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Jerry Landay
June 25, 2002

A Brass-Balled Warrior's Flight From the Right

Conservatives who run the Republican Party often pay perverse honor to detested liberal adversaries by copying Blinded by the Right them, a certain sign of intellectual impoverishment. GOP presidential aspirants love to quote Democratic Presidents at the drop of a panegyric – Truman, Kennedy, FDR (why not Calvin Coolidge?). They distort liberal words and meanings to strangle the social gains of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the “deals” that followed.

They ape Leninist, Trotskyite, and Maoist tactics to undermine the left. Wealthy patrons of the radical right have copied the architecture of Stalin’s international popular front, creating a constellation of hundreds of activist front-organizations that comprise a network of right-wing activism:

• Well-heeled policy assembly lines like the Heritage Foundation;
• Such comfort zones for scholars and faux scholars as the Claremont Institute;
• Litigation hit-squads such as the Washington Legal Foundation;
• Harriers of mainstream journalism, including bloviator Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media;
• And the powerful Federalist Society, the legal think-tank that penetrates the Federal government under Bush and reshapes American law and jurisprudence by suing the life out of it.

Hard-starboard forces importantly exploit the tactics of Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party. Gramsci preached that a political movement, to prosper, must capture a nation’s culture.

For two decades, the well-meshed power apparatus of the radical right has been doing just that, leaving the enfeebled Left in the dust with its single-issue myopia, dilettanti politics, weak-kneed funders, and a Democratic Party chained by Clinton, Gore, and Lieberman to a paralyzing dependency on corporate handouts. The right has conceived and promoted the policies America argues about, then frames the debate around them. Those doing the job are rep-tied, horn-rimmed members of the massive conservative propaganda machine who operate under the mythic smokescreen they created called the “liberal press.” Conservatives go on to manage the anti-left political dirt that oozes into newspapers and onto television news.

The mode of these squads of self-serving young propagandists is take-no- prisoners polemics – writers, journalists, and lawyers who earn good money and get big foundation grants trashing the left in rightist journals and talk shows, and force-feeding the corrosive content into mainstream media. David Brock was the most notorious brass ball warrior of the poison-pen lot. He authored the big smear against law professor Anita Hill, who had vainly tried to squelch the Supreme Court nomination of her former boss, Clarence Thomas, by revealing his penchant for pornography and sexual harassment. Brock now confesses that in his infamous The Real Anita Hill, he created “a cruel smear disguised as a thorough investigation,” dumping, unchecked and uncorroborated, “virtually every derogatory – and often contradictory – allegation” fed him by conservative sources.

Brock fueled the disinformation campaign, inspired in part by Newt Gingrich, against Bill and Hillary Clinton. The campaign’s aim was to portray them as “moral monsters,” leaving Clinton too weak to govern (Clinton himself later unwittingly helped). Brock exploited the money-and-publicity grubbing of four Arkansas state troopers who guarded Governor Clinton, and then lied for pay about his alleged sexual escapades after he became President. Brock launched “Troopergate” in an article called “His Cheatin’ Heart” in the right-wing literary dump-truck, The American Spectator, now defunct. Brock promoted the rumor that Hillary Clinton had an affair with former law partner Vince Foster. He was driven to suicide by the smears.

Brock reveals all in a new political confession that rivals in detail the late Whittaker Chambers’ conversionist literary sensation of the 50s, Witness. Brock travels in the opposite political direction, from right to left. In an eloquent self-disavowal of his hatchet-man tactics called Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative (Crown Publishing), he bears detailed witness to the hypocrisies and outrages of Republican conservatism during the past two decades. Corporate-owned journals have failed to investigate what Brock now reveals about the conservative-generated scandals to de-fund and destroy the left. The campaign easily out-slimes Joe McCarthy, but few are even aware of its operation.

It pays to work for the right. Brock earned a plush pad in stylish Georgetown and a beach house in Delaware for his labors. But money can’t buy happiness. There was a grievous problem that Brock could not solve with money and power: his gayness.

He lived as a homosexual, self-stuffed into the closet to protect his fame and status in a radical-right world where being homophobic, anti-Black and anti-Semitic comes with mom’s milk. Brock is shaken when the likes of Norman Podhoretz, editor of the right-wing Commentary, once Brock’s sacred screed, writes that a vaccine for AIDS would allow homosexuals “to resume buggering each other by the hundreds with complete medical impunity.”

Brock reveals the existence of an army of gay conservatives in Washington, “closeted opportunists” who hide in desperation in an after-hours capitol-city subculture from the denizens of the religious and social right wing, who embrace gay-bashing as an “explicit party strategy” (many underground GOP gays refer to themselves as the “Laissez Fairies”).

How Brock was “outed” by New York Times columnist Frank Rich and then confronted the opportunistic lie he was living is a singular metaphor for the relentless implosion of this democracy, and a spur to understanding its slow collapse. Through neglect and fear, some critics and editors will work to keep Brock’s book off the best-seller list. But anyone who is oppressed and outraged by rightist, brass-balled terrorism, or worries about the bedraggled state of the conversation of America’s culture, must read the book. It’s a particularly relevant case study for aspiring young journalists in how ideological fanatics can convert a free press into a precision-guided missile. A voyage to a local bookstore is well worthwhile for access to the only political tome of its kind in two decades, detailing the corrosive ideological cleavage that eats at the political heart and soul of the Republic.