998 when Lucianne Goldberg handed him the Monica Lewinsky story, after Newsweek spiked it. That is how reporters get stories: through sources.

Mark Felt handed Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward the Watergate kerfuffle after Nixon passed Felt over as FBI director. The story brought Nixon down, negating an election which Nixon had won with 49 states — the most ever by any president; however, both Washington and Monroe carried every state when the nation was much smaller.

Lucianne Goldberg’s friendship with Drudge earned him the Lucianne Seal of Good Conservatism. Indeed he earned it by being a pest as well as a good link to have for a journalist. Much of the traffic that the New York Times and Washington Post enjoy today stems from his links over the decades.

But something happened upon the election of President Donald Trump that turned him against the country and the MAGA movement in favor of a deep state that wants to rule we the people.

After Biden stole the 2020 election, the Tablet reported, “Matt Drudge Logs Off: The Drudge Report has become a conformist shadow of its formerly bratty, oppositional self. Why?”

The story cited a tweet from Trump before the election, “Our people have all left Drudge. He is a confused mess.”

The Tablet then said, “Drudge has always been an enigma, but aspects of Trump’s critique appear to be accurate. The Drudge Report once cycled through 40-50 links in a single five-hour period. The page is now updated only once or twice a day and almost never reacts to breaking news, as if it’s being run by someone who simply doesn’t care anymore.

“Traffic has reportedly lagged, with Comscore data suggesting a 45% plunge in the year before this past September. In the glory days even a midpage Drudge link could pull a million views; the number is now down to the high tens of thousands. Drudge pulled the report’s app from Apple’s and Google’s app stores, only to later link to it in the Drudge sidebar after switching ad brokers without explanation in mid-2019. And unlike in past years, when the page had multiple staffers working morning and afternoon shifts, Drudge watchers have no idea who, if anyone else, works for the site.

“The last reported employee was Daniel Halper, a former Weekly Standard editor hired on in 2017, though it is unclear whether he still works there. When reached by Tablet, Halper would not comment on any past or current involvement with The Drudge Report.”

The boredom theory of the downfall of Drudge makes sense as does the theory that he literally sold out.

Goldberg, a fearless lady who never was afraid of anything, went on the record unlike others who talked to the Tablet. I miss her although her site continues to reflect her vision of what America was and shall be again.

She said, “It’s a totally different publication.” Asked what was the biggest sign, she said, “Oh, every line of the page. It’s just so obvious that he’s not interested, that somebody else is doing it.”

His change of heart has drawn competition from many other conservative linkers (aggregators to use the jargon) with Kane at Citizen Free Press being the fastest with breaking news — like Drudge once was.

Bob Norman of Columbia Journalism Review went into deepest darkest Florida in 2020 to hunt down the reclusive Drudge.

Norman reported, “I did not have high hopes of finding him. Drudge’s house, which he bought along with the adjoining property for about $2.2 million in 2013, is hidden in woods, not far from the Everglades. Pulling up to the entrance after driving on some of Redland’s idyllic tree-domed roads, I expected nothing less than a high-walled bunker. A wooden gate greeted me instead. It was wide open.”

That’s some recluse.

The story’s headline was “Why did Matt Drudge turn on Donald Trump?”

Norman never answered the question. He apparently never asked Drudge if he sold the site or just quit trying. Selling the site after 20 years made sense. Drudge’s father started Refdesk and sold the a month before Trump’s inauguration.

But something else happened that month.

The Daily Mail reported on December 30, 2016, “The founder of Drudge Report got a very unpleasant surprise Thursday night when the popular news aggregation website went down for 90 minutes.

“Matt Drudge wrote on his Twitter account that the website had been targeted with the biggest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) it had ever experienced in its 21 year history, leaving users unable to access content.

“He also stated that the ‘routing and timing’ of the attack was ‘VERY suspicious,’ which then led him to tweet: ‘Is the US government attacking DRUDGE REPORT?’

“Drudge then followed up with another tweet shortly after, writing: 'Attacking coming from thousands of sources. Of course none of them traceable to Fort Meade. . .’

“The suggestion that the Obama administration might have launched a targeted attack against the website polarized Twitter users, with fans of Drudge Report supporting its founder’s suspicions and detractors responding with disbelief and in some cases outrage at the allegation.

“Shortly before the website went down, it was announced that President Obama had deemed 35 Russian diplomats ‘persona non grata’ following evidence that the country used coordinated hacks to try and influence the presidential election, giving individuals just 72 hours to get out of the country.”

We all know now that the Russian election interference hoax was a cover story for spying by the FBI on Donald Trump at the behest of President Barack Hussein Obama who was bitter that Trump kept bringing up Obama’s false claim in 1991 that he was born in Kenya. When he decided to run for president, Obama changed his story to the more plausible birth in Hawaii where his mother lived at the time.

The federal government has great power with no ethics or oversight. It brought down the first 49-state president (Reagan tied Nixon in 1984) nearly 50 years ago. Bringing down Matt Drudge would be like swatting a fly.

But that is mere speculation on my part.

Still, CNN reported six months into the Trump presidency, “Matt Drudge has been in the White House an awful lot these days — all the time, as one senior administration official puts it. He's met with President Donald Trump, spent time with Ivanka Trump, and doled out advice to Jared Kushner.

“That he’d have influence in the Trump White House should not be all that surprising. The internet news tycoon, who founded and edits the Drudge Report, the narrative-setting conservative news website, has been one of Trump's most ardent supporters since Trump announced his candidacy. He boosted him through the contentious Republican primaries, helped him defeat Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton by galvanizing the GOP base, and, for the better half of his young presidency, has stayed in sync with the White House's talking points.

“But Drudge is blindly loyal to no one — which could, ultimately, make him as dangerous to this White House as he has been helpful to it.”

CNN is deeply devoted to the deep state which likely tipped it off to Drudge’s flip just as the FBI tipped the news channel ahead of its SWATting of Roger Stone and later its raid on Mar-a-Lago.

I don’t know why Drudge flipped but I still check out the Drudge Report a few times a week as I scour for my Highlights of the Week column each Saturday.

And I wish him a merry Christmas because he once was on our side. My fond memory of shutting down Charleston Newspapers for one afternoon remains. Sure I finally gave them a reason to fire me 8 years later and I felt bad for a couple of days but it was worth it — just as the Drudge Report was once worthy of my readers’ time.