Category: Blogging

Is Neal Rauhauser Trying to Scheme His Way Back Into Political Consulting?

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Three years ago, in August 2010, Democrat political consultant Neal Rauhauser published two articles under his “Stranded Wind” alias:

Claiming that there was a “centrally initiated effort” to harass him and other progressives on Twitter, Rauhauser described a plan for “hauling [a stalker] into court is a gateway to identifying the source of the strategy,” to “get up inside their network and collect actionable information.” Rauhauser solicited assistance in his plan of attack against conservatives online, to “force them into expensive, long distance, lengthy, discovery laden litigation” in order “to make a very visible example of at least one of them.”

The result of that plan, apparently, was the debacle known as “TwitterGate.” in which Rauhauser was accused of having “organized a group of E-Thugs meant to harass, threaten, provoke, disparage, intimidate, verbally assault, berate & employ hate-speech.”

Now, it seems, Rauhauser wants to get back into the politics game and has posted a weird conspiracy theory that involves me:

Nine months ago I swore off domestic politics and started paying attention to foreign policy issues. A large part of my disgust stemmed from the hate groups that have hijacked the GOP, in particular a drunken hillbilly named Robert Stacy McCain, who provided a forum for a paranoid, delusional mall cop in New Jersey to ruin my reputation with her obsessive promotion of a conspiracy theory known as Twittergate.
Groundswell: A Secret Tape Reveals How It Lobbied Boehner & Issa on Benghazi was both a delight and something of a shock. I was forced to take back all the bad things I had said about playing gotcha with wire taps earlier in 2013, and I was surprised to find that the same people who fabricate all sorts of ‘news’ about me are also directly connected to this group . . .
Other happenings in Maryland include an assault outside a courtroom, threats to judges and prosecutors, a courthouse cleared with a bomb threat, and some other things which are not public, but which all add up to a textbook definition of hate group tactics. Law enforcement has cause to act at the state level in Maryland and I strongly suspect there is already something in the federal pipeline. The smear machine behind this derpy ‘war’ on the Obama administration is under fire from GOP strategist Karl Rove and it’s literally one indictment short of tearing itself to pieces.
Nothing is going to stop that flow of Groundswell articles. The leak was handled correctly, given to an investigative journalism outlet with enough reach to make something of it rather than being spammed across the whole internet with bittorrent. I expect Akbar, McCain, and their toadies are all going to get swatted like the annoying little insects that they are — if the Maryland Democratic machine doesn’t do that job the Republican national machine certainly will.

When somebody told me last week that Rauhauser had posted this, my immediate reaction was, “Neal’s trolling for clients,” probably hoping he can get hired by the Maryland Democrat Party.

Neal is nuts. His assertion that “Groundswell” has anything to do with him is, so far as I know, based entirely on someone forwarding an e-mail from Ali Akbar to a Google group. Also, while we’re at it, “TwitterGate” was not a conspiracy theory, I’m not a drunken hillbilly, I don’t live in Maryland, and I don’t have any “toadies.”

Basically, everything Neal Rauhauser says is the exact opposite of truth, and by the way, he’s taking credit for killing Andrew Breitbart:

This undated tweet from @AndrewBreitbart is from either right before the 2010 election or shortly thereafter. The attention from he and his toadies chased me off LinkedIn, but it sent me on a two year mission which included him dropping dead in the midst of a battle of words with me and two anonymous Twitter commenters.

I checked. The date of that Breitbart tweet (at the top of this post) was Oct. 7, 2010. It’s true that on the day Andrew died, he was in a Twitter battle with Neal and some of Neal’s friends.

In the days immediately following Andrew’s death, Neal was actually bragging that his harassment had caused Breitbart’s heart attack, but he deleted that. Neal deletes a lot of his crap, once he gets called out on it. This was why he now thinks he can get away with dismissing TwitterGate as a “conspiracy theory,” because when he got caught by Tea Party activists, he deleted a lot of stuff — including his “WingNutWatch” Twitter account that was central to that fiasco — and got his “beandog” buddies to tell Adrian Chen that it was all a silly prank.

Bullshit, Neal. You can try to play that off as the imaginings of “a paranoid, delusional mall cop in New Jersey” (and oh, how you’ve been obsessed with “Zapem” for three years), but there were plenty of witnesses, and anybody can go read Patrick Read’s account complete with numerous screenshots showing communications between your “Stranded Wind” account and the “beandogs” who participated in the harassment of Tea Party activists.

You were guilty as hell and you know it and, to repeat, you provided the game plan for that little escapade in advance:

See, Neal, we not only know what you did in 2010, we know why you did it. You failed. You got caught. And your long campaign of revenge — your blame-shifting “Accuse the Accusers” tactics, to smear and demonize your enemies — has similarly failed.

Now, if the historical pattern holds true, Neal Rauhauser will go delete some more of his lies, pretend he never wrote it, claim victimhood, and accuse me of cyberstalking him.

And, oh yeah, Andrew was totally right about you, Neal.

UPDATE: Just in case you’ve never seen it before, this is part of the Twitter conversation between Neal Rauhauser and Andrew Breitbart on Feb. 29, 2012, just before Andrew’s death:

You see him taunting Breitbart, calling him a coward, suggesting that “my lawyers” were going to sue Breitbart. What I believe they were talking about was charges filed against Neal by Mike Stack who, you see, Neal accuses of “stalking” Anthony Weiner. Of course, as everybody now knows, there was never any stalking or hacking or “conspiracy” against Anthony Weiner — he was guilty as hell.

Just another busted lie from Neal Rauhauser . . .

 

Barrett Brown Inspires a Bizarre Campaign for Douchebag Rights

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Sept. 12: Barrett Brown rants on YouTube about his plan to ‘destroy’ an FBI agent

“I know what’s legal, because I know what’s been done to me and if it’s legal when it’s done to me it’s going to be legal when it’s done to f–king FBI Agent Robert Smith, who is a criminal, who is involved in a criminal conspiracy. . . . Uh, anyway, so that’s why Robert Smith’s life is over. And when I say his life is over I don’t say I’m gonna go kill him, but I am gonna ruin his life and look into his fuckin’ kids, because Aaron Barr did the same thing, and he didn’t get raided for it. How do ya like them apples?”
— Barrett Brown, Sept. 12, 2012

Did you ever find yourself in an Internet flame-war with some bozo and kinda wish bad things would happen to him? Honestly, I try to avoid thinking like that. But in your wildest revenge fantasy, you could never imagine this: They hook up with an international criminal conspiracy, get raided by the FBI and then, with federal prosecutors breathing down their neck, they flip out on YouTube and — in a raving fit of paranoid insanity — threaten to “destroy” an FBI agent, and get themselves locked up facing the possibility of 105 years in federal prison.

All of which is to say, I never could have wished this on Barrett Brown, because I simply never could have imagined it.

Nor could I have imagined that a coalition of his deluded admirers would turn Barrett Brown into a First Amendment martyr, but tonight they’re having a joint benefit for Barrett and his “Anonymous” comrade Jeremy Hammond as “political prisoners of the information age.”

And if you believe that, you’re a gullible chump, the kind of sucker who doesn’t deserve an even break.

“Anyway, while I was in the backyard, and I remember I heard the Mexican FBI agent bringing the other one back in he said, oh yeah, the bad guy’s back here. It was then that I realized that I’m a bad guy. You know, I had no idea beforehand. You know, and even now I still have trouble really sort of internalizing that. But if the FBI says it, it must be true, and from now on I am the bad guy. And I’m gonna prove that in the coming months, using the court system, using the media, using my group Project PM, which has always been, uh, secretly to some extent created for the purpose of wiping out this f–king government and certain media institutions and through other means at my disposal, some of which are known, some of which are known to a few and some of which are still secret. But I don’t like keeping secrets. I was a journalist for a long time, it’s not my nature.”
— Barrett Brown, Sept. 12, 2012

The “Anonymous” hackers spent more than two years engaged in terroristic intimidation — “Do what we say, or we’ll hack you! We’ll dox you! We’ll do a DDOS against you! We’ll SWAT you! Because lulz!” — and thought they could never get caught. Barrett Brown got the idea he could ride that wave to fame and glory, and when it didn’t turn out the way he planned, he decided that this was unfair, an injustice.

That’s the bottom line: Barrett Brown failed and, unable to accept responsibility for his failure, he blamed his failure on his enemies. Look at his final video meltdown if you dare:

  1. Meltdown Video 1 — 15:03 (transcript)
  2. Meltdown Video 2 — 15:03 (transcript)
  3. Meltdown Video 3 — 13:30 (transcript)

Go watch all of it, read all of it, and good luck making sense of any of it, because it’s nothing but pure paranoid gibberish. He recorded 45 minutes of video to explain this vast conspiracy against him — the “criminal conspiracy” with which he says this FBI agent was involved — and I’d like to see someone attempt to describe it in a linear or logical fashion, because it is evident that Barrett Brown was so deeply confused he couldn’t even make sense of his own theory.

Yet this scrambled mishmash of a conspiracy theory — allegedly involving Aaron Barr, Jennifer Emick, Alan Everett and Tom Ryan, among others — is the justification for Barrett Brown threatening to destroy an FBI agent, ending with this violent sign-off:

Every little news circus I create from here on out directs the media and the public to the criminal conspiracy that was never investigated last year involving Team Themis and the Justice Department, Eric Holder’s little f–king Justice Department, already f–king under a cloud, you know, not relative to the Bush administration but still almost as bad, ah, you know, and uh that helps, so I have no choice left but to defend my family, myself, my girlfriend, uh, my reputation, my work, my activism, my ideas, and the revelations that my friends are going to prison so that we can have a chance to get out for other people, so that they would matter. And frankly, you know, it was pretty obvious I was gonna be dead before I was forty or so, so I wouldn’t mind going out with two FBI sidearms and a f–king Egyptian pharoah. Adios.

This guy is a victim of injustice? This guy is a First Amendment hero? No, this guy is ridiculous douchebag, and if I never could have imagined him doing something quite this ridiculous, I think a nice long stay in federal custody for Barrett Brown might be a helpful warning to any other fame-whoring douchebag who thinks he can roll like that and never encounter any serious consequences.

Did you know, by the way, that in 2009 Barrett Brown was working on a book called Hot, Fat, and Clouded: The Amazing and Amusing Failures Of America’s Chattering Class, about such eminent figures as Thomas Friedman, William Bennett and Charles Krauthammer, and then — after my 2009 flame-war with Charles Johnson — Barrett decided to add a 45-page chapter on me. His editors took a look at the manuscript and said, “Robert Stacy Who?” So that got axed, and the book flopped anyway, and I think Barrett somehow blamed me for that.

All of which is necessary to explain why I’m featured rather prominently in the first part of the “Ballad of Barrett Brown”:

You have the right to be a douchebag, but being a douchebag does not confer upon you any special privileges.

Some douchebags just have to learn that lesson the hard way, I guess.

 

Barrett Brown’s Overblown Ego

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Sept. 12: Barrett Brown rants on YouTube about his plan to ‘destroy’ an FBI agent

“Uh, I’ve been on Suboxone since then, um, partly because, in fact in large part, um, in preparation for this particular day, or two days as it’s turned out, um, which I’ve also been, uh, preparing for by virtue of the last six leaks, uh, Project PM put out in the last, uh, month or so — the New York Times leaks, there’s two parts of that on Cryptome, and the LA county prosecutor leaks, there’s three parts of that on Cryptome and with more coming on both, uh, by and by.”
— Barrett Brown, Sept. 12, 2012

The Left’s ongoing attempt to turn Barrett Brown into a heroic martyr for First Amendment freedom — the latest issue of Rolling Stone calls him “America’s Least Likely Political Prisoner” — requires his admirers to overlook a lot of things, especially the vast distance between his grandiose claims and his paltry accomplishments.

Also, he was crazy.

Barrett was obsessed with the idea of “leaks,” and seemed to have the idea that he would out-leak Julian Assange, thus making himself a worldwide hero of the online anarchist community who worship at the anti-American altar of Assange, Bradley Manning, et al.

Barrett’s problem was his overblown ego, his habitual bragging, his relentless inflation of the significance of whatever occupied his unbalanced mind at any given moment. Wildly undisciplined and emotionally unstable, his “work” production was never impressive, as he wasted time on subjects that were of no real interest or importance.

Sane people could see Barrett Brown was losing his grip even before he became involved with “Anonymous.” In December 2010, when he outlined his “informational schematic” in Video 153? Go watch that rambling 13-minute video. The phrase you’re looking for is red flag. Here was a young heroin addict describing his plan to create “what should be the best means of obtaining information in existence.”

Riiiiight.

Typical of Barrett Brown’s grandiosity was what he called, in his epic Sept. 12 meltdown rant, “the LA county prosecutor leaks.” This involved Los Angeles County Assistant District Attorney Patrick Frey, who is the conservative blogger known as Patterico.

For years, his various enemies have been trying to get Frey fired from his day job, on the basis of his off-hours political blogging, as though it were somehow unethical — a conflict of interest — which it is not, because there is no relationship between (a) what Frey does on his day job and (b) what he does on his blog. Frey’s day job is as a prosecutor in the anti-gang unit: The Bloods, the Crips, the Latin Kings, and so forth — he puts those guys in prison for their crimes. Maybe you could speculate some kind of psycho-babble theory between that work and what Patterico writes about politics, but he never writes about any of the crimes or criminals he prosecutes. Ergo, no conflict of interest. Q.E.D.

Frey’s enemies either don’t understand this or don’t care about the truth, and so he has repeatedly been the target of various schemes hatched by Neal Rauhauser. Why? Because in 2011 (a) Patterico’s blogging about the WeinerGate scandal made him a central figure in Rauhauser’s theory of a Breitbart-led right-wing conspiracy against Anthony Weiner, and (b) Frey’s employment in a public-sector job seemed to Rauhauser to make Frey a vulnerable target.

This background is necessary to understanding why, in August 2011, Neal Rauhauser used the pseudonym “Carlito2000” in an IRC channel to sic Barrett Brown on Patrick “Patterico” Frey:

[13:50] [Carlito2000] So [Brandon] Darby is under suspicion as being the SWAT caller that triggered #Swatgate
[13:50] [BarrettBrown] And what’s Darby’s deal in particular?
[13:50] [Carlito2000] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe4NCaz4NgM
[13:51] [BarrettBrown] he’s under suspicion of doing swat call on Patterico?
[13:51] [Carlito2000] calls on Mike Stack aka @CryingWolfeBlog
6/23/2011 @Patterico 6/30/2011 @EWErickson on 5/26/2012(?)
[13:52] [Carlito2000] and alleged event for @AaronWorthing [a.k.a., Aaron Walker] on 5/29/2012, but no audio has been released
[13:52] [Carlito2000] SWAT of Stack was done to cover their tracks – they took out Weiner because he triggered the extortion investigation into former FBI agent turned Congressman Mike Grimm
[13:52] [Carlito2000] Ofir Biton, Mike Grimm fundraiser, arrested.
[13:53] [Carlito2000] 2012 calls are due to some stuff with James O’Keefe – Rauhauser appear at some hearing in NJ about him
[13:53] [Carlito2000] @Patterico dox @NadiaNaffe, Rauhauser hooked her up with @LeidermanDevine, epic lawsuit ensued
[13:57] [Carlito2000] So New Hampshire state grand jury on O’Keefe, NY
federal grand jury on Grimm, D.C. federal grand jury on O’Keefe, and Chicago cybercrime task force wants swatters, they get info on Darby
[14:09] [BarrettBrown] okay, so I’ll take a look at these links here

You don’t have to understand Rauhauser’s bizarre conspiracy theories (variously involving Brandon Darby, Mike Stack, New York Rep. Michael Grimm, James O’Keefe III and the FBI’s “cybercrime task force”) to understand what Rauhauser/”Carlito” was trying to do, namely to get Barrett Brown to write something — anything — that Rauhauser could then use as “evidence” against his enemies.

The immediate result of that provocation was a series of online chats between Barrett Brown and Frey, who was profoundly suspicious of Brown’s motives, correctly suspecting that Brown had contacted him in pursuit of a Rauhauser-inspired scheme. And my name kept coming up in these Brown-Frey chats, e.g.:

Only reason I ask [if Frey knows anything about Jennifer Emick] is that she left a comment on Robert Stacy McCain’s blog last year when he did a post about me, during such time as she was both serving as an FBI “informant” and working secretly for HBGary pursuant to their covert campaign to get me “picked up” and discredited despite the fact that I committed no crimes against them, etc.
Right now, I think the only real question I have for you is, do you know if Robert Stacy McCain might have had any discussions at all with either Emick or anyone at HBGary at any time, and do you have any correspondence in which he discusses me?

Now, if you’ll go read the transcript of Barrett’s Sept. 12 meltdown video, you’ll see how this theme of Emick as being an FBI “informant” while also working for HBGary is central to Barrett’s paranoid belief that he was the target of some kind of conspiratorial set-up:

I know what’s legal, because I know what’s been done to me and if it’s legal when it’s done to me it’s going to be legal when it’s done to fuckin’ FBI Agent Robert Smith, who is a criminal, who is involved in a criminal conspiracy that has thank god been revealed, part of which was evident, uh, months and months ago because I told the fucking FBI Agent Daniel Borsuk, who gave me a fake name when his fucking little Jennifer Emick fuckin’ informant, HBGary employees, was bragging about this shit and gave me the number, I guess he wanted to talk to me and see what I’d say. Well, his real name’s Daniel Borsuk, I know that now because of more hacked e-mails that she got that she has not refuted although she is, [laughs] the informant is now claiming she doesn’t work for HBGary even though we, again, we have the invoices, the e-mails, her ex-partner’s been in touch, it was already obvious and we have other proof of it, even besides these things that she doesn’t know about yet. Um, we don’t play all our hands, like they do. Uh, anyway, so that’s why Robert Smith’s life is over.

Four words: Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

What do I know about Jennifer Emick? Almost nothing. Never talked to her until October of last year, after Barrett Brown had been arrested for threatening an FBI agent, and Emick sent me an account of her interactions with Neal Rauhauser. Yet you see that this idea — that I was somehow part of Emick and HBGary’s “covert campaign” against Barrett Brown — was part of the conpiracy theory Brown was trying to get Frey to confirm, and was also part of the madness that led to that Sept. 12 meltdown. (See: “Neal Rauhauser as Carlito2000: How Barrett Brown Went Down,” Oct. 26.)

On Sept. 6, less than a week before his final meltdown, Barrett Brown published his “LA county prosecutor leak” — i.e., the transcript of an online chat Brown had with Frey — at Daily Kos with a prologue that included this disjointed 89-word sentence:

As noted, this leak is being conducted in retaliation for Frey’s failure to readily answer questions about a possible connection between Confederate/white nationalist Washington Times editor Robert StacyMcCain and the HBGary criminal organization as well as Frey’s decision to publicly attack an RNC protester who was arrested in possession of a weapon, with the final straw being R.S. McCain’s latest attack on Brown, whom the author and conservative stalwart denounced in public as deserving of FBI attention in 2011 — before later claiming instead that Brown is in fact an FBI informant based on his own misunderstanding of facts known even to many reporters who have covered Anonymous in the last few years.

Again, four words: Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Whatever my “misunderstanding of facts,” I always understood that Barrett Brown was a raging narcissist, and what Brown called “the final straw” — my “latest attack on Brown” — was my Sept. 4 response to Brown’s threat to sue me for libel, which ended thus:

You don’t need a lawyer, Barrett. You need a psychiatrist, or perhaps a priest to exorcise your demons. You are traveling a road to destruction, as harmful to yourself as to any of your chosen enemies. Get help.

Can I call ’em, or what? Eight days later, Barrett melted down on YouTube and was arrested by the FBI. But before he got himself arrested, Brown published his “leak” of his chat with Patrick Frey, and announced that with a Sept. 4 YouTube video:

To which America responded with a collective yawn. Who cares anything about Frey, one of dozens of lawyers employed by the L.A. County District Attorney’s office? Why would my “possible connection” to “the HBGary criminal organization” be of interest to anyone, even if there were any such connection (which there is not)? Barrett was obsessed with HBGary, as were Neal Rauhauser and various people associated with Anonymous, but in the grand scheme of things — as far as your average consumer of news is concerned — the typical response is, “HB who?”

In light of his well-deserved obscurity, what shall we say of Brown’s success in convincing his fellow anarchists that he was somebody important who was doing “journalism” that was such a threat to the status quo that he is a “political prisoner”? He has merely proven that there is a sucker born every minute, and that a lot of those gullible suckers are nowadays employed as liberal journalists.

Go read “The Kook Who Knew Too Much.” Is Barrett Brown a political prisoner? Only if insanity is a political ideology.

 

On This Day In 1945…

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— Wombat-socho


…the United States Army Air Force dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, and six days after that the Japanese agreed to an unconditional surrender. Ever since then, all manner of intellectualloids have been moaning about the inhumanity of it all, how it didn’t need to happen, and 31 other flavors of morally superior nonsense. Ace has a really excellent post which he admits is nothing more than an extended tease to get people reading Paul Fussell’s Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays, which he generously excerpts in the post.


I’m not going to rehash Fussell’s arguments, especially since I’ve seen them before in George MacDonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here; the TL;DR version is that some sorry whiners think Japanese lives were more important than the lives of American men in uniform*. Strange but true. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that argument, and think that anyone holding that opinion ought to consider getting a brain implant. One look at how the landings would have gone is in Alfred Coppel’s The Burning Mountain; if you enjoy reading about bloodbaths and slaughterhouses, this will be right up your alley. Sweet dreams. I for one am grateful we had the bomb, because the alternative would have been a lot worse for all concerned.

*Also Australian, British, Chinese, Dutch, Filipino, French and Indian soldiers, sailors, and airmen, to say nothing of civilians in the war zones.


Bob Belvedere — Hacked!

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Bob Belvedere at Camp of the Saints knows that the guidelines for “Rule 5” set a limit at the PG-13 line. Obviously, on Saturday, the hackers took control of Bob’s blog and posted photos of, uh, plus-size model Melissa Manning which are definitely Not Safe For Work.

Or so I’m told, by persons familiar with this dreadful cybercrime. An immediate investigation must be launched to find these hackers.

Melissa Manning is on Twitter. Bob Belvedere is, too.

 

Deranged Cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt: Bats, Belfry, Some Assembly Required

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Bill Schmalfeldt ranting on YouTube

When last we left the strange saga of Bill Schmalfeldt, the self-described “brain-damaged troll,” his incessant barrage of Twitter gibberish had become so demonstrably crazy that there were fears for his safety. Apparently, however, the nice young men in white coats didn’t take Bill to the Funny Farm, or else the psychiatric staff at Spring Grove have granted him Internet access for therapeutic reasons, because he’s still ranting today. Now he’s got new reasons to rant — Ken White at Popehat has begun his dismantling of Schmalfeldt. A few excerpts:

Our special tonight is a disturbed self-styled journalist named Bill Schmalfeldt. . . .
He leaves no sense of what values he promotes, only of what groups and individuals he hates. There’s only one circumstance when you get a sense that he’s enjoying what he does, that he has a craft or a calling. That’s when he’s describing someone being raped, murdered, or otherwise abused, or when he’s pursuing the families of someone he hates. . . .
There are constant themes. The first is that, though he is nominally “progressive,” he delights in using homoerotic imagery and insults normally associated with homophobes to attack people he doesn’t like . . .
Second, despite being nominally “progressive,” he is perfectly willing to indulge in racism to revile people he doesn’t like. . . .
Third, he’s really, really into the rhetoric of violence and murder.  . . .
Fourth, Schmalfeldt enjoys attacking the family of his political targets.  . . .
Schmalfeldt . . . reported [Breitbart.com contributor Lee] Stranahan to the Dallas Police, the FBI, the District Attorney, the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Texas Family Protective Services . . .
Bill Schmalfeldt doesn’t have principles. Bill Schmalfeldt doesn’t have values. Bill Schmalfeldt doesn’t have beliefs. Bill Schmalfeldt has enemies, and then nothing, a black and dank and empty void of sullenness. . . .

Read the whole brilliantly brutal thing and remember: This is just the first installment of an expected series of digital vivisections.

Two weeks ago, when Bill Schmalfeldt threatened me with a spurious copyright claim, I replied with 5,000 words to explain something really simple: BILL SCHMALFELDT IS CRAZY. He keeps providing more evidence of his irrationality, because he can’t help himself. This will not end well for him. He will either go to jail or go to the nuthouse, or else he’ll suffer a fatal neurological and physical breakdown.

If anyone were sincerely interested in Bill Schmalfeldt’s well-being, they’d be begging him to stop, but nobody who actually knows Bill Schmalfeldt likes Bill Schmalfeldt. He evidently lacks any concern for whatever remains of his own human dignity. None of his enemies could ever hate him as much Bill Schmalfeldt hates himself.

 



 

 


Meltdown Monday: Does Bill Schmalfeldt Need a Brief Vacation at Spring Grove?

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Bill Schmalfeldt ranting, 2011. (Image via Thomas Anderson at Vimeo)

“The point is, the sound advice I gave Barrett Brown could apply equally to you, Mr. Schmalfeldt: ‘Spare me your lawsuit threats … you are traveling a road to destruction.’ …
“As for your own understanding (of law or anything else), sir, I am quite certain it is impaired by the fact that YOU’RE CRAZY.
“Crackers. Psycho. Loopy. Off your rocker.
“Nuttier than a Snickers bar.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, July 26

“Spring Grove Hospital Center is the oldest hospital for the mentally ill in Maryland, and the third oldest in the United States. … It was renamed the Maryland Hospital for the Insane in 1838, and moved to its present site at Catonsville in 1872. …
“With 295 inpatient beds and 62 assisted-living beds, the Center provides acute, subacute and long-term psychiatric care to adult and geriatric patients …”
— Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

It would be wrong to say that Bill Schmalfeldt “went crazy” today, because clearly he arrived at that destination long ago. Having been ordered by Carroll County Circuit Court Judge Thomas Stansfield June 14 to cease all contact with John Hoge, Schmalfeldt’s insane obsession makes it impossible for him to comply. So when for the third time Schmalfeldt “accidentally” addressed Hoge in a Twitter message (the difference between speaking about someone and speaking to someone on Twitter) what does Schmalfeldt do? He sends a crazy e-mail to the Carroll County State’s Attorney’s office:

“People contacting me now are surreptitiously adding @wjjhoge to their tweets hoping to catch me in this mistake, and they have succeeded again. . . .
“Hoge’s friends have been trying to trap me this way. . . .
“I know that I have blundered into the trap that was set for me . . .”

Exactly whom does Schmalfeldt mean to accuse of “trying to trap me”?

What is actually happening — you should read this post by Hoge — is that Bill Schmalfeldt is engaged in cyberstalking: Obsessively watching Hoge and Hoge’s friends to see what they’re talking about, and them jumping into their timelines to shout his crazy accusatory gibberish at them.

If anyone wants me to provide a court affidavit to explain how Schmalfeldt’s particular form of harassment works (in terms of tactics, strategy and purpose), I’ll be glad to do so, but I’m not going to describe it here, because I don’t endorse it, and I don’t want to accidentally offer a “How To Be a Troll” guide for copycats.

Schmalfeldt’s problem is that he has become so obsessive and/or compulsive about his cyberstalking that he lacks the rationality necessary to avoid violating the court order.

Bill can’t help himself. So when he starts ranting about “POOP FLAKES” and scrotums (trust me, you don’t want to see those Tweets), this is not merely evidence, it’s symptomatic. His Twitter timeline got so crazy, even his left-wing buddies were telling Schmalfeldt he was losing his mind and finally Hoge felt it necessary to ask police to do a welfare check to make sure Schmalfeldt had not become a danger to himself or others.

Having expended 5,000 words to explain to Bill Schmalfeldt that he’s crazy, I don’t know what more can be done. When the nice young men in white coats show up to cart him away for a psychiatric evaluation, we can expect that Schmalfeldt will blame other people for his problems.

Because that’s what crazy people always do.

UPDATE: This was predictable:

Switching your Twitter account to “protected” status is, in this kind of situation, very much like waving a white flag. Bill Schmalfeldt was the aggressor, and it’s impossible to accomplish much in terms of Twitter aggression once you switch to “protected” status.