The link to freerepublic was critical in the late 90’s. It helped to spread the word about the forum in the very early days.
As I recall, it was taken down for a period. I cannot remember exactly when or why.
Something about racism if I recall correctly, it was about the same time that Luciann quit.
I remember it well. Lucianne Goldberg used to post here, but then she decided to make her own forum. She shat on Free Republic in doing so, and then Matt started promoting her.
Some FReepers (NOT JimRob) started posting that Matt was gay, so he dropped us, or that was the excuse as he and the Goldberg’s were pretty tight.
You’re right on all counts. I believe he took it down because some folks bashed his site if he didn’t do exactly what they wanted. That’s speculation. I don’t really know. And he restored the link after a year or so.
Me too!
I discovered Free Republic because of a link on the Drudge page. Then one day I sensed some conflict and the link was gone. For me the effect of discovering the Free Republic website was huge.
I had attended an event called "March for Justice - 1998" for taking pictures. I met several people, Larry Klayman, Ann Coulter, and Gary Aldrich among them.
I wrote a summary of what I observed and posted it on Free Republic. I don’t recall exactly who but someone was kind enough to format my summary to the required HTML format. Later someone contacted me for the pictures, which were my negatives, and I found someone at my Brother-in Law’s print shop that scanned the prints and returned jpg files. I sent the files somewhere, a Newspaper in the Southwest, with permission to publish them.
I later learned to use Photobucket to make pictures available to more people. In fact, one of my favorite pictures is a still there.
Constitution at March for Justice
As I reflect on the events, I realize that was nearly twenty years ago. Drudge, Free Republic, and I are still going the same direction.
Suffice it to say I feel more comfortable knowing that Free Republic and Drudge are not in conflict. They are like men and women, not equal but complementary.