Masters of Their Domain
Silicon Valley conservatives are trying to build the right-wing MoveOn from the top down.
In 1992, Stanford University censured a law student named Keith Rabois for shouting at a university lecturer, in front of the man's house, "Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of aids." The incident became a cause célèbre for the group of students who, a few years earlier, had founded the proudly right-wing Stanford Review. Having bonded as a conservative shock troop in the culture wars, many of them would go on to cofound the company that became PayPal, where employees often kept Bibles in their cubicles and held workplace prayer sessions. "That was a little unique for Silicon Valley," notes Rod Martin, a Southern Baptist who was a top lawyer at PayPal. "But that was exactly the way they would want it to be."
PayPal staffers dreamed big: They hoped to establish an alternative electronic currency to bypass national fiscal policies, in much the same way a previous generation of conservatives had advocated reviving the gold standard. But that vision was stymied after PayPal was sold to eBay, and its group of believers dispersed across the think-tank and media landscapes. Cofounder Peter Thiel joined the board of the Hoover Institution, another exec became a research fellow at the conservative Independent Institute and was a producer of last year's Hollywood hit Thank You for Smoking, while a third launched a conservative publishing company.
All that, though, felt a little old media, and as Martin and his cohorts watched the success of MoveOn.org, founded in 1998 by fellow techies just up the freeway in Berkeley, they grew jealous. "Nobody on the conservative side was doing anything like it," says Martin, who left PayPal in 2002 and became a full-time activist in 2004. "There were several of us who just looked at each other one day and said, 'You know, somebody needs to do this, and I guess we're it.'" Their answer to MoveOn is slated to debut this summer under the name TheVanguard.org, a wry riff on Vladimir Lenin's description of the Communist Party.
Martin acknowledges that TheVanguard faces a tough road ahead. The only existing conservative organization vaguely resembling MoveOn, RightMarch.com, counts 1 million members compared with its rival's 3.3 million, and its activities are largely limited to emailing elected officials. Conservatives are just too busy to participate in MoveOn-style virtual town halls, social networks, and marches on Washington, says RightMarch founder Bill Greene: "Most of them are just hardworking, everyday patriotic Americans that have families and kids and dogs and cats and jobs."
A Vast YouTube Conspiracy
Ever since YouTube sold out to "those evil guys at Google," says Charlie Gerow, conservatives such as himself have been convinced the site's managers have a clear liberal bent, plugging anti-Bush spoofs on the home page and occasionally pulling conservative videos, such as pundit Michelle Malkin's anti-Muslim "First They Came." (Even the New York Times faulted the site for a "slippery slope of censorship"; YouTube denies any bias.) But YouTube's outcasts are now Gerow's insurgents: In March he launched QubeTV, a video-sharing site for the "conservative army with cameras."
More than 100,000 people visit QubeTV daily for user-generated videos such as "Redneck Judge" (a Bud-swilling peta foe), clips of Ronald Reagan, grainy posts from Newt Gingrich, and slick fare from the Heritage Foundation. Short of nudity and death threats, almost anything goes. "If you have a better mousetrap," Gerow says, "they will beat a path to your door." (That's the hope, at least. In May, OURcountry, a conservative video site put together by the creator of George Bush Sr.'s infamous Willie Horton ad, Floyd Brown, suddenly went offline.)
Not everyone is thrilled with the idea of a conservative haven on the Net. "I don't think we need to be building gardens and digging moats," says David All, a Republican online political consultant who'd rather see conservatives influence YouTube from within. "I think we need to plop right down among the group of people singing 'Kumbaya' and tell them why they're wrong."
—Josh Harkinson
Martin believes he can leapfrog MoveOn by outfitting TheVanguard with the latest online video and social-networking tools. Mobilizing such virtual communities for real-world activism "is really the Holy Grail for everybody," he says. So far, TheVanguard's achievements have been more modest: an email list of 100,000, online fundraising (via PayPal, of course), and a beta site that includes blogs and a connection to a Vanguard interest group on LinkedIn, a career-networking site founded by yet another former PayPal exec. The operation's board members include ex-Apple ceo Gil Amelio, antitax lobbyist Grover Norquist, and Marvin Olasky, the Bush adviser credited with mainstreaming the term "compassionate conservative"; its 10 staffers are led by Jerome Corsi, coauthor of the anti-John Kerry book Unfit for Command, and, until recently, Richard Poe, a former editor of the conservative magazine Front Page.
Martin believes TheVanguard's platform (flat tax, missile defense, and Social Security privatization) will galvanize a conservative consensus he believes remains strong beneath a fracturing gop coalition. Beyond the presidential campaign, he aims to target members of Congress considered rinos (Republicans In Name Only), seeking to pull the gop rightward just as MoveOn, in his view, has pushed the Democrats to the left.
To skeptics, though, the PayPal crew is the right-wing equivalent of Lower East Side communists. "None of those guys are relevant," says a prominent Republican consultant who asks not to be named. And MoveOn Executive Director Eli Pariser, who lurks on TheVanguard's email list, says the operation looks too top-down to work on the Net: "TheVanguard folks are spending a lot of time thinking about what they want," he notes, "and then figuring out how to spin it to their members." Martin insists, though, that command and control will yield to collaboration once conservatives finally catch on. "It's going to be a wonderful thing," he insists, "and it's going to be good for everybody."
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TheVangaurd? Do these peole understand the meaning of that word? LOL, o.k.? Right March? I subscribed for a few moths to watch this. It was mostly hilarious; but it was also sobering when you think that this discontented, frightened and apparently poorly educated group was serious. Go ahead VanGuard 0- give us your best shot!
Well, as of June 29,2007 the vanguard website is on hiatus, referring visitors to a blog, which was last posted to over one month ago. Looks like the right and the web aborted their net roots baby in the second trimester ?
Looks like I'll have to get rid of my LinkdIn account...Would love to get rid of PayPal, too, but I'll have to work around the payment for things we use it for first...
I knew there was a reason I never used paypal. Where I couldn't use a credit card, I always found myself scrolling off the snail mail order form to get that money order at the local Post Office. RightMarch? Vanguard? Give me a break.
no worry the hackers are gonna have a field day annihilating this site
Once it starts going it won't need to be top down anymore! Didn't Marx believe that once communism got going the state would wither away? Is that what happened when the wall fell?
I can't believe TheVanguard.org is still getting press. The whole operation is a joke.
After Richard Poe left TheVanguard, and basically left Rod Martin without a programmer, the site has been in this "temporary status" for months. Needless to say, Rod still displays Poe as a staff member when Poe's own blog says that he quit.
Rod is a sheister of the first order. This guy drags around his wife, son, daughter (who I must say is rather attractive), wife, and his "assistant" to every event he attends as to create the appearence that he's important. His fundraising didn't work out, so he hired Tom Dodd who was fired from the Leadership Institute.
Rod tries to act like a big-whig, but in reality he's not. He got the job at PayPal because his brother worked there. He got the job with Governor Huckabee because he's friends with his son. And to top it off, when he ran for congress, he stole the mailing list from Eagle Forum of Arkansas.
Why am I writing this? Because it totally made my day to see this article treating Rod like someone who's going to do anything important. I know the man. He's a first class joke. Remember the college republican from your alma-matter who always thought he was the most important individual in the world? Well, thats Rod.
Read the comments on these two blog entrys and see what people close to Rod think of him. Its hilarious!
http://arkansasfamilycoalition.blogspot.com/2007/01/wow-rod-martin-still...
http://arkansasfamilycoalition.blogspot.com/2007/02/saturday-morning-pos...
Wow...this post totally made my day. Its too bad I didn't see it earlier.
Oh, by the way, TheVanguard.org isn't new. Rod's had the website registered since 1998 and still nobody goes to it.
I have to say the commenter from July 26th nearly stole my thunder. Rod Martin is a complete and total phony. I used to know Rod very well. All of the things Thomas said are true. He used Eagle Forum's mailing list to raise nearly $100,000 for a congressional race against Vic Snyder in Arkansas's 2nd district. He didn't count on another Repub entering the race at the last minute. The other guy raised less than $20,000 and slaughtered Rod by a nearly 2 to 1 margin. Rod hadn't bothered to use the money he raised for any actual campaign purpose and actually ended up with sizable unpaid debts. So what did he spend his 6 figure warchest on? Rent for his "office", a rent house which on occasion had a cheap looking Rod Martin for Congress sign, the only one of its kind by the way, a rental car, and food, mostly. There were items listed on his FEC reports such as $11.00 (approximation) for "volunteer lunches" at a restaurant where food for one person costs about $10-11.
The best part of that is an article published earlier this year in Human Events, which was most likely written by Rod (a favorite trick of his), but was published in another name, describing him as the second coming, more or less. The explanation offered for his slaughter in the 2000 primary? Democrats were so scared of him that they actually recruited a candidate to beat him in the Republican primary... If he was so formidable, why was he beaten so soundly in a Republican primary by a guy that even party officials had never heard of? Did democrats also trick Rod into not buying any campaign materials (yard signs, bumper stickers, push cards, etc...)?
Rod's been pawning lies like this for years. I can remember the moment when I started to realize what an ambitious sheister he is. He once told me that he knew from the time that he was 11 that we would be president of the United States. There are probably lots of goobers who think that, many of whom actually rise to high political offices, but Rod is a grade A, know-it-all nobody. He can talk up a storm and sound intelligent, but when it comes to doing any real work he's nowhere to be seen. He thinks he's too good for that, so he usually has a half dozen minions who follow him around doing his menial tasks thinking he's the greatest thing in the world. Every once in a while the wool comes off and they see that the emperor has has no clothes.
Since the WorldNetDaily piece ran a few days ago on Martin and TheVanguard "SwiftBoating" Hillary with Peter Paul, here, http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59676 , I've been trying to find out everything I could about these people. and most of its pretty scary, like this piece in the UK's (very progressive) "Guardian" about how Martin, Peter Thiel and the CIA are behind Facebook, here http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook So I was kind of puzzled by the above comments, until I Googled further. They're from an anti-Huckabee blogger, here http://arkjournal.com/2007/08/therearguardorg.html Appears to be wingnuts who hate Martin (and maybe they really do hate him), but their main target is Mike Huckabee (Martin used to work for him, and there's a glowing quote by him on TheVanguard.org). Don't know about Martin's campaign, but Phyllis Schlafly (head of Eagle Forum) wrote a chapter in his book afterward, so it's kind of hard to see how he could have stolen a list from her. Either way, I'd watch these guys. They look prety real to me.
"Don't know about Martin's campaign, but Phyllis Schlafly (head of Eagle Forum) wrote a chapter in his book afterward,so it's kind of hard to see how he could have stolen a list from her."
Nice try, Rod. You know plenty about your campaign. Maybe we should find Leah and ask her.
I especially like how you talk about national Eagle Forum, as opposed to Eagle Forum of Arkansas, for whom you were once executive director and from whom you stole the aforementioned mailing list.
Having lunched with Phyllis, recently, I can tell you that she was rather nonplussed when I recounted your unscrupulous activities while working for Eagle Forum of Arkansas. She verified the it with Betsy Hagan, the head of the Arkansas group. As I said, she was not happy.
Now you're with the CIA, huh? You continue to build the facade of your hollow legend. But I guess that's what a snake oil salesman does. I particularly like how you refer to yourself as "Dr. Martin" on your pitiful website. Since when do people with Juris Doctors refer to themselves as "Doctor"? While I'm on the subject, would you mind telling us why you voluntarily relinquished your Arkansas law license last year? I can honestly say that I've never heard of anyone doing that.
Pretending to be someone warning people about what a bogeyman you are is truly pathetic.
"They're from an anti-Huckabee blogger, here http://arkjournal.com/2007/08/therearguardorg.html Appears to be wingnuts who hate Martin (and maybe they really do hate him), but their main target is Mike Huckabee (Martin used to work for him, and there's a glowing quote by him on TheVanguard.org)."
That's a bit transparent, don't you think? Seriously, pointing out that Mike Huckabee said nice stuff about you? Why don't you tell us about the fact that you were asked to leave Huckabee's administration for misusing government property for personal gain? You should reprint what you wrote for John Mark's blurb about you, too.
How's your conservative answer to MoveOn.org going? Not too well, if no content or readership are any measure.
For those of you who haven't figured this out, "watcher" is Rod Martin pretending to be someone warning you about what a dangerous conservative Rod is. Believe me, he's not. Everything I wrote about him in my previous comment is true. And Andrews seems to know a thing or two, as well.
Really, this thread is five months old. Did you actually think people would believe that there's some random person out there, named "watcher", who felt so moved that they just had to write something about what how great you are?
What a joke.
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paypal is definitely getting
paypal is definitely getting better. have not had a problem with them in while.
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