Category: Blogging

Peace, Love and Murder: Green Radicals Target Brandon Darby on ‘Hit List’

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This hippy-dippy flower-child stuff may sound silly and harmless:

“F–k me open like a prayer book,” the poet declaimed, setting down his guitar to recite. It was Sunday evening on the grounds of an aging, pink/orange stucco home in a Lake Worth immigrant neighborhood, and the Monkeywrench Cafe — a one-time-only affair — was drawing to a close.
The first in a series of events to memorialize and celebrate the passing of the Night Heron Grassroots Activist Center, the cafe made for a day to mist an aging hippie’s eyes: homemade vegetarian fare, untutored acoustic music, a youngish crowd of many genders, and barefoot children scampering across a garden and yard of primitively tended tropical flora.
That spirit of community and concern is what first brought the Night Heron into being three years ago this December, in a faded commercial complex by the FEC railroad tracks north of downtown Lake Worth. Entirely self-funded, it was exactly what it claimed to be — the hub of the quirky little city’s political counterculture, seriously intended, light of heart.

Why would anyone pay serious attention to this ridiculous “political counterculture” center in Lake Worth, Florida? Maybe you should read J. Christian Adams’s article at PJMedia:

The latest newsletter from the environmentalist group Earth First! Journal contains a curious topic — assassinations.
In fact, the newsletter conveniently provides the names, addresses and phone numbers of the assassination targets.

Radical environmentalists have a long history of terrorism, but this “eco-revolutionary” hit list contains a nudge-nudge, wink-wink disclaimer:

Let us say clearly, this is not a call to undertake assassinations of the elite scum who are pillaging the planet and enslaving the populace — but not because we think that is a bad idea. And it’s also not because we think killing CEOs and lobbyists is negative PR either. In fact, most everyone hates these creeps, and many would applaud their demise. Some would even be so enthusiastic as to make a bid on the assassin’s old underwear if given the chance in a government auction, as we found out last year, when the State sold off Ted [Kaczynski]’s personal belongings to further enrich the family of Unabomber victim Thomas J. Mosser, executive of corporate marketing giants Burson Marsteller.

Perhaps this casual, sarcastic tribute to Ted Kaczynski would be of interest to David Gelernter, the Yale University professor who was critically injured by one of “Hut Man’s” mail bombs in 1993. (I recommend Gelernter’s 1997 book Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber.) Or perhaps someone might ask the Discovery network employees held hostage by the Al Gore-inspired “inconvenient terrorist” James J. Lee.

The disingenous disclaimer on the Green extremist “hit list” does nothing to reduce the risk to the targets whose names, addresses and phone numbers they publish — mostly corporate CEOs and other typical villains of the Left’s demonology, but also including Brandon Darby:

The radical left loathes Darby because he is a heretic — a former leftist who helped the FBI break up a plot to bomb the 2008 Republican Convention in Minneapolis. That’s why loony publications like Mother Jones refer to him as a “snitch.”

J. Christian Adams explains the bloody obvious:

Surely the FBI will find it difficult to track down the origins of these threats, right? Earth First is one of several shadowy fringe environmental groups that engage in the euphemism “direct action” but have no centralized structure.  So finding the author of these threats is probably impossible, right?
Except that the author of the assassination list provided contact information:
Earth First! Journal
PO Box 964, Lake Worth, FL 33460
(561) 249-2071

What a coincidence! Lake Worth, Florida, home to a “quirky” counterculture group that quite recently disbanded:

The Night Heron’s core was a lending library, with shelves full of labor history, feminist thought, environmental tracts, anarchist and Marxist theory . . . It reflected the center’s avowedly radical philosophy. . . . [T]he library will live on, as will the center’s co-tenant, the radical environmental journal Earth First! . . .
Address: 1307 Central Terrace, Lake Worth. Call: 561-249-2071.

What? These silly Florida hippies are directly connected to a radical eco-terrorist group that has targeted Brandon Darby for assassination?

Wow. I’m sure Attorney General Eric Holder will make this investigation a top priority for the Justice Department . . .

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 


The Obama Age: ‘That ’70s Show’

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In last night’s traditional Christmas round-up — genius! — I began by quoting Rob Long’s doom-and-gloom comments from a New York magazine feature about the post-election National Review Caribbean cruise, an article you should read in its entirety, if you want to be thoroughly depressed about the uselessness of our conservative elite: Wonks, pundits, pollsters and consultants on a free tropical vacation paid for by elderly magazine subscribers who, we presume, were grateful to be in the intellectual presence of the presumed heirs of Bill Buckley.

Near the end of the article — the “print” version is 11 pages — Joe Hagan quotes Jonah Goldberg, who offered this assessment of the cruise:

“This is a more downbeat bunch this year,” he said. “We lost in 2008, but it was almost boisterous and fun. This, a little less so. People were dyspeptic.
“Their conception of what the country is about, they really were sure the country would reject Barack Obama,” he continued. “I do think it hits them hard. The fear I have, why this election stung, I think, Obama has successfully de-ratified some of the Reagan revolution in a way that Clinton never could and didn’t even try to. That’s what freaks people out, that feeling in their gut, either Obama has changed the country, or the country has sufficiently changed that they don’t have a problem with Obama. That’s what eats at people.”

Indeed. You might even say that we are Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption, but if there is any hope of redeeming us from this disaster, it wouldn’t involve a political campaign or a legislative agenda. The problem is the culture, especially the culture of youth, over which Jonah Goldberg and his fellow NRO cruisers — both the geriatrics who footed the bill and the intellectual free-riders — have near-zero influence.

Flashback to Paul Weyrich’s 1999 pronouncement that America had suffered “a cultural collapse of historical proportions.” The demographic aspect of that collapse was apparent to me, and yet where is the evidence that the Bush-era GOP took it seriously? For that matter, where were the conservative intelligentsia? When Weyrich died four years ago, I wrote:

One aspect of the collapse Weyrich decried was the rise of the celebrity culture, wherein the famous people on TV exercise more influence over our attitudes than do the ordinary people in our own real lives.

Has there been any conservative intellectual pushback against that phenomenon? Or has the celebrity culture overwhelmed our intelligentsia? Coming up next on The Daily Show . . .

The consequences are nearly too grim to contemplate, particularly in what it means for the economy, namely a continuation of conditions that resemble the “stagflation” of the 1970s. Obamanomics will forever blight the prospects of an entire generation:

“This generation will be permanently depressed and will be on a lower path of income for probably all of their life — and at least the next 10 years,” says Rutgers professor Cliff Zukin, a senior research fellow at the university’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. Professionals who start out in jobs other than their first choice tend to stay on the alternative path, earning less than they would have otherwise while becoming less likely to start over again later in preferred fields, Zukin says.
Michael Greenstone, who was chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 2009 and 2010, says the shift to a downwardly mobile society may be lasting. “Children are not earning as much as their parents, and I think we’re laying the seeds for that to continue into the future,” he says.

Bitter irony: Culture overwhelms politics, and politics overwhelms economics, so that ambitious young people — reacting to cultural cues that told them to oppose Republicans as “rich old white men” — end up supporting a political agenda hostile to their economic interests. It’s the mirror-reverse of the left-wing woe that Thomas Franks lamented in What’s the Matter With Kansas?

And where is our Thomas Franks capable of explaining this?

Ed Driscoll was on that National Review Voyage of the Damned, and Ed has further thoughts on the ongoing Obama Age catastrophe.

Merry Christmas! 

 


Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Chains Rattling, and Who’s That Ghost?

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

“At more than one point in the movie, Breitbart asks members of audiences he’s addressing to hold up their iPhones, pocket cams, and other recording devices and to turn them on. You, he says, are the media. That gesture is the essential takeaway of Andrew Breitbart’s work — and of the documentary Hating Breitbart. Such moments illustrate how something weird and wonderful is happening when it comes to media. . . .
“Andrew Breitbart understood that it’s easier than ever to own a press and that despite the vast, incomprehensible increase in chatter . . . the demand for even more is still infinite.”
— Nick Gillespie, “Hating Breitbart‘s Powerful Post-Partisan Message,” Nov. 2

One of my favorite books is P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government, which ought to be on every college freshman’s reading list. It therefore seemed obvious, when I bumped into O’Rourke in the bar of the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, N.H., after the Republican presidential debate, that I must introduce him to Andrew Breitbart.

So now I sit here and ask myself, “How would ‘a lone humorist’ attempt to explain the entire tragic situation at Breitbart.com?”

Having spent more than a few hours on the phone talking to people about it the past several days, a reasonably coherent picture is emerging, and I’m not really sure I want to be the guy describing it. In fact, the smartest thing for me to do would probably be to ignore it.

None of my business. Walk away and pretend nothing happened.

Except there’s a federal lawsuit filed by Dana Loesch, which is actual news, and maybe it’s not a good idea to let myself get scooped here.

Andrew Breitbart liked to say he had two modes of operation, jocularity and righteous indignation, and it’s rather unfortunate that he never got around to writing the book, Jocularity: Excuse Me While I Make You Laugh Your F–king Asses Off, because he certainly could.

In his righteous indignation mode, by contrast, Andrew went off on Glenn Beck last year, calling Beck a “coward,” a “snake” and a “huckster” in an interview on Stephen Bannon’s podcast:

You really ought to listen to that entire 13-minute interview. As a matter of fact, a transcript might come in handy, because (a) people are telling me that it was Glenn Beck who wanted to hire Dana Loesch away from Breitbart.com, (b) the same people depict Stephen Bannon as the villain of the story, and (c) I’m genuinely perplexed by all this.

My advice has not been solicited, because I’ve only worked in the news business since 1986, so what do I know about newsroom management?

Every newsroom is a seething cauldron of frustrated ambition. There has never been a news outfit that wasn’t afflicted by clueless management, inept editors and disgruntled reporters. “We’re working for chimpanzees,” as a former Washington Times colleague used to say.

Mistakes, conflicts, rivalries, backstabbing — it’s par for the course, standard operating procedure, and the key to survival in the business is deciding how much craziness you can stand before you decide to sing that Johnny Paycheck classic, “Take This Job and Shove It.”

What’s bizarre about the case of Dana Loesch v. Breitbart.com LLC is that when Dana wanted to leave, they wouldn’t let her.

Or so Dana alleges, I hasten to add, because the last thing I need is someone suing me for defamation, tortious interference, etc.

“Mongo just pawn in game of life.”

The last thing I need is to insert myself into the middle of the New Media equivalent of the Battle of Stalingrad, but as I said a couple days ago, the sharks are going to have themselves a feeding frenzy no matter what I do (or don’t do) and why should I let myself get scooped?

Never mind my dilemma. Hear what Patterico has to say:

I never said this before, but I was personally the recipient of some pretty shabby treatment myself from that organization, after Andrew died.
[M]y experience was not the only such experience. Not by a long shot. And having been through it, it is plenty easy for me to believe that Loesch was also treated shabbily.
And when you treat people like crap, it doesn’t stay a secret.

Read the whole thing, because it’s exactly right. The world of conservative New Media is kind of like a small town, and if a secret is juicy enough, don’t think you’re going to keep the town gossips from doing what they habitually do. Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly.

Anyway, this wasn’t my plan for a cheerful Christmas Eve column, and I’m sorry for throwing this bummer on you when we’re all supposed to be making merry. But even heavy burdens are lighter when they’re shared by enough people, and maybe we can crowd-source this problem.

After all, as Breitbart said: You are the media.

UPDATE (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!





 

PREVIOUSLY:

 


Newsroom Management Training Video

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“The idea that I could do for a living that which I would do in my free time, for free, is the single greatest thing on the planet.”
— Andrew Breitbart, May 2007

“He had so much energy. He was so positive. . . . He was definitely a mentor. He was great to his employees. . . . He leaves behind a huge legacy.”
— Dana Loesch, March 1, 2012

“This case concerns a poorly managed but well meaning relationship gone tragically awry, resulting in the attempt by one vindictive party to sabotage the reputation and career of another. . . .
“For reasons that may just as easily be attributed to basic ideological conflicts, the working environment for Loesch became increasingly hostile.”
— Dana Loesch v. Breitbart.com LLC, December 2012

Generally speaking, when a routine personnel matter at a political news organization turns into a federal lawsuit that zooms to the top of Memeorandum, we might suspect that editorial management practices are not optimal, to say the very least.

Look, I once worked for the legendary notorious Otis Brumby, the pluperfect stereotype of the temperamental domineering publisher.

Otis recently did the world of journalism an enormous favor by dying, so that he can’t sue anyone for libel. Then again, truth is the ultimate defense and there were alway plenty of witnesses willing to testify that Otis was one evil, mean and crazy son of bitch.

A certain level of “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” in the newsroom therefore seems entirely normal to me, experience that came in quite handy during my decade at The Washington Times, another news operation where the words “commitment” and “institution” have special significance.

IYKWIMAITYD.

Megalomania as a managerial principle is perhaps a suitable topic for a graduate thesis at the University of Columbia J-school, but I digress . . .

Having further explored the background on what is now a matter of litigation (Loesch v. Breitbart.com), I think three things are obvious:

  1. Andrew Breitbart never would have let this happen;
  2. There’s much more to the story; and
  3. Dana Loesch has already won.

Whatever happens to the lawsuit, Dana is and will remain a person much beloved by the conservative Tea Party grassroots, whose light cannot possibly be kept hidden beneath a bushel.

The problem for the defendants in this lawsuit is that there is now blood in the water and the sharks — TPM, ThinkProgress, Media Matters, Mother Jones, Slate, Salon, Politico, Gawker, etc. — are going to insist on having themselves a feeding frenzy.

When McKay Coppins did his little “sources say” story in October, it pissed me off, because institutional loyalty and staff morale are essential to any news organization. It was shocking to think anyone who worked for Breitbart would have anything to say to McKay Coppins that did not begin with “fuck” and end with “you.”

Now, however, in my mind’s eye I’m seeing a 4,000-word article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, or an equally in-depth cover article in The New Republic — written by liberal journalists who despise everything that Andrew Breitbart believed — and there is nothing anyone can do at this point to prevent that from happening. Too many people are already talking, and the inherent news value is too great, to convince an editor that it’s not worth reporting at length.

Go read Dana Loesch’s lawsuit and ask yourself what is meant by such phrases as “poorly managed . . . vindictive . . . sabotage . . . basic ideological conflicts . . . increasingly hostile.”

Well, these are merely allegations, eh? So far as we can claim to know, all these things are wholly imagined by the plaintiff, and the defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

I first met Andrew Breitbart at CPAC in February 2007, and interviewed him for a feature profile in May 2007. I hung out with him many times over the years, including at the Michigan AFP event in February this year, just a few days before his untimely death.

And I think everyone involved in this unfortunate mess — defendant, plaintiff, and the horrified witnesses — can agree with this four-word sentence: Damn, I miss Andrew.

 

 

 


Dana Loesch, Indentured Servant?

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Rumbles of discontent at Breitbart.com, which I’d been hearing from various sources since spring, have finally erupted into actual news, as Dana Loesch has filed a federal lawsuit seeking (a) $75,000 and (b) to be released from her contactual obligations:

St. Louis talk radio host Dana Loesch, also a frequent guest on CNN, alleges in the suit filed in federal district court in St. Louis that the site is refusing to publish her work while “sabotag[ing] her attempts to labor in a similar fashion elsewhere through public misstatements and private threats to sue those who would otherwise employ Loesch.” . . .
Breitbart.com is “binding Loesch to what amounts to an indentured servitude in limbo,” she charges in the suit, which was first reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

More at the BuzzFeed. It’s unfortunate that matters came to such a pass, and I don’t want to get into the blame game in a situation where I don’t know both sides of the story.

As I said, I’ve heard “rumbles” about the Breitbart.com operation for several months, but having spent so long in the newspaper business — where every newsroom is a seething cauldron of frustrated ambition — it’s something I didn’t want to read too much into.

Dana Loesch is one of my favorite people in New Media, and I know she was one of Andrew’s favorite people. It’s just very sad to see things break down so badly so soon after Andrew’s death.

Click here to read the eight-page text of Dana’s lawsuit.

UPDATE: Now a Memeorandum thread. I’ve printed out the lawsuit and may have further comment after I read it.

UPDATE II: OK, now having skimmed over the lawsuit, the claim is that in October 2011, Breitbart.com failed to exercise its option to renew Dana’s contract for another year, so that her employment thereafter was on a month-to-month basis. In September of this year — perhaps having been offered better terms by another site — Dana gave a month’s notice of her intent to leave Breitbart.com, at which point management claimed that she was still contractually bound to the company, and threatened legal action against any company that hired Dana.

Four word come to minds: Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Without regard for contracts, it is just plain nuts for Breitbart.com to try to keep Dana if Dana wants to leave. What is this, the Mafia or something, where once you’re in, you’re in for life?

Frankly, I’ve never heard of anything like this before. It simply doesn’t make sense: If, as Dana alleges, Breitbart.com no longer wants to publish her writing, why would they prevent her from taking her work elsewhere? If her services are not valuable to them, why deny her the right to find another publisher who might value her services more?

Maybe management at Breitbart.com can explain this, or maybe I’m somehow misunderstanding the dispute, but what it looks like is, they’re trying to drive Dana Loesch off the Web altogether: She can neither write for Breitbart.com, nor write for anyone else.

How the hell can they do that in America?

UPDATE III: Linked by Doug Hagin at Daley Gator and by The Lonely Conservative. Continuing rumbles indicate that the situation with Dana Loesch may be part of a larger issue with the business model and the management philosophy at Breitbart.com: More like an old-style Hollywood studio system, oriented toward celebrity “star power,” so that if they can’t have Dana Loesch, nobody can have Dana Loesch. Or something like that, anyway.

David Martosko at the Daily Caller points out that, since Andrew died in March, “a coterie of friends of the company’s late namesake has continued to run the  company, most recently hiring a raft of conservative bloggers and reporters that  included former Washington Times staffer Kerry Picket and former Daily Caller  reporter Matthew Boyle.”

Knew they had hired Boyle, a young investigative reporter, but didn’t realize they’d also hired Picket, an ultra-aggressive Capitol Hill reporter. And, to show you how little attention I pay to these things anymore, I hadn’t seen this Dec. 10 story by Betsy Rothstein at Fishbowl DC, talking about Breitbart.com’s Stephen K. Bannon hiring up reporters by the bushel basket load, signing them up to four-year contracts:

Reporters around town being wooed for Breitbart.com include: Katie Pavlich of Townhall, Lachlan Markay of Heritage, Charlie Spiering of the Washington Examiner, Caroline May of The Daily Caller and Daniel Halper at The Weekly Standard.
Some have described a cultish feel to the process, with phrases such as “This is the way Andrew would have wanted it” being bandied about in conversation.

So, if they’ve got all this cash to throw around for hot talent in D.C., why should they insist on keeping Dana Loesch sidelined?

To repeat: Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Occupy Althouse? (The Zero-Sum Error)

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There are times when you must choose between gratitude and resentment and, considering how rarely this blog gets linked by Ann Althouse, I’ve decided to be grateful that my thoughts on Professor Erik Loomis provided her and Meade with some laughs. Also, because her post linking my post got linked at Instapundit, I’ll be grateful for what bloggers know as the “Secondhand-o-lanche.” Nevertheless . . .

What’s up with people choosing to leave clever comments at Althouse’s blog, rather than to share their pithy witticisms with us?

Moneyrunner said…
It’s worth stating that there is a case to be made for the freedom of academics to take unpopular views. In Loomis’ case it becomes a matter of defending the right of academics to be outrageous assholes without consequences.
12/21/12 6:47 AM

Jim Treacher said…
What’s the big deal? It’s not like he put crosshairs symbols on a map.
12/21/12 7:27 AM

Astro said…
I’m guessing that 100 years from now, Prof. Erik Loomis will be regarded as an historical dildo.
12/21/12 8:46 AM

Jim Treacher? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Never mind. If Treacher wants to goldbrick on his Daily Caller gig by commenting at Althouse’s blog, that’s between him and Tucker, I guess

Good thing I’m not a lefty, or I’d call for an “Occupy Althouse” movement, to demand a more equitable redistribution of funny comments. This is where one is reminded again of the alternative between resentment and gratitude.

Our commenters aren’t chopped liver, after all, and what’s to stop other bloggers — Donald Douglas or Bob Belvedere, for example — from launching their own protest campaign against us?

“Comrades! We must resist the imperialist dominance of the blogospheric bourgeoisie that exploits the commenter proletariat!”

No, we’ve seen where that ideology leads: The HuffPo “killing fields,” with volunteer contributors rounded up in a digital veal pen, promised that their unpaid work will help advance the Progressive cause, only to see the People’s Democratic Republic of HuffPo shamelessly sold to the highest bidder by Arianna and her investors.

We’re not going down that road. We’re not even going to slow down as we pass the off-ramp that leads to that road.

It would be easy enough, I suppose, to find bloggers prone to a sour-grapes mentality, to convince them that success is a zero-sum game, to mobilize their petty resentments, to persuade them that the reason they don’t get more funny comments on their blogs is because Althouse is unfairly monopolizing funny comments.

But that would not only be false, it would be evil.

The spirit of generosity and gratitude can accomplish more in human affairs than can the spirit of selfishness and envy. And I suppose, since this is the Friday before Christmas — and most of you are reading this while goldbricking at your jobs prior to taking 11 days of paid holidays — I should remind you of this greatest gift, that God so loved the world as to give his only son. And the shepherds heard an angelic host, proclaiming, “Peace on Earth! Goodwill toward men!”

If you don’t get back here until Wednesday, Jan. 2 — like Treacher, goldbricking at your job again — Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!




 

UPDATE: This seems to be a good time to thank readers who have hit the tip jar in the past week: William in Bakersfield, James in North Carolina, Gregory in Elmhurst, Clare in Larchmont, William in Dallas, Cathryn in Oregon, Glenn in Tennessee, John in Annapolis, Charles in Oregon, Amelia in New Jersey, William in Owego and Dianna in San Jose.

Again, Cassone, On Newtown

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by Smitty

We need a word for that awkward point,
When one enounters art,
And says, “Da best in da flippin’ joint!
Tell, me: How’d it start?”

The artist’s face, it then grows dark,
And with a lowered eye,
Replies, “Blood down in the park,
That deserved not so to die.”

Oh that we could enjoy beauty,
But with a lower price,
For with the living lays duty,
To dodge diabiolical dice,

And honor those less fortunate,
For reasons we grasp not,
Perishing in moments turbulent,
In sudden, hellish shot.

We need a word for that awkward point. Pre-catharsis? Take in this touching tribute:

‘Candyass Blogger’ Update: Free Speech Absolutists Who Banned Mr. Althouse UPDATE: ‘These Are Historical Dildos’

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The defense of Professor Erik “I’m a Lumberjack and I’m OK” Loomis is becoming somewhat of a cause célèbre for the progressive community online and in academia. I’m actually working on a much longer piece about this ongoing controversy, based on my own vast experience in saying stupidly offensive stuff that pisses people off. Meanwhile . . .

Essential to the progressive pro-Loomis project is promoting a narrative in which (a) Loomis is the victim of deliberate misrepresentation, and (b) the full context of the controversy is obscured. This is the bogus narrative presented by Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Education:

Critics of Loomis have been quick to describe the tweet as literal. The blog  American Thinker wrote, under the headline “Professor  Calls for Murder of NRA President,” the following: “A professor at a  taxpayer-supported state university has called for the murder of the president  of the NRA. Apparently the carnage in Newtown, Connecticut was not enough  slaughter to satisfy the blood lust of Erik Loomis….” At National Review  Online, the headline was “The  Post-Newtown Witch Hunt: Anti-gun champions of nonviolence urge violent death on  NRA members.” Other bloggers have taken to attacking  Loomis’s scholarship (which focuses on environmental and labor history).

Now, if you are aware of what Loomis actually did, you know it wasn’t just one Tweet (“head on a stick”) that got him in hot water.

As Professor Donald Douglas has explained, before Loomis deleted his Twitter account, it “was practically flooded with blood from all the violent tweets and retweets he’d been sending out.” Unless you consider Tweeting “Fuck the NRA” and re-Tweeting messages about “fuckers” deserving to be “beaten to death” to be appropriate forms of expression for an assistant professor of history, this meltdown was . . . well, arguably problematic.

When I said that the mentally ill should be in institutions, public universities weren’t the kind of institutions I had in mind.

Leaving aside whatever personal psychiatric issues may afflict The Ranting Professor — and if a nut like Loomis can legally buy a gun, maybe we do need new laws — Jaschik’s link to “attacking Loomis’s scholarship” is to the guest blog Badger Pundit wrote late Tuesday night.

To Jaschik, apparently, to “attack” someone’s scholarship is to quote their dissertation and describe its contents. Whose fault is it that Erik Loomis, Ph.D., studied the historic significance of anal sodomy in logging camps and the proletarian symbolism of “Everest’s testicles”?

It this a dissertation or a Monty Python skit?

Well, enough with the random sarcasm. It is interesting to note that the chief proprietor at Lawyers, Guns & Money, where Erik Loomis blogs when he’s not pondering the genitalia of early 20th-century I.W.W. members or gibbering like a madman on Twitter, banned Ann Althouse’s significant other in March 2011, inspiring her to brand Professor Robert Farley a “candyass blogger.”

So the operative principle is clear: (A) it would be a crime against human liberty for Erik Loomis to be denied tenure at the University of Rhode Island merely because he’s a demented kook, and (B) no fair trying to talk back to Commissar Farley and the LG&M politburo.

“Intimidation,” anyone?

UPDATE: From comments on Dr. Loomis’s latest opus:

RedWood says:
December 20, 2012 at 10:42 am
Again LOOMIS was the one going on and on (and on) about anal sex in his dissertation, and tweeted that he gets very excited talking about dildos to his teenage students. Who is the one with issues again?

Erik Loomis says:
December 20, 2012 at 10:44 am
To be clear, these are historical dildos we talked about. Actually read about to be specific. I can provide you some readings if you’d like to learn.

Uh, spare us the footnote citations, Professor . . .

(Hat-tip: Badger Pundit on Twitter.)