My thoughts went back to the Gannon scandal. As long-time readers may recall, Gannon's phony-balony news organization had subterranean ties to the Reverend Moon. Aside from Gannon's propaganda, GOPUSA ran primarily UPI copy (Moon owns UPI), and GOPUSA front man Bobby Eberle was known only for his work for other Moon publications, such as the Washington Times and Inisight. Gannon also worked for the Moon-linked group Frontiers For Freedom.
Many (including yours truly) have wondered whether Gannon's unusual overnight White House stays indicate that he provided the administration with non-journalistic services. Those familiar with the Koreagate scandal know that Moon has a history of using prostitutes to compromise politicians.
Something about this scenario has always sounded eerily familiar to me. Where, I wondered, have these elements (fake journalism, hidden gays, Moon) appeared before? Then I re-read the early chapters of David Brock's Blinded By the Right.
Take another look at those pages, and ask yourself: Was Brock being groomed to be an early-day Gannon?
Brock makes clear that, at the age of 22 -- and despite the lack of impressive writing credits, an advanced degree or the usual journalistic apprenticeship -- he was hired fresh out of college to write for Moon's publications. He received rapid promotion within that milieu, as did a number of other young men who were gay or presentable. Everyone in Moon-world knew full well that Brock was gay, despite his reticence to discuss his sexuality.
Moon's formula for success involves outrageous contradiction and hypocrisy. Moon considers Jesus pathetic, yet he funds fundamentalist preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye. Moon decries promiscuity, yet his sect began as a sex cult. Moon thinks Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves, yet he is closely linked to Jewish neocons and funds a group allegedly devoted to resolving differences between Israelis and Palestinians.
So perhaps we should not be surprised to see that Moon, a man who denounces homosexuality in no uncertain terms, owns publications noted for -- how to put it? -- their unusual staffs.
In his book, Brock paints an interesting portrait of Insight editor John "Pod" Podhoretz, son of famed Jewish conservative Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Brock pictures Pod as a man opposed to homosexuality, who nevertheless once wrote an effusive essay praising Sylvester Stallone's "pectorals" and Don Johnson's "manliness." Pod also wrote a column under the name "Tiffany Midgeson." One needn't acquire many more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to comprehend the picture.
The Washington Times briefly hired John Lofton, a twice-born fire-and-brimstone screecher who charged that the paper's staff was riddled with "homosexuals, adulterers and fornicators." While one must consider the source for this claim, one must also admit that Brock's sojourn with the Moonie right introduced him to a little-known world populated largely by barely-closeted conservatives. Brock makes telling references to Terry Dolan of NCPAC, Republican lobbyist Peter Maletesta, and Marvin Liebman of Young Americans for Freedom (a group which has a stranger history than most know).
Peter was only one of the many closeted gay right-wing Republicans I would come to know in my years in Washington. Perhaps because they were trying too hard to fit into GOP ranks, they often embodied the worst attributes of the extreme right -- racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism. While I was well-acquainted with the hidden subculture of conservative gay life, as a journalist I was never brought fully into the closely guarded fold. And I was never sure I wanted to be, either. The secretiveness, not to mention the binge drinking and the common use of male prostitutes, lent a disturbing quality to it all.Brock's natural reticence, his one-step-removed attitude, may have deflected his mentors -- his would-be puppet-masters -- from making the offer that I suspect was made to Jim Guckert/Jeff Gannon.
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