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.
