Conor Clarke reports from the YAF conference keynote:
The speech was, at root, a paean to the marketplace of ideas—a marketplace that, by Custer's lights, needed to be wrested away from the odious Left and restored to glorious openness. And it took exactly three hours and 47 minutes to expose this rhetoric for what it actually was: bullshit. I went to the conference, as a reporter for The Washington Monthly, to engage with conservative ideas and continue the research on college organizing that I had been doing all summer. I also agreed to blog on the event for campusprogress.org. But it was not to be. Two events and three posts after Custer's opening remarks, I was approached by YAF's spokesman, Jason Mattera, on my way to see Newt Gingrich. “Who do you work for?” Mattera demanded, with a touch of petulance. “The Washington Monthly,” I told him. “Are you writing for anyone else?” “I'm blogging for Campus Progress.”
And that did the trick. “There's the elevator,” Mattera pointed. “I can have one of my interns push the down button.” But it didn't end there. What happened to the vaunted marketplace of ideas, I asked. The openness and exchange?
You don't get the sense, talking to Mattera, that he's really an “ideas” guy. In fact, like a teenager who lords over his little brother, he seems to revel in power for its own sake—blissfully uninterested in arguments, and completely at ease with force. Indeed, the first justification that escaped Mattera's lips was this: “Because I said so.”[...]
Mattera, however, lacks the courage of those convictions. How should YAF respond, I asked him, if I were reporting for The Monthly and blogging for The National Review? The point of the thought experiment never seems to connect, because Mattera's response is once again glib and irony-free. “You know what?” he says. “If you were with The National Review, I'd get you a seat right up front and have one of my interns give you a nice massage, and grab you a cup of Sunkist.” (Just who are these interns, forced to fetch drinks, push elevator buttons and give massages?) On Mattera's intellectual horizon, however, the contradiction never dawns. So is the closeout ideological? “Sure, whatever,” he says.
Read the rest, it's great fun. I'm starting to really love the Jason Mattera character, who pops up every once in awhile as a slimy coward, total brute, and general embarrassment. Whether he's abusing some unsuspecting intern or denying Campus Progress -- which credentialed him for their convention -- a press pass, Mattera is doing more harm to the right than a hundred hit pieces ever could. I can only hope that I'll meet the kid in person some day. I'm starting to feel that the absence of a good Jason Mattera story is a real demerit for me.
