Joshua Treviño co-founded Red State. For a while he even teamed up with Armando LLorens of Daily Kos on a now (pretty much) defunct project called Swords Crossed. He wrote speeches for the George W. Bush administration. He used to be known by the pseudonym Tacitus, in honor of the legendary 1st and 2nd-Century Roman historian of the same name.
If you’ve been around the blogosphere for long enough, you probably remember Tacitus-Treviño. You may even remember that he pioneered something called Online Integrity, but almost all direct (linkable) evidence of it has been converted to porn sites or Chinese spam. Much like it is necessary to read Origen if you want to read Celsus, it is necessary to use secondary sources like Thers if you want to remember Online Integrity. In any case, the long and short of it was that Tacitus did things like “coquettishly” let slip Billmon’s last name, then call all such behavior monstrous and then shove petitions to ban all such behavior in the faces of bloggers like Chris Bowers. Of course, if you want to read about that, you must rely on another secondary source (this time, HTML Mencken). It seems as if 2006 was covered in volcanic ash or suffered some other catastrophe favored by the ancients.
So, anyway, Tacitus-Treviño was savaged by a broad swath of the blogosphere from the folks at Lawyers Guns & Money to Jane Hamsher to Retardo Montalban. (According to my archives, I have only mentioned Josh Treviño once, and that was a favor to Armando).
I was never suckered into thinking that Josh Trevino had integrity, online or anywhere else. Quite obviously, he was a nonentity to me. But future blogosphere archeologists will be looking for secondary sources on how this all turned out. Tacitus eventually got a job with the Guardian, proceeded to say some discouraging things about the coolness of Israelis killing Americans on flotillas, and then got fired for undisclosed relationships with Malaysian business interests. After that, he denied everything. Then this happened.
A range of mainstream American publications printed paid propaganda for the government of Malaysia, much of it focused on the campaign against a pro-democracy figure there.
The payments to conservative American opinion writers — whose work appeared in outlets from the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner to the Washington Times to National Review and RedState — emerged in a filing this week to the Department of Justice. The filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act outlines a campaign spanning May 2008 to April 2011 and led by Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit, who received $389,724.70 under the contract and paid smaller sums to a series of conservative writers.
Trevino lost his column at the Guardian last year after allegations that his relationship with Malaysian business interests wasn’t being disclosed in columns dealing with Malaysia. Trevino told Politico in 2011 that “I was never on any 'Malaysian entity's payroll,' and I resent your assumption that I was.”
According to Trevino's belated federal filing, the interests paying Trevino were in fact the government of Malaysia, “its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with either.” The Malaysian government has been accused of multiple human rights abuses and restricting the press and personal freedoms. Anwar, the opposition leader, has faced prosecution for sodomy, a prosecution widely denounced in the West which Trevino defended as more “nuanced” than American observers realized.
Shilling for an oppressive anti-Democratic government after asking bloggers to have some integrity? That’s pretty rich. And who were his co-consprirators?
Trevino’s subcontractors included conservative writer Ben Domenech, who made $36,000 from the arrangement, and Rachel Ehrenfeld, the director of the American Center for Democracy, who made $30,000. Seth Mandel, an editor at Commentary, made $5,500 (his byline is attached to the National Review item linked to above). Brad Jackson, writing at the time for RedState, made $24,700. Overall, 10 writers were part of the arrangement.
You might remember Ben Domenech. He’s another co-founder of Red State, who the Washington Post actually hired to blog for them (as some kind of balance for the great Dan Froomkin) but who had to resign after three days because he’s a plagiarist.
All this time I thought the Wingnut Welfare rightwing bloggers rely on was coming from rich white dudes in America. Why would Muslim autocrats pay the editor of Commentary?
Oh, who the fuck cares?
