(This is excerpt No. 39 (of 45) from America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power, by Richard A. Viguerie and David Franke.)

“Hillary doesn’t like the Internet because she (and her leftist co-conspirators) can’t control it. It’s that simple.”

That was true in 2004, when we published America’s Right Turn, and it remains true today. Only today, the leftist politicians realize they can’t openly put the genie back in the bottle, so they are delegating the task of censoring conservatives to the new social media oligarchs—Facebook, Google, and their allies.

As we fight this new censorship threat to free speech, it is good to remember what Hillary Clinton thought about the Internet when it was still young, and how the Clintons used the IRS to threaten conservatives. Conservatives have plenty of other reasons to rejoice that Hillary did not become president in 2016; this just reminds you of another reason you may have forgotten.

Drudge (and the future) vs. Hillary (and the past)

It’s not just the media-establishment types who worry about the lack of gatekeepers in the new media. That worries members of the political establishment, too. The new media jeopardize their cozy arrangement with reporters who know their place.

Speaking to the Wednesday Morning Club in Los Angeles, a series of talks arranged by David Horowitz, Drudge told how he tried to remain civil with First Lady Hillary Clinton, to no avail: “I tipped my hat to her at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner a couple of months ago and got quite a dirty look.”

One of Hillary Clinton’s functions as co-president was to handle the White House Millennium Project. At a press briefing on the Millennium Project, she was asked her opinions about the Internet, and she came across as far less enthusiastic than, say, the vice president at that time.

Stumbling for words at times, she rambled on about how “we are all going to have to rethink how we deal with this,” whatever that means. “As exciting as these new developments [the Internet] are … there are a number of serious issues without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function …. [“I wonder who she was referring to,” Drudge quipped about this.] I mean, it is just beyond imagination what can be disseminated. So I think we’re going to have to really worry about this …”

“Sounds like you favor regulation,” someone asked.

“I don’t know what I’m in favor of,” she replied. (Actually, her actions as First Lady tell us a lot about what she’d like to do with the Internet. See below.)

The First Lady continued: “I don’t have any idea what we’re going to do legally, regulatorily, technologically – I don’t have a clue. But I do think we always have to keep competing interests in balance …. Anytime an individual or an institution or an invention leaps so far out ahead of that balance and throws a system, whatever it might be – political, economic, technological – out of balance, you’ve got a problem … [and] it can lead to all kinds of bad outcomes …”



To this amazing example of Ludditeism, Matt Drudge responded: “Would she have said the same thing about Ben Franklin or Thomas Edison or Henry Ford or Einstein? They all leapt so far ahead out that they shook the balance. No, I say to these people, faster, not slower. Create. Let your mind flow. Let the imagination take over. And if technology has finally caught up with individual liberty, why would anyone who loves freedom want to rethink that?”

Summing up their opposite reactions to the Internet, Drudge avowed: “The First Lady says we need to rethink it. I say we need to embrace it.”

Why Hillary doesn’t like the Internet

Hillary doesn’t like the Internet because she (and her leftist co-conspirators) can’t control it. It’s that simple.

Think back about the exact nature of Matt Drudge’s Monica scoop. He wasn’t the first journalist to learn about Monica – he was just the first to report it. Specifically, his scoop was that Newsweek had spiked the story. The establishment press had been intimidated, just as the establishment press of an earlier era had been intimidated into not reporting Jack Kennedy’s sexual escapades. Bill and Hillary had no such power, however, over that wild weed called the Internet. Moreover, with like-minded sites linking to each other, a story can spread faster than wildfire – for a really hot story, we’re talking instantaneous combustion around the globe.

Ten days after the Monica story broke, and with the White House under siege, Hillary told NBC’s Matt Lauer what she thought was behind it all: “I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this … this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.” And if most of NBC’s audience was puzzled over what she was referring to, she knew. Several of her staffers at the White House had put it all together into a 331-page “enemies list” and report called The Communications Stream of Conspiracy Commerce. (You can still get excepts on the Web today; use your search engine.) And the report made it clear that it was the Internet that made this conspiracy work:

The Internet has become one of the major and most dynamic modes of communication. The Internet can link people, groups and organizations together instantly. Moreover, it allows an extraordinary amount of unregulated data and information to be located in one area and available to all. The right wing has seized upon the Internet as a means of communicating its ideas to people. Moreover, evidence exists that Republican staffers surf the Internet, interacting with extremists in order to exchange ideas and information.

You can get this story in detail in the new book by Richard Poe, Hillary’s Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists. As the subtitle indicates, Hillary wasn’t about to surrender to her enemies without a fight – and she had some powerful friends.

Case in point: Joseph Farah’s Western Journalism Center (precursor to WorldNetDaily) supports the investigative reporting of Christopher Ruddy on the Vincent Foster “suicide.” Suddenly it’s the subject of an IRS audit. IRS Field Agent Thomas Cederquist demands “copies of all documents relating to the selection of Christopher Ruddy as an investigative reporter and how the topic was selected. Who was on the review committee?” When Farah protests, Cederquist tells him: “Look, this is a political case and the decision is going to be made at the national level.”



Case in point: The day after he joins the Clinton White House, Sidney Blumenthal starts action to sue Matt Drudge for $30 million in damages over a story. He also sues America Online, which carried columns by Drudge at that time. “Had Blumenfeld succeeded in holding AOL liable for Drudge’s writings,” says Poe, “crusaders for Internet censorship – such as Hillary Clinton – would certainly have used the ruling as a steppingstone for more ambitious actions.”

Case in point: Drudge has no lawyer or money, so David Horowitz of FrontPage.com sets up a Drudge Legal Defense Fund. The Wall Street Journal gives it national publicity. “Within five days, I was being audited by the IRS,” says Horowitz.

Many other conservatives were on Hillary’s IRS hit list, among them Bill O’Reilly (audited three years in a row), The American Spectator, National Review, and the Heritage Foundation. The joke in conservative circles was that you must not be very important if you aren’t being audited.

Of course these actions are reprehensible, and the three cases we cite here were eventually dismissed. But the point of an IRS political audit is as much to harass as to convict, and often for years. We have a pretty good idea of what conservatives can expect if the Clintons return to the White House.

Hillary’s Secret War also recounts the early conservative days on the Web, primarily through portraits of the work of Jim Robinson (FreeRepublic.com), Chris Ruddy (NewsMax), Joe Farah (WorldNetDaily), David Horowitz (FrontPage.com), and, of course, Matt Drudge (The Drudge Report).

As with all wars, Hillary’s war had unintended consequences. One occurred when Joe Farah read Section IX, “The Internet Influence,” of The Communications Stream of Conspiracy Commerce, the Hillary-commissioned report on the vast right-wing conspiracy. As Farah told author Poe:

“The ironic part is that we weren’t utilizing the Internet very well back then. We did have a Web site called etruth.com, and it did get a high level of traffic. I was always surprised that there were more people reading our stuff on the Internet than were reading our newsletter. But it still never occurred to me that it had all that much potential until the Clintons connected the dots for me.

“When I saw that report, I became convinced that the Internet was the vehicle for keeping government under control, because if these guys were so scared of it, I felt we could do much more as journalists to utilize it. That report really was the genesis for WorldNetDaily.com.”

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