Kent, who would later manage Ron's 2008 presidential campaign, never accepted an official story.

As we drove past the Pentagon, he told me about his uncle, a senior pilot for a famous British airline, who held that it could not have been a commercial jet that hit that government building on 9/11.  Kent also warned me about a giant internet firm.

He said it's a brilliant enterprise, in search technology and many other other ways, but it's also helping the state spy on us. The federal ambition was to store every single email, web search, web page, and phone call for political purposes, under the guise of fighting terrorism. It will turn on LRC, he predicted. This was long before Ed Snowden, and I remembered what Kent had told me when that brave truth teller exposed the US Stasi.

It's true, a public company, in a corporatist, authoritarian regime like ours, may seem to have little choice when the official mafia makes it an offer it cannot refuse. But are the founders required also to be enthusiastic Obama statists? Regardless, it's not pleasant to be on the receiving end of that company's displeasure.

LRC is reaching too many people, and they don't like it. They even penalize us for the sorts of articles we publish.

Another major web firm arbitrarily cut the traffic ranking of every site considered anti-government or right-wing. All this makes it much more difficult to get ads.