I was among the earliest readers of LGF soon after 9/11. It was a great site for several years. I witnessed several purges of frequent commenters, and at least two almost complete turnovers of frequent commenters.
I believe Charles was a California liberal before 9/11, and then he took a turn sharp right, at least in terms of the Islamic threat to the US, Israel and the West in general. But I’ve scarcely posted there for almost two years, and now only check the site once or twice a week. The site has become like a small college campus with very restricted admission, and very strict speech codes and strictly enforced adherence to their brand of political correctness.
And, yes, there have been articles this past week that are very critical of Ann Coulter and Robert Spencer. Charles seems to have made it one of his new missions in life to ferret out any and all conservative links to organizations or individuals he considers unacceptable. Only the 100% pure meet his approval now. He’s throwing the unacceptable under the bus faster than Obama did while dumping Reverend Wright, Ayers, his grandma, and others during the campaign.
And this new obsession with creationism and evolution is just bizarre. That is a topic that can be debated, but it’s not as if the future of Western civilization hinges on the outcome of a debate that most care little about.
I only scanned the posts condemning Coulter and Spencer, so I can’t provide many details other than Charles found association of both that he found unacceptable.
I think the whole evolution v. creationism debate is being used as a tool to undermine conservatism and thus America. The leftists demand that evolution be given exaggerated prominence in the public schools curriculum in order to undermine religion and to provoke conservatives into reacting in ways that the left then uses to their general political advantage. I think that Johnson, wittingly or otherwise, is doing the left's bidding on this topic. I posted a comment to this effect at LGF and got banned as a "creationist" which I am not. There is some bad craziness going on over there and it seems to me to be clearly to the detriment of conservatism.
I was floating around LGF for a while, started losing interest a few months back, finally getting banned from there for refusing to bow to Charle's orthodoxy. I consider his practice of also blacklisting your IP address somewhat childish (particularly since I can continue to view using other IP addresses).
I'm wondering if the change is coming from Charles needing to bow to his advertisers' wishes to have lots of people reading his forum, while not being too "controversial" in directions that his advertisers dislike. The end-result is LGF being too bland for my taste, having turned into Charles echo chamber.
Amen to that, brother! “Obsession” is exactly the right word in this case.
I too was a frequent reader of LGF, and have noticed the constant posts regarding the creationism / evolution debate. “Where is all this coming from?”, I wondered. In reading the comments on some of these posts, it’s pretty clear that a majority of the commenters suffer from “RDS” - “Religion Derangement Syndrome”.
While I wouldn’t say that Charles Johnson himself is guilty of that, what certainly seems to be the case is that LGF is now systematically going through the perceived GOP front-runners for 2012 - Jindal, Huckabee, and that great gov. from SC whose name escapes me at the moment - and rejecting them because of their promotion of bills to simply **allow discussion** of creationism in schools.
It indeed makes one wonder whose game Charles Johnson is playing.