One of the richest seams of online gold is the worldwide network of freaky, right-wing “news” sites. A lot of them are American, sure, but here in Australia we have our own rag-tag flotilla of mysteriously cashed-up outlets, publishing fringe garbage for an audience measuring in the dozens. I’ll try to introduce you to some local and international touchstones over coming weeks.

We start with Human Events. Never heard of it? Here’s a short, introductory video.

“As long as I can remember…”

Anyhow, Human Events comes out of Washington DC, both in dead tree and Web 0.9 formats. It features a number of eminent columnists, including the one and only Ann Coulter.

Their grabby-hooky “thing” is a weekly Top Ten list, a highly original feature. This is the funnest part of this otherwise ranty, sludgy and predictable outlet, but mostly because it reveals so much about the wingnut mind.

The undisputed classic in this column was 2005’s “most harmful books” top ten, which was voted on by a bunch of conservative luminaries. The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf and Quotations from Chairman Mao are the top three, and fair enough you might say. But John Dewey? Betty Friedan? The Kinsey Report? Keynes’s General Theory?

Then you get to the “Honourable Mentions”. Charles Darwin gets two entries – The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. Poor old John Stuart Mill gets a jersey with On Liberty. Perhaps Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was no surprise, but I was a little puzzled that the brains trust had put Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe At Any Speed at similar levels on the pernicious-o-meter. You’re left wondering what’s on the bookshelf at the Human Events bunker. Now that Readers’ Digest has gone bust, presumably it’s just the King James, Conscience of a Conservative and Atlas Shrugged.

That should show well enough what we’re dealing with here. All of the other top ten lists are also directed at correcting Liberal Bias. A couple of weeks back they took on sex scandals. They got Bill Clinton and John Edwards in there, along with every Democrat pantsman ever. They only mention one (liberal) Republican, Nelson Rockefeller, who died on the job, (like our own late, lamented Billy Snedden).

Why? It’s not like this year alone hasn’t produced enough Republican sex scandals to fill out half the top ten. Just for starters, there’s John Ensign, the Nevada senator, and his extramarital affair, and the fact that the freaking Governor of South Carolina went AWOL on Father’s Day to tryst with his Argentinian mistress.

And then, of course, there’s Alan David Berlin, a long-time aide to a Republican State Senator in Pennsylvania, who was arrested in May this year. What did he do? Well, he

contacted a fifteen year old boy over the internet, and offered to “yiff” the boy in a panda outfit, while his parents weren’t home. The parents discovered the graphic emails on the boy’s computer and called the attorney general’s child predator unit sometime in May. Police raided his home and discovered various furry outfits such as a wolf costume, as well as a cat outfit; all complete with two holes cut out at the undersides of the costumes. He is now arraigned in Dauphin County jail on a $250,000 bail.

Now why would Human Events leave that one out?