When Charles Johnson went wacko and began purging commenters at his Little Green Footballs blog, he purged some of the most clever “Lizards” whose participation had once made LGF a must-read for many. Among the purged were those who formed Diary of Daedalus and The Blogmocracy, which today join forces to expose how CJ’s pro-Obama turn now requires him to become an apologist for the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan:
“He also has a strong message of responsibility and self-reliance for young African Americans, and that is why [critical race theory proponent Professor Derrick] Bell described him as a hero.”
Also:
“Farrakhan does have a positive, empowering component to his message.”
Well . . . OK. Except that in 2007, as the ex-Lizards demonstrate, Johnson condemned the Nation of Islam as “Farrakhan’s hate group.”
What explains this otherwise mysterious turn in Johnson’s view of Farrakhan and NOI? The simplest explanation is that four years ago, LGF was a conservative blog and CJ was expressing views shared by conservatives. Now, LGF is a left-wing site and thus Charles is required — as part of a general effort to defend the Democratic Party — to make excuses for President Obama’s association with Professor Bell, whose praise of Farrakhan is a matter of record. (Blame those “Jewish neoconservative racists“!)
So what Johnson once condemned as a “hate group” must now be praised for its leader’s “positive, empowering . . . message.”
At the time he publicly “parted ways with the Right” in November 2009, Charles Johnson made a big deal of his repugnance at being associated with various unsavory persons, groups and ideas. Yet you see that the logic of his politics now compel Johnson to defend Farrakhan – whom he formerly denounced in Oct0ber 2007, which was about the same time he was beginning his attacks on Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs for supposedly allying herself with unsavory elements in the European counter-jihad movement.
What happened? It’s hard to say, but when I saw the giant compilation of Johnson’s comments about Farrakhan over the years, I noticed something interesting: On April 29, 2008, CJ wrote indignantly that Obama must have known that Rev. Jeremiah Wright “traveled to Libya with Louis Farrakhan and met Muammar Gaddafi.”
A big nothing? Really, Charles?
Considering how much hell you raised about Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer attending the Brussels conference with figures you deemed disreputable, how about a little consistency in regard to your guilt-by-association games? And now that you find yourself defending Farrakhan in order to defend Obama’s association with Derrick Bell, don’t you see how stupid that whole game is?
Never mind that now. My point is that you can see in this example a clear demonstration of just how quickly CJ’s opinions shifted: In April 2008, evidence of a Farrakhan connection to Obama was something Johnson took seriously. By June 2008, he dismissed similar evidence as “a big nothing.”
Thanks to The Blogmocracy and Diary of Daedalus for bringing these interesting facts about Jazzy McBikeshorts to light.
UPDATE: After all the unwarranted cruelty he dished out on Geller — and me, and Jim Hoft, and Ace of Spades, and everybody else who called him out on it — now Jazzy McBikeshorts wants to complain that he wasn’t quoted accurately:
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