Category: Andrew Breitbart

A jolly inspirational fellow.

Vile Lie-Peddler @Karoli Kuns and the Posthumous Vindication of Breitbart

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“Liberal bias is not a matter of unfairness, but rather a matter of dishonesty — deliberately ignoring some facts, and misrepresenting other facts, in order to misinform the public by portraying to them a politically falsified view of events and personalities. If there were ever any honest person employed by the New York Times (we stipulate the hypothetical), that person would have been obligated to quit Thursday morning [July 25], when the banner headline on the front page of the paper should have been: ‘ANDREW BREITBART WAS RIGHT.'”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “Beauty, Brains and Bias,” The American Spectator, July 26

Andrew Breitbart had a special contempt for Karoli Kuns, whose hatefulness and ignorance are exceeded only by her stunning dishonesty. Of course, there is no such thing as an honest Democrat, but the vile lies peddled by Karoli Kuns are especially odious because she has made a habit of hatefully smearing honest and decent people.

It’s formulaic: Anyone who tells the truth, Karoli Kuns calls a liar, while she reserves her highest praise for people whose dishonesty is notorious. And speaking of Neal Rauhauser, here is how Karoli Kuns praised the head “Weiner Truther” in November 2012:

From the moment the Anthony Weiner scandal broke, Neal Rauhauser smelled a rat, and as it turns out, he was right. . . .
I’m certain the Breitbots expected all left-wing outrage over the setup to evaporate when Rep. Weiner resigned. . . .
One person wouldn’t let it go, and that one person was Neal Rauhauser, who kept on with it and keeps on with it until this day.

Well, well, well, Karoli Kuns. Seems you’ve changed your tune, eh?

Whereas in 2012, you were certain that Anthony Weiner was an innocent victim of a “setup” by “Breitbots” — and thus, Weiner’s defender Neal Rauhauser was deserving of praise — now that Andrew Breitbart has been vindicated and Anthony Weiner has been disgraced, you say the Weiner story is “not of national concern.”

Because you peddle vile lies, that’s why.

There was never any “setup” of Anthony Weiner by anyone. All honest and intelligent people recognized this in 2011, but Neal Rauhauser manufactured a series of lies intended to deceive the ignorant and Rauhauser was, as you say, the one person who “wouldn’t let it go.” He was the acknowledged leader of “Weiner Truthers” and he kept lying about Andrew Breitbart even after Breitbart was dead.

Karoli Kuns of Ventura, California, interviewed on GRITtv, 2010

Were you stupid enough to believe Neal Rauhauser’s lies about Andrew Breitbart, Karoli Kuns? I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, and instead conclude that you knew Rauhauser was lying — as any intelligent person would — and deliberately helped him peddle vile lies, because that’s all you’ve ever done in your entire life.

And here’s the truly interesting thing, Karoli Kuns: The title of that dishonest 3,000-word November 2012 blog post of yours didn’t even mention either Andrew Breitbart or Anthony Weiner.

Neal Rauhauser, Brett Kimberlin,
and a Right Wing Blueprint

Isn’t that interesting, Karoli Kuns? Your entire purpose was to defend the notorious liar Neal Rauhauser and the convicted felon Brett Kimberlin.

And how did you do that? You peddled vile lies.

Here’s what you wrote about Neal Rauhauser:

Neal Rauhauser in particular has been robbed of his ability to earn a living simply because right wing bloggers decided to make him the devil incarnate with no evidence, no actual wrongdoing, and no foundation in truth.

“No foundation in truth”? When were you ever interested in truth, Karoli Kuns? I would ask you to go read “‘A Faint Whiff of Vigilante Hysteria’: Weinergate’s Kimberlin Connection,” if I thought you were interested in truth, but you’re not now and never have been.

Rauhauser hasn’t been “robbed of his ability to earn a living.” Certainly “right wing bloggers” have not prevented any liberal group from hiring Rauhauser. The problem is, Neal is so compulsively dishonest even liberals don’t want to work with him. Which is amazing, considering some of them don’t mind being associated with you.

As for your “who are we to judge” attitude toward Brett Kimberlin — “Whatever the truth about Kimberlin’s past is,” as if the facts weren’t actually known — there are a couple of important names missing from your account: Julia Scyphers and Carl DeLong. Once people know about Julia Scyphers and Carl DeLong, it tends to affect their attitude about Brett Kimberlin. Not in a good way, either.

Hey, did you know Tetyana Kimberlin fears for her life?

Please don’t pay any attention to the facts, Karoli Kuns.

All honest and decent people share Andrew Breitbart’s contempt for you, but whatever you do, don’t ever repent your vile lies.

Because we wouldn’t want you to save your soul from Hell.

 

FLASHBACK: Breitbart to Blumenthal: ‘You’re a Despicable Human Being’

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Following up on the Mona Eltahawy meltdown, Donald Douglas is celebrating the 4th of July fireworks and I promised I’d dig up video of Andrew Breitbart’s epic shaming of Max Blumenthal at CPAC. Yeah, Andrew nailed Max for all time in 2010:

“You’re ridiculous. You are a joke. You’re a despicable human being. You are the lowest life-form that I’ve ever seen.”

Makes you want to order that DVD of Hating Breitbart, doesn’t it?

“Memories light the corners of my mind . . .”

 

Why Is the New York Times Now Campaigning for Anthony Weiner?

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First, the dishonest puff-piece feature, now a transparent “news” plug for Congressman Meat-Tweet. What’s going on here? I’ve got a few hunches about their motives, but no time to explain my theory just now. But there was time for Neutral Objective Journalism at ViralRead:

The New York Times has attempted to assist Weiner’s political rehabilitation, publishing an 8,000-word profile feature about the Democrat who resigned in June 2011 after he was caught sending photos of his bulging underwear to women via Twitter.That article in Sunday’s New York Times magazine was denounced by popular conservative blogger Ace of Spades as “a deliberate lie from start to finish” because of how the story by Jonathan Van Meter obscured the role of the late Andrew Breitbart in exposing Weiner. Breitbart.com was the first news organization to report on the so-called “WeinerGate” scandal. Van Meter’s article disparages Breitbart as a “not entirely reputable right-wing blogger.” Monday, Breitbart.com featured on its front page a lengthy account of WeinerGate excerpted from Andrew Breitbart’s book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World.

 

 


‘It’s Really Astonishing. It’s Just a Deliberate Lie From Start to Finish.’

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So says Ace of Spades about the way the New York Times re-writes the history of the Anthony Weiner cybersex scandal.

In a just world, Jonathan Van Meter of the New York Times — and every editor who signed off on this thoroughly dishonest article — would be fired, and effectively blackballed from the industry like Jason Blair and Stephen Glass, for engaging in such a vicious distortion of facts.

Everyone who knows what actually happened must be outraged by Van Meter’s underhanded attempt to revive the Weiner-Truther “hack” theory, by quoting Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin: “Anthony had told me in the past that there were these sort of trolls on the Internet who were trying to damage him, take him down.” And then this hateful lie:

It wasn’t such an implausible theory; after all, it was the not entirely reputable right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart who broke the story.

“Here Mr. Disgraced Democrat, let me help you blame this on your enemies by smearing the dead man who exposed you.”

Beyond this, Van Meter deliberately misstates the chronology of revelations, denying Breitbart credit for the impact of his reporting on the Texas woman who had also received Weiner’s dirty pictures, a key development that Breitbart gave as an exclusive to ABC News to break the story first. Ace of Spades nails it:

What they’re doing is mixing up the timing of Breitbart’s scoop — that there were other women, and one was talking on the record with ABCNews, and that the case was now entirely proven– by mentioning Breitbart’s scoop and then June 1, as if June 1st followed Breitbart’s scoop.
Nope! Breitbart’s scoop came later — just before Weiner admitted it, hours before he admitted it. The scoop forced Weiner to admit it — but only because he had no other options left to him.
This fact is obscured by the Times’ deliberate misstatement of the chronology because they’re now going to pretend that Weiner chose the honorable course of admitting the cybersex, when in fact Breitbart’s scoop left this as the only remaining option, after all lies were rubbished.

Read the whole thing at AOSHQ, because this is simply heinous: The New York Times smearing a dead man, in a transparent effort to revive the career of this perverted self-destructive disgrace.

UPDATE: To explain why this angers me so much, I remember quite clearly what it was like during the first four or five days of the WeinerGate scandal, which broke over the Memorial Day weekend when Andrew Breitbart had promised his wife and family they’d get a vacation from the news. Instead, of course, he found himself up to his eyeballs in arguably the biggest story of his career.

Breitbart was the first news organization to report it, and Weiner’s office then used the hostility toward Breitbart as a defensive weapon to convince reporters that the infamous meat-tweet was a “distraction” fabricated by a hacker.

For the first 36 hours of this bizarre story, a lot of us — including right-wingers like myself — were treating this as essentially a technology story: Was it possible that Weiner’s account was hacked? Or, as I thought at the time, was it possible that a staffer who had access to Weiner’s Twitter account might have accidentally sent that picture to the Seattle coed? The first thing I was trying to do, in other words, was to figure out if there could be an innocent explanation, simply because the idea of a member of Congress sending dick-pics to a college girl seemed so wildly implausible.

I was scratching my head over this stuff on the afternoon of Sunday, May 30, when I thought, “Hey, I’ll call Andrew.”

Now, calling Breitbart was like using the Bat-signal. Andrew was totally accessible — he actually once gave out his personal cellphone number during a speech at a Tea Party rally — but you didn’t want to waste his time or make a nuisance of yourself by calling him unless it was really important. Over the five years I knew him, I probably only called him about two-dozen times. And on this Sunday before Memorial Day when I called Breitbart, he was supposed to be spending time with his family and we only talked for about three minutes.

So I was trying to figure out if there could be any innocent explanation for Weiner’s meat-tweet and tried to suggest such a possibility when Andrew cut me off: “No, Stacy, trust me — there’s more.”

Well, I didn’t know the backstory at that point, and Breitbart didn’t want to discuss the details, but it was that assurance — Breitbart already had the goods and was just biding his time to let the story play out — that made me understand it was only a matter of time before Weiner would be forced to confess and resign in disgrace.

That’s why, during all the crazy drama that ensued — the press conferences, the silly “Betty and Veronica” nonsense — my own coverage of WeinerGate was based on a confident knowledge of how the story would eventually end.

And now this lying swine, Jonathan Van Meter, is trying to deprive Andrew Breitbart of his due credit.

Like the man said: “Fuck you! War!”

UPDATE II: To help you remember how the deal went down, here’s the Fox News WeinerGate timeline, which is not exhaustive, but which does make clear what it was that led Weiner (who spent the first 10 days of the scandal telling lies) to finally confess the truth on Monday, June 6:

The scandal escalates as Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com website publishes photos purportedly from a second woman who said she received shirtless shots of the congressman. The site says the pictures were in a cache of intimate online photographs, chats and email exchanges the woman claimed to have. The website does not identify the woman.
Responding, a tearful Weiner makes a profuse public apology at a Manhattan news conference. He admits sending a photo of his underwear-clad crotch to a young woman over Twitter and then lying repeatedly to protect himself. . . .
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi calls for a House ethics investigation into whether he broke the rules. Democratic leaders voice disappointment and embarrassment, reflecting an erosion of support for Weiner.
Weiner insists he did nothing wrong, and begins making calls to Democratic colleagues to apologize. He says he has no plans to resign.

Well, Weiner may have had “no plans to resign,” but just as Andrew Breitbart had told me: “There’s more!”

 

 


Who Andrew Breitbart Was

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P.J. O’Rourke encounters Andrew Breitbart at the
Manchester, N.H., Radisson Bar, Saturday, Jan. 7, 2012

In May 2007, I interviewed Andrew Breitbart while he was working — doing his shift as an editor at the Drudge Report — at the D.C. offices of Reason magazine, and described how he worked and why he did it:

His computer pings with every new e-mail. His cell phone rings with calls from friends. Distractions surround Andrew Breitbart. Yet he remains focused on the latest happenings from around the world, flowing into his laptop computer via a half-dozen wire services and other news sources.
A self-described “news addict,” the 38-year-old Californian sips a Mountain Dew as he scans the latest headlines and talks about his journey from being a stereotypical Generation X slacker to being on the cutting edge of the 21st-century information revolution. . . .
“I’m a news addict, news aficionado who, instead of watching ‘Sesame Street’ growing up, would watch the local news. And I’d watch the 4:30 news, then I’d watch the 5 o’clock news, then I’d watch the 6 o’clock news, then I’d watch the national news at 6:30. . . . I was such a voracious news consumer.”

You can read the whole thing. There have been multiple tributes to Andrew today, the one year anniversary of his shockingly sudden death at age 43. Professor Glenn Reynolds has a round-up at Instapundit.

It’s important to remember, I think, that Breitbart was a self-professed “news addict” — not a politics addict or still less a Republican Party addict, which is what his enemies would very much love to demonize him as having been.

Any intelligent “news addict” (and Breitbart was extraordinarly intelligent) who approaches the business from an outsider’s perspective cannot help but observe the herd instinct of the media, and resent it: “Hey, look, big media — over here! There’s an interesting story you missed because it doesn’t fit your prefabricated template!”

 That’s really what it’s about. The fact that the big media’s herd instinct, insofar as it touches politics, is demonstrably about 90% partisan Democrat or ideologically liberal — that’s the niche Breitbart was filling, and also the source of his Righteous Indignation. But it’s wrong for the animals in the media herd to make that political difference a motive to smear Breitbart as they did during his life and as they have continued to do after his death.

Whose bias is the real problem here?

To assert that Breitbart’s liberal critics hated him for something other than politics is to tell a lie, just as it was a lie for liberals to smear the Tea Party as “racist.”

At some point, the cumulative weight of such dishonesty becomes a negative verdict on the credibility of those who tell these lies. And the Democrat-Media Complex, by its incessant partisan cheerleading, becomes responsible for the policy failures of the party whose propaganda it delivers as if it were Neutral Objective Fact.

Well, I need to hurry up and post this before midnight, and I’ll come back later to extend it with updates and links to other tributes, but I just had to get that off my chest first. Right now, frankly, I’m kind of depressed by this news:

A range of mainstream American publications printed paid propaganda for the government of Malaysia, much of it focused on the campaign against a pro-democracy figure there.
The payments to conservative American opinion writers — whose work appeared in outlets from the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner to the Washington Times to National Review and RedState — emerged in a filing this week to the Department of Justice. The filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act outlines a campaign spanning May 2008 to April 2011 and led by Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit, who received $389,724.70 under the contract and paid smaller sums to a series of conservative writers.
According to Trevino’s belated federal filing, the interests paying Trevino were in fact the government of Malaysia, “its ruling party, or interests closely aligned with either.” . . .

You can read the whole thing, and all I’ve got to say about it is, damn. Just . . . damn.

UPDATE: Rick Bulow makes an important point:

Like Andrew said at CPAC last year, “If you’re not in that bunker because you’re not satisfied with a certain candidate, more than shame on you! You’re on the other side!”

This is a point that I’ve certainly come to appreciate — and I think all of us should appreciate more — in the past year. During the long primary campaign, some conservatives got so into the “Anybody But Mitt” mindset that they simply couldn’t let it go. In the four months since Election Day, there has been an endless round of finger-pointing and told-ya-so’s that haven’t done anything useful toward organizing victory or, at least, staunching the bleeding.

So, yeah — get in the fight, or you’re on the other side.

UPDATE II: At the annual CPAC Blog Bash last year, the National Bloggers Club awarded Andrew Breitbart the “Changing the Narrative” Award — the only award he ever received for his work as a journalist. This year and henceforth it will be known as Andrew Breitbart’s Changing the Narrative Award.

UPDATE III: Dana Loesch remembers:

It was easy to be brave with Andrew around. People drew from his courage when theirs had dissipated. He likened himself to a rodeo clown, of all things. I want to share something for which I’ve never gotten to thank him, which has really bothered me. . . .

You really, really need to read the whole thing. As was said of a great general, he saw the whole field.

 

Credit Where Credit Is Due: Breitbart, Beck and the Dana Loesch Lawsuit

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Back in the Day: Andrew Breitbart was a guest on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show

In April 2011, Matthew Boyle of the Daily Caller reported that Glenn Beck had been accused of using bloggers’ content without attribution:

Mandy Nagy, a conservative blogger known online as Liberty Chick, spent untold hours last fall creating a chart that tracks left-wing billionaire George Soros’s influence over media organizations, only to see it appear, in its exact form and without any attribution, on Beck’s famous chalkboard. “We were laughing that he went to all the trouble of [recreating] the visual on the blackboard,” Nagy said, not sounding entirely amused.
John Sexton, who blogs at VerumSerum.com, has provided Beck with material several times, and has sometimes received credit for it. But in several other cases, Sexton says, “he’s used our stuff without any hat tip at all. I don’t understand that.” According to Sexton, in one instance even famously liberal CBS News credited VerumSerum.com for content it used, while Beck, who lifted the same material, did not.
Pamela Geller of AtlasShrugs.com recalls watching Beck use a story she wrote about campaign contributions the Obama campaign received from donors in Gaza. Many other publications referred to the story, Geller says, but only Beck refused to give her credit for it.
“I went through thousands of pages of FEC documents and it was an enormous task to uncover the campaign contributions from Gaza, a Hamas-controlled area, to President Obama,” Geller says. “It’s in my book and it wasn’t a secret that I wrote the story. I don’t know how to describe such outrageous and proud thievery. I like his work, but he’s a thief.”

You can read the whole thing. Let’s be clear that Glenn Beck is certainly not the only broadcaster or journalist who has been accused of failing to give adequate credit to the work of others, and bloggers especially get used to being shortchanged by the big shots.

That April 2011 article, however, was sort of an Empire Strikes Back episode in what became a widespread backlash against Beck after he had a falling-out with Andrew Breitbart. And this is relevant now because, as I reported Christmas Eve, “people are telling me that it was Glenn Beck who wanted to hire Dana Loesch away from Breitbart.com,” and Dana has filed a federal lawsuit against Breitbart.com.

Let’s be clear (a) there’s a whole lot of backstory to this, which may never be entirely known, and (b) I cannot verify that there were actually any negotiations between Dana and Beck — it’s just what “people are telling me.” Obviously the plaintiff in a lawsuit can’t talk about it, and nobody at either Breitbart.com or Beck’s operation has said a word about it. Then again, I haven’t gotten any angry e-mails denying it, so . . .

In order to understand why Breitbart.com might take especial umbrage at the idea of Dana Loesch leaving to join Glenn Beck’s rival New Media operation, it helps to listen to a podcast interview Andrew Breitbart recorded in December 2011 with Stephen K. Bannon.

Because Bannon is now executive chairman of Breitbart.com, this is a very important interview. Becca J. Lower and Danielle Saul have provided a full transcript, which I briefly excerpt here:

Breitbart: [T]here are a lot of Beck supporters. In the past, Beck has made a lot of mistakes and his supporters come out and try to defend him, because Beck is a coward and will not defend himself when he makes a mistake or lies about a person or steals content —
Bannon: Hold on, I want to go back over this: you’re saying that Glenn Beck’s a coward, Glenn Beck’s a liar, and you’re saying that Glenn Beck steals material from people?
Breitbart: Oh yes, and this is well-documented. And whenever he does it, he never answers to the charges. He’s a coward. He won’t have me on the radio show, he won’t have himself [and] me on GBTV, refused to have me on Fox when he threw me under the bus. During the Sherrod thing, I asked to be on TV or radio to explain why he had it wrong. Months later, we found out why he wouldn’t have me on is because he lied to his audience on television that he didn’t do the Sherrod story. . . . In order to rectify the situation, he went on TV and tried to pretend like he was above the fray and told O’Reilly, to his face, a lie . . .
He also has historically been found to take countless bloggers’ content, to turn it into book gold, to turn it into chalkboard gold . . .He will not answer to the charges, and his minions online like to defend him. . . .

You can — and certainly should — read the whole thing.

 

PREVIOUSLY:

 


Further Tales of ‘Heroic Hatred’: Down the Rabbit Hole With Neal Rauhauser

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Neal Rauhauser was a speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference

“I’ve been all over Patterico for the last several weeks, as he looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate . . .”
— Neal Rauhauser (“Stranded Wind”), Daily Kos, “Weinergate Perps Pay Dearly,”July 27, 2011

Patterico comments on the habits of sociopathic monsters: “I have seen this exact pattern play itself out, again and again.” One of his commenters offers a helpful comparison:

Like Richard Dawkin’s attacks on religion — completely irrational and hateful but he justifies it by claiming that he’s opposing something hateful and irrational.

Is the hatred of religion a coincidental aspect of this problem? Let us recall that Barrett Brown, the former “Anonymous” spokesman who was arrested in September after an online video meltdown, was once the communication director of the atheist group Enlighten the Vote (a/k/a, Godless Americans Political Action Committee). Brown’s atheism and his insuperable arrogance were hand and glove: Assuming that religious people are ignorant bigots, to whom he was infinitely superior, Barrett then proceeded to a series of assumptions that seemed to him equally plausible, ultimately including the erroneous assumption that he could get away with threatening to “destroy” an FBI agent’s life.

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

Along his path to destruction, Barrett Brown let himself fall under the sway of Neal Rauhauser (a/k/a, “Carlito2000”) and was drawn into Rauhauser’s paranoid fantasies involving HB Gary, Jennifer Emick, Tom Ryan, et al. This brings us back around to something that will surely be of further interest to Patterico. Mike Stack today posted a message to someone who is engaged in a feud with Emick:

Neal Rauhauser is the reason I was SWAT-ted.
Your girlfriend is friends with Neal. . . .
You have a long-standing war with Jen Emick and the only reason that she was thrown into the mix was because again of what Neal Rauhauser did with the Michigan Police Department.

Stack was the first victim of SWATting in the wake of the WeinerGate scandal. Rauhauser became obsessed with the idea that Weiner was the victim of a hoax, eventually focusing on Patterico as the alleged mastermind of the (wholly imaginary) conspiracy against Weiner. In the comments of Stack’s post today, someone linked to a Pastebin document from August, transcribing an online chat in which Rauhauser (using the alias “BangoSkank”) was trying to gather information on his enemies. A few key excerpts:

20:59 you want a Maltego graph of this stuff? . . .
21:00 yer smack in the middle, I started with nachash dox
21:00 and melded it into my other stuff . . .
21:11 This Maltego graph is sort of the top level map
21:11 for the last two years, for me
21:12 There is a federal grand jury in D.C. and I presume one attached to the cyber task force in Chicago . . .
21:12 this graph contains what I know about the subjects, and I have left a number of their associates who appear only due to social media link analysis . . .
21:23 New York grand jury, too. Forgot that one.
21:23 So that’s a map of those I think may be culpable, their close associates, and then a ring of Twitter accounts that are well connected enough that they are interesting for comparison’s sake when I get new information . . .
22:19 I did this in an iterative fashion for the cluster of groups I watch
22:19 and then one day one of those connected eggs
22:19 matched a twitter account that pulled up when I brought a mailing list into Gist
22:20 and then the light came on, because it was the third time a specific funding source had popped up on the graph . . .
22:21 NY grand jury, DC grand jury, Chicago cyber task force
22:21 and it all come back around to the same central place

OK, you’re asking, “What the heck is Rauhauser talking about?” And I can’t fully answer that question, however (a) Rauhauser has repeatedly claimed to have high-level law enforcement contacts, (b) Rauhauser has routinely asserted that his enemies, including Patterico and others, are the targets of federal investigations, and (c) this particular online chat took place just a few weeks before Barrett Brown’s meltdown.

What Rauhauser seemed to be focused on in that particular chat were a number of enemies of “Anonymous,” including Emick, William Welna and various of their supposed associates. At one point, Rauhauser made this comment about “White Hat” hacker Thomas Ryan:

22:50 I catch Ryan from behind, he gets a skull fracture with something good and heavy

Hey, why the hate, Neal? Oh, maybe it’s because in October 2011, Ryan obtained “Occupy Wall Street” leadership planning e-mails that were published by Andrew Breitbart! And we remember that Rauhauser was involved (representing himself as an agent of Brett Kimberlin’s “Velvet Revolution” non-profit) in the “Occupy” movement.

So whereas Neal Rauhauser was allied with the “Occupy” thugs, Ryan was allied with Andrew Breitbart and opponents of “Occupy.”

In August, Neal was claiming that his enemies were under investigation by federal grand juries and a Chicago-based federal “cyber task force.” What happened instead? Within a matter of weeks, after Rauhauser tried to sic Barrett Brown onto his enemies, Brown melted down and was arrested on federal charges. At one point during his 13-minute video rant, Brown accused Thomas Ryan of being an “FBI informant.”

Think about this for a minute: In Barrett Brown’s perverse worldview, being an FBI informant — i.e., helping law enforcement investigate crime — makes someone an agent of evil.

Similarly, in Rauhauser’s worldview, Thomas Ryan deserves a “skull fracture,” while Patterico (who is himself an agent of law enforcement) can be falsely accused by Rauhauser of criminal wrongdoing — a “perp“! — and yet Rauhauser, having shown himself willing to lie to accomplish his purposes, expects his political allies to view him sympathetically as the victim of a “wingnut” conspiracy.

People like Brown and Rauhauser inhabit an inverted moral universe, where those who obey and uphold the law are the villains, while criminals — including Rauhauser’s associate, “Speedway Bomber” Brett Kimberlin — are noble and heroic warriors against “wingnuts.”

At any rate, the commenter at Mike Stack’s blog who linked the Pastebin document asks of Rauhauser, “Can you just see this wanker in court trying to sell his ever-changing conspiracy theories?” Read it for a laugh. We have not heard the last of Neal.

 

Sociopathic Monsters: ‘Heroic Hatred’

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In September, Ladd Ehlinger Jr. published “A Breathtaking Lack of Empathy,” an attempt to explain Neal Rauhauser’s sociopathic tendencies:

He thinks of people as playthings to be toyed with. By categorizing them as “trolls” he can do to them whatever he wishes, and creates all sorts of elaborate games to entrap them. His revelry in their misery is quite apparent, justified by dehumanizing those he manipulates.

This dehumanization of his targets — viewing them as objects — is characteristic of the sociopath, and Rauhauser’s delight in playing “conflict cupid” (inciting others to attack his targets) displays the sadistic aspect of his warped personality. Ehlinger noted Rauhauser’s aptitude for recruiting similarly deviant characters to assist him in his malicious projects. Among Neal’s most persistent henchpeople is “Occupy Rebellion,” who recently decided to share this in the comments at a pro-Kimberlin site (which I won’t link, for obvious reasons):

We have every single right to mock Andrew Breitbart and any other Breitbart trash who dies. Since THEY are the ones who mock people’s deaths every single day. . . . Andrew Breitbart was a career criminal who made it his mission to destroy people & their families. . . .
NO ONE linked to Breitbart has the right to ever claim their “victims” of anything. NO ONE linked to Breitbart has the right to ever “grieve” for anyone they know who died. NO ONE CARES. We should only “grieve” if it’s Breitbart trash who dies but not for anyone else??

Here you have someone utterly dehumanizing not only the late Andrew Breitbart, but also anyone who ever associated with him.

This is how damaged people become monsters: They externalize their inner feelings of worthlessness as hatred of demonized scapegoats, whom they construct in their own minds as symbols of wrong, so that doing evil to the scapegoat is (in their twisted thinking) an act of righteousness. In the perverted mind of the obsessive sociopath, hatred of the scapegoat is thereby endowed with a heroic quality.

The peculiar “heroic hatred” directed at Andrew Breitbart by these monsters is not merely the product of politics, but rather an obverse reflection of their own damaged egos: Breitbart was famous and successful; they are obscure failures; his fame and success must therefore be re-imagined by them as unjust and symbolically evil.

What is striking — and, in a weird ironic way, a tribute to Breitbart’s greatness — is how this obsessive hatred has persisted even after Breitbart’s death, so that now Rauhauser, “Occupy Rebellion” and others (most of them involved with the “Weiner Truther” cult) have transferred their “heroic hatred” to Breitbart’s associates.

Trapped inside their own self-justifying delusions, and huddling online among those who share their strange obsessions, these monsters are incapable of understanding how drastically abnormal their hateful attitudes and actions really are.