The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [115]
“‘Three. If you make more than 2 or 3 posts in a day, you are posting way above average,’” Frank read. He went on: “‘You’d better have something extraordinarily important or people will just start ignoring you.’”
“Way above average?” I laughed. “There are only like six people on the board as it is!”
“No, it gets better,” Frank said. “Listen to this: ‘I think it will benefit YOU as a message poster if you more-or-less follow these suggestions, because people will take you more seriously and are more likely to read what you post.’” He laughed. “And here’s how he ends it: ‘Again, just suggestions. Other folks might have different visions of how this message board should function. Take care. Have fun. Keep up the good work. Mark.’ Have fun? Fun? What the fuck is wrong with these people? Do other people know about this?”
“Dude, this is like 36 percent of America, according to recent polls,” I said.
“Bullshit.” He frowned nervously. “That can’t be true. You’re lying again.”
I said I wasn’t, but he refused to listen. He kept staring at the screen, muttering to himself. “Fun,” he said. “Have fun. Jesus.”
Back to the site: almost immediately, Mark’s rival, John, posted a soothing letter to Mauricio, but it was too late. That was the end of Mauricio on that board. So much for a “safe place.”
Soon after, Mark dropped out of the group and John took over. In a letter to me, Mark explained that he had become disillusioned with the movement. “My initial beliefs about conspiracy came from a general understanding of how our government operates and what kind of agenda it follows,” he wrote. “And I believe strongly that these are the questions the 9/11 Truth Movement should focus on. We can argue for the rest of our lives about all the different theories about the towers’ collapse, and the ‘shocking proof’ in the form of highly speculative interpretations of photos and videos, and while we struggle with that argument, the noose draws steadily tighter around the neck of American democracy.”
So there! Mark didn’t even sign his name—it was like he wasn’t even talking to me, but to God, to the Fates. And with that, dramatically, this would-be leader was out of the movement. But there were more to take his place; the Meetup kept growing and growing. Months later, the numbers had doubled—but the group was still stuck trying to set up a movie night.
IN THE SPRING a friend of mine named Joel Barkin called and invited me to lunch. Joel is the executive director of the Progressive States Network, a group dedicated to passing progressive laws in America’s state legislatures. He’s a young guy, very idealistic, who grew disillusioned with certain aspects of the system while working as a congressional aide years ago. Whenever the Democrats sell out their electorate somehow, I can count on getting a call from him. And now he was calling me on the heels of the Democrats’ latest failed attempt to stop the war.
He was fuming. He said that since the Democrats won the Congress in the midterm election, an entire peace-movement bureaucracy had magically appeared in Washington, a bureaucracy staffed not by grassroots peace activists but, by and large, by the same hacks who were manning the Democratic ship when the Democrats supported the war.
“It’s the same groups meeting with Pelosi and Reid all the time,” he said. “It’s groups like Americans United for Change, Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, MoveOn, and so on. But here, take a look at this.”
He handed me a piece of paper.
“These are quotes by a guy named Brad Woodhouse,” he said. “Brad Woodhouse is the head of Americans United for Change. He’s one of the leaders of the so-called peace movement in America right now. But check out what he was saying a few years ago, when he worked for [North Carolina Senate candidate] Erskine Bowles.”
There were two Woodhouse quotes on the page:
“No one has been stronger in this race [than Bowles] in supporting President Bush in the war on terror and his efforts to effect a regime change in Iraq,” said Bowles’s spokesman,