When I'm introduced to the group of about 25 members sitting at the tables, organized in a square, I'm mostly met with glares, some steely, others surprised. It's not just that Freepers hate Salon. (But, boy, do they hate Salon.) They also hate, with the exception of Fox News, the rest of the media. "Feminized men and airhead women," clucks Janice Matchett, a retired widow from Florida. The room suddenly seems a little darker. I'm instructed by someone to turn to Page 15 in a handy, pocket-size version of the Declaration of Independence (provided by the libertarian Cato Institute) to peruse the list of signatories.

"See, even a Clymer signed it," she says, and the group breaks into laughter. The signer was a George Clymer; the reference, of course, was to venerable New York Times reporter Adam Clymer, slurred by George W. Bush last summer as a "major league asshole." Now Clymer has become shorthand on the Free Republic site (which has rules against profanity) for "asshole" and "journalist," since to Freepers they're synonymous.

A very large man sitting next to me launches into a tangent on how the media is generally biased because reporters are generally dumb. Journalism schools, he points out, are where all the kids who couldn't make it in business school go. "They're just not very smart," he says angrily.

I didn't expect to be the only media person at this, the second annual Southeastern Rally, thrown by the South Carolina chapter of the Free Republic Network, the nascent organizing group that has spun off from no-holds-barred conservative Web site FreeRepublic.com. Expectations were high. Last year was a high-profile success, thanks to Linda Tripp's first post-impeachment hearing appearance, but this weekend's gathering seemed ready to top it: Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and Circuit Judge Sanders Sauls, who stopped the Florida recount requested by Vice President Al Gore before it was temporarily jump-started again by the Florida Supreme Court, planned to attend the convention banquet to receive awards.

Or so they thought. Harris waffled last week, then blamed "scheduling conflicts" before pulling out. Sauls pulled out at the last moment, after getting a shellacking from Florida newspapers for considering appearing at such a partisan event. The cancellations were due to "outside influence," Julie Nicholson, the event organizer and South Carolina chapter head, said gloomily.

Both may have decided that Freepers were a little hot even for their firebrand images. Freepers are angry -- boy are they mad -- and they don't just like to argue online, they like to get in people's faces. This is the only annual gathering for the Freeps (as they call themselves) and, aside from the hundreds of protests they throw every year, the only chance to meet one another.

The people who traveled and paid about $220 a night to attend this conference at the plush, gated island of Seabrook, south of Charleston, S.C., are true believers. Many of them regularly attend the protests organized in the site's chat rooms. Jo-Ann Melhuish, a friendly older woman from New Jersey, says she frequently drove down to D.C. last year to pull shifts with other Freepers in front of the White House in a daily protest the group kept alive throughout the Clinton years. Melhuish mentions, with clear pride, having once met Juanita Broaddrick at a Freeper event in Arkansas.

It's a group of conservatives who have largely self-organized online, fulfilling one of the great promises of the Internet, and there's a comfort level among them, though some are meeting for the first time, purely because they identify one another as political comrades. Journalists constantly use their forums as quasi-focus groups, and often look to them for outrageous postings; a UPI story last month found one poster who sympathized with Timothy McVeigh, and another who called him a "modern-day Paul Revere."

The group has also expressed a level of vitriol toward Democrats, particularly the Clintons (including occasional death threats), that has normally reasonable voices on the left wishing they could shut the group up. Legal scholar Cass Sunstein uses the Free Republic as an example of what his new book, "Republic.com," describes as "group polarization," where people segregate themselves so effectively online with other like-minded thinkers that they create an echo chamber where the group's worst and most malevolent opinions get reinforced and strengthened. "We might want to consider," Sunstein startlingly told the Times recently, "the possibility of ways of requiring or encouraging sites to link to opposing viewpoints."

So who are these hyperidentified Freepers, and are they dangerous? Only about 50 people are at the conference, and a majority of them appear to be over age 50, with an impressive contingent of seniors as well. But there is also Elizabeth Cornette, 25, a grad student at the University of Kentucky, who says she's a daily Free Republic chatter. She says she identified herself as a conservative in 1981 (which would put her at around age 5), when Ronald Reagan was shot.

"I was sitting on a brown velour couch, wearing black watch, plaid walking shorts and navy blue kneesocks," she says. "I can remember it clearly. He was my hero." But for a pretty blond "Bushie" in her 20s, she says, being conservative can be lonely. "It's so hip to be liberal." For her, Free Republic is a refuge.

Members of the group resent the way they've sometimes been ridiculed and caricatured by the media -- "like a bunch of sinister crazy people," says Gloria Laird, a senior citizen from Florida.

While most of them, like Laird, appear to be nice, funny, friendly people, they do make it easy to poke fun.

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