The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Oh, Dear God: Barrett Brown Again!

Posted on | July 13, 2021 | Comments Off on Oh, Dear God: Barrett Brown Again!

2012: Barrett Brown calmly explains why he’s going to ‘destroy’ an FBI agent

Longtime readers will remember Barrett Brown, the former “Anonymous” spokesman who went to federal prison after a September 2012 incident in which he threatened an FBI agent’s family in a bizarre 13-minute video rant on YouTube. That episode went down while I was trying to cover the 2012 presidential election, but Barrett had been threatening me (and also Patterico) in connection with some of the weirdness swirling around Neal Rauhauser, which is a very long story.

My habit, from decades in the news business, is to operate in “file it and forget it” mode. Once I’m through covering a story, I forget about it and move on, and this would certainly apply to Barrett Brown, if he could just go somewhere and stop bothering people. Prison would be best, but the feds had to turn him loose (“Notoriously Crazy Felon Barrett Brown Has Been Released From Federal Prison,” Nov. 29, 2016) and a couple years ago, he showed up in the comments here with a bunch of paranoid accusations (“Is Barrett Brown Back on the Junk?” July 1, 2019). Did I mention he’s a heroin addict? Because whether or not he is back to his old junkie habits, the symptoms of organic brain damage caused by Barrett’s years of substance abuse are readily apparent.

Can you say “impaired judgment,” boys and girls?

The American journalist Barrett Brown has been arrested and detained in the UK for allegedly overstaying his visa and for alleged public order and incitement offences relating to his role in holding a protest banner which said: “Kill Cops.”
Police arrested Brown on Monday at a canal boat moored in east London, where he had been living for several months with a British woman. He was interviewed and released on bail the following day, but immediately detained by immigration authorities.
Brown told the Guardian he intended to claim asylum in the UK. . . .
Brown said he had been in Britain since November. His profile in London grew last month when he was photographed without a mask at a protest against a new crime bill. . . .

Barrett Brown in London, April 3, 2021

Hey, if you’re a convicted felon in a foreign country on an expired visa, maybe holding up a “KILL COPS” banner is not such a good idea.

Oh, but Barrett is an “investigative journalist,” see?

Speaking to the Guardian [May 21] from Brook House immigration removal centre near Gatwick airport, 28 miles south of London, Brown said two of the alleged offenses for which he was arrested concerned the banner.
He said that . . . police turned up at Bow Locks, on the River Lea in a rundown eastern district of the city, after his fiancée left for a coronavirus vaccine appointment.
Brown said he intended to claim asylum in the UK on the basis that he had been persecuted in the US for his journalism.
“The asylum case is something I’ve been thinking of doing for a couple of months,” he said, “because I’m just not confident in the US’s ability to properly handle me, any more than they did last time.”

What “journalism” has Barrett done lately that anyone would bother to “persecute” him for? Heroin addicts are not noted for their productivity, and if Barrett’s byline has appeared anywhere the past two years, I must have missed it, but it’s not like he’s been exposing some dark government secrets that would result in him being “persecuted.”

As recently as a year ago, he spent a month in rehab and — here’s that impaired judgment symptom of his brain damage again — then apparently decided to travel via Antigua to London in order to crash on a houseboat in a river on the bad side of town with a “fiancee” (likely some credulous bimbo impressed by the famous America “investigative journalist”) then overstayed his visa, a crime he might have gotten away with, had it not been for his genius idea to show up at a public protest holding a “KILL COPS” sign. Now he wants to play persecuted martyr by forcing the British government to grant him asylum, and I can only hope he succeeds. Farewell and adieu, Barrett! Go somewhere — anywhere will do — load up on narcotics and nod off like the hopeless junkie you are, and stop bothering the rest of us with your self-aggrandizing drama.

Someday he’ll die of an OD, and nobody will bother to notice.




 

Category: Barrett Brown

Comments

Comments are closed.