The address www.harvardgop.com seems like a pretty good first guess at the website of the Harvard Republican Club (HRC). But where George W. Bush and Brian Grech ’03 you may seek, “Sexy Sylvia Saint” and “Sultry Asian Star Miko” you shall find. Harvardgop.com has become a porn site. “It’s a pretty hilarious scenario,” admits HRC Secretary Josh M. Mendelsohn ’05.
Harvardgop.com was born two years ago when HRC bought the domain name and programmed it to take the viewer to HRC’s website, http://hcs.harvard.edu/~gop. Retaining ownership over the domain, which frequently did route traffic to the official HRC site, pinched the club’s pocketbook to the tune of $12 a month, and last month club leadership decided to let the domain go.
They weren’t factoring in the competition. According to Mendelsohn, when the domain names of high-traffic websites expire, private companies—usually pornography sites—purchase the discarded domains and set up shop.
Within two days of the expiration of its lease on www.harvardgop.com, a representative of a conservative organization that supports HRC informed the club that harvardgop.com had fallen into the wrong hands. “We were floored,” Mendelsohn says. “We didn’t know what the hell to do.” HRC promptly went through its public materials and eliminated references to the site, and notified the dean of the College’s office, which sent its proprietors an order to cease and desist. But Harvard probably won’t have much success in seducing the new owners to move out. “We were very dismayed, but we recognize that there’s not much a club can do when something like that happens,” Mendelsohn says. “It would be funny if someone would confuse [the porn] with the Republican Club, but we don’t anticipate that happening.”
The new owners of the site have kept true to its old spirit in one way, however—rather than offering actual substance on www.harvardgop.com, it simply links to content located elsewhere on the Web. Last week’s headline, “MILF Mothers I’d Like to Fuck,” linked only to another site where no nude MILFs were immediately available to the nonpaying passerby. “I checked every link on our website, and it took a really long time,” says Mendelsohn. “We don’t have any links to MILFs.”
