I’ll say a final word on poor disgraced “columnist” Ben Domenech and then let the dead horse lay. By now most everyone knows that Washingtonpost.com (which is separate from The Washington Post paper edition) hired a 24 year old far-right activist and Bush appointee to offer a unique perspective to their opinion pages. As Domenech has built his young career solely on inflammatory invectives to everyone who isn’t a right-wing White Christian, the progressive half of the blogosphere rose up to attack the Post.com’s decision. Most of the criticism centered on Ben’s party-line activism absent a counterpoint blogger. But as the bloggers dug – really they just Googled his articles’ excerpts – they found Ben to be a serial plagiarist. What at first seemed to be some poor attribution while writing for the student paper in college was exposed as blatant cutting and pasting for publications like the National Review. The examples of inarguable and inexplicable plagiarism grew till Ben “resigned” from the Post.com.
I said yesterday that I was uncomfortable fighting to get a blog removed simply because of its views no matter how offensive. Using en masse protests to smother viewpoints is the calling card of the religious right and progressive minded people should have enough respect for pluralism to dispute arguments instead of just silencing them. However, plagiarism is a good reason to fire a writer. While it may seem mean for others to dig through your professional life to find fault, if you build that professional life on a foundation of animosity to so many you should not be surprised when that foundation causes your fall.
The defense of Ben has been as interesting to watch as the attacks. First “conservative” bloggers rushed to their keyboards to say that it was all a liberal hissy fit – a vast left-wing conspiracy if you will. Then, even the fire-breathing uber-right site Ben co-founded, Redstate.com, acknowledged Ben had serious questions to answer. It was sad because they kept posting updates to previous postings as reality took hold. Ben flailed his drowning reputation around coming up with bizarre explanations such as P.J. O’Rourke had met him and given him permission to republish his work under Ben’s name. But the NY Times found O’Rourke who said he never met Ben and never gave that sort of permission to anyone. Ben claimed he wrote for two publications at once while working at the National Review and that’s why the same text appears in two different articles. But the other articles clearly have other author’s names attached to them who are still alive to contradict. Eventually, Ben re-posted ‘contrition’ on RedState admitting to rampant plagiarism. His rabid supporters on the site encouraged him to “take some time off.”
Of all the defense of Ben the one most compelling is the argument that he made his mistakes when he was young and detractors shouldn’t be going into the histories of teenagers to find fault with their writings. That is the most convoluted reasoning considering how Ben has been billed. His bio boasts he’s the youngest Bush II appointee and has all these professional accomplishments at a young age. Then when those accomplishments are put under scrutiny and found to be wanting we’re told we’re not supposed to pick on the work of people when they were younger and made mistakes. He’s only 24 now!
The story reminds me of poor disgraced Steven Glass. My roommate, Tyghe, and I watched his biopic, Shattered Glass, a few months ago. He too was a celebrated super successful kid at the age of 24 whom everyone praised for quick assent after college. But his reputation began to unravel when examined by critics. It may be an oversimplification but 24-year-olds shouldn’t be editors or senior anything for major publications. It stands to reason that one grabbing the golden ring that quick cut some corners.
Of course, Ben was trained exclusively for this type of work. Much hay has been made about his home-schooling and his pedigree as the son of a Bush appointee. While some home-schooled kids develop genius aptitudes for spelling bees and Geography olympics many who are home-schooled in order to prevent contradictory viewpoints just end up incapable of original thought. The “pro-family” websites including Focus on the Family, which Ben wrote for, relentlessly pound the idea that parents should home-school to restrict secular influence on their children. Put less kindly, the only way to create a foot soldier for the religious right as an adult is to saturate a child’s mind with limited perspective till all he can process is theo-poli rhetoric. If Ben’s family followed the model of Dobson, and one would assume they did, then Ben’s childhood education consisted of mommy withholding the cookie plate until he prayed to Jesus, Mary, and Reagan. A thoughtful mind is not constructed from this upbringing.
Dr. Myers' piece summed up the analysis when he said he was “not surprised to learn that he [Ben] is the product of home schooling, which in its worst instances can foster an unfortunately narrow point of view, and usually means the kid is instructed by someone with absolutely no training in education.”
Of course Ben went to the same college I did. But by the time he got there he was so fixed with the theo-politics of his training that he thought it best to criticize the education system the entire time he was there. While a student he wrote for Boundless – another site by Focus on the Family – in which he bi-weekly criticized how stupid the liberal professors were and how if he were in charge he’d have a whole different education model than the liberal elite. His four years were just a formality while he waited to advance on DC with the rest of the Christian soldiers.
Once out of college Ben had no original thought to present but parroted the same repetitious stuff that appears on all the pro-family sites. What has struck me about Ben’s writings for RedState and Red America is their lack of personal perspective. The judges on American Idol have an oft used criticism. When a contestant gets all the notes and words to a song correct but fails to personalize the music they say the contestant sang karaoke instead of making the song their own. Ben sang karaoke. He was programmed as a child to utter the talking points of the religious right. And nothing he wrote came from a personal observation but rather a rote recitation of specific activism.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that Ben plagiarized. He literally right clicked portions of other web pages, selected copy, and pasted them into his own posts. The evidence is there and someone at the National Review online was asleep at the switch. But this is exactly what he as a writer was trained to do. Not think… not critically analyze and be a student of the world… when new information was presented to him, even in college, if it did not match his programming it did not compute. So what you are left with is a writer that can only spit out what has been allowed to get in.
If you care enough to examine his writings, and you probably don’t, compare them to a similar topic on CWFA.com, Family.org, WND.com, or any of the other “pro-family” propaganda mills you will see endless redundancy. Dogma is all they can sputter. So, Ben Domenech was disgraced not because he was a religious right writer who got caught cheating but because the very essence of religious right writing is lack of original thought. Because a writer needs to go through a process of finding his voice and developing a personal style he usually isn’t on top of the world at age 24. It requires personal development over years to have an authentic and unique perspective on life. It also requires the type of formal and informal education that exposes you to viewpoints with which you disagree and people that live by different codes. Without that type of development and influence Ben had nothing new to say. The inability to speak personally rocketed him to success within the fandom of the far right but that same inadequacy is what caused his downfall once exposed to a wider audience.
