DON SURBER: Merry Christmas, Matt Drudge.

The Daily Mail reported on December 30, 2016, “The founder of Drudge Report got a very unpleasant surprise Thursday night when the popular news aggregation website went down for 90 minutes.

“Matt Drudge wrote on his Twitter account that the website had been targeted with the biggest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) it had ever experienced in its 21 year history, leaving users unable to access content.

“He also stated that the ‘routing and timing’ of the attack was ‘VERY suspicious,’ which then led him to tweet: ‘Is the US government attacking DRUDGE REPORT?’

“Drudge then followed up with another tweet shortly after, writing: ‘Attacking coming from thousands of sources. Of course none of them traceable to Fort Meade. . .’

“The suggestion that the Obama administration might have launched a targeted attack against the website polarized Twitter users, with fans of Drudge Report supporting its founder’s suspicions and detractors responding with disbelief and in some cases outrage at the allegation.

“Shortly before the website went down, it was announced that President Obama had deemed 35 Russian diplomats ‘persona non grata’ following evidence that the country used coordinated hacks to try and influence the presidential election, giving individuals just 72 hours to get out of the country.”

We all know now that the Russian election interference hoax was a cover story for spying by the FBI on Donald Trump at the behest of President Barack Hussein Obama who was bitter that Trump kept bringing up Obama’s false claim in 1991 that he was born in Kenya. When he decided to run for president, Obama changed his story to the more plausible birth in Hawaii where hid mother lived at the time.

The federal government has great power with no ethics or oversight. It brought down the first 49-state president (Reagan tied Nixon in 1984) nearly 50 years ago. Bringing down Matt Drudge would be like swatting a fly.

But that is mere speculation on my part.

As Paula Bolyard wrote last month: A Dirty Little Secret About Drudge.

Many of you will recall that Drudge at first did everything he could to promote Donald Trump. Then something happened, some sort of falling-out that no one ever really got to the bottom of, and Matt Drudge turned on the president. That was in 2019, a year of big changes for Drudge. There were rumors (still unconfirmed) that the site had been sold. Drudge changed its ad provider, and it began to lean more liberal and more favorable toward mainstream media. That same year, PJ Media became part of the Townhall Media family and the links stopped—abruptly. Literally on the day of the sale. Whoever was running Drudge at the time, whether Matt or some minimum-wage intern, apparently had some sort of grudge against Townhall and he/they even dropped us from the blogroll at the bottom of the page. Petty, vindictive, and, if I’m being honest, rather costly to our bottom line.

Now, if you go to the Drudge report you’ll find links to a bunch of left-wing UK sites, and well-funded mainstream media sites like the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the New York Post. Good for them, I guess. For whatever reason, Matt Drudge, who was reportedly apolitical and more interested in the success of his site than anyagenda, decided to tank the site. A comparison of Similiar Web (a site that ranks websites based on various metrics)  shows that Drudge was listed as #41 in the nation with 164 million visits in October 2018. Currently, the site ranks at #145 with 51 million visits in October 2023. That’s a major, major drop.

I’m not losing any sleep over any of this, and I trust you’re not either.

Not at all, but I’d love to finally get to hear the actual story of what turned Drudge into a zombie Website; a mere shadow of its former greatness. Flashback: Where’s Matt Drudge? “The Drudge Report reminds me of MTV in the early 2000s, a channel I returned to sheerly out of habit based on its greatness from decades before.”