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As an example, ladies and gentlemen, I give you...Mike Silverman.
For those in the early days of the Internet, few places were more worth visiting than Silverman's TurnLeft.com. Featuring an outspoken defense of liberalism, TurnLeft also included frequently-updated lists of liberal and conservative places to live, coverage of liberal popular culture, tons of links to political organizations, and, best of all, a "gallery" of right-wing hate mail that was some of the funniest (unintentionally, of course) material on the net. TurnLeft was a "must-visit" site for me every morning.
Alas, around 1999, TurnLeft went "inactive," although its old material is still available for viewing. Mike Silverman disappeared...or so it seemed.
As it turned out, he never really went away, merely moved out of our orbit. You see, Mike got hit hard by 9/11, and quickly morphed into a PNAC crusader (albeit a militantly gay one). He claimed to "stand proudly with Richard Perle" on so-called "national security" issues, and became a frequent poster on far-right sites like LittleGreenFootballs, ranting against anyone who questioned the Iraq invasion ("whacko-leftists") or Bush's knee-jerk support of Ariel Sharon ("anti-semites"...as if you couldn't guess), posting admiring comments on the latest ravings of David Horowitz, claiming that he could never vote for a Democrat who would "back down" in Iraq, etc., etc.
A look at his current blog, www.mikesilverman.com, shows that he continues on his neo-con path, while still claiming to be a "social liberal" (which, in his case seems to be restricted to the self-serving cause of gay rights). In particular, check out the selections in his "Blogs I Read" section. No sign of a single liberal entry like DailyKos, TalkingPointsMemo, or MyDD, but plenty of neo-con picks like Roger Simon (another rabid "ex-liberal"), Classical Values (which attacks "left-wing McCarthyism" for the Gannon outing), Common Sense (free-market worshipers) and something called Right Side of the Rainbow ("news and commentary on law and politics by a right- of-center, gun-owning, gay Texan").
Sad, indeed...
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