They really do hate America!
ZACK EXLEY (Kerry's New Hate-America Man)
. Runs Kerry presidential Internet campaign
. Activist with violent anarchist Ruckus Society
. Worked as undercover labor union organizer
. Creative director of MoveOn.org
. "Don't blame 9/11. Don't blame the Greens. And…don't blame the American people! Blame the Democratic Party leadership. Terry McAuliffe is an Idiot." -- Zack Exley
Since April 2004, Zack Exley has been the Director of Online Communications and Online Organizing for the John Kerry-John Edwards 2004 presidential campaign organization. Prior to that, he was director of special projects for MoveOn.org and was employed to help develop the web-based organization of the Howard Dean presidential campaign.
Exley was also trained by, and worked as a "workshop facilitator" for, the radical organization The Ruckus Society, which has trained protestors in a variety of techniques to disrupt the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. The head of the Ruckus Society was arrested in 2000 and charged in connection with protestors attempting to disrupt that year's Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.
Born in 1970, Exley grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut. In junior high school he became a computer geek. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts, Exley went through a training program for radical union organizers run by the AFL-CIO and then went to work the United Auto Workers. "For seven months, he worked undercover at a Michigan auto parts factory," wrote Los Angeles Times reporter Joseph Menn in May 2004. "The unionization effort there failed, but Exley later used a team of infiltrators to successfully organize large nursing homes in Minnesota."
At age 29 Zack Exley quit his life of covert organizing to work full-time as a computer programmer, work that left him bored and unfulfilled. "IT workers work 45 minutes a day," he told the leftist magazine In These Times. "I had a lot of time on my hands."
Exley quit his job as a union organizer, on the other hand, because he apparently found the work too trying for what he was paid. "Our goal in getting a union campaign going," he told the business magazine Fast Company, "was to get all of the leaders together in a room to make a collective decision. To get them into that room together, we had to go knock on all these doors. That was tremendously time consuming."
Bored and eager to find a way to combine his radical politics with fun and excitement, Exley noticed web sites such as Salon.com and Slate.msn.com that were advancing leftist views. Browsing for domain names in December 1998, he discovered that GWBush.com was unclaimed and grabbed it. At this Internet address he created a web site that mimicked the official internet site of Texas Governor (and soon-to-be Republican presidential candidate) George W. Bush.
Exley's Internet site, created with friends at the San Francisco look-alike web site builder RTMark ( pronounced "Art Mark"), featured bizarre articles purportedly written by George Bush Bush and, as the 2000 election neared, images digitally doctored to depict Gov. Bush as a drunkard and cocaine user. "It was totally Beavis and Butt-head," Exley told the Austin Chronicle, "just a couple of guys bored and coming up with a way to get a phone call from the Bush people."
When Bush lawyers threatened to sue Exley for using copyrighted photographs digitally lifted from the official Bush web site, and when George Bush described Exley as "a garbage man," the resulting publicity brought six million viewers to Exley's site and made the young programmer an overnight darling of the left.
Exley quickly exploited the opportunity by offering an array of "Hate Bush" and "Hate America" products such as T-shirts and bumper stickers with such slogans as "Bush is a Punk Ass Chump," "Imperialism: A Way of Life Worth Bombing For," and ("oddly enough, for a site selling wares" noted Shawn Macomber in 2004 at FrontPage Magazine) "Capitalism: It's Great in Theory, It Just Didn't Work in Practice."
"Just in case the radical content of the site has left you with any question over the political leanings of Mr. Exley," wrote Macomber about another Exley web site called CounterCoup.com launched one month before the 2000 election, "he posts a prominent link to a conspiracy theory-laden article on the World Socialist Web Site, declaring it a 'must read.'"
CounterCoup.com also left little doubt about the emotions bubbling beneath Exley's surface. "One page shows a devil on the ground, a broadsword-wielding angel preparing to behead him," observed Macomber. "The devil is labeled 'Bush Coup,' while the sword the angel sports is christened 'The Spirit of Democracy.' Another box displays a picture of a screaming lynch mob with the caption, 'Sometimes Democracy Requires More than Voting.'"
In 2002 Exley was hired by Wes Boyd, Internet multi-millionaire creator of the "Flying Toaster" screensaver and other software, to work for Berkeley, California-based MoveOn.org. This web site had been created to echo Bill Clinton's slogan intended to rescue the Democrat President from a flood of scandals - "America needs to move on and let me get back to the work of the American people." But MoveOn.org quickly transformed into a vehicle for fund-raising and mobilization on issues ranging from gun control to anti-war and anti-Republican activism. It was pioneering new ways to use the Internet politically to advance the left. "In the long run," said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, "MoveOn.org could be our Rush Limbaugh."
MoveOn.org launched a contest encouraging its audience to produce negative ads about President Bush. It posted on its web site two of these ads that commingled images of President Bush and Adolf Hitler, conveying a message that they are alike. Public outry over this smear prompted MoveOn to remove the images from their site. Exley himself refused to apologize for MoveOn.org's posting of these Bush-Hitler ads, dismissing the controversy surrounding this issue as "Typical Republican Bulls—t."
In 2001 Exley's book about radical labor (and Internet) organizing techniques, Trust the People, was published by the small Brooklyn-based left-wing publisher Soft Skull Press. This press has produced such titles as Confronting Capitalism, a collection of essays by radical political cult leader Noam Chomsky, Marxist Alexander Cockburn, socialist Barbara Ehrenreich and other radicals; How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office; and WakeUp, You're Liberal!: How We Can Take America Back from The Right by Ted Rall (foreword by George McGovern).
Exley's publisher Soft Skull Press also keeps in print Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President by James Hatfield, a book that claimed Bush had been arrested for possession of cocaine but that his father George H.W. Bush intervened to erase all records of the case. St. Martin's Press, which had rushed the title into print during the 2000 election season, halted its printing and recalled copies of this book after Hatfield turned out to be a fraud and two-time felon whose wild allegations could not be substantiated. An eccentric 2002 documentary titled Horns and Halos about Soft Skull Press and Hatfield in the wake of his being discredited includes footage of one of Hatfield's closest friends repeatedly giving him advice and support. That friend is Zack Exley.
"Don't blame 9/11. Don't blame the Greens. And…don't blame the American people!" wrote Exley on a short-lived new web site angrydems.com after Democrats lost the 2000 election and two years later lost even more ground in the 2002 congressional elections. "Blame the Democratic Party leadership. Terry McAuliffe is an idiot."
But Exley soon became a Democratic candidate operative. In 2003 he was employed to help develop the web-based presidential campaign organization of anti-war leftist former Vermont Governor Howard Dean. On April 16, 2004 Exley was hired by John Kerry for an undisclosed amount of money to run Internet communication and organizing activities for Kerry's presidential campaign.
As of August 2004 more than $65 million worth of anti-Bush television ads had been run by Democrat-aligned 527 organizations such as the MoveOn.org Political Action Committee. One of the few legal restrictions on these groups, which otherwise circumvent most rules and limits of the new campaign finance law, is that they are forbidden to "coordinate" their activities with political party candidates such as John Kerry. Senator Kerry, without documentation or other concrete evidence, in August 2004 filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) accusing the 527 organization Swift Boat Veterans for Truth of illegally coordinating its Kerry-criticizing ads with President Bush's re-election campaign.
But Senator Kerry refused to fire Exley, who in April 2004 had come directly from MoveOn.org to the Kerry campaign. MoveOn.org's Executive Director Eli Pariser acknowledged that Exley will be able to use "what he's got in his head" about the organization's plans, reported NewsMax.com. MoveOn.org also issued a statement that "federal election rules permit some forms of communication" between Exley and MoveOn.org.
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