Why Liberals Hate Matt Drudge

Bill Maher said that "the problem with racism is Matt Drudge."

MJ Rosenberg, an analyst with the liberal activist group Media Matters, referred to Matt Druge as a "racist demagogue."

Gawker.com referred to Matt Drudge's DrudgeReport.com website as "profoundly racist."

So why do liberals seem to hate Matt Drudge? Why do liberals consider his website so racist? After all, his website only very rarely includes original content. The Drudge Report is primarily made up of links to other news websites, most of which are safely within the confines of what is typically referred to as the "mainstream media" (think ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, CNN, etc).

Liberals hate Matt Drudge because his website continually highlights liberalism's historic failure to improve the social and economic conditions that the majority of America's Black population finds itself in.

Drudge often spotlights incidents of Black crime. Drudge often includes stories that describe the depressed economic conditions, government corruption and crumbling state of physical infrastructure that is endemic to cities like Detroit, Chicago and Atlanta. Drudge often posts links to stories that point out the near-total dissolution of the family (and other traditional social support networks) in poor, minority-heavy, urban areas.

This is a major threat to liberalism.

Liberals have governed most of America's major metro areas for decades and in many major cities (Chicago being a great example) liberals have total monopolistic control over municipal governance. The Democratic Party today is anchored by social liberalism (unlike the 1930 - 1965 period when it was anchored by left-wing economics) and social liberalism has vociferously fought against traditional social institutions like the nuclear family and the church and slandered anyone who supports these institutions with terms like "patriarchal" and "fundamentalist." The majority of teacher's unions in this nation are in alliance with the Democratic Party.

When Drudge reminds readers about the degraded conditions in which Black America lives, it turns the tables and puts liberals in the "hot seat." It forces liberals to take accountability for liberalism's inability to live up to its promise of redressing social and economic inequality, even after forty-plus years of rule. After several decades, the liberal insistence that more subsidies, more funding and more social liberalism are the keys to social betterment has begun to sound hollow to many Americans. Liberals would rather sweep this ugly reality under the rug and construct a fantasy narrative wherein liberal mayors, liberal teachers and liberal social institutions bear zero responsibility for these failures. Instead, responsibility is passed on to the Tea Party, white people who died several hundred years ago and other people with no discernible influence over present-day urban policy making. The Drudge Report is the needle that bursts this fantasy bubble regularly.

This, in turn, stokes so-called "white guilt" and sharpens the demographic divisions with the Democratic Party itself. Alexa.com indicates that the typical Gawker reader is (1) young, (2) disproportionately female, (3) overwhelmingly white, (4) higher-income, and (5) highly-educated. A quick review of the website indicates that support for homosexual rights and feminism are the paramount political positions among the readership. The possibility that social liberalism has played a major role in the destruction of Black America is too terrible to contemplate for the Gawker demographic. It suggests that they are personally responsible for or personally benefit from racial inequality. It suggests that the demographic alliance(s) underpinning the Democratic Party are fragile and weak. Reflexive accusations of racism and ad hominem attacks on Matt Drudge himself offer an easy escape.

Because Drudge so rarely offers personal commentary and instead relies on third-party news (many from otherwise liberal outlets), he is quite difficult for liberals to argue against. This provokes the irrational, visceral reactions of intense hatred that we sometimes see. Liberals can not admit that their real objection to his website is the "type" of news story that Drudge links to, so they rely on superficial arguments about the images he chooses, the headlines he writes and the way in which he contextualizes stories on his page, and completely sidestep the socio-political questions that the content in these stories should provoke instead.