Category: Blogging

‘At a Time of My Choosing’

Posted on Comments

Patterico has a few careful words about the constant harassment:

Threats just give me something new to talk about. At a time of my choosing.
Do you folks understand that yet? You’ve tried to intimidate and threaten me for over two years now. No letter to my boss will stop me. No threat will stop me.
I’m not going away.

Exactly. Sociopathic monsters like Bill Schmalfeldt think they’re doing a smart thing with their endless cyberstalking against people who have better things to do with their lives. But the targets have discretion over what to ignore, when to respond and how. And when the tables are turned — when Brett Kimberlin, Neal Rauhauser and their troll gang find themselves exposed by those whom they’ve tried so desperately to destroy — it ill behooves the monsters to cry, “No fair!”

Read the rest of Patterico’s post.

June 3: Bill Schmalfeldt Begins Cyberstalking Aaron Walker

Posted on Comments

Bill Schmalfeldt is one of the strange characters in the troll army that has been harassing targets of the Kimberlin-Rauhauser Axis for the past several months. Schmalfeldt recently called attention to himself by cyberstalking me (see, “Pray for Ten Thousand Angels,” Nov. 23), but research shows that he has been at it since June.

His Twitter account has been suspended due to his abusive misbehavior. However, for reasons unknown, in July someone posted to Pastebin 2,800 of Schmalfeldt’s Twitter messages from May 29-July 2. From this cache, it is possible to learn how and when Schmalfeldt got involved:

2670. Sun Jun 03 19:55:53 +0000 2012, liberalgrouch, 209372854213558273,
@catsrimportant can someone point me to something written about this Aaron Walker case that was NOT written by some right wing shithead?

2669. Sun Jun 03 20:30:58 +0000 2012, liberalgrouch, 209381683034722305,
@AaronWorthing Are you really comparing yourself with MLK?

2668. Sun Jun 03 20:42:09 +0000 2012, liberalgrouch, 209384499425976320,
@AaronWorthing I know next to nothing about this case. What did Kimberlin say you allegedly said/tweeted/google that proved threating?

2667. Sun Jun 03 20:42:39 +0000 2012, liberalgrouch, 209384626899255296,
@AaronWorthing Forgive me for asking, but I have some strong views about the First Amendment and I’m researching this story for my blog.

2666. Sun Jun 03 20:42:54 +0000 2012, liberalgrouch, 209384689511841792,
@AaronWorthing I promise. No one will come to get you. 😉

2665. Sun Jun 03 21:10:29 +0000 2012, liberalgrouch, 209391629881192448,
@AaronWorthing Well, certainly a new Twitter chum can recommend to another new Twitter chum a website he might find interesting, say wot?

This is important to understanding Schmalfeldt’s motives, methods and mental disposition. Schmalfeldt’s target was Aaron Walker who, on May 17, had published a 28,000-word account of his conflict with Brett Kimberlin. About the length of a 90-page book, Walker’s account was studded with links to original court documents and e-mails. Schmalfeldt wasn’t dealing with a story where there was any shortage of factual information available.

What was Schmalfeldt seeking? Some way to discredit Walker, to create a narrative in which Kimberlin could be portrayed as the victim.

This is the “accuse the accusers” motif that has added layers of unnecessary confusion to this story: By a sort of narrative ju-jitsu — minimizing the deliberate harmfulness of Kimberlin’s actions, while depicting his targets as unethical, selfish or motivated by purposes of political revenge — the “accuse the accusers” strategy creates a false equivalence between victim and victimizer. This method of online obfuscation is effective because few people (including law enforcement officials and judges) have the patience necessary to trace the conflict to its origins, nor do they seem willing to contextualize any particular aspect of the conflict by studying it as part of an overall pattern of behavior.

Schmalfeldt began his involvement by declaring to Melissa Brewer (@catsrimportant) — an ally of Kimberlin and Rauhauser — that he wanted coverage of the Walker case not written by “some right-wing shithead.” He then started to hector Walker, questioning whether the convicted bomber Kimberlin had done anything threatening. Schmalfeldt offered as his motive his “strong views about the First Amendment.”

Keep in mind that, on May 20, Schmalfeldt evidently got himself banned from Daily Kos, where he’d been a diarist less than six months. Schmalfeldt’s stint as a blogger at the Examiner was terminated May 2, after he was accused of abusive conduct toward fellow Examiner contributor Joe Newby. (Shmalfeldt resurfaced June 22 as Examiner columnist “Bill Matthews,” only to be terminated again Aug. 6 after his deception was discovered.) His “strong views about the First Amendment,” we may suppose, involve Schmalfeldt’s antisocial belief that he should be able to say anything to anyone in other people’s privately-owned online space, without regard for the proprietors’ rules or even basic human decency. (See “Bill Schmalfeldt: Too Disgusting For Daily Kos,” Nov. 25, by Lee Stranahan.)

“Troll Rights” may be an interesting legal concept, but it’s a lousy career strategy. Schmalfeldt entered early June with more than one burnt bridge behind him, and his apparent plan for redemption was to make himself the white knight who would slay the dreaded Aaron Walker dragon that was threatening that noble progressive, Brett Kimberlin.

“The Narcissist as Self-Imagined Hero” — Schmalfeldt isn’t the first such character we’ve encountered. Incapable of accepting responsibility for his own errors and misfortunes, the narcissist instead externalizes blame for his failures, demonizing and scapegoating others. Unwilling or unable to emulate successful people, the narcissist envies them. Viewing success as a zero-sum game, he convinces himself that the game is rigged against him, and that the success of others results from their unfairly taking advantage of the “system,” thus wrongly cheating him out of the rewards and admiration he believes he deserves.

All people naturally want to think well of themselves, and even people with healthy minds are susceptible to the psychological defense mechanisms involved in narcissism. The difference between normal self-regard and pathological narcissism, however, is the profound ego-damage that motivates the narcissist, and his inability to recognize or accept the reality of his situation. In its most extreme manifestation, narcissism becomes paranoid psychosis, as the demonized scapegoats used to explain failure are inflated into an all-powerful “Them.”

Most narcissists never slip over the edge into outright psychosis, but instead exhibit borderline antisocial traits, among them grandiosity — an irrationally exaggerated sense of self-importance — and a tendency to dehumanize others. You can see this, for example, in the grotesque Photoshop image of Sarah Palin that Schmalfeldt used to illustrate his July 26 Examiner post (written under his “Bill Matthews” alias):

Palin bleeding with a spike through her forehead? Coupled with an unfunny “joke” about nipple-piercing? And Bill Schmalfeldt created this image to illustrate a blog post about Chick-fil-A?

Here’s a simple mental health test: You might be dangerously crazy if you need an explanation of what’s wrong with that.

So, Bill Schmalfeldt, courageous defender of the First Amendment, about midway through the 33 days between his getting banned from Daily Kos and his re-emergence at the Examiner as “Bill Matthews,” chooses as a suitable target for destruction Aaron Walker.

Why Aaron Walker?

Well, on May 29 — the Tuesday before the Sunday on which Schmalfeldt began “researching” his anti-Walker attack — Walker had been briefly arrested following a court hearing in Montgomery County, Maryland. That incident was widely reported (see “IBD At Kimberlin Hearing: Walker Handcuffed, 1st Amendment Muzzled,” by David Hogberg, Investors Business Daily) and, for the second time in less than a week, the Kimberlin saga controlled the top seven threads at Memeorandum.

Bill Schmalfeldt, courageous defender of the First Amendment, couldn’t stand it: How dare “some right-wing shithead” claim that he had rights that were threatened by noble progressive Brett Kimberlin? Therefore the white-knight hero would ride forth to save the day by “exposing” Aaron Walker as the dastardly villain. The result of Schmalfeldt’s scheme was a June 6 blog post with this vicious headline:

Buzzing Blowflies Swarming
the Rotten Breitbart Carcass

Ah, yes! That’s it! Schmalfeldt hated Breitbart when he was alive, he heinously mocked Breitbart after he was dead, and he knew that the way to invoke the Left’s sympathy for Brett Kimberlin was to portray Kimberlin as the victim of a Breitbart-inspired “hoax,” just like the Breitbart “hoax” that had brought down Anthony Weiner.

What? You didn’t know that Weiner was the victim of a “hoax”?

Maybe you aren’t one of the “Weiner Truthers” who coalesced around a certain Web site that is now run by Bill Schmalfeldt.

Narcissists crave attention, and some people think that the best way to deal with Bill Schmalfeldt is to ignore him. Schmalfeldt started cyberstalking Aaron Walker in June, and I tried to ignore him. It wasn’t until September that his name was first mentioned on this blog.

We keep re-learning the same sad lesson:

“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.”
— Ace of Spades, May 22

Evil is persistent. Duck your head, shrug your shoulders — “Gosh, too bad what happened to Aaron Walker” — and never mind who will be visited next by this particular specimen of evil. Never mind what innocent person the monsters will choose to victimize, because nobody can be bothered to pay attention to what’s happening.

Monsters on the Internet: Sociopathic
Sadism and Bill Schmalfeldt’s Madness

“Sociopathic sadism”? Am I an expert, to make such a judgment? No, but after more than six months of this craziness, I’m pretty damned familiar with it. Never mind what clinical label the diagnosticians might apply. You don’t need a Ph.D. to recognize evil.

Don’t let evil win. Go hit Aaron Walker’s tip jar.

And please, don’t stop praying now.

 

They’re Still Hating Breitbart

Posted on Comments

After screaming into the phone in frustration, I caught my breath and calmed down, finally paraphrasing scripture: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Never mind to whom I was talking or what the original subject of my rant was, the bottom line is something some of us have been saying for months: “Damn, I miss Andrew.”

Of course, Breitbart himself was often frustrated — in his “righteous indignation” mode — at the apathy and incompetence he encountered when dealing with the ossified GOP Establishment.

Despite the mythical image of Breitbart as an invulnerable superhero who went from one triumphant victory to another in his war against the “Democrat-Media Complex,” Andrew experienced discouragement just like anyone else. While he was always sanguine in public, understanding his role-model status in exemplifying the “happy warrior” spirit, he didn’t mind sharing his disappointments privately with friends.

This morning, Da Tech Guy had Aaron Walker’s attorney Dan Backer on his radio show for a two-hour special about the Kimberlin saga. The astonishing news this week — Judge Richard B. Potter’s dismissal of the Virginia lawsuit Walker v. Kimberlin, et al. — was a main topic. I called in during the second hour of the show, and there was extensive discussion of how to get courts, cops and reporters to start taking this story seriously. People have been SWATted, other people have been sued, arrested, wrongly accused, threatened, harassed and cyberstalked, people have lost their jobs or had their employment jeopardized, and yet there continues to be a false narrative about this story that it’s “just about politics” or “just a bunch of crazy people arguing on the Internet.”

Frustration and discouragement are natural, and it is difficult to see the way forward without visionary leadership. “Damn, I miss Andrew.”

OK, so . . . Bill Schmalfeldt.

Bill Schmalfeldt of Elk Ridge, Maryland, a.k.a. “Liberal Grouch”

You remember: Two weeks ago, the deranged Schmalfeldt threatened to call my wife and, over a span of 48 hours, sent me more than 200 Twitter messages inspired by his obsessive rage. He had been attacking me since June, but I’d tried to ignore it until Schmalfeldt’s madness escalated to such an intensity that I felt obliged to turn on the light and let people watch the cyberstalking cockroach scurry away.

Do you know how much Bill Schmalfeldt hated Andrew Breitbart?

Two weeks ago — the day after Thanksgiving, the same day he went nuts on Twitter — Schmalfeldt took over the “Breitbart Unmasked” site that for the past nine months has been used to attack various targets of what I’ve called the Kimberlin-Rauhauser Axis. But even before that, four months ago, Schmalfeldt did something so perverse and hateful that decent people can scarcely comprehend it.

In July, Schmalfeldt created a Web site called “Big Damnation” which he promoted with a Twitter account called @DeadAndrew that mocked Breitbart as supposedly repenting his conservative “sins” (and denouncing his former colleagues) while suffering in Hell.

Bill Schmalfeldt is a remorseless liar and, after this vile project was exposed, Schmalfeldt deceptively used his phony “Bill Matthews” alias at the Examiner to promote his dishonest (anti-Breitbart) version of this controversy. In doing so, Schmalfeldt (a) defended Brett Kimberlin and (b) pretended that he wasn’t responsible for the “Big Damnation”/@DeadAndrew atrocity, as Lee Stranahan has explained.

This is important to understand because, as I have previously pointed out, the original reason Aaron Walker became a target of Kimberlin is because Walker was CC’d on an e-mail sent to Andrew Breitbart that became part of a police report.

That is to say, Walker was collateral damage, a target of convenience, in Kimberlin’s larger project of destroying Breitbart. This project has continued even after Breitbart’s death, and Schmalfeldt appears very much to be part of that project, although whether he’s being paid or is just a moonbat volunteer is not clear.

Two weeks after his “Big Damnation”/@DeadAndrew atrocity project was exposed, Schmalfeldt used his “Bill Matthews” alias at the Examiner to attack me as “one of the few odious wisps of intestinal gas still floating in the air, emanating from the decomposing empire of the late conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.”

Like everything else Schmalfeldt writes — his initials are “B.S.” — this is laughably wrong. I was never part of Breitbart’s “empire,” never contributed to nor was paid by any of Breitbart’s enterprises.

Rather, I was just one of many friends that Andrew made over the course of his career. I first met him at CPAC 2007, and interviewed him later that year for a Washington Times feature story. This friendship continued over the next five years and, as chance would have it, I was among a dozen or so people hanging out with Breitbart in a hotel lobby on the eve of an AFP Michigan conference the weekend before he died. Somewhere online, there’s video of the speech I gave at the D.C. memorial for Breitbart, but I’m not in a mood to look that up now.

My point is that (a) Schmalfeldt is a liar, (b) he’s part of a much larger project aimed at destroying the conservative citizen-journalism movement that Breitbart helped inspire, and (c) the reason I became a target is that, like so many other targets of the Kimberlin-Rauhauser Axis, I’m trying to carry on this movement. As I wrote on May 18: Who Warned Us About Brett Kimberlin?

People better wake up. Where there is no vision, the people perish.

And remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

 

 

 

 


New Charges Filed Against Former ‘Anonymous’ Spokesman Barrett Brown

Posted on Comments

Barrett Brown, whose online meltdown led to his September arrest for threatening an FBI agent, has been indicted for last year’s Stratfor hacking.

UPDATE: Brown acted as an unofficial spokesman for the Anonymous hacking conspiracy for more than a year and was raided (but not arrested) in March at the time the feds busted the “Lulzsec” splinter cell of Anonymous. Because Brown was not arrested, there was widespread suspicion from March onward that he was cooperating with authorities as an informant, in a deal similar to the one whereby “Lulzsec” leader Sabu ratted out his comrades.

Six months after the March raid, Brown posted a series of bizarre YouTube video rants in which he threatened by name an FBI special agent, and was charged with three federal counts related to that incident. Brown’s belated indictment for the December 2011 hacking of Stratfor (and distribution of illegally obtained credit card information) may help explain the strange paranoia that led to Brown’s September meltdown.

UPDATE II: Associated Press via Washington Post:

Barrett Brown, 31, was indicted in Dallas this week on a dozen charges that include aggravated identity theft and device fraud. He is accused of making public an Internet link providing access to credit card information stolen from Stratfor, which had emails taken during that same hack released by WikiLeaks. . . .
Brown was a de facto spokesman for Anonymous, willing to speak for a movement that prides itself on anonymity. The Stratfor breach claimed by Anonymous ravaged the company’s servers, leading to the disclosure of thousands of credit card numbers and other information.

You can click here to see the 12-count federal indictment.

UPDATE III: Brown’s egomaniacal arrogance caused him to be regarded as a selfish “famewhore” by some Anonymous members. When he emerged as the media-grabbing face of the hacker movement in 2011, I predicted that Brown would become a focus of law-enforcement scrutiny. Logically, Brown could not speak for the Anonymous hackers without communicating with them, and thus surveillance of Brown could lead the feds to other members of the group. Whether or not that’s what led to the subsequent arrests of Anonymous hackers, it’s now becoming evident that the feds have been watching Brown closely for months:

The new charges stem from a Christmas Day attack against Stratfor, a U.S.-based intelligence gathering firm, in which Anonymous hackers stole some 5.5 million emails, some of which were later published on WikiLeaks. Brown allegedly facilitated the hack by posting a hyperlink in an Internet Relay Chat channel he controlled, thereby providing others access to the credit card information and identities of 5,000 individuals in the Stratfor database.
That’s count one: knowingly trafficking in stolen authentication features. Count two alleges that Brown kept at least some of this credit card information for several months in an attempt to defraud the card holders. He is also charged with 10 counts of aggravated identity theft. All told, Brown could face up to 45 years in prison and a $3 million fine on the new counts alone.
Another Anonymous hacker, Jeremy Hammond, has been accused of orchestrating the Stratfor attack and could face life in prison.

So one of his erstwhile comrades is facing life, and Brown himself could spend 45 years in the pen. Guess that book deal won’t work out, huh?

UPDATE IV: I first became aware of Barrett Brown in October 2009, when he evidently got the idea that it would be cool to dogpile on Charles Johnson’s attacks against me. Rather than argue with him about that — or even mention his name — instead I put up a post mocking his former role as spokesman for an atheist group.

For a while thereafter, Brown would occasionally pop up online harassing me about one thing or another, and every so often I’d heap more scorn and mockery on him. In December 2010, I mocked Brown’s weirdly grandiose scheme for “Project PM”:

Has Barrett Brown slipped a cog? Is he zany, daft, wacko, loony, bonkers, Froot Loops, and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?

Brown reacted by threatening to sue me for libel, which I laughed off as ridiculous, the evidence of Brown’s derangement being quite obvious. It was about two months later (February 2011) that somebody sent me an e-mail informing me that this narcissistic nutcase had made himself the public spokesman for Anonymous. Now here we are 22 months later, with Barrett Brown under arrest and threatened with the possibility of decades in federal prison. Perhaps his atheist pals will recommend that Barrett take comfort in praying to infinite eternal nothingness.

UPDATE V: Robert McMillan at Wired points out something I’d forgotten about Barrett’s September video rant:

The self-proclaimed Anonymous spokesman said he was expecting to face fraud charges after his apartment was raided back in March. He mentioned them in a long, rambling video posted to YouTube the day on the same day he was arrested in September. “I bring in no money. I have $25,000 I brought in the last year from this f–king book deal. that’s it.” he said. “A f–king fraud charge for a f–king writer activist who has no fucking money.”
Later in the video, Brown railed against FBI Agent Robert Smith, saying that he was going to “ruin” Smith’s life “and look into his f–king kids.” The Anonymous activist said he was angry that feds were contemplating obstruction of justice charges against his mother.

Brown knew he was being investigated in connection with the Stratfor hacking, which explains a lot about his agitated state in that video. It doesn’t explain, however, why he was ranting about Jennifer Emick, HB Gary and other stuff he had been discussing with “Carlito2000.”

 

The Continuing Newsworthiness of the Weird Kimberlin-Rauhauser Story

Posted on Comments

Brett Kimberlin could have been sentenced to 230 years in federal prison

“Keep in mind that Rauhauser, by inciting Nadia Naffe’s lawsuit against Patterico, has obligated Patterico to avoid writing about this subject on advice of counsel, and Aaron Walker‘s attorneys have advised him likewise. So two of the bloggers most knowledgeable about what I call the Kimberlin-Rauhauser Axis are not in a position to tell readers what’s happening on that front. William Hoge has been keeping tabs on the court proceedings, but Rauhauser’s methodical cyberstalking required my special attention.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 21

“It’s as if the whole matter is just being treated as a blogger war, as opposed to something that could have gotten multiple people killed.”
— Patrick “Patterico” Frey, Nov. 8

“I believe this to be reckless endangerment if not attempted murder. The intent there was to cause harm.”
— Aaron Walker, Nov. 27

When Neal Rauhauser’s blog went dark (and Neal’s pet Twitter troll, “Occupy Rebellion” went silent) Friday, it didn’t make big headlines — even most blogs ignored it — despite the fact that it involves one of the central figures in one of the most bizarre stories of the year.

Among the minor frustrations of covering this story has been the occasional accusation that I’ve gone down a rabbit hole, chasing an inconsequential controversy that boils down to “just a bunch of crazy people arguing on the Internet.” Yet the story remains every bit as newsworthy today, in early December, as it was on May 25, when it accounted for the top seven threads on Memeorandum.

As a matter of fact, with a key court date approaching Tuesday — when Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Richard B. Potter will hear several motions in the Virginia case of Walker v. Kimberlin, et al. — the story is now more newsworthy than ever. Furthermore, the possibly related incidents of “SWATtings” (which have targeted conservative bloggers including Patrick “Patterico” Frey) recently gained notice in the mainstream press:

So here we have a story with a celebrity angle and nationwide significance, related to the Anthony Weiner scandal, and also involving Brett Kimberlin, the infamous “Speedway Bomber” who gained notoriety for claiming to have sold drugs to a youthful Dan Quayle. In addition, this story involves the late Andrew Breitbart because, as I explained Nov. 24, Aaron Walker first came to Kimberlin’s attention after Walker was CC’d on an e-mail that liberal blogger Seth Allen (who had been sued by Kimberlin) sent to Breitbart last year. And, if all of that is not enough to make the story sufficiently interesting:

The strange relationships between all these incidents and individuals could scarcely be sorted out and explained in a single blog post, but as confusing as it may be, the point is — as Patterico told L.A. Weekly‘s Simone Wilson — this isn’t just “a blogger war.”

The Internet is being used as a weapon of what Patterico has called “political terrorism.” Law enforcement seems indifferent to this threat to First Amendment freedoms, and a similiar indifference has been shown by many journalists and bloggers.

“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.”
— Ace of Spades, May 22

Over the past six months, the danger of which Ace spoke has been visited on many innocent law-abiding American citizens, some of whom had nothing to do with the Kimberlin story. Neal Rauhauser has boasted of his skill at playing “conflict cupid” with his enemies, and has evidently incited several vile creatures to join a sort of troll army, attacking not only those who have spoken out against Rauhauser’s client Kimberlin, but also anyone who has rallied to the defense of Kimberlin’s targets. Larry Sinclair, Bill Schmalfeldt and Brooks Bayne are among those who have assisted in sowing confusion, conflict, suspicion and fear around these targets. This is part of what I’ve called the “accuse the accusers” strategy and, as I said in September:

I am not deceived. I am not distracted. And I sure as hell ain’t afraid.

There was an election campaign to cover and so, except for the occasional mention of new developments, “The Kimberlin Files” were laid aside until that ended. Now I’m back on the story.

Aaron Walker’s lawsuit against Kimberlin, Rauhauser and Ron Brynaert aims to hold people accountable for their dangerous and harmful activities. The hearing Tuesday in Manassas, Virginia, will resolve several preliminary motions in that case:

Kimberlin’s conduct in the case, acting as his own attorney, has been decidedly weird. At one point in August (see “Exhibit J” here), Kimberlin sought to delay the case to Dec. 15 and e-mailed Walker’s attorney Dan Backer:

“I am cooperating with the FBI and other law enforcement officials regarding several issues involving your client and I believe that the resolution of those matters will have a bearing on this case.”

The idea that a notorious criminal like Kimberlin would be “cooperating with the FBI” is strange enough, but what “issues involving” Aaron Walker could be of interest the FBI?

My guess is that Kimberlin was talking about Rauhauser’s effort to depict Walker (along with Patterico, HB Gary, Jen Emick and others) as part of a conspiracy that exists only in Rauhauser’s twisted imagination. Rauhauser has been pushing this craziness for months. In February, it was the “Kookpocalypse“; a few months later, Rauhauser adapted the conspiracy theory to his false claim that Brandon Darby was to blame for the SWATtings. By September, Rauhauser (aka “Carlito2000”) was pushing this insanity at Barrett Brown.

If Kimberlin thought he could save himself the trouble of defending against a lawsuit by getting the feds to prosecute Walker based on Rauhauser’s false “Kookpocalypse” theory, wouldn’t that implicate Kimberlin in an attempt to obstruct justice? What other purpose could Rauhauser’s falsehoods serve, except to distract and confuse authorities investigating the SWATtings? And, as Patterico points out, why would Kimberlin plead the Fifth Amendment when asked what he knows about SWATting?

There are people who think they know the answers to those questions, just as there are people who think they know why Rauhauser’s blog suddenly went “dark” on Friday. Rather than supply the common-sense inferences — readers may connect the dots however they please — my main goal is to encourage journalists and bloggers to bring attention to this case as Tuesday’s hearing approaches.

More than six months after I canceled a planned trip to the G-8 Summit in order to cover this story, Walker’s lawsuit against Kimberlin promises to bring some sort of clarity (and, perhaps eventually, closure) to this savage tale. Reader contributions to The Shoe Leather Fund have permitted me to stay on this story despite every effort by Kimberlin and his henchmen to intimidate me into quitting, and I know readers don’t want me to quit now. So once again I remind you of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

 

 

 

 

THE KIMBERLIN FILES:

 

 


Auto-Marginalization: @BrooksBayne Decides to Jew-Bait (!) Aaron Walker

Posted on Comments

Did I ever mention that I was friends with the late Sam Francis? That I have shaken hands with Pat Buchanan and once interviewed the late Joe Sobran? I’m bringing this up — doing “guilt-by-association” against myself, as it were — to make the point that I’ve hung out with Thought Criminals of the Dreadnaught class, the kind of right-wing extremists your nice Republican mother warned you about.

Having been smeared as a “hater” myself and having seen good people suffer from intra-conservative factional infighting, I am loath to support purges of people on the basis of cheap attacks from the Left or flimsy accusations of ideological impurity.

Ask Pamela Geller who stood up for her when Charles Johnson accused her of abetting “Euro-fascism.”

So now we confront the problem of Brooks Bayne.

Exactly who he is, or thinks he is, or has convinced other people that he is, Brooks Bayne has recently decided to auto-marginalize himself. It’s a hell of thing to say about somebody that I’d rather link a Firedoglake article about them than to link anything they ever wrote.

The Entire Internet Hates Brooks Bayne’s Guts

That was in March, when Bayne decided to go off on a weird tangent about Sandra Fluke’s boyfriend being Jewish and the scion of a family who subscribed to “the typical Jewish variant of socialism.” Marc Tracy offers an examination of Bayne’s rant at Tablet Magazine.

Just to demonstrate that one can speak of “the typical Jewish variant of socialism” without being a Jew-hater, I would direct you to David Horowitz’s memoir Radical Son, in which he ponders how and why his Jewish parents became members of the Communist Party U.S.A., and thus idolators in the totalitarian personality cult of a mass murderer named Josef Stalin. Horowitz recognized the cultural roots of this and discussed it in the context of tikkun olam. As I wrote in February 2011:

Tikkun olam is a rabbinical concept that might properly be translated as “for the public good,” but which in the modern era has been politicized by many on the Left, so that it is indistinguishable in their interpretation from “social justice.” Most famously, Michael Lerner — a 1960s anti-war radical who once led an SDS splinter group called the Seattle Liberation Front — named his magazine Tikkun.

“Social justice” is, as Hayek said, a mirage. Whatever you call it, and whatever compels you to pursue it, chasing the mirage of social justice will eventually bring about disillusionment, if you are intelligent and honest with yourself. It would be good if more Jewish conservatives spoke bluntly about this, just as it would be good if more Catholic conservatives spoke bluntly about how various “social justice” teachings of their church empower Welfare State liberalism that is ultimately hostile to faith and morality. For that matter, most Protestant churches could use a stern lecture or two about this perverse and nonsensical misinterpretation of Christian teaching.

As Ludwig von Mises observed nearly a century ago, “Christian Socialism is nonetheless socialism.” But I digress . . .

Brooks Bayne rather reminds me of another enthusiastic political parvenu, Glenn Beck, in that during his famed chalkboard lectures, Beck was often teaching his viewers facts that he himself had just learned. Not that there was anything wrong with that — Beck’s genuine excitment as he traced the historical background of current politics was quite infectious — but there is always a danger that such student-teachers will let themselves be sidetracked into well-known dead-ends that more experienced teachers might have warned them about.

The origins of the Federal Reserve system are indeed a frightful mess, but if you start ranting too excitedly about Jekyll Island and “international bankers,” you’ll sound like a kook — and might actually become one. More than a few well-meaning folks have started down that path and ended up on the paranoid fringe, barking madly about the Bildebergers, the Bavarian Illuminati and the New World Order.

It is in such light that we must evaluate Brooks Bayne and the suspicious whiff of anti-Semitism that surrounds him. I don’t want to be hasty. It takes more than a few sharp jabs at “neocons” to arouse my suspicion in this regard; many of my good friends are paleoconservatives, traditionalists or libertarians who have their own legitimate complaints against neconservatives. Such an éminence gris as Russell Kirk once infamously quipped that it seemed some neocons “mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” Unless we’re willing to airbrush Kirk from the conservative pantheon, then, we can’t be haphazardly purging people on the basis of random remarks.

Nevertheless, Brooks Bayne keeps tallying up marks against himself, and has managed to alienate so many conservatives that it’s difficult to find anyone willing to defend him anymore. And this brings me to the incident that inspired this long rumination: After a U.S. District Court judge dismissed Aaron Walker’s federal lawsuit against Brett Kimberlin — I blogged about that decision, and the PDF of the judge’s ruling is here — Brooks Bayne made a comment at his own blog mocking the plaintiff as “Walkerwitz.”

WALKERWITZ?

What the hell is this? Never mind why Bayne, who endlessly celebrates himself as a True Conservative, would take sides with Brett Kimberlin. Why would Bayne make this bizarre anti-Semitic jest about Walker, a conservative Presbyterian from Texas? Maybe because Brooks got this idea (as he has seems to have gotten so many other falsehoods) from the pro-Kimberlin “Breitbart Unmasked” site.

More than two months ago, Aaron Walker explained how “Breitbart Unmasked” began harassing him in March on Twitter with claims that records at Yale Law School showed Walker as being Jewish.

This was preposterous. And where did “Breitbart Unmasked” get that silly idea? From an anti-Semitic site whose idiot author evidently decided anyone with the first name “Aaron” must be Jewish.

So, a falsehood makes its way from a Jew-hating site to a pro-Kimberlin Twitter account and now, it seems, to Brooks Bayne, “True Conservative.”

Anyone care to defend Bayne in this? Anyone? Bueller?

UPDATE: Phillip McGuire on Twitter informs me that Bayne has been throwing this “Walkerwitz” idiocy at Aaron Walker for weeks now, and Google confirms this as true, raising the question: Why were none of Bayne’s fanboys troubled by this? And why do mainstream conservatives think they can safely ignore people like Brooks Bayne?

On the one hand, he may be an irrelevant distraction. On the other hand, he seems to have made himself the center of gravity of a minor galaxy of “True Conservative” posturing, so that when he starts Jew-baiting a Presbyterian, maybe we ought to take time to warn people about this dangerous fool.

UPDATE II: Back in September, Ladd Ehlinger Jr. subjected Bayne to a memorable satirical beatdown.

 


Benghazi => ‘High On A Mountaintop’

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

I’ve been waiting to see this video. Stevens, Smith, Doherty and Woods did their part. Cassone has done his. Now, you know what to do for your part: make this viral. All over twitter, blogs, and inboxes.

“Who gave the order to let his son die?” indeed. I think we need to get what we know to be the truth out there, and have #OccupyResoluteDesk stand tall. He’s really adept at hiding behind Susan Rice’s skirts, admittedly.

Update: thanks, Instapundit, and thank you again, Cassone!