Antiwar.com is an excellent website. It is devoted, on a nonpartisan basis, to preventing war. SLL has featured many antiwar.com articles. The website has been on the Drudge Report’s list of permanently linked websites for quite some time. Justin Raimondo, the guiding light of Antiwar.com, supported Trump’s candidacy as a potential break in the neoconservatives warmongering grip on Washington. Since the election, Raimondo has been a vocal critic of actions in which Trump seems to have abandoned his non-interventionist promises. Recently, the Drudge Report took Antiwar.com off its list. Raimono accuses Drudge of being co-opted by the Trump administration. He may be right. From Raimondo at antiwar.com:
I’ve always been a big Matt Drudge fan. That’s because I was there at the beginning, when the Drudge Report was just another web site and the Legacy Media was still the main focus of the journalism business. I remember when he was an habitué of Freerepublic.com, one of the earliest gathering places for all sorts of dissidents in the Age of Clinton. I remember how his breaking of the Monica Lewinsky story propelled him into the spotlight, and I distinctly recall the vicious attacks on him by the “mainstream” media, which resented the by-his-bootstraps way he achieved what is essentially a hegemonic position in the journalistic universe. I particularly appreciated his famous 1998 speech at the National Press Club, in which the notoriously reclusive Drudge delivered a manifesto that all us bootstrappers cheered and took to heart:
“We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices. Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be. The difference between the Internet, television and radio, magazines, newspapers is the two-way communication. The Net gives as much voice to a 13-year-old computer geek like me as to a CEO or speaker of the House. We all become equal. And you would be amazed what the ordinary guy knows.
“From a little corner in my Hollywood apartment, in the company of nothing more than my 486 computer and my six – six-toed cat, I have consistently been able to break big stories, thanks to this network of ordinary guys.”
Drudge broke the monopoly of the Legacy Media, and he did it in a spectacular way. If the inventors of the Internet are the equivalent of Gutenberg, then Drudge was a modern day Peter Zenger – whom he alludes to in his speech. He took on the naysayers, the kind who resist any innovation because they think it threatens their perks and privileges. Drudge pointed out that the movie moguls and the radio networks tried to get the government to suppress television when it came out, but something else happened instead:
“No, television saved the movies. The Internet is going to save the news business. I – I envision a – a future where there’ll be 300 million reporters, where anyone from anywhere can report for any reason. It’s freedom of – freedom of participation, absolutely realized.”
To continue reading: Farewell to Matt Drudge
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 