That George Gilder & Richard Vigilante piece on Bill Joy sounds like a cross between Ayn Rand and Lyndon LaRouche. I remember Robert Lekachman in a review of Gilder's bestseller, "Wealth & Poverty(?), " wondering why he had turned from a liberal Ripon Society Republican to a Reaganite.
Michael Pugliese
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 5, 2001; Page C01
The American Spectator, which once pictured Hillary Clinton as a broomstick-riding witch, is abandoning its villainess. In the new issue, she is relegated to a mere back-page essay about her extravagant tastes, while her husband, the Boy President, merits one paragraph in a column by founder R. Emmett Tyrrell.
That's about it for politics. The new cover boy is Wall Street economist Lawrence Kudlow, who ruminates about the Nasdaq quadrupling to 10,000 in an 11-page interview. Another 11 pages is devoted to assailing the technology warnings of Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy.
Can this possibly be the conservative monthly that has spent more than 30 years shredding, skewering and otherwise eviscerating beleaguered Democrats? Suddenly it reads more like a cross between Fortune and Wired.
The slickly redesigned magazine is the brainchild of technology guru George Gilder, who bought the Spectator from its nonprofit foundation last fall and is trying to transform it into a moneymaking venture. Richard Vigilante, who worked at the Gilder Technology Report, has assumed the role of editor and publisher.
"Any magazine that wants to cover and influence American politics and policy needs to be in the forefront of understanding the new economy and the technology that drives it," says Vigilante, who once served briefly as a Reagan White House speechwriter. "To me, the perfect Spectator article is one where, at any given moment, you're not quite sure whether you're reading a political treatise or something that's going to help you in your business or investment life." (First lesson in capitalism: raising the newsstand price from $3.95 to $5.95.)
There are other features, from Ben Stein's Diary to a Peter Hitchens letter from London to a Tom Wolfe piece on painter Everett Raymond Kintsler (a lavish photo spread oddly groups former president George Bush and a naked woman on the same page). But the financial emphasis -- a report from the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the launching of an investment section, the first monthly profile of a high-tech entrepreneur -- is inescapable.
"We're going to advocate the political interests of investors in the new economy," says Vigilante, who replaced Gilder's cousin Josh as editor. "We're going to help them be successful and enrich their lives."
In the piece on "The Rise of the Techno-Left," George Gilder and Vigilante warn that Joy's call for curbs on potentially dangerous technology "will be the 21st century's leading rationale for anti-capitalist repression and the revival of statism, a tonic for beleaguered socialists, a program and raison d'etre for the New Left." (There's also a mention of the Telecosm conference co-sponsored by Gilder Publishing.)
But journalism is tough work: After Gilder interviewed Joy, "I inadvertently press the erase button on my new Sony recorder . . . that uses silicon 'flash memory' rather than tape. The interview indeed vanished in a 'flash.' . . . Joy seems to believe some delusional maniac or evil enemy could press the erase button on his computer -- perhaps even by mistake -- and delete the American biosphere."
As the Spectator's circulation has dropped from 300,000 to 100,000, the Weekly Standard and National Review have captured most of the attention on the right. The Arlington-based Spectator was so deeply involved in anti-Clinton crusades under Tyrrell that it hired private detectives to dig up dirt in Arkansas. (Tyrrell retains the title of editor-in-chief.) But the lack of politics in the March issue, other than a short piece on the Bush tax cuts, makes it feel like Playboy without the pictures.
"The strong political opinions will continue, [as will] satirical, hard-hitting expressions of political views and going after liberals for theirs," says Wlady Pleszczynski, editor of American Spectator Online. "That won't change."
Will the Spectator be able to double its circulation, as Vigilante hopes, and do what virtually all political magazines fail to do -- turn a profit? "We believe it will make a substantial amount of money without being niched into the box 'political magazine,' " he says.