A Vincent Foster for Usenet liberals?

A Vincent Foster for Usenet liberals? By Andrew Leonard. The mysterious death of an online debater sparks a flurry of suspicions and theories.

By Andrew Leonard

Mar 19, 1999 | One fact about Steve Kangas is indisputable: This proud veteran of years of political argument in Internet discussion forums, and creator of an award-winning Web site devoted to liberal issues, is dead. On Feb. 8, his body was discovered in a men's room on the 39th floor of a building in Pittsburgh -- just outside the offices of conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.

But that's where the certainty ends -- at least on the part of those discussing Kangas' death in the very same Usenet newsgroups that Kangas, a dogged debater who championed liberal causes with formidable persistence, once participated in. Was Kangas, as press reports in Pittsburgh papers declared, the drunken victim of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head? Had he really become obsessed with Scaife to the point that he had traveled all the way from his home in Las Vegas on a deluded mission to assassinate him? Could it possibly be true that this lifelong foe of right-wing ideology had been found with a copy of "Mein Kampf" by his side?

Or was something more sinister at work? In newsgroups such as alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater and alt.society.liberalism, longtime virtual acquaintances of Kangas picked apart odd discrepancies in the story. Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death? Why had Scaife assigned his No. 1 private detective, Rex Armistead, to look into Kangas' past?

To some of Kangas' longtime adversaries, the conspiracy-theorizing by his sympathizers was absurd -- and yet at the same time it served as a kind of long-sought ratification of their own pet obsessions. Hadn't they been arguing for years that Vincent Foster, the Clinton official whose death in 1994 has been officially ruled a suicide, was actually the victim of a malign conspiracy? If the liberals were going to start questioning strange aspects of Kangas' death, then shouldn't they open their minds to the possibility that there was more than met the eye to Foster's demise?

The story's many baroque layers of cross-references don't end there. The single person most responsible for spreading conspiracy theories about Vincent Foster is, arguably, Scaife himself. The Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review newspaper has been the leading vehicle for pushing the claim that Foster was murdered. Now, that same paper was dismissing any possibility of foul play, dismissing Kangas as a would-be assassin and suicide, not to mention an Internet pornographer and ne'er-do-well.

Who can one trust in such an atmosphere? On the Net, and on Usenet in particular, you judge people by their words. Thousands of Kangas' posts are still around, and thousands more posts invoke Kangas' memory or point to articles archived at Kangas' impressive Web site, Liberalism Resurgent. What do they say about him?

"He had a helluva Web page," says John Van Metre, a retired General Motors worker who describes himself as a regular poster to the political newsgroups. "More people are looking at it now than ever before, that's for sure."

Next Page: Kangas was not the type to "go over the edge"

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