Leaders understand their job is to lead, and to instill in their team, if you will, the desire to follow. Not by constraint or out of fear but out of a knowingness by the players that if they follow they will be better individually and they will be successful as a team.
Not only does Obama not lead but neither does he inspire people (especially young blacks) to be better. Under Obama people are not motivated to be better; they are motivated to follow the path of generational failure.
The myth that Obama inspires young blacks to be president is pure Pollyanna. If Obama inspired young blacks, it would be reflected in their test scores and by their social behavior. But instead we see increased illiteracy, increased unemployment, increased abortions, increased disregard for social propriety, increased gang violence, and increased flash mobs.
Something a successful leader understands very well is that division, especially racial discord, is the death knell to having a successful team. But Obama not only panders to racial discord, he also feeds on it.
If Dr. Ben Carson was the good cop, then Massie plays the bad. In a much-needed way. Read the whole thing.
Glenn Greenwald spent the Bush years in a constant state of hysteria about war and infringements of civil liberties. It’s hard to think of a commentator who more typifies the anti-war Left of that era. It is therefore a shock to see Greenwald now grumbling this way:
I wonder: does someone who goes from being an Obama White House spokesman and Obama campaign official to being an MSNBC contributor even notice that they changed jobs?
Greenwald’s complaint was quoted by Professor Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, but he missed the obvious headline:
Bill Schmalfeldt of Elk Ridge, Maryland, a.k.a. “Liberal Grouch”
It’s noon, boys and girls, which means that deranged cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt is now podcasting his fathomless rage against Lee Stranahan and other eeeee-vil people who, just coincidentally, happen to be on Brett Kimberlin’s enemies list. Schmalfeldt’s compulsive lying has been previously examined here, but on his podcast yesterday, the sociopathic sadist had the effrontery to accuse me of “dishonestly” cropping his photo to make him look scary.
Oh, cruel irony: That picture of Bill came from the same online file of images in which Schmalfeldt included obscene Photoshopped smears of his various enemies who, as I say, are so coincidentally coterminous with the Kimberlin enemies list. Not going to share those here, but you could ask Ali Akbar what Schmalfeldt “dishonestly” does to photos. Or just look at what Bill did to a Sarah Palin photo:
Schmalfeldt created that Photoshop of Palin bleeding with a stake through her forehead to illustrate a post he wrote under his “Bill Matthews” alias at the Examiner, a deceit he perpetrated after his harassment of fellow Examiner contributors got Schmalfeldt axed as the “Liberal in Baltimore” columnist at the Examiner. He returned as “Bill Matthews” of Wisconsin (despite being a Maryland resident not named Matthews) and kept up that charade until getting banned permanently from the Examiner in August.
Photoshopped images of Republicans spattered in blood is a favorite theme with Schmalfeldt, as shown by an image of Allen West he created to illustrate a May post at Daily Kos.
So much for the Schmalfeldt “image integrity” lecture, eh? My apologies for using “Schmalfeldt” and “integrity” in the same sentence.
Schmalfeldt is forever burning bridges behind him as he careens from disaster to disaster caused by his antisocial personality. He never accepts responsibility for his failures, always externalizing blame onto his scapegoated enemies. The classic example of this was when Schmalfeldt, clumsily attempting to smear “homophobic” conservatives, published a May 18 Daily Kos diary about anal sex.
Go ahead and click that link. Double-dog dare ya.
To say that Schmalfeldt’s graphic discussion of what he called “the Butt Stuff” was obscene and offensive is to understate the matter. Perhaps the most adequate description is “Too Disgusting for Daily Kos,” which is really saying something.
Schmalfeldt’s gross discourse about sodomy drew outraged comments from DKos readers, including “Cinnamon,” who remarked that it seemed “to have been written by a 14 year old, using one hand.” Schmalfeldt then added an unintentionally hilarious disclaimer:
UPDATE: To clarify for Cinnamon’s sake, this is not an indictment of all heterosexual men. I happen to BE a heterosexual man. A heterosexual teacher coerced me into becoming straight when I was just eight years old. I was permanently scarred by the experience of being told of the pleasures of heterosexuality. She never touched me or anything like that, but it was clear that SHE was a heterosexual and I admired her, so I decided then and there, this would be the lifestyle I chose. No, this is an indictment of STUPID heterosexual men who are either self-loathing closeted gays or believe that every gay man in the world wants to f–k him. I thought this was self-apparent throughout this satirical diary, but Cinnamon begs to differ and has slapped this diary with an HR to show her disapproval. Now that we are clear on the actual INTENT of the diarist, who uses satire to make his point (and not everyone “gets” satire, so apparently it has to be explained before it can be read), we begin.
In other words, if graphic discussion of “the Butt Stuff” offends you, it’s because “not everyone ‘gets’ satire.” Two days later, as progressives at DKos continued to pillory Schmalfeldt, he then offered a new Daily Kos contribution:
Please Stop Reading My Diaries. Thanks.
This diary, short and sweet, is really dedicated to the six people who found no humor whatsoever, thank you, in the piece I wrote yesterday about how it’s the “butt stuff” that male homophobes find so scary about “teh gey”.
It is not an apology.
It’s a suggestion.
Stop reading my stuff.
Evidently, this did not placate his critics and that day — May 20 — was Bill Schmalfeldt’s last as a DKos contributor.
This, then, is the character of the remorseless monster who will spend two hours today on his podcast attacking Lee Stranahan and others on the Kimberlin enemies list.
The question of exactly how to re-engage the culture is a serious one, especially when approached from a Christian viewpoint. This is a political blog with a SoCon flavor that is neither hidden, nor preached like Jonathan Edwards. And yet, Jerry at Goldfish and Clowns issues “A Challenge to Conservatives” that tempts one to shift tone a bit, at least for a post (emphasis mine):
One of the more raging debate points these days within conservative new media is what exactly needs to be done as far as influencing popular culture. There is a general consensus that the right has abandoned the culture influencers — entertainment media, news media (insert obligatory “there’s a difference?” snark here) — in favor of either continuing to consume whatever is thrown its way by the aforementioned entities, regardless of how much it is slanted against they believe, or retreating behind a wall to create its own entertainment.
In both cases, it reinforces my belief that conservative new media is in the exact same position the contemporary Christian music industry was twenty to thirty years ago.
In a post at Breitbart.com’s new group-blog thingie, Mandy Nagy asks “Is Social Media Breeding Monsters?” and offers this sampling of evidence in support of the answer, “Oh, hell, yes”:
The downside of the internet’s egalitarianism is that people who have no social peers in their own lives — because, most likely, they are insane or too repulsive in character to attract real-life friends — flock to the internet. They’ve alienated everyone they’ve ever known in real-life; now it’s time to try out their off-putting schtick on the millions of new potential victims at their fingertips.
Exactly so. And it’s also a fact the Internet facilitates deceit, impersonation and fantasy role-playing, all of which involve blurring the line between perception and reality. As a famous Steiner cartoon pointed out, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” and people with an appetite for fraud or make-believe therefore find the Internet irresistible. Not all of these people are criminals or nutjobs, but there are enough of the insane/dangerous types to create a critical mass whenever they find some cause for common action and — no matter how narrow their fringe appetites — it’s possible in an international communication matrix with hundreds of millions of users for a few dozen of them to cluster together and bask in the warm support of their fellow crackpots.
If there is a critical mass for that kind of delusion, then you see why Bill Schmalfeldt may believe there must be an eager audience for his bizarre fixation, as Lee Stranahan reports:
Bill Schmalfeldt shows no signs whatsoever of stopping public discussion of his sexual obsession with me and my family. He’s been writing about my wife Lauren for months, in insulting and prurient terms that have including fantasizing about having her perform sexuals acts on him and then do menial labor before discussing the death of our daughter Collette
Somehow today, he’s gotten even worse.
On today’s podcast, Bill Schmalfeldt had not one but two new ‘comedy’ pieces, both of which make explicit sexual references to my minor daughter in deranged fake commercials that are about me selling her.
Remember: Bill Schmalfeldt has said repeatedly that he is a serious journalist following a story as any professional would.
Five days a week, Schmalfeldt rants for two hours about his selected list of enemies which — curious coincidence — exactly matches the Kimberlin-Rauhauser enemies list.
For example (and here we close the circle, as it were), the title of Schmalfeldt’s Feb. 12 podcast was, “It’s Mandy Nagy Day!” Reasonable people may ask, Why would Bill Schmalfeldt single out Mandy Nagy for an entire day of abusive podcasting?
Some of these random coincidences crossed my mind today after I received an e-mail from Schmalfeldt with the subject line, “DENOUNCE THIS, OR OWN IT!” The e-mail included a screen-cap of a death threat to Schmalfeldt from a Twitter account. But when I checked the Twitter account — which I suspected of being bogus — the account had been suspended. So I replied to Schmalfeldt’s e-mail:
STOP CONTACTING ME. FURTHER CONTACT WILL BE CONSIDERED AS EVIDENCE OF HARASSMENT.
By the time I got back on Twitter, Schmalfeldt was already sending me unsolicited messages and trumpeting to various others my reply to his e-mail as proof that I endorse death threats. But there was no way for me to verify that the Twitter account which sent the threat is anything but another of Neal Rauhauser’s notorious collection of sockpuppets.
This morning, I remarked on “Schmalfeldt’s lack of self-awareness, his failure to understand the transparency of his own motives” — he seems to think he is cleverly deceiving people when, in fact, no intelligent person could be deceived by him. In the vastness of the Internet, there may be a sufficient audience of stupid people to justify Schmalfeldt’s daily podcasts, but what are the chances that all these stupid people are also obsessed with Brett Kimberlin’s enemies? Not very good, really.
I’ve never seen such a weird mixture of sadism, narcissism, grandiosity and self-pity as Bill Schmalfeldt. He is *uniquely* crazy.
Sept. 12: Barrett Brown rants on YouTube about his plan to ‘destroy’ an FBI agent
Ever since former “Anonymous” spokesman Barrett Brown freaked out on video and got himself arrested, various kooks have floated conspiracy theories to explain Brown’s arrest in terms of the paranoid delusion that Brown was an “enemy of the state” who got too close to the hidden truth about government wrongdoing. He’s like the pasty-white geek version of Chris Dorner or something.
No matter how often I’ve pointed to the far more mundane and obvious explanation — that Neal Rauhauser as “Carlito2000” provoked Brown’s final meltdown — Brown’s defenders keep pushing conspiratorial explanations that reflect their anarchist worldview wherein (a) shadowy government secrets are protected by illegitimate means, and (b) threatening to “destroy” an FBI agent is no big deal.
Some of the charges against Brown are related to the hacking of Stratfor by the Anonymous splinter known as LulzSec. (The trial of the lead suspect in that crime, Jeremy Hammond, will reportedly “focus on the alleged theft of around 60,000 credit cards from which, say the prosecutors, charges of more than $700,000 were illegally made.”) McGuire pushes the “hidden secrets” theory of the hacking:
It’s obvious by looking at the most recent posts on Barrett Brown’s blog that while he is highly interested in Stratfor, it wasn’t the credit card information that motivated him. When those five million emails leaked, a product called TrapWire, which was created by a company called Abraxas, was revealed to the public at large. And it caused a media sh-tstorm. In 2005, the founder of Abraxas and former head of the CIA’s European division, Richard Helms, described TrapWire as software that is installed inside of surveillance camera systems that is, “more accurate than facial recognition” with the ability to “draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” As Russia Today reported, one of the leaked emails, allegedly written by Stratfor’s VP of Intelligence, Fred Burton, stated that TrapWire was at “high-value targets” in “the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC.”
TrapWire has since largely been dismissed as nothing to “freak out” over, and that hopefully is the case. However, far beyond what the surveillance software itself can or can’t do, the revelation that TrapWire exists has caused a chain reaction of discoveries that have seemingly revealed a mob of very powerful cybersecurity firms.
Barrett Brown was doing some very serious investigating into a company called Cubic from San Diego, that was alleged to own TrapWire as a subsidiary of their firm. This is an allegation that they officially denied. However, these tax filings from 2010 that Barrett uncovered clearly state that Cubic had in fact merged with Abraxas Corporation.
“Barrett Brown was doing some very serious investigating” — and, to finish McGuire’s insinuation, that’s why the feds busted him!
All this scary Big Brother-ish noise about “surveillance” and “threat assessment” — and OMG! the CIA! — permits McGuire to portray the merger between two software firms as a dark secret the feds are so eager to keep under wraps that they would arrest and prosecute Barrett Brown on a bogus pretext, because he was getting too close to the hidden truth. McGuire extends this theme:
Barrett started ProjectPM, a wiki that is completely dedicated to piecing together all of this information about surveillance companies in the United States. . . . Without Barrett Brown, tons of this research would likely have gone unearthed. Besides a few journalists, not many people have been looking into this information. The one other group that does is called Telecomix . . . They operate the Bluecabinet Wiki, and they worked very closely with Barrett Brown to uncover more information about the network of cybersecurity firms.
I talked to one of the volunteers at Telecomix, who strongly believes in the work that Barrett did to connect all of these very confusing dots: “I haven’t seen reporters really taking a hard look at what Barrett Brown, the investigative journalist, was researching and where it leads to. His discovery that TrapWire = Abraxas and that there is CIA involvement is very important. Do you know in Berlin right now a game was started to destroy surveillance cameras in public places? Barrett apparently was reading through the emails of HBGary and Stratfor, linking the data to the specific surveillance companies and contractors . . . It is an extremely time consuming task.”
Here’s a simple question: Who do you suppose, apart from avid civil libertarians, would be interested in uncovering “more information about the network of cybersecurity firms,” especially those firms working to protect government computer systems?
Here’s a simple answer: Criminal hackers, cyber-terrorists and hostile foreign governments, that’s who!
Even if you are willing to accept protestations of noble “information freedom” motives by the Anonymous hackers, you have to recognize that there are reasonable limits to how much penetration of computer systems the feds can ignore without risking truly serious consequences, perhaps with national security implications.
So there are good reasons why law enforcement would take the activities of Anonymous and LulzSec seriously, and why illegal intrusions targeting a “network of cybersecurity firms” might arouse especially intense law-enforcement scrutiny. Nevertheless, the indictments against Barrett Brown do not charge him with being an “enemy of the state,” but rather specify three sets of crimes:
Threatening harm to an FBI agent and the agent’s family;
Illegally accessing credit card information from the Stratfor hacking; and
Obstruction by attempting to conceal evidence.
The fact that the cumulative potential prison time for these federal crimes amounts to 100 years behind bars may seem shocking, but (a) it’s highly unlikely that Brown would be put away for the maximum term, and (b) don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
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.
Obviously, he didn’t listen, and it was therefore scarcely surprising to learn from his hearing in federal court last month that Barrett is being treated with Zoloft, an anti-depressant, and another drug, Risperidone, an anti-psychotic medication used to treat symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Didn’t I tell you he was crazy? Maybe not legally insane — he was, after all, ruled competent to stand trial — but certainly it would not be libelous to describe Brown with the colloquial term “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”
The unabashed media love affair with Anonymous — their depiction as crusading progressive activists — plays into the heroic fantasies of demented people like Barrett Brown, who saw this movement as his best shot at that big narcissistic payoff, the Moment of Glory.
Some people have seen too many spy thrillers in which the evil government/corporate conspirators are exposed and brought to justice by the Misunderstood Lone Protagonist, and the Internet is a convenient vehicle by which they can pursue that heroic fantasy.
It’s never enough for these Moment of Glory chasers to do mere reporting or commentary. No, they’re conducting an “investigation” that will expose the Hidden Evil and Corruption! A sort of outlaw-vigilante mentality grips their imagination. They exaggerate their own importance and, as confirmation of that delusion, cherish the idea that sinister powerful forces are arrayed against them.
This narcissistic fantasy is inspired by elements of popular culture — The Last Honest Man as a heroic ideal — and also involves the paranoid fears that were stoked by the Left after 9/11: Endless scaremongering about “warrantless wiretaps,” portraying the Bush administration as engaged in unconstitutional domestic surveillance. A 2005 Daily Kos headline, “Echelon, the NSA, and Bush’s wiretapping initiative,” captures the climate of fear engendered by the Left in the post-9/11 era. We are therefore not surprised that the amateur enthusiasts who nowadays play-act the role of “investigative journalist” are mostly found on the Left.
Memo to the media: Stop indulging their fantasies.
Jay Liederman, an attorney who has represented a number of high-profile hackers, accused the government of employing the [Computer Fraud and Abuse Act] to stifle dissent.
“It’s as if with the explosion of hacktivists and activism, this is the government’s new toy. It seems like they took a new look at the CFAA and realised they can chill this type of activism that they don’t like,” he said.
Liederman has represented Commander X, a hacker who is on the run from the FBI for an attack on a website in Santa Cruz, California, and Raynaldo Rivera, a suspected hacker from LulzSec, accused of stealing information from Sony last year. He has described illegal hacker activities such as Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) as “digital sit-ins” or ” the equivalent of occupying the Woolworth’s lunch counter during the civil rights movement” and has called for the law to be changed.
He sees a common thread running through prosecutions of activists for DDoS attacks and those of Swatrz, Auernheimer and Barrett Brown, a former affiliate of hacktivist collective Anonymous currently in prison facing charges under the CFAA, whose prosecution has also attracted criticism.
“They are very closely related,” said Liederman. “It is one rich tapestry of prosecutorial overreach and government oppression.”
Brown faces 45 years in prison and $3m in fines for charges relating to a Christmas Day attack in 2011 against Stratfor, a US intelligence-gathering firm, in which Anonymous hackers stole 5.5m emails, some of which were later published on WikiLeaks.
Brown was not involved in the hack, but allegedly facilitated it by posting a link in a chatroom, thereby providing others with credit card information and identities of thousands of individuals in the Stratfor database.
He has also been charged with internet threats to FBI agents, relating to his Twitter and YouTube feed. All three were “popular, free-thinking information activists” facing “stunningly abusive” prosecutions, according to Liederman.
“With [Aaron] Swartz, with Weev [Andrew Auernheimer] with Barrett, there was no hacking, yet they are being prosecuted by statutes that were made for hackers.”
Each took a “contrarian notion” against established principles, he said.
“Aaron Swartz had the outrageous notion that information should be free, and that future generations should be allowed to enjoy and learn from academic articles. Weev had the outrageous notion that companies like AT&T, because they are sloppy with your information, should be called out on it. Barrett had the outrageous notion that governments and those private security companies that act like the black hand of the government should be transparent and the public should have the right to know.
“These were virtues extolled by our forefathers in this country and all of a sudden they are lost to us.”
What a load of self-serving bovine excrement! And oh, “private security companies that act like the black hand of the government” — that is to say, firms hired to help the government protect information that might be very dangerous in the wrong hands — do the names Julius and Ethel Rosenberg ring a bell here, Liederman?
Is it not possible that the technology that protects government computers, or which enables the government to detect terrorist threats, would be as valuable to America’s enemies as the secrets of the atomic bomb were to Stalin’s Soviet Union? And isn’t it therefore a valid analogy to say that hackers targeting private firms which develop this cybersecurity technology are engaged in crimes as potentially serious as the espionage that sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair?
Now, I don’t mean to say that Barrett Brown deserves the death penalty, but I’m sick and tired of people trying to pretend that Anonymous is just a bunch of harmless pranksters, or that attacks on “private security companies” are benign civil disobedience.
Perhaps a more relevant criticism, however, is the simple fact that Barrett Brown is nuttier than squirrel farts. Just in case you’ve forgotten what a lunatic in full rant mode looks like, here’s the 13-minute YouTube meltdown that landed Barrett in jail:
Yeah, he had an “outrageous notion” or two, but what the public really has the right to know is, Barrett Brown is a dangerous kook.
“It’s all horsesh-t. It’s all absolute horsesh-t. And I and my family have been put through pain and suffering because Lee Stranahan has a grudge. Because somebody, in my opinion, is paying Lee Stranahan to file these charges against me, in the hopes that I will either break or die. I got some f–king news for you, Stranny — Walker, Hoge, Frey — beware the Ides of March.”
What famously happened on the Ides of March? An assassination. And March 15 this year occurs during CPAC, which Stranahan will be attending (he’s nominated for a Blog Bash award).
Why is Schmalfeldt dropping the names of Walker, Hoge and Frey into this threat? And why does Schmalfeldt imagine someone would pay Stranahan to file these charges? Stranahan explains:
Nobody paid me to file charges. It cost me about $140 total to go to Maryland. . . .
It was my idea to file criminal charges against Bill Schmalfeldt but I admit it was not my idea alone. My wife Lauren was adamant about filing harassment charges, especially after Bill Schmalfeldt spent days telling lies and raising ugly, bizarre questions about the death of our daughter as part of his ‘investigation’ of me. There was also the fact that Bill Schmalfeldt called child protective services on us plus the bizarre and constant sexual talk about my wife.
Trust me; after months of Bill Schmalfeldt stalking, harassing, threatening, annoying, and directly contacting us dozens of times, nobody had to talk us into filing criminal charges against him.
There’s also Schmalfeldt’s megalomanic persecution complex, as evidenced by his claim that the harassment charges were filed “in the hopes that I will either break or die.”
No, Bill: You were charged with harassment because — wait for it — you were engaged in harassment.
The obsession, the fixation, the inability to step back from the situation and view it with anything like objectivity — these are symptomatic of a deranged mind, and why Schmalfeldt focused his madness on Lee Stranahan is somewhat mysterious. Schmalfeldt started cyberstalking Aaron Walker in June, and peripatetically hopscotched around to attack various other enemies of Brett Kimberlin over the course of ensuing months. In November, Schmalfeldt’s stalking of me escalated to the point that he threatened to contact my wife and sent me more than 200 harassing Twitter messages in the span of 48 hours. And through it all, Schmalfeldt has insisted that his targets deserve his malicious attention, that they are guilty of some heinous wrongdoing that Schmalfeldt is obligated to “investigate” and “expose.”
It seems nothing can dissuade Schmalfeldt from his persistent delusions of grandeuradequacy. Schmalfeldt’s response to being charged with harassment? Threats of retaliation:
“They thought they had chosen the weakest one in the herd, culled me from the herd, and now they think they’re going to break me. I face two misdemeanor charges in criminal court, and that is supposed to break me. I got news for you boys: I’m bringing down the thunder. I’m bringing up the hellfire. I’m rolling the bomb out to the Enola Gay, and I’m loading it into the bomb bay. I’m taking off for Hiroshima. You won’t know when. You don’t know where. You won’t know how. But you will know why.”
This vague threat to unleash “hellfire” upon his enemies at some future time typifies one of Schmalfeldt’s psychiatric traits I noted in November: Sociopathic sadism. Schmalfeldt enjoys inflicting punishment on those he dehumanizes into hate-objects whom he attacks remorselessly as undeserving of sympathy. He relishes the idea that he inspires fear, and the vague threat of future harm — “You won’t know when. You don’t know where. You won’t know how.” — is intended to vindicate Schmalfeldt’s self-image as someone dangerous to his enemies.
One might also observe Schmalfeldt’s lack of self-awareness, his failure to understand the transparency of his own motives as revealed by the characteristic psychological projection: “They thought they had chosen the weakest one in the herd, culled me from the herd, and now they think they’re going to break me.”
No, Bill, that is what you thought you were doing to Stranahan: You believed Lee was particularly vulnerable to your persistent harassment, and so you kept piling up the attacks, the threats, the smears in expectation of destroying him. And now that Stranahan feels compelled to file criminal charges to end your harasssment, you are projecting your own sadistic motives onto Lee.
You’re a sick freak, Bill Schmalfeldt, and every decent person watching your bizarre behavior regards you with utmost horror.
Yesterday evening, evidence was presented to a District Court Commissioner in Westminster, Maryland, and the Commissioner found it sufficiently persuasive that he issued summonses to Brett Kimberlin, Neal Rauhauser, and Bill Schmalfeldt for Harassment and Misuse of Electronic Communication. A summons was also issued to Bill Schmalfeldt for Unauthorized Access to a Computer.
On 19 April, preliminary hearings will be held in Westminster to determine if there is probable cause to try these individuals for the crimes indicated.
I will have no further statements concerning these matters until I am advised to do so by the State’s Attorney or my lawyer, except to say that 1.) continuation of past behavior could result in additional charges and that 2.) other investigations continue.
Exactly what this means — does “unauthorized access to a computer” mean hacking? — I do not yet know.
“[Neal] Rauhauser consistently promoted the hoax-hack theory of the WeinerGate scandal, continuing to argue that [Rep. Anthony] Weiner had been the victim of some devious hacker, even after Weiner admitted his guilt and resigned from office. Rauhauser also repeatedly linked [Brett] Kimberlin’s ‘Indict Breitbart’ site and, along the way, made several interesting statements.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, June 4, 2012
Four days later, on Monday, May 21, Kimberlin contacted my wife’s employer and accused me of “harassing” him, inspiring my departure to an undisclosed location so that I could continue to cover the story without endangering my family or others. And by June 4, I’d finally put together enough of the story to explain in detail how the tax-exempt “progressive” empire of Brett Kimberlin was connected to the WeinerGate obsessions of Neal Rauhauser:
Both Rauhauser and Kimberlin were enemies of Breitbart for different reasons and in mid-2011 — in the wake of Weiner’s resignation — they joined forces, an alliance that eventually made Aaron Walker a target of convenience, collateral damage in a much larger campaign against their enemies, especially including Andrew Breitbart.
A lot of people became targets in that campaign, including Seth Allen, Mike Stack, Patrick “Patterico” Frey, Mandy Nagy, Ace of Spades, James O’Keefe, Lee Stranahan, Brandon Darby, Ali Akbar and myself, to name a few. And what Ace wrote in May is still true:
“It is very easy to decide ‘this isn’t any of my trouble’ and permit vicious behavior. . . . Who wants to get involved? Easier, and surely safer, just to duck one’s head and hide, and hope the danger visits someone else.”
A fearful, defensive posture toward danger will not save you, and the “duck and hide” response only permits the danger to envelop others.
