The apostate

Former conservative attack dog David Brock tells all about his old right-wing cronies -- but whoever gets smeared, the results are still slimy.

By Kerry Lauerman

March 8, 2002 |

One of the buzziest stories in "Blinded by the Right," the new memoir from right-wing poison penman turned liberal avenger David Brock, comes late in the book, when he describes a night on the town with Internet gossip-monger and conservative star Matt Drudge. Brock reveals how he learned that the two "had even more in common than I thought."

The rumor that Brock, who is gay, would out Drudge in "Blinded by the Right" began making the rounds last summer, after the publication of a juicy Talk magazine excerpt, and is already being repeated on many leftish Web sites. But what is it that Brock reveals? The Drudge story is a great example of why "Blinded by the Right" is so fun to read, but so hard to trust.

As Brock recounts it, he already had a friendly rapport with Drudge. But he began to suspect that the other man wanted more on a visit to Los Angeles. Drudge picked up Brock "in his red Geo Metro, arriving with an impressive bouquet of yellow roses."

"Jesus, I thought," Brock writes, "Drudge thinks we're going on a date."

After dinner, they headed for Santa Monica Boulevard and a strip of gay bars "which Drudge navigated like a pro." While the two danced at one bar, Brock says his attention drifted to two other men dancing nearby, but who then soon disappeared. "I asked Drudge if he had seen where the pair had gone. 'Yeah,' Drudge quacked, 'I saw what was going on there, and I stepped on one of their feet really hard to get rid of them.'"

"The gesture," Brock writes, taking Drudge seriously, "was sweet, in a way, but also scary, and I quickly called it a night." Six months later, Drudge sent him an e-mail saying that a mutual friend, blond GOP pundette Laura Ingraham, was "spreading stuff about you and me being fuck buddies. I should only be so lucky."

But does that prove Drudge is gay? Brock's not the first writer to try to out him; MSNBC gossip Jeannette Walls quoted an alleged former male lover of Drudge's in her book "Dish" last year; Drudge continues to deny that he's gay.

Nevertheless, Brock's dish on Drudge, and his other former conservative allies, has liberals salivating. Matt Drudge, the man who stole a Newsweek scoop and launched the Monica Lewinsky scandal, has been among Democrats' most dogged, and successful, recent tormentors. If Drudge was a closet case, it could prove more than a rich irony. With his own personal life treated to Drudge-like sensationalism, would his credibility be strained, especially among his far-right allies?

But did Drudge, after all, actually hit on Brock? We're left to assume that he didn't because Brock doesn't say so, and Brock clearly isn't shy about serving up details. Did Drudge even tell Brock he was gay? Apparently not. Brock misses -- or just purposely ignores -- the high-camp style of Drudge, the cornball wordplay and forced retro-irony of mid-1990s Los Angeles, of "Swingers" and swing dancing, that have always helped fuel rumors of his homosexuality. (A political editor friend used to be convinced Drudge was gay because he signed e-mails to him "kiss kiss.")

That manner has also always provided Drudge with a plausible cover; it's the same shtick that, in cosmopolitan coastal cities, prompts some straight men to flirt outrageously with gay men, either out of an ill-advised attempt at hipness, or from sheer discomfort. Regardless, Drudge never made a clear advance, and this gives the whole episode an oddly flimsy feel on the second read.

Brock, however, wants to let his innuendo speak for itself, and that suggests a fundamental problem in "Blinded by the Right," which is meant to be the author's attempt to redeem himself from his celebrated early career of bending facts and intimidating sources on behalf of a right-wing agenda. The problem is, a mea culpa doesn't necessarily mix well with a tell-all.

Some of what Brock has to tell may indeed be believable, and when he's exposing yet another of his own acts of deception, it's difficult to doubt him. But with "Blinded by the Right," Brock is striving for historical authenticity; he aims to be the chronicler of an era -- roughly from Clarence Thomas to Monica Lewinsky -- dominated by the politics of personal destruction. But given the author's track record, readers of all political persuasions should take his insinuations with a grain of salt.

Some on the left have already claimed this book -- and, by awkward proxy, Brock himself -- as their own for political purposes. That Brock now hates the same people they do is all the proof they need of his authenticity. And he does go after the left's favorite enemies: not just Drudge, of course, but the entire "vast right-wing conspiracy" (a term he somewhat implausibly takes some credit for in the book), from conservative activists to editors and Supreme Court justices.

However, Brock's technique -- a few details, lots of sneering and unsubstantiated (except by him) gossip -- doesn't seem dramatically different from what it was in the days when he infamously described Anita Hill as "a bit nutty and a bit slutty" in the pages of the American Spectator. And it prompts an inevitable question any reasonable reader will have when reading the words of David Brock: Why should we believe him now?

The bombshells in "Blinded by the Right" won't be news to the political junky. The biggest one, revealed in the Talk excerpt last summer, describes how Brock bullied a former colleague of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to backtrack on statements she had made to Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson in their rival book, "Strange Justice." (The woman's statements alleged that Thomas had a penchant for porn.) According to Brock, Thomas passed along damaging, unverified personal information on the woman, which Brock then used to blackmail her into submission so that he could then trash the Mayer and Abramson book in a Spectator book review, titled "Strange Lies."

Next page: "The strange lies were all mine"