alt.politics.bush

Long-form reference · 7,623 words · about a 33-minute read

A room in the anarchic hierarchy

alt.politics.bush was an unmoderated newsgroup in the alt.* hierarchy, which is to say that it came into being because somebody sent a message saying it existed, and it persisted because a sufficient number of news administrators did not disagree. The origins of that arrangement, and the reasons a hierarchy was built in which group creation required no vote, belong to the alt.* hub page and are not retold here.

What the arrangement meant for a political group is worth stating exactly, because everything else about this page follows from it. There was no moderator: not a lenient one, not an absent one, none. No person or process stood between an article arriving at a server and that article appearing in the group. There was no membership, so nobody could be removed; no charter with force, because nothing enforced charters; and no owner, because the founder of an alt.* group acquired no rights over it beyond those of any other reader. A group was a name in a configuration file on a few thousand independently administered machines, and the only decisions anyone made about it were made privately, one machine at a time.

The branch it sat in was large and unsupervised. The newsgroups file published by the Internet Systems Consortium on 25 August 2026 lists 45,003 group names, of which 20,466 are in alt.*; 152 of those begin alt.politics. The branch has no governing document and never had one. Its members include country and region groups, ideology groups, groups named after government agencies, several named after individual politicians, several named after individual posters, and a residue of names created to make a point and never used for anything else. Nothing coordinated them: alt.politics is not an organisation but a shared prefix.

One consequence deserves emphasis before anything else in this article is read. Because carriage was a private decision, there has never been an authoritative answer to the question of whether a given alt.* group existed at a given moment. Two readers on two providers could disagree, correctly, about whether alt.politics.bush was available to them. Any statement about the group's reach in a particular year is therefore a statement about particular servers, and this page makes none that it cannot source.

The mechanics of the argument: crossposting, followups, filters

The technical furniture of Usenet shaped political argument on it more than any editorial decision ever did, and three features did most of the shaping.

The first is crossposting. RFC 1036, the December 1987 Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages written by Mark Horton and Rick Adams, specifies that the Newsgroups header of an article may name several groups separated by commas. The same document defines the Xref header, which lists each of those groups against the article's number in it, so that a reader who has met the article in one group sees it marked as read in the others; news software of the period held one copy of the article rather than one per group. Crossposting was therefore nearly free in bandwidth and storage while multiplying the audience, and in political groups it became the default rather than the exception. The practical effect was that adjacent groups were not separate rooms at all. A thread nominally in alt.politics.bush might exist simultaneously in several other groups, its participants drawn from all of them, its subject line drifting steadily away from whatever it began as.

The second is the Followup-To header, defined in the same document: it names the group or groups where replies should go, and if it carries the keyword poster, followups are not permitted at all and the reply is to be sent to the author by mail. It is the one mechanism the format offers for narrowing a conversation, it depends entirely on the goodwill of the person posting, and in an argument nobody is obliged to use it.

The third is the kill file, the reader-side filter that arrived with Larry Wall's newsreader rn, first released in 1984: a list of patterns matched against subject lines, author addresses or other headers, with matching articles discarded before the reader ever sees them. Later newsreaders generalised it into scoring, and threading meant an entire conversation could be dropped in one keystroke. This was the whole of the moderation apparatus available to an unmoderated political group, and it has an unusual property: it is applied by each reader to their own copy. Two people reading alt.politics.bush on the same afternoon were, quite literally, not reading the same group. Exclusion was universal in practice and private in effect, which is why arguments about who ought to be excluded never went anywhere and never stopped.

Two presidencies, one group name

The name is ambiguous, and the ambiguity is not a defect in this page's research but a property of the thing being described. Two presidents of the United States were named Bush: George H. W. Bush, in office from January 1989 to January 1993, and George W. Bush, in office from January 2001 to January 2009. A newsgroup called alt.politics.bush announces which family it concerns and nothing else.

On the question of when the name was created, the record is unusually good, because Usenet's group creations are themselves messages and a substantial mirror of them survives. The Internet Systems Consortium keeps an archive of control messages by hierarchy and group. The earliest one it holds for this name is a newgroup message dated 21 July 1992, posted from a netcom.com address by a poster giving his name as Bob D. Crane and crossposted to talk.bizarre, alt.politics.gooley, alt.politics.perot and alt.politics.clinton. Its body is a short form of the kind alt.* proposers used at the time, and its operative lines read:

NAME: alt.politics.bush — STATUS: unmoderated. — FOUNDER: rdc — DESCRIPTION: Forum for posting and reading articles related to President Bushs re-election.

The missing apostrophe is the original's. The message then jokes that the range of discussion will not require an expanded hierarchy beneath the group, and supplies as its example a name that is not repeated here. The president being discussed, then, is the first one, and the occasion is the campaign of 1992, in which the incumbent was seeking a second term against Bill Clinton and Ross Perot — two of the three alt.politics groups the creation notice was crossposted to.

What the archive establishes and what it does not are worth separating. It establishes that a message of that date, bearing that control header and that text, propagated to the sites whose control traffic the archive mirrors. It does not establish the moment at which any particular server acted on it, nor that no earlier attempt was made at some site whose traffic was never collected, and no vote, no formal Request for Discussion and no charter exists for an alt.* group to check it against, because the hierarchy has none of those things. The honest formulation is that the surviving administrative record dates the name to July 1992 and to the first Bush presidency, and that the group's later traffic — the traffic this directory's own description of the group refers to — accumulated under a name created for the father while the subject in the news was the son.

That is the fact about the page, and it is not a tidy one. A reader who comes to the archive of alt.politics.bush expecting a group founded for the presidency of 2001 to 2009 is reading a room built in 1992 for an election that its founder's contemporaries expected to settle the matter.

Nine control messages

The control archive for this one name holds nine messages: four newgroups and five rmgroups, spanning not quite twelve years. Read in order they are a complete miniature of how alt.* governance worked, which is to say of how it did not.

After the creation of 21 July 1992, the next message is dated 4 November 1992, the day after the election. It is an rmgroup — a request that servers delete the group — sent by the news administrator of a Michigan system posting as the USENET News Manager, and its entire body is a joke about the result and the disk space. Three days later, on 7 November, the same administrator sent a newgroup message recreating the group, with a body that is the same joke rewritten in the opposite direction. On 11 November the same address sent another rmgroup, this one with an insult aimed at another administrator appended, which is not reproduced here.

On 11 December 1992 a poster at the University of Delaware sent two rmgroups within seven minutes, both with the same reasoning: the group was created to discuss candidates in an election, and the election is over. The archive then holds a newgroup message for the group dated three days later whose body is that identical sentence and whose message identifier differs from the rmgroup's only in the date component. What that resemblance means is not something the record settles. Control messages carried no authentication in alt.*, forgery required nothing more than a text editor, and no authority existed to adjudicate the question, then or since.

The last serious attempt at removal is dated 13 July 1996, from a poster at an Oregon provider, crossposted to alt.config and to the group itself, and reasoned in one line: the group was created for the 1992 election and should be removed. It did not take either. Four years after the campaign that occasioned it, the name was still on enough servers for its removal to be worth requesting and its retention to be the actual outcome.

The final message in the archive is dated 15 March 2004 and is not really an intervention in the network at all: an administrator in Texas issued a newgroup for alt.politics.bush with the distribution limited to his own site's local hierarchy, creating the group on his own server for his own users. By then the subject in the news was the second President Bush, in the middle of a re-election campaign, and the newsgroup that would carry the argument had existed for not quite twelve years.

The pattern is the one the hierarchy was designed to produce. Both creation and removal were requests, and a request that administrators ignore has no effect. The default configuration many sites started from told them to ignore removals: control.ctl, the access-control file distributed with the INN news server and published by the Internet Systems Consortium, still carries an alt.* policy of accepting all newgroup messages and silently dropping all rmgroups, and its own comments observe that there is no official, generally accepted alt.* policy and that there are nearly as many policies for alt.* groups as there are Usenet sites. Against a default of that shape, an established alt.* group was very hard to remove. Nobody decided that alt.politics.bush should survive its occasion. It survived because deciding otherwise would have required a mechanism that did not exist.

The namespace disambiguates itself

Usenet's response to the ambiguity of the name was the response it made to everything: it created more groups. The record of those creations is as good as the record of this one, and it shows a namespace tracking the American electoral calendar with some accuracy and no coordination whatever.

alt.politics.clinton was created on 17 July 1992 by the same poster, four days before alt.politics.bush; its creation message opens by saying that, as the creator of alt.politics.perot, he is now creating alt.politics.clinton, because the Perot group has served its duty. It drew an rmgroup from the same Delaware address in December 1992, carrying the same single sentence of reasoning. alt.politics.gw-bush — the second Bush, distinguished by his initials — was created on 16 June 1999 from a University of Nebraska address, and the creation message supplied the newsgroups-file description itself: The next president of the United States of America, more than sixteen months before the election it was predicting. A poster writing from an alt.config address sent an rmgroup for it within seven minutes; the creator reissued the newgroup, and the two of them repeated that exchange five more times over the following fortnight. The group is in the Internet Systems Consortium's list today, and the description the 1999 message supplied is the one the list still carries.

The 2004 cycle produced the same pattern at speed. alt.politics.howard-dean was created on 17 March 2003 and rmgrouped the same afternoon; it was created again that night, removed again the next morning, created again on 19 March, and put through the cycle once more on 25 March. Four newgroup messages and three rmgroups for the name survive from those nine days: the removals all came from one address, the creations from more than one. alt.politics.kerry was created early on 28 February 2004, rmgrouped some hours later, and recreated before the day was out. Creation was cheap, removal was equally cheap, and neither settled anything, which is why the branch accumulated names the way a beach accumulates driftwood.

A sibling group of the period, alt.impeach.bush, first appears in the control archive on 16 November 2000, nine days after the election that had not yet been resolved; four newgroup messages for it were sent from the same address within about half a minute of each other that evening, and more followed over the next day. Impeachment as a constitutional mechanism, and the documented advocacy campaigns of the 2000s that used the word, belong to that group's own page in this directory and are left there.

One small artefact of the namespace is worth recording because it is the only description the group has ever had that is not this directory's own. The newsgroups file — the network's unofficial list of one-line group descriptions, compiled from whatever text creators and administrators supplied — describes alt.politics.bush as: The politics of shrubbery. Nobody voted on that line, no process approved it, and it is the line the file carries today. It is a fair sample of how seriously the alt.* namespace documented itself.

The chronology, and what a chronology is for

The remaining question a reader of the archive will have is what the group's traffic sat inside. The answer is a public chronology of dated events, and the sections that follow set it out: names, dates, votes and outcomes, in the order they happened.

It is worth being explicit about what this is not. It is not a summary of what the group said about these events, which no honest summary could give: the traffic was large, unmoderated, uncounted and written by people whose identities cannot be verified, and any characterisation of its overall opinion would be invention. Nor is it an assessment of the events themselves. Where a matter was contested, the entry says who contested it and stops. This directory documents newsgroups; the chronology is here because the group is unreadable without it.

The 2000 election and the decision that ended it

Voting took place on 7 November 2000. By the following morning the result turned on Florida, whose margin was inside the threshold for an automatic machine recount. The state certified its result on 26 November; litigation over manual recounts in particular counties continued, and on 8 December the Supreme Court of Florida ordered a statewide recount of undervotes — ballots on which the tabulating machines had recorded no presidential choice, more than sixty thousand of them.

The Bush campaign asked the Supreme Court of the United States to halt it. The Court granted a stay on 9 December, heard argument on 11 December, and on 12 December 2000 issued its decision in Bush v. Gore: a per curiam opinion holding, by five votes to four, that no recount meeting constitutional requirements could be conducted within the time remaining before the federal safe-harbour deadline for the appointment of electors. The recount ended. Al Gore conceded the following day.

The certified Florida margin was 537 votes out of about 5.96 million cast in the state. Nationally, Gore received 50,999,897 votes to Bush's 50,456,002, a margin of 543,895; Bush received 271 electoral votes, one more than the number required. It was the first election since 1888 in which the winner of the electoral college had not won the popular vote.

The decision was and remains contested. The dissenting justices published dissents; legal scholars, editorial boards and the parties themselves disagreed then and disagree now about the reasoning, the remedy and the stay. This page records that the disagreement exists and is documented at length elsewhere; it does not join it.

September 2001 and the authorisations that followed

On 11 September 2001, nineteen men hijacked four airliners and flew two of them into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York and one into the Pentagon; the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania. The attacks killed 2,977 people, not counting the hijackers.

The legal and military sequence that followed is dated with unusual precision. Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which became law on 18 September 2001, authorising force against those the president determined had planned, authorised, committed or aided the attacks, or had harboured them. Strikes on Taliban-held Afghanistan by American and British forces began on 7 October 2001.

The surveillance legislation of that autumn moved at comparable speed. The bill that became the USA PATRIOT Act was introduced on 23 October 2001, passed the House of Representatives on 24 October by 357 votes to 66, passed the Senate on 25 October by 98 to 1, and was signed on 26 October 2001. What its provisions did, how they were argued over, and the wider history of surveillance and privacy law are the subject of this directory's privacy group page, which owns that material; the date and the votes are all that belong here.

The Homeland Security Act, creating the Department of Homeland Security, was signed on 25 November 2002 after passing the Senate by 90 votes to 9. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States — the 9/11 Commission — was set up on 27 November 2002 and published its final report on 22 July 2004.

Iraq, 2002 to 2005

The Iraq sequence is the longest strand in the period and one of the strands this directory's own description of the group names. Its public dates are these.

• 10 October 2002: the House of Representatives passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution by 296 votes to 133; the Senate passed it in the early hours of the following day by 77 to 23. It was signed on 16 October 2002 as Public Law 107-243.
• 8 November 2002: the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1441, offering Iraq a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations.
• 5 February 2003: Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the American case on Iraqi weapons programmes to the Security Council.
• 15 February 2003: coordinated demonstrations against the imminent war were held in more than 600 cities; researchers of social movements have described the day as the largest protest event in human history.
• 20 March 2003: the invasion began, conducted by a coalition of mainly American, British, Australian and Polish forces.
• 9 April 2003: coalition forces took central Baghdad.
• 1 May 2003: the president announced from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, in front of a banner reading Mission Accomplished, that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, while adding that the mission continued.
• 6 July 2003: Joseph Wilson published an opinion article in the New York Times disputing the uranium claim in that year's State of the Union address. A week later, on 14 July 2003, the columnist Robert Novak identified Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a Central Intelligence Agency officer, beginning the affair and the criminal investigation that followed.
• 13 December 2003: Saddam Hussein was captured at Ad-Dawr.
• 28 April 2004: photographs of the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison were broadcast by CBS News, prompting condemnation in the United States and internationally, courts-martial, and several official inquiries.
• 30 September 2004: the Iraq Survey Group, the fact-finding mission sent to locate the weapons programmes that had been the war's stated justification, released its comprehensive report; it recorded only small stockpiles of chemical weapons, in quantities inadequate to pose a militarily significant threat.
• 1 May 2005: the Sunday Times published the Downing Street memo, a British official's note of a meeting of 23 July 2002 recording the head of the Secret Intelligence Service reporting that in Washington the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The document's authenticity has never been seriously challenged; the meaning of the sentence was disputed immediately and at length.

Every item in that list was argued about while it was happening, and several of them are argued about still. The group carried those arguments in the sense that any unmoderated political newsgroup of the period carried whatever its readers brought to it. What proportion of its traffic each item drew is not recoverable, and no figure for it appears on this page.

The 2004 election

Voting took place on 2 November 2004. The incumbent was re-elected with 286 electoral votes to John Kerry's 251 — 252 were pledged, but a Minnesota elector voted for John Edwards — and with 62,040,610 popular votes to 59,028,444. The decisive state was Ohio, carried by 118,601 votes, a margin of 2.10 per cent.

Two features of the campaign belong to this article's subject rather than to its chronology. It was the campaign in which raising money and organising supporters online stopped being experimental: Howard Dean's campaign for the Democratic nomination took most of its funds in small donations over the internet, the average donation just under eighty dollars, and built its field organisation around its website. It was also the campaign whose documented set-piece of the autumn began on an internet message board and was carried onward by weblogs. Those developments are the subject of the sections that follow.

It was also the campaign in which the fact-checking organisations founded in the preceding three years did their first full presidential cycle, and in which a dispute conducted largely through advertising gave American English a new verb. A veterans' organisation formed that year ran advertisements disputing Kerry's Vietnam service record; his campaign and a number of news organisations' reviews of the military records disputed the organisation's assertions in turn; and the organisation's name became the pejorative swiftboating, used since for an attack of that kind. Which side of that dispute was right is not this page's business. That the episode left a word behind is a fact about the period's vocabulary.

2005: the hurricane and the disclosures

Hurricane Katrina made its Gulf landfall near Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, on 29 August 2005, having peaked as a Category 5 storm the previous day, with a final landfall near the Louisiana-Mississippi border. Its storm surge caused 53 breaches in the flood-protection structures around greater New Orleans and about 80 per cent of the city flooded. The National Hurricane Center's current figure for the death toll is 1,392, revised downward in January 2023 from an earlier estimate of 1,833.

Investigations of the levee failures, including a 2007 report by the American Society of Civil Engineers, attributed the breached floodwalls to design and construction flaws in the federally built hurricane protection system, for which Congress had made the United States Army Corps of Engineers responsible. The emergency response by federal, state and local government was criticised extensively and from every direction; the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, left the post on 12 September 2005, and the superintendent of the New Orleans police also resigned. Other agencies, notably the National Hurricane Center, the National Weather Service and the Coast Guard, were commended for their forecasting and rescue work. Who was responsible for what remained a matter of public argument long after the water went down, and remains one.

On 16 December 2005 the existence of a programme of warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency was reported by the New York Times and subsequently confirmed by the attorney general, opening a legal and political argument that ran for years. As with the legislation of 2001, the substance belongs to the privacy pages of this directory rather than to this one.

What online political argument looked like before the platforms

The forms of the period are observable in the record and can be described without characterising who used them. Four are worth setting out, because they are the ones a reader of a Usenet political archive will meet immediately and may misread as native to the newsgroup when they were general to the era.

Crossposting as a rhetorical act. Because an article could be addressed to several groups at once, the choice of which groups was itself an argument: posting a message to a group of the opposing persuasion and to one's own simultaneously guaranteed a reply and an audience for it. The header is preserved in the archive, so the choice is legible decades later. A researcher reading a thread without looking at the Newsgroups line is reading half of it.

The talking point. The unit of political text in the period was the pre-formulated line, coordinated in advance to remain identical whoever repeats it. The form long predates the internet — it belongs to press offices, not to newsgroups — but the network made its circulation visible for the first time: identical sentences appearing in different hands within hours could be observed, collected and compared by anyone with a search interface. The weblog that became the period's best-known political site, Talking Points Memo, launched on 12 November 2000; its name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the talking points memo much discussed during the Lewinsky scandal of the Clinton years. FactCheck.org has long run a standing feature under the title Party Lines, cataloguing lines used repeatedly by members of a party.

The forwarded chain. Political e-mail — the anonymous forward, the petition, the sent-to-everyone-in-your-address-book appeal — was the mass medium of amateur politics before social platforms, and it interlocked with Usenet at both ends: forwards were pasted into newsgroup posts, and newsgroup posts were pasted into forwards. MoveOn, formed in 1998 around one of the first mass viral e-mail petitions — a call for Congress to censure President Clinton and move on — is the documented case of the genre becoming an organisation.

The link as a weapon. Coordinated linking to manipulate search rankings was named Google bombing by Adam Mathes in an article of 6 April 2001, describing an attempt he had organised to attach the phrase talentless hack to a friend's website. The best-documented American political example of the following years attached the phrase miserable failure to the White House biography page of President George W. Bush; by January 2007 Google had changed its indexing so that such searches returned commentary about the tactic instead. The alt.* namespace registered the episode in its own way, as it registered everything: there is a group called alt.politics.miserable-failure whose one-line description in the newsgroups file is simply the target's web address.

Fact-checking becomes an institution

One of the more consequential developments of the period was the appearance of organisations whose product was the adjudication of specific factual claims, published with citations, on a schedule. Their founding dates matter, because they mark the moment when a poster in an argument acquired somewhere to point.

• Snopes, originally the Urban Legends Reference Pages, was created in 1994 by David and Barbara Mikkelson and grew directly out of the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban, where both had been active and whose discussions supplied much of the early site's material. It began with urban legends and acquired political material as political material acquired the form of urban legends.
• Spinsanity, edited by Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan, ran from 2001 until January 2005, was syndicated by Salon and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and published more than four hundred articles on political spin before closing.
• FactCheck.org was launched in December 2003 by the journalist Brooks Jackson as a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania; the idea came from Kathleen Hall Jamieson, whose 1993 book Dirty Politics, on the presidential campaigns of 1988, had argued the case for the genre.
• Media Matters for America, founded in May 2004 by David Brock, monitored conservative media and describes itself as progressive; it is an example of the adjacent form, the openly aligned monitoring organisation, which is not the same thing as the non-partisan checker and was not treated as such at the time.
• PolitiFact, launched in 2007 by the St. Petersburg Times, arrived after the period this group's traffic belongs to and is listed here to mark the boundary.

Two observations follow, and both are about form rather than merit. First, the citation changed the shape of an argument: a poster could now answer a claim with a link rather than an assertion, which made a certain kind of exchange shorter and a different kind — the argument about the checker — longer. Second, the checkers themselves promptly became contested objects, accused from various directions of selection bias in what they chose to examine and of false balance or its opposite in how they rated it. Those accusations were made; this page records that they were made and does not evaluate them.

The weblog wave, and the test case of September 2004

The political weblog of the early 2000s was made possible by publishing tools that removed the need to write HTML by hand. Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs on 23 August 1999; Movable Type was announced on 3 September 2001 and released that October; WordPress followed on 27 May 2003. The political sites that mattered in the period were founded across those same years: Talking Points Memo in November 2000, Instapundit in August 2001, Daily Kos on 26 May 2002, Power Line in 2002.

The relationship between weblogs and Usenet was less a succession than an overlap, and the difference between the two forms is structural rather than cultural. A weblog has an owner. Its author sets the subject, keeps or deletes the comments, and cannot be crossposted into by a stranger. A newsgroup has none of those properties. Political argument moved, over the decade, from the form where everyone shares one room to the form where each writer owns a room and links to the others — and the archives show the transition in progress rather than complete, with the same names and the same disputes appearing in both.

The documented set-piece of the interaction happened during the 2004 campaign. On 8 September 2004, CBS broadcast a report on 60 Minutes II, then billed as 60 Minutes Wednesday, about the president's service in the Texas Air National Guard, based on documents attributed to his late commanding officer. The documents' authenticity was challenged almost immediately in postings on internet forums and weblogs, initially on typographic grounds. CBS defended the report for about two weeks and then repudiated its use of the documents on 20 September. A panel the network appointed, led by the former attorney general Dick Thornburgh and the former Associated Press executive Louis Boccardi, criticised both the segment and the network's subsequent defence of it; the producer was dismissed in January 2005 and three news executives were asked to resign, which they did over the following months. The episode is documented in detail as the Killian documents controversy, and it is cited here for one narrow reason: it is the clearest dated instance of amateur online scrutiny altering the course of a mainstream broadcast story, which is a claim about a mechanism and not about anybody's politics.

The standing accusation of coordinated posting

Every unmoderated political group of the era carried, continuously, the accusation that some of its participants were not what they appeared to be. The vocabulary was already in place. Astroturfing — concealing the sponsor of an orchestrated message so that it appears to be spontaneous grassroots activity — was coined in 1985 by Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, who, faced with a barrage of insurance-industry mail, remarked that a fellow from Texas could tell the difference between grass roots and AstroTurf. A sock puppet is a false online identity used for deception, including the practice of an author creating additional identities to support his own arguments.

What made the accusation permanent on Usenet is that the medium could not answer it. There was no registration, no verified identity, and no authentication of headers: a From line is a string typed by the sender's software, and forging one required no skill. A poster could hold several addresses without difficulty and there was no mechanism by which anyone could demonstrate that two posters were, or were not, the same person. The consequence is that the charge of coordinated or paid posting was made routinely, in every political direction, and was almost never resolved — occasionally supported by technical evidence in headers, more often not, and functionally unfalsifiable either way.

Two things can be said honestly about this. The first is that coordinated posting demonstrably existed as a practice in some contexts, in the general sense that the astroturfing literature documents. The second is that the accusation was also the standard rhetorical move available to anyone losing an argument, which is a different observation and does not settle any individual case. A reader working through a political Usenet archive will meet the accusation on all sides and should treat it as evidence of the argument's temperature rather than of anybody's employment.

The answer available to an individual reader was the answer available to every problem in an unmoderated group: the kill file. It removed the suspected poster from one reader's screen and from nowhere else, and it is the reason accusations of this kind never had to be resolved in order for the group to continue.

alt.politics against talk.politics

Usenet had already tried to solve the problem of political argument once, structurally, before alt.* existed. The Great Renaming of 1987 sorted the old flat namespace into topical hierarchies and gathered open-ended dispute — politics, religion, the questions that do not close — into talk.*, in part so that sites which did not want to carry that traffic could decline it in one line of a configuration file. That story belongs to the soc.* hub; the resulting hierarchy has a page of its own here.

What this page can add is the comparison, and it is stark in the current namespace. The Internet Systems Consortium's list carries 13 groups beginning talk.politics and 152 beginning alt.politics. The talk.* names are subject categories that a committee could have written and in effect did: guns, drugs, medicine, China, Tibet, the European Union, theory, misc. The alt.politics names are something else. They include ideologies, countries and government agencies, but also individual politicians, individual posters, individual grievances and jokes, because creating one cost nothing and required nobody's agreement.

Three differences follow from that, and they are the substance of the distinction between the branches.

• Granularity. talk.politics groups were sized for a subject that would last: a country, a policy area, a perennial question. alt.politics groups were routinely sized for a campaign, a candidate or a week. That is why the branch is full of names whose occasion has passed — and why alt.politics.bush, created for the campaign of 1992, was available to be filled with something else entirely in 2003.
• Creation as speech. In the Big Eight of the period, proposing a group meant a Request for Discussion, weeks of argument and a formal vote, so the name that emerged was a compromise. In alt.*, the name was whatever the creator typed, which made group creation itself a way of making a statement. A significant fraction of alt.politics consists of positions rather than places to discuss positions.
• Carriage. talk.* was among the hierarchies administrators most often declined to take, which affects what survived to be archived; alt.* was declined for its own reasons, including volume and the content of other branches of the tree. Neither branch's archive should be read as a complete record of what was written in it.

The FAQ, the flame war, and the formulation of 1990

Two recurring forms belong to Usenet political argument specifically, and one adage about it outlived the network entirely.

The first form is the FAQ. A group that argued the same points continuously produced, sooner or later, a document setting out the recurring questions and the answers its regulars had settled on, posted at intervals so that new arrivals would meet it. The network institutionalised this: news.answers and its alt.* counterpart alt.answers exist, in the newsgroups file's own words, as a Repository for periodic USENET articles, and both are moderated, which in an unmoderated hierarchy is a notable exception. The FAQ was the closest an unmoderated group came to an authority, and it had exactly as much force as its readers chose to give it — which in a political group, where the recurring questions are the disputed ones, was frequently none. No FAQ for this group has been found in the course of writing this page, and none is claimed.

The second form is the flame war. The Jargon File defines flame as posting a message intended to insult and provoke, or speaking incessantly on some relatively uninteresting subject with a patently ridiculous attitude, and reports the word from MIT and other campuses as far back as 1969, before the network the term is now associated with existed. A flame war is the self-sustaining version: an exchange whose subject has become the exchange. In a group with no moderator, no membership and no closing mechanism, it is not a pathology of the form but a normal state of it, and the archives contain a great deal of it.

The adage is Godwin's law, promulgated by the American lawyer Mike Godwin in 1990 and originally about Usenet discussions specifically: as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. Godwin has described it as a deliberate experiment in memetics, framed as though it were a law of nature so that people who glibly compared others to Hitler would think harder about the Holocaust, and he wrote up the experiment in Wired in October 1994 under the title Meme, Counter-meme. It is one of the few things Usenet produced that everyone now knows and almost nobody attributes. A political group of the 2000s is precisely the environment it was written for.

What the archive is worth

The case for preserving a group like this one has nothing to do with the quality of its contents, which was various, and nothing to do with anybody being right. It rests on four properties that are difficult to find together anywhere else.

It is unfiltered. No moderator selected these posts, no editor commissioned them, no algorithm ranked them, and no platform's recommendation system determined what was seen. Whatever a person typed and sent is what is in the record, including the parts that no institution and no participant would have chosen to preserve. Archives of political speech are ordinarily assembled from what somebody thought worth keeping; this one is closer to what was actually said.

It is timestamped and ordered. Every article carries a date, a message identifier, a reference chain to the article it answers and the list of groups it was sent to. A thread can be reconstructed in the order it happened, which means that claims can be dated to the hour and read against what was publicly known at that hour. For studying how a belief propagated — as distinct from whether it was true — that is the property that matters.

It is ordinary. Political history is written overwhelmingly from the output of people who write for a living. A Usenet political group is the other thing: what people who were not journalists, politicians or academics said about public events at the time, in their own words, at length, without an editor and without the flattening effect of a form that limits them to a few hundred characters. There is very little of this from the pre-platform decades and there will not be more.

It is public and durable in a way its successors are not. The material was written for public consumption on a network with no owner, and it was copied to many independent machines as a matter of routine. Much of it is therefore still readable, which is more than can be said for most of the web forums, comment sections and platform accounts of the same years.

The corollary is a warning about how to read it. Contemporaneous claims in an unmoderated argument are evidence of what people believed, feared and were told at the moment of believing it — not evidence of what was so. That distinction is the same one this directory applies to any contested subject; the page on alt.conspiracy.jfk covers a group where the temptation to conflate the two is even stronger.

A note on this directory's position

This page documents a newsgroup. It takes no position on the presidencies the group was named for, on any election, on any war, on any statute, on any of the disputes recorded above, or on the merits of anything argued in the group.

That is the standing rule here, and the reason for it is practical rather than decorative. A directory of newsgroups is only useful if its entries can be trusted about the same things regardless of subject: when a group was created, what its charter said, what hierarchy it sat in, what the world it belonged to was doing at the time. An entry that also told the reader what to think about the politics would be doing a different job, worse, and would make the factual parts harder to rely on. The same rule governs the entry for soc.culture.iraq and the entry for a group about bluegrass, and it is applied here without adjustment because the subject is contentious.

Where a matter is contested, this page has named the parties to the contest and stopped. Where a figure is disputed, it has given the figure, its source and the fact that it was revised. Where the record is silent — on how many people read this group, on what they mostly argued, on whether any particular characterisation of its participants is fair — it has said so rather than filling the gap with something plausible.

Scope and limits

What this page establishes about alt.politics.bush is narrower than what a reader might want, and the boundary is worth marking precisely.

• Established. That the earliest surviving control message for the name is dated 21 July 1992 and was written for the re-election campaign of the first President Bush; the wording of that message; that nine control messages for the name survive in the Internet Systems Consortium's archive, four creating the group and five asking for its removal, the last dated 15 March 2004; that the group was unmoderated; that it is still listed in the newsgroups file with the description The politics of shrubbery, and still carries the posting-permitted flag in the active file published on 25 August 2026.
• Not established. How many people read or posted to the group in any year; how much traffic it carried; which servers carried it and when; whether it ever had a FAQ or a maintained charter beyond the description line of 1992; who its regular participants were; and what the balance of opinion in it was at any point. No figure or characterisation of any of these appears above, because none could be sourced.
• Deliberately left to other pages of this directory. The origins of alt.* and the mechanics of group creation, on the alt.* hub; the Great Renaming and the line between soc.* and talk.*, on the soc.* hub; the talk.* hierarchy itself, on its own page; impeachment as a constitutional mechanism and the advocacy campaigns of the 2000s, on the alt.impeach.bush page linked above; surveillance and privacy law, on the alt.privacy and comp.society.privacy pages.

Three gaps in the surviving record apply to any Usenet political archive and should temper any conclusion drawn from an absence. An article posted with an X-No-Archive header was never archived at all. The Deja News service, which indexed Usenet from March 1995 and whose archive Google acquired in February 2001, allowed posters to remove their own messages from the index permanently. And Google Groups stopped supporting new Usenet content on 22 February 2024, so the archive is now a closed collection rather than a growing one. A missing article in a 2003 thread may therefore record a poster's second thoughts, a spool nobody kept, or an accident of collection — and not anything about what was said.