When Trolls Attack: Marcusean Mob Gets @ChrisLoesch Bounced from Twitter

Posted on | April 30, 2012 | 42 Comments

“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”
— Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 1965

Sunday night, I was a guest on “BlogMock Radio,” the weekly online podcast hosted by Blogmocracy and Diary of Daedalus, and a caller asked, “Did you hear what happened to Chris Loesch?”

Chris Loesch is a musician who joined forces with Steven Crowder to perform as Powdered Zombies for the viral rap hit “Mr. America.”

Chris is also, not coincidentally, the husband of blogger/talk-radio host/CNN contributor Dana Loesch. Chris was arguing with some left-wingers on Twitter who had attacked his wife when the enlightened tolerant progressives decided — to borrow a phrase from Spencer Ackerman — to smash him through a plate-glass window. Chris explained to Twitchy what happened:

I was suspended 20 minutes after I was done debating a few liberals. Twitter’s suspension message to me stated that I had used “Abusive Language” I never cursed, threatened or belittled anyone. . . .
I stumbled upon a few tweets between the liberals I was debating, discussing getting groups together to block conservative twitter accounts in mass. I am certain that @OccupiedMuslim got her entire OWS rally in NYC to report me for spam. I wish I would have taken a screen shot because those tweets were deleted as soon as I started making noise about it. . . .
This is clearly a tactic being used by the left and Twitter is either ignorant or allowing it to occur.

Got it? Any conservative active on Twitter is familiar with how left-wing trolls — many of them associated with the Occupy movement — like to get up “in your face,” hurling abusive language and dishonest smears. The best response usually is to ignore them.

Most people don’t have time to waste on such vermin, but ignoring the troll attacks will sometimes give them the idea that they are “winning” (Charlie Sheen-style), so that the trolls start congratulating each other on their success, and claiming that the objects of their attacks are too stupid or too cowardly to engage them in arguments. You’ll never guess who wrote this:

Right wingers harass, abuse, insult & attack people constantly on Twitter, then act outraged and whine when their accounts are suspended.

OK, maybe you did guess, huh? This is what happens when the target responds to the trolls: The enlightened tolerant progressives deliberately mischaracterize the response as an “attack,” or “whining,” as if the targets of their vicious dishonest online aggression had no right to answer them back. And now, as the case of Chris Loesch dramatizes, the Left has begun organizing stalker mobs to falsely report conservatives for “spam”/”abuse,” in order to silence the Right on Twitter. Why?

Silencing opposition is the Left’s only hope for success.

If conservatives are permitted a fair chance to critique the Left’s agenda, to expose the Left’s tactics and demonstrate the failure of the Left’s policies, the Left loses. Not content to dominate academia, public schools, the entertainment industry, book publishing and the mainstream news media — all of which cultural institutions are characterized by an overwhelming liberal hegemony — the Left is now determined to silence conservative opposition in the few bastions of freedom that remain: Talk radio, cable TV and the Internet.

Nearly half a century has passed since Marxist theoretician Herbert Marcuse proposed a “liberating tolerance” — in fact, progressive intolerance — that would silence the Left’s opposition. Many old-fashioned liberals at that time recognized the totalitarian nature of Marcuse’s formula. Leszek Kolakowski observed that the ultimate object of Marcuse’s ideology was “Marxism as a Totalitarian Utopia. . . . the freedom he advocates is non-freedom.”

Here we are now in 2012, and we see mobs of left-wingers still pursuing the Marcusean totalitarian formula: Smash the opponent “through a plate glass window,” as Spencer Ackerman infamously said, and do not scruple about the means to the end. If one imagines that the Right is Evil by definition, then defeat the Right “by any means necessary,” to employ a favorite slogan of the Left.

Ten days ago, Daniel Vergara committed libel against me — and Twitter has still done nothing about Vergara’s defamation.

Yesterday, a left-wing online mob attacked Chris Loesch, and Twitter suspended Loesch’s account. When conservatives rallied under Ben Howe’s #FreeChrisLoesch banner, Loesch was briefly reinstated, but continued agitation from the left-wing Twitter trolls resulted in a second suspension. If this could happen to such a prominent person, whose wife is a paid contributor to CNN, what do you suppose happens to smaller, less influential figures online?

As Twitchy documents, these attacks have happened to many conservatives, and Twitter has done nothing to stop it.

Anneke Green reports the story at The Washington Times. Now a Memeorandum thread, with commentary from Hot Air and Nice Deb.

Conservatives must defend free speech now, before the Left uses Marcusean “liberating tolerance” to silence all opposition.

UPDATE: Darleen Click on the Twitter troll tactics:

They even believe they “own” certain hashtags and target conservatives who engage, mockingly or seriously, in “their” space.
Sister Toldjah was able to uncover one of the “hit lists” and, scroll down and you’ll find me and Serr8d on the list.

She’s exactly right: The Left wanted to “own” the #OWS and #Occupy Twitter hashtags, and when conservatives began using those tags to promote stories documenting the criminal violence of the Occupy movement, the Left became enraged. Well, they were enraged already, I guess, but they went into an especially demented sort of frenzy at being unable to control the “narrative” of the Occupy movement.

UPDATE II: Da Tech Guy sees Soviet tactics by the Left, while Dan Collins discusses the possibility that the White House is orchestrating such attacks. One need not believe that to understand that Our President has done nothing to discourage the Left’s venomous hatefulness and has, indeed, in many ways fomented it.

Category: #Occupy, Dana Loesch, Michelle Malkin, Progressivism, Twitchy

Comments

42 Responses to “When Trolls Attack: Marcusean Mob Gets @ChrisLoesch Bounced from Twitter”

James Knauer
April 30th, 2012 @ 10:36 am

Conservatives will lose any “twitter war” simply due to being vastly outnumbered.
Bob Belvedere
April 30th, 2012 @ 10:38 am

You’re back, I see.

Are you participating in this ‘Liberating Tolerance’, by chance?
ThePaganTemple
April 30th, 2012 @ 10:47 am

I was on Twitter last night and happened on this. I think he got his account back, or he might have started a new one. The leftist scumbuckets have been after Dana as well.

The best way to fight leftist progressive traitors on Twitter is by use of the #hashtag. RT some of their greatest hits in the meantime. You’re not attacking any single one of them directly, and also using their own tweets against them.

Me, personally, I’d like to see most of them buried in the same mass grave I know they’d love to put all of us in, but for now at least, little things like this will just have to do.
Zilla of the Resistance
April 30th, 2012 @ 10:58 am

You think that’s bad, why don’t you have a look sometime at what the fuckers have been doing to me and The Lonely Conservative?
Adobe_Walls
April 30th, 2012 @ 11:06 am

Well it isn’t as if we didn’t already know that we needed to abolish twitter.
Edwd. Haas
April 30th, 2012 @ 11:33 am

It was not only old fashioned liberals who were unnerved by Marcuse’s idea of “tolerance.” ‘One Sixties radical, Theodore Roszak as one example, curtly observed that ideas of “this vintage” (a reference to Stalinism, I suppose), rarely needed the kind of elaborate intellectual infrastructre that Marcuse developed. Totalitarianism could be stated much more simply.
ThePaganTemple
April 30th, 2012 @ 11:34 am

There are a lot of conservatives on Twitter, I like it myself. Where else can you go to piss off Charles Johnson and Keith Olbermann so badly they take the time to ban you from following them?
Stupidity Tableaux
April 30th, 2012 @ 11:34 am

[…] from these crude mechanisms of censorship, the idiot left has other ideas, and this leads me to remark on the latest round of Lysistrategy. […]
vermontaigne
April 30th, 2012 @ 11:36 am

Well, fuck . . . why am I not on the list?
Datechguy's Blog » Blog Archive » Soviet tactics and the Totalatarian left on twitter » Datechguy's Blog
April 30th, 2012 @ 11:42 am

[…] on twitter beat them time and time again have decided to abuse the reporting system to shut down debate: the Left has begun organizing stalker mobs to falsely report conservatives for […]
vermontaigne
April 30th, 2012 @ 11:44 am

I linked you up in my latest post, on that very subject.
vermontaigne
April 30th, 2012 @ 11:50 am

Hahahahahaaaaa! Good one.
JHo
April 30th, 2012 @ 11:57 am

Well Dan, you do grasp that 20% outnumbers the plurality, right? In morality, if nothing else.
Twitter: Where Dissent is Punished. « Andrew J. Patrick
April 30th, 2012 @ 11:57 am

[…] McCain offers the Marcusian rationale for silencing people in the name of tolerance. At Protein Wisdom, Darleen Click notes the “hit […]
James Knauer
April 30th, 2012 @ 12:33 pm

I do not use social media of any kind. The Patriot Act and DHS are enough intrusion, thanks, as these are, you know, actual threats to our freedoms.
Adobe_Walls
April 30th, 2012 @ 12:51 pm

The policy of Obscenely Disproportionate Over Reaction will require sacrifice.
ThePaganTemple
April 30th, 2012 @ 1:01 pm

Who is this nut, another pole smoker or just an all-purpose leftist traitor?
ThePaganTemple
April 30th, 2012 @ 1:03 pm

Liberals have always believed conservatives were backwards, intolerant and bigoted, and as such their views were not worth discussing in polite company. The only difference between them and Marcuse, in my opinion, is he stated it openly.
Lib Mobs Use Twitter to Silence Conservatives | The Lonely Conservative
April 30th, 2012 @ 1:12 pm

[…] all of the outlets reporting on the incident, including NewsBusters, HotAir, The Washington Times, The Other McCain, iOwnTheWorld, The Conservatory, Daily Pundit and DaTechGuy. It’s also the top story at […]
JeffWeimer
April 30th, 2012 @ 1:21 pm

Like how we lost the #ObamaEatsDogs war? Or the #DontDoubleMyRate war? How about getting pummeled by #AttackWatch?

Lessee; 40% of nation “Conservative”, 20% “Liberal”. Ergo – outnumbered!
Adjoran
April 30th, 2012 @ 1:28 pm

Twitter is going to have to change the “self-policing” rules, or this stuff will not stop, especially in an election year where the far left sees all their gains at risk.

They aren’t even doing it in the open – many of the complaints are coming from new accounts just opened with no followers and following no one. Makes you wonder how they ever found something to be offended by! But it’s done to preserve their anonymity and as protection in case Twitter catches on to what they are doing.

Which comes make to the basic thesis: leftists are scum; we cannot persuade them, we cannot negotiate or discuss anything with them. We can only kill them, or they will kill us.
ThePaganTemple
April 30th, 2012 @ 1:34 pm

many of the complaints are coming from new accounts just opened with no followers and following no one.

Those are the ones you know to ignore.
DonaldDouglas
April 30th, 2012 @ 1:45 pm

Great post!
Edwd. Haas
April 30th, 2012 @ 1:58 pm

O.K., but to give Marcuse his due (which is more than he’d give his ideological adversaries), he did analyze the links between liberalism and fascism better than anyone else in the nineteen thirties and forties, some of which is collected in “Negations” which may still be in print. These new-fangled grass roots left wing assaults on speech (an atrocious transplant from Europe to America) were a sort of fantasy to Marcuse–but maybe those John Bircher’s who were after him in La Jolla were onto something.
TR
April 30th, 2012 @ 1:59 pm

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube Google, etc in fact all ‘social media’ are owned by “idealistic” leftist billionaires. In the end conservatives are going to face problems like this over and over.

Breitbart or Glenn Reynolds (or someone who has money and technology) should endeavor to make parallel platforms that attract purely political operators and then (maybe in someway with overide of somekind) be better able to eliminate the banning and discretionary problems that those platforms above have.

In particular Facebook is a tool of many leftist and violent groups, while sometimes honest (right-leaning) videos are booted because of political choices.
Bob Belvedere
April 30th, 2012 @ 2:43 pm

I did too, Zilla.
Bob Belvedere
April 30th, 2012 @ 2:46 pm

Dead solid perfect.
richard mcenroe
April 30th, 2012 @ 3:15 pm

Unless of course, you’re Twitter.
richard mcenroe
April 30th, 2012 @ 3:19 pm

The problem here is, we got lucky this time and the moron lefties couldn’t sit on their impulse control long enough to save this tactic for, oh, say a week before the election.

Twitter’s management skews left; no secret we have to organize a mechanism to teach them that this is going to be personally expensive for Twitter, as in developing a similar mechanism to shut down corporate or lefty celebrity accounts. One of ours goes down, so does Alex Baldwin, and so on…

If Twitter faces a legitimate threat of being shut down completely right before the election (or the Oscars or Grammies or whatever), they will have a real fine incentive to put safeguards in place.
ThePaganTemple
April 30th, 2012 @ 3:32 pm

I’d rather leave the leftist accounts up, so long as they don’t get too threatening, or spam, inflict viruses and trojans, etc. In fact, its better that they do what they do so we can present it as an example of their “tolerance” and “inclusiveness”. It’s all the same anyway. When they saw they couldn’t ban conservatives they’d go nuts, stark raving batshit insane, and then they’d act even worse and give us even better examples of their crap to present to the world at large. Whereas if we ban them, they’d just say we couldn’t handle the “debate”, yada yada yada.
Bob Belvedere
April 30th, 2012 @ 5:23 pm

I have to admit to feeling a slight pang of disappointment when I didn’t see my name there.
Adobe_Walls
April 30th, 2012 @ 8:11 pm

We’re soooo misunderstood. I don’t want them to understand us I just want them living under bridges is at all.
Adobe_Walls
April 30th, 2012 @ 8:13 pm

Sounds like a plan.
What makes anyone think that twitter wants it too stop?
richard mcenroe
April 30th, 2012 @ 8:15 pm

Ditto. I have to settle for setting them frothing in public in Los Angeles.
Adobe_Walls
April 30th, 2012 @ 8:17 pm

Let them say what they want. The world at large doesn’t care much one way or another but skews against us but many would just rather both sides would STFU so they don’t have to choose.
ThePaganTemple
April 30th, 2012 @ 8:33 pm

Yeah, but if you ban them, what’s the point of having a conservative run version of Twitter? To me, half the fun-well, all right, all the fun-would be in giving them all kinds of shit and watching them go apeshit when they realized they couldn’t ban us, nor would there be any damn thing else they could do about it.

Even better, their rants could be saved and archived, so if they complained about what we said to them, we would have that record to counter with.
Um… About That Twitter Mess | Goldfish and Clowns
April 30th, 2012 @ 11:41 pm

[…] Twitter fight that boiled over yesterday and carried through into today. Several writers such as Stacy McCain and the Lonely Conservative have already extensively written about the matter, and I defer to […]
Adobe_Walls
April 30th, 2012 @ 11:46 pm

You write as if they are sentient beings capable of comprehending hypocrisy.
ThePaganTemple
May 1st, 2012 @ 12:32 am

No, but they are damn sure capable of realizing when they’re having their asses handed to them, and nothing beats that, with the knowledge there’s not a damn thing they can do about it. Why spoil the fun by banning them? Sure, there are some that banning might be called for. But for the most part, let them rant and rave like the asylum lunatics everyone else knows they are whether they do or not.
Adobe_Walls
May 1st, 2012 @ 11:10 am

I doubt they can be aware of even that.
The purpose of abolishing (not the same as banning) Twitter is to make leftism unprofitable.
Quartermaster
May 1st, 2012 @ 12:29 pm

Y’all just ain’t conservative enough.
ThePaganTemple
May 1st, 2012 @ 12:36 pm

@Adobe_Walls:disqus

Oh, well we’ve been talking about two different things. I was talking about what it might be like if conservatives started our own version of Twitter, and how we should treat leftists who might use it. You’re talking about doing away with Twitter.

I wouldn’t want to do away with Twitter, I enjoy using it from time to time. You just have to know who and what to avoid. I haven’t been kicked off yet, and I’ve pissed off quite a few well-known leftists. So it can’t be that bad.