Popping the Left’s Internet bubble. By Jonah Goldberg

The government and the corporate media,” declares a prominent activist website, have created a “propaganda machine whose goal is to continue the expansion of a (fascist) state and to control every aspect of our lives and fortunes.”

Sounds like any one of a bajillion posts on a left-wing “netroots” website these days, right?

Wrong. It’s from 1998. And I cheated a little. I’ve doctored the quote. “Fascist” was originally “collective.” The activist website? The populist-conservative FreeRepublic.com.

The short history of the Internet is already long enough to repeat itself. In dog years, I’m 288, but in Internet years, I’m Methuselah. I was the founding editor of National Review Online in 1998 (and before that, I worked down the hall from this quirky Microsoft start-up called Slate).

Back in those days, when the Internet ran on a series of pneumatic tubes and hemp-rope pulleys, conservatives were patting themselves on the back for seizing the commanding heights of the digital frontier. The argument was that because the Liberal Industrial Complex maintained a stranglehold on the Old Media, conservatives had, with ninja-like stealth, mastered the fledgling forms: direct mail, talk radio, cable news, and, now, Al Gore’s newfangled invention, the Internet.

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