Charles Johnson Uses Twitter to Push ‘Racist’ Smear of Red State’s Josh Trevino

Posted on | July 4, 2010 | 28 Comments

Joshua Trevino is a Texan, former Bush administration official and Republican political consultant. In 2004, he co-founded Red State along with Ben Domenech and Mike Krempasky.

A couple of days ago, Trevino was named among the “Top 25 Conservatives on Twitter.” And it was just about then that Trevino and his colleagues began kicking around a Twitter meme, “I’ve been blogging so long . . .” in which they recounted their memories of the medium’s early days. Two of Trevino’s contributions mentioned Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs:

As night follows day, Trevino’s mention of the LGF Grand Lizard provoked a predictable response:

It seems that no one may criticize Charles Johnson without incurring this kind of attack. Johnson’s Tweet linked a post he had written in April 2009:

The post Johnson Tweeted referred to an April 2009 article in the Washington Independent by David Weigel, recounting the “civil war” among anti-jihad bloggers that Johnson had instigated:

Johnson worries, in conversation and on his blog, that his old allies have been duped by far-right European political parties and have bought into wild attacks on the president that discredit their own causes.
“I don’t think there is an anti-jihadist movement anymore,” Johnson said. “It’s all a bunch of kooks. I’ve watched some people who I thought were reputable, and who I trusted, hook up with racists and Nazis. I see a lot of them promoting stories and causes that I think are completely nuts.” . . .
Johnson’s former allies can pinpoint the month, if not the moment, when he started to turn on them. In October 2007, some of the leading terrorism-focused conservative bloggers flew to Belgium for a Counterjihad Summit sponsored in part by the Center for Vigilant Freedom . . . an outgrowth of the LGF-inspired blog Gates of Vienna.
“It was the best conference I ever went to,” remembered Geller. But the summit included members of Vlaams Belang, a controversial Belgian political party that criticizes Islam and Shariah law . . . Johnson went to work exposing this, and the attendees reeled from the negative attention.
“He chose to portray the Brussels Conference as evil and he unconscionably slandered the people who attended,” said Dymphna, one of the editors of Gates of Vienna. Baron Bodissey, the other site editor (both editors use pen names), worries that Johnson “did serious damage to the American blogosphere’s view of European nationalists who oppose the EU . . .”
“Not only that,” said Bodissey, “he made it harder for certain American anti-jihad groups to raise funds if they failed to repudiate his designated ‘fascist-enablers’ like us.”

This article by Weigel — written in April 2009, I remind you — was the first journalistic recounting of Johnson’s estrangement from his former allies and admirers. And when Trevino responded to it (in a post that Trevino seems subsequently to have deleted), he said this:

Charles Johnson’s disenchantment with a movement he did much to create is more likely a function of his contrary nature than his active conscience, but it would be ungracious to pry overmuch. The sad truth is that the self-proclaimed anti-jihadists, as a group, have done a great deal to discredit themselves in the past decade.

Note that second sentence, which Johnson omitted when quoting Trevino at LGF. What Trevino appears to be saying is that he felt Johnson (and Johnson’s anti-jihad comrades) were often too extreme in their rhetoric even before Johnson and LGF turned on Geller, et al. And, as Weigel noted in a follow-up post, Johnson’s qualms about Belgian nationalism hadn’t prevented him from lamenting the banning of Vlaams Blok in November 2004:

While it’s hard to approve of every one of Vlaams Blok’s policies, there’s also no denying that this is very much a victory for European Islamic supremacist groups such as the openly radical, terror-supporting Arab-European League — because almost no one else opposes them.

In November 2004, then, Johnson seemed to “get” that far-right groups like Vlams Blok (a precursor to Vlaams Belang) were quite nearly the only active opponents of the Islamicization of Europe. A year later, in November 2005, when this problem was dramatized by Muslim riots in France, Michelle Malkin linked both LGF and Brussels Journal — the latter of which Charles Johnson, in attacking Josh Trevino, has since declared to be a “racist Website” run by an ally of “neofascists.”

Well, what were Josh Trevino’s contributions to Brussels Journal? Was he fomenting anti-Arab racism or advocating some sort of Blut und Boden nationalism? Not in the least. His first contribution, in February 2006, was a thoughtful consideration of America’s interest in the fate of Europe. His last article, in April 2009, was a rather highbrow analysis of wartime information strategies. In between, he wrote about multiculturalism, about Christianity, about the Israeli campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, about the Pope’s visit to Istanbul, about the election of Obama, etc.

Go through the entirety of Trevino’s Brussels Journal archives and see if you find anything that could fairly be described as “racist.” You won’t.

Whatever the errors of Paul Belien and Brussels Journal (which I haven’t bothered to research), Trevino has not committed them, so that Charles Johnson’s “racist” smear is obviously just that — a cheap guilt-by-association smear. And this is of a piece with Johnson’s recent modus operandi: Declare that Person X or Group Y or Publication Z is “fascist” or “ultra-nationalist” or whatever, and then proceed in connect-the-dots fashion, demanding that others denounce and repudiate the target, or else become tainted by association as an “enabler” or “apologist” for the target.

Johnson’s demand for endless purges against his erstwhile allies very much resembles Josef Stalin during the Moscow ”show trials” of the 1930s, in which other Soviet leaders were mercilessly liquidated. In his famous 1956 recounting of Stalin’s crimes, Nikita Kruschev made reference to a 1934 meeting of Communist Party leaders when he said:

It was determined that of the 139 members and candidates of the party’s Central Committee who were elected at the Seventeenth Congress, 98 persons, i.e., 70 percent, were arrested and shot (mostly in 1937-38) . . .

Charles Johnson’s mad hunt for “racists,” which now numbers Joshua Trevino among its targets, is akin to Stalin’s accusations that his Communist comrades were “Trotskyites,” “deviationists” and “saboteurs.”

Students of history will recall that, scarcely a year after these show trials ended, Stalin entered into a treaty with Hitler. Immediately upon the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, those American communists who had loudly repeated Stalin’s anti-fascist slogans during the Popular Front years suddenly fell silent about fascism and began denouncing England and her allies as “warmongers.”

This first communist-led “peace” movement lasted 21 months, until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. American communists instantly switched to denouncing pacifists and isolationists (who had been their allies just days before) as de facto allies of Hitler, if not indeed Nazi sympathizers.

It was the peregrinations of the Communist Party USA and its allies in that era — first, the “Popular Front” solidarity against fascism, then the advocacy of “peace” while the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was in effect, and then pro-war militancy after the Soviet Union was invaded — which exposed CPUSA as a subversive tool of Soviet power, rather than an independent political movement.

We return, then, to Trevino’s April 2009 statement that “self-proclaimed anti-jihadists, as a group, have done a great deal to discredit themselves in the past decade.” Be that as it may, we can at least say that some anti-jihadists have been steadfast and sincere in their opposition to Islamicization and dhimmitude.

By contrast, his former colleagues now recognize Charles Johnson as a self-aggrandizing sociopath who attempted to make himself the Stalin of anti-jihadism, dictating a ”party line” to which he demanded that others adhere or else be repudiated. I described how I became aware of Johnson’s jihad against Pamela Geller in an e-mail last week to the Blogmocracy:

It was the day after the 2008 election and Charles Johnson decided that the way to mark the occasion was to lash out at his idee fixe. I called him on it:
http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/2008/11/pam-geller-nazi.html
“Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has apparently decided that the problem with the conservative movement is that it needs more purges, and Pam Geller at Atlas Shrugs seems to be his designated scapegoat. . . . Pam is a good person and I would suggest that this guilt-by-association ‘urge to purge’ is antithetical to the best interests of conservatism. You can’t build a movement by the process of subtraction.”
Given everything that conservatives had to worry about on Nov. 5, 2008, how did Geller’s association with Belgian nationalists rate such attention?

This is the point, you see: Amid all the woes that afflicted conservatism in November 2008, Johnson made his year-old feud with Geller the top priority. As I also explained to the Blogmocracy:

Johnson can’t tell the difference between his pet peeves and genuine dangers, and people who don’t share his pet peeves are suspected of being in league with the enemy.
I’ve studied Johnson’s modus operandi and, what’s more, I know the type: People who seek to impress others by a pretended expertise, and who become enraged when it is pointed out that they don’t actually know what they’re talking about.

Read the whole thing. Beware of those who exhibit the “urge to purge,” who are furiously intolerant of disagreement and error, who are so insistent on the infallibility of their own judgment as to demand that anyone who criticizes them must be condemned and ostracized. It is more dangerous to be such a person’s friend than to be their enemy because they will eventually turn their paranoid rage upon their closest allies.

At the time of his death in 1953, Stalin was persecuting suspects accused of complicity in the (wholly imaginary) ”doctors plot,” a purge that threatened to implicate even Kruschev, Beria, Malenkov and Molotov. The targets of Stalin’s “doctors plot” purge were mainly Jews.

Sic semper hoc.

UPDATE: Apologies for further extending a long post, but Trevino sends along a link to the post that inspired Johnson’s rage. The weird part? Trevino actually criticized Geller, and wrote:

As a rule of thumb, the policy preferences of the anti-jihadists range from thoughtless support of neoconservatism at best, to strange and unworkable schemes of Muslim exclusion at worst.

True to form, however, rather than seeing in Trevino a potential ally, the narcissistic Johnson only cared that he had been criticized, evidently decided that Trevino was therefore an enemy, and attacked.

Category: Atlas Shrugs, Charles Johnson, History, Joshua Trevino, Red State, The Blogmocracy, The Flemish Menace

Comments

28 Responses to “Charles Johnson Uses Twitter to Push ‘Racist’ Smear of Red State’s Josh Trevino”

Rob
July 4th, 2010 @ 1:18 pm
It’s politics…
Ian Vaughan
July 4th, 2010 @ 1:29 pm
Chuckie always was a reality deprived ideologue.
The following link helps explain his angst.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,702679,00.html
Ian
Estragon
July 4th, 2010 @ 1:54 pm
LGF still manages 100,000 hits per day . . . who would have thought there were that many who share CJ’s addiction to sniffing bicycle seats?
Wondering Jew
July 4th, 2010 @ 1:55 pm
“conservatives” who engage in witch hunts for “racism” amongst their fellow conservatives are deeply enmeshed in a fundamentally leftist world view and need to be driven from the movement.
Noted Stalker and Smear Blogger continues to prove that he is crazy | Political Byline
July 4th, 2010 @ 2:32 pm
[...] Stalker and Smear Blogger continues to prove that he is crazy By Patrick, on July 4th, 2010 Click here to read SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Noted Stalker and Smear Blogger continues to prove that he is crazy", [...]
Chris
July 4th, 2010 @ 2:33 pm
You’ve apparently gotten under his skin. He’s having a complete meltdown on his twitter, posting link after link attacking you…lol.
So pathetic and so funny, at the same time. I would say, Mr. McCain that your superiority over silly little Charles has been proven yet again.
Robert Stacy McCain
July 4th, 2010 @ 2:34 pm
LGF still manages 100,000 hits per day
According to whom?
Dave C
July 4th, 2010 @ 2:57 pm
LGF still manages 100,000 hits per day
If you count the number of times members hit the refresh button, then yeah..
Robert Stacy McCain
July 4th, 2010 @ 3:21 pm
If you count the number of times members hit the refresh button, then yeah.
UPDING
(refresh)
LOL
(refresh)
UPDING
(refresh)
Lather, rinse, repeat. The closed “community membership” model was perfected by DKos, and has the effect of attracting argumentative personalities who will drive up the total page-view totals by repeatedly refreshing to see how others have responded to their comments. You can contrast this with Ace of Spade’s open community model, where anyone can comment and the occasional troll is hammered flat.
Whatever LGF’s actual numbers may be — and since he doesn’t have a visible SiteMeter link, we don’t actually know — his traffic has clearly declined in the past three years, as he increasingly purged members who disagreed or criticized the site’s leftward shift. Clearly, he’d slipped a cog when he banned even Irish Rose as insufficiently subservient.
Grimcargo
July 4th, 2010 @ 4:04 pm
If that vile old bat…and he does act like an old bat. He looks like an elderly woman.Quite fitting since most of those musicians end up looking like that. If that vile old bat has any hits its just from people who cannot believe their eyes. The more he goes the sooner it will come to pass that he meets all those people he smears. You know a family reunion.
William Teach
July 4th, 2010 @ 4:05 pm
Unsurprisingly, Charles is whining about this post in the comments of his post on July 4th, which was a deep, heartfelt, typical one liner.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/36676_Happy_Independence_Day/comments/#ctop
Comment 3 and 10
DEZ
July 4th, 2010 @ 4:28 pm
I have no idea if CJ ever said Palestinians ate human remains, If he did, you can bet its long gone, his purge was not only of conservative posters and their comments, but a good deal of his own comments and articles.
The fools on his site digging for answers wont find them, and not because they never happened, but because Chuck did a thorough house cleaning so not to offend the lunatic left he wished attract.
The man is dishonest to say the very least.
Charles Johnson
July 4th, 2010 @ 4:51 pm
I am sick and tired of the lies you spread about me RSM. I get a 100,000 hits a day. A good portion of that is from my special program (that I wrote myself) that records hits so people do not actually have to click on.
Blogs are so much cleaner without actual readers bugging you. I do not take criticism well.
Charles Johnson
July 4th, 2010 @ 4:58 pm
Palestinians do eat human remains. Themselves. They are the most self destructive people on the planet, they are like a snake eating its own tail.
Yes, I do occasionally have moments of clarity in my madness.
Randy Rager
July 4th, 2010 @ 5:29 pm
Using the old “tell the truth until it drives them mad” gambit, eh?
Good on ya. Keep it up, RSM.
Robert Stacy McCain
July 4th, 2010 @ 5:39 pm
Charles is whining about this post in the comments of his post
Heh: “McCain’s post is a textbook example of his debased intellectual dishonesty.”
He was the one who started slinging these smears — beginning with his assault against Pamela Geller in October 2007 — and now he complains that others fail to engage in civil discourse with him.
CrustyB
July 4th, 2010 @ 6:21 pm
This is how I explain Charles’ thought process to people:
You like oranges. Mozart was known to like oranges. His work influenced Richard Wagner, whose music was greatly admired by none other than Adolph Hitler. So why don’t you put on your Nazi uniform and do a goose-step for us, you racist, fascist, creationist hater!?
In other words, if Charles calls someone a racist it’s almost a sure bet that they are not.
MegaWhat
July 4th, 2010 @ 7:19 pm
If lgf is still getting any hits at all, it is only because someone who has an actual blog that gets actual hits seems to feel compelled to continue referencing him instead of ignoring him like he ought to. Stacy.
Do you stop and argue with crazy people muttering to themselves in the street also?
song_and_dance_man
July 4th, 2010 @ 7:27 pm
Foster wants to be the Emperor of the whole dadgum Galactic blogoshere with the power to banish any who might disagree with him, and/or are critical of his panty waist proclivities.
And since he can’t ban anyone he wishes he chooses to cruise down defamation avenue in his one and only worn down vehicle.
Oh wait. He’s also trying to raise traffic on True/Slant. Excuse me while I bwaahaha.
Dave C
July 4th, 2010 @ 8:18 pm
@ comment #1.
Does that mean you won’t be back for a while..
Because if it is..
Rose
July 4th, 2010 @ 8:43 pm
TOOOOOOOOOO funny. Hey DEZ, we miss ya. The “Lounge” is still in operation.
m
July 4th, 2010 @ 11:18 pm
Clearly, he’d slipped a cog when he banned even Irish Rose as insufficiently subservient.
Got that right!
/and that milkshake was painful through the nose!
wooly one
July 4th, 2010 @ 11:20 pm
Johnson & the sockpuppets are good for a laugh every once in a while now.
Bunk X
July 5th, 2010 @ 12:43 am
Charles Johnson is not the equivalent of Stalin, and to compare the two is a ridiculous waste of time. He’s just a petulant blogger with a dull axe that matches his wit.
Johnson can do what he wants, but as long as he insists on slandering other bloggers for imaginary transgressions of HIS rules, he leaves himself open to a lot of well-deserved mockery.
His loyal attack dogs are a different breed, and Charles encourages them, often discreetly and indirectly, to do his own dirty work for him. He keeps his nose clean that way, but it’s the coward’s way out.
Aside from that, I’m glad that you clearly understood the post that begat your email to The Blogmocracy, as a small number of others missed the point completely.
Estragon
July 5th, 2010 @ 1:16 am
I grabbed the 100,000+ figure from NZ Bear the other day, but the site was down. The cached page was from June 26.
My understanding was that The Truth Laid Bear used unique visits, but that was years ago so the measuring stick might have changed, or he could be using the last reported numbers (he did do that for months a couple years back when Wizbang eliminated a couple of sections, the dead sections were still showing their last counts).
Robert Stacy McCain
July 5th, 2010 @ 8:06 am
I grabbed the 100,000+ figure from NZ Bear the other day, but the site was down.
Dunno. I never joined that TTLB “ecosystem” thingie and never understood how it worked. The fact that LGF doesn’t display Site Meter strikes me as suspicious, but I noticed that when Hot Air sold out to Salem, they stopped displaying Site Meter, too.
I guess opacity is the new transparency.
Charles Johnson
July 5th, 2010 @ 2:39 pm
Do not question the size of my network RSM. It is massive. Bigger than my ego, if that is possible.
It is just a coincidence that I am runing more frequent blegs (if you haven’t noticed). You may be a white supremacist wingnut, but I have to admit the mugs maybe a good idea.
I am not moving any of my LGF calanders. I have no idea why, they all contain my riviting photography of sand and more sand. Don’t people love sand?
Kojocaro
August 3rd, 2010 @ 7:45 pm
Do not the question the size of my network RSM
yeah don’t question the size of penis btw GG fuck off puddin

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Charles Johnson Uses Twitter to Push ‘Racist’ Smear of Red State’s Josh Trevino

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