Blinded by the Right
A Democratic Senator once described David Brock as "...a young man with more ability than judgment." The Senator was investigating accusations made in The Real Anita Hill, a book Brock had written supporting Clarence Thomas’s appointment as a Supreme Court Justice. But it took David Brock, then writing for the conservative magazine American Spectator, many years to understand and accept that evaluation.
Brock’s writing career as a right-wing conservative began when he was attending University of California at Berkeley. And it didn’t let up when he moved to Washington D.C. shortly before the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas congressional hearings. When his book The Real Anita Hill was finally published, it was widely applauded by Republicans and the Moral Majority in Washington D.C. and across the country. His writing made him the right-wing hit man, which would then involve into the "scandal politics" the GOP used as their "path to power."
Brock worked along with such conservatives as Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Oliver North and Richard Scaife, the man who paid Arkansas troopers (Troopergate) to testify about Bill Clinton’s sex life. Even when the Republican conservatives learned that Brock was gay, they still supported whatever he could write denouncing Clinton.
But when Brock’s book The Seduction of Hillary Rodham was published, his support from the right-wing disappeared. He honestly believed and wrote that "...Hillary wasn’t a crook after all," and that weakened the anti-Clinton crusade of Republican right-wingers. David Brock realized that "...when I broke ranks, my sexuality [homosexuality] was used to discredit me."
To Brock, the sexual scandals Clinton was accused of, even the Monica Lewinski affair, had nothing to do with the presidency or the obstruction of justice, so was not grounds for impeachment. Clinton was only caught as "being a human being."
It became apparent to Brock that the "Republicans...from Reagan to Bush to Gingrich to Bush again, pursued politics of self-interest...against the public good." So he wrote an open letter of apology to President Clinton for "...writing the unreliable Troopergate story...". He also apologized to Anita Hill for attacking her "wrongly as a liar" in his first well-publicized book.
In 1997 Brock disassociated himself from the Republican conservative movement, and in the year 2000 he registered as an Independent voter. Blinded by the Right was published in 2002.