Category: Neutral Objective Journalism

Brett Kimberlin Attempts a Hail Mary, But ‘None of His Passes Finds a Target’

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Late last month, while I was covering CPAC, convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin lost a case in federal court in Indiana, in which he was trying to get some of his earlier convictions vacated. My podcast partner John Hoge has covered this latest failure of Acme Law:

One of my favorite excerpts from this proceeding is U.S. Attorney Josh Minkler’s response to one of Kimberlin’s court motions:

Kimberlin has received an abundance of process. He had three trials, and at least four direct appeals, five collateral attacks, and four habeas petitions. … Put differently, “Kimberlin is no stranger to appellate proceedings.” United States v. Kimberlin, 898 F.2d 1262, 1264 (&th Cir. 1990) (Kimberlin VII). As of 1990, he had “averaged two appeals per year in [the Seventh Circuit] over the last decade.” Id.
Now he is back. Decades after his convictions, Kimberlin returns for another inevitable round of litigation. Dispersed over at least 10 filings, he launches a fusillade of claims — complete with typical conspiratorial bent — that range from merely incorrect to actually misleading. He does so under the writ of coram nobis — “[the] criminal-law equivalent” of a “Hail Mary pass.” United States v George, 676 F.3d 249, 251 (1st Cir. 2012). None of his passes finds a target.

I enjoy it when lawyers include colorful language in their filings. Like, how often do you encounter the word fusillade? We might have expected “barrage,” but fusillade catches us by surprise. The author of this filing is assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Reitz, an Indiana University alumnus who majored in — wait for it — sports journalism.

There was a time, about ten years ago, when I could write like Grantland Rice. Not necessarily because I believed all that sporty bullshit, but because sportswriting was the only thing I could do that anybody was willing to pay for. And none of the people I wrote about seemed to give a hoot in hell what kind of lunatic gibberish I wrote about them, just as long as it moved. They wanted Action, Color, Speed, Violence…. At one point, in Florida, I was writing variations on the same demented themes for three competing papers at the same time, under three different names. I was a sports columnist for one paper in the morning, sports editor for another in the afternoon, and at night I worked for a pro wrestling promoter, writing incredibly twisted “press releases” that I would plant, the next day, in both papers.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

How perfect is it that an ex-sportswriter like Brian Reitz became a Republican lawyer whose job gave him the opportunity to sling a sports metaphor in the face of that evil bastard Brett Kimberlin?

There is no reason why legal writing must always be boring, and I suspect that Judge Pratt got a smile on her face when she read Reitz’s filing in the Kimberlin case, which concluded thus:

Kimberlin’s incessant litigation appears unlikely to abate. Reveling in his litigiousness, he covers the “continual reexamination of [his] old convictions.” Craig. 907 F.2d at 658; cf. Kimberlin, 2017 WL 3141909, at *1. But he has had his day(s) in court. This Court should deny his petition — without discovery or a hearing — to preserve precious judicial, and governmental, resources for “those who have yet to receive their first decision.” Sloan, 505 F.3d at 698 (citing Keane, 852 F.2d at 204) (emphasis in Sloan). Because, besides the weakness of Kimberlin’s claims, “no society can afford forever to question the correctness of its every judgment.” Withrow v. Williams, 507 U.S. 680, 698 (1993) (O’Connect, J., concurring and dissenting). Enough “is enough.” Peoples, 403 F.3d at 846.

That’s lawyer-talk for, “This criminal pest deserves nothing.”




 

Are You Listening?

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In case you haven’t been listening to The Other Podcast, you really should. My podcasting partner John Hoge has applied his decades of audio engineering expertise to the program and, when the BlogTalkRadio software doesn’t go glitchy on us (as sometimes happens), it’s a lot of fun.

Saturday night, we had a call-in from a Democrat (!!!) who had found our program randomly, and he wanted to talk about the #NeverTrump phenomenon, as inspired by our bon voyage to The Weekly Standard. In case you don’t know it, John didn’t even vote for Trump, and is therefore sympathetic to such sincere Christian conservatives as David French, whom I also consider a friend (while also considering him sadly misguided). As I indicated (“So Much Ahoy,” Dec. 14), I’m more in agreement with Ace of Spades, a regular conservative who has a profound resentment toward Movement Leaders™ who were de facto pro-Hillary and are now de facto pro-Pelosi. Those of us who do not rank as Movement Leaders™ are compelled to go to war with the army we’ve got and to fight or battles as we find them, rather than wistfully wishing we were in an ideal army fighting the battles of our choice. But I digress . . .

 

Saturday’s podcast was also interesting in that I found myself in mid-show reading a Vox article by Murray Waas in which he talked about Michael Avenatti’s newest client, Alexandra Chalupa, attributing his information to a “source with direct knowledge of the matter.” As an experienced editor, what I noticed about this article was that, while Waas conveys the impression his “source” is someone close to the Mueller investigation, he never specifically characterizes his source(s) this way. If you know how investigative reporting works, you understand that if Waas was getting this from a law enforcement source, he would say so, because that would give the story more credibility. Waas wants his readers to believe he knows for a fact that (a) Paul Manafort advised the White House “to specifically target Alexandra Chalupa, a political strategist and consultant for the DNC, for allegedly working with Ukrainian officials”; (b) it was this advice which Mueller was referencing in saying Manafort “lied about his contacts” with the White House; and (c) we should accept this “exclusive” story as true, based on the authority of Waas’s “source with direct knowledge of the matter.” However . . . 

What if Murray Waas’s source is a clever sociopath?

We know that Alexandra Chalupa was working with Brett Kimberlin, one of the most notorious sociopaths on the planet. Furthermore, Kimberlin is a known associate of Neal Rauhauser, an operative whose skill in misleading journalists is remarkable. So that’s at least two known liars who could be sources for Waas’s “exclusive,” and now that Michael Avenatti’s representing Chalupa, that makes three known liars. Of course, we cannot rule out Chalupa herself as this “source” and, because she is a former DNC operative . . . well, that makes four.

Question: If this Murray Waas “exclusive” were true, wouldn’t other reporters be able to match the story? Because if it is true that Manafort was acting as a White House advisor on this DNC/Ukraine angle, and that this was what Mueller was referencing, that would be newsworthy. Wouldn’t we expect to see this story picked up and expanded by the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, Associated Press, etc.?

But those dogs are not barking, are they?

There is a distinct aroma of bovine excrement here, you see, and I didn’t notice it until John and I were in the middle of our podcast Saturday night. After we got off the air, I put in a call to Lee Stranahan, who’s one of the few reporters following the Chalupa/Kimberlin story, and his hunch about the story closely matched my own.

See John Hoge’s latest “Team Kimberlin Post of the Day.”

Stay tuned, dear readers . . .



 

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Gilmore v. Jones, et al., Hearing

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CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia
Defendants in a major First Amendment case today urged a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit by former State Department official Brennan Gilmore, who claims he was defamed by Alex Jones and others who criticized his activities at the August 2017 riot where a woman was killed.

Attorneys for Jones and his co-defendants, including Gateway Pundit blogger Jim Hoft and investigative journalist Lee Stranahan, not only disputed Gilmore’s claims of defamation, but also argued that the U.S. District Court for Western Virginia does not have proper jurisdiction in the case. Stranahan is a Virginia resident and, his attorney Aaron Walker argued, this fact defeats the “diversity of citizenship” requirement for federal jurisdiction over a state law case, as the plaintiff Gilmore is also a Virginia resident. Walker has filed a motion for sanctions against the plaintiff’s attorneys under Rule 11, alleging they did not exercise due diligence in their filings. (Which is not legally the same as saying “they lied,” but readers are free to draw their own conclusions.)

Gilmore was on the scene of the August 2017 riot in Charlottesville, where left-wing counter-protesters engaged in sometimes violent confrontations with white supremacists at a “Unite the Right” rally. Gilmore captured video of the fatal incident in which 20-year-old James Alex Field Jr. rammed his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of leftist protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring several others. In subsequent TV appearances and a column for the Politico website, Gilmore sought to blame President Trump for what he called the “escalating, toxic politics of hate” that resulted in Heyer’s death.

Once Gilmore’s ties to the State Department and the Democrat Party became public knowledge, Jones accused Gilmore of being a CIA operative and suggested he was on the payroll of liberal billionaire George Soros. Some of Jones’s claims were echoed by other defendants (Hoft called Gilmore “a deep state shill with links to George Soros”) and Gilmore blames the defendants for his being targeted for harassment.

During today’s court hearing, Gilmore’s lawyers — Andrew Mendrala of the Georgetown University Civil Rights Clinic and Brianne Gorod of the Constitutional Accountability Center — repeated the assertions in their complaint that the defendants had sought to make Gilmore a “scapegoat” for the violence in Charlottesville, in order to deflect blame from right-wing white supremacists. Lawyers for the defendants, including former Republican congressman and Army Lt. Col. Allen West, mostly emphasized the jurisdictional issues in the case. However, Walker and defense attorney Andrew Grossman, representing Jones, also strongly disputed the plaintiff’s characterization of Stranahan’s comments in an interview with Lee Ann McAdoo on Jones’s InfoWars site.

Reporters for several media organizations were on hand for the hearing and, in a brief interview outside the courthouse, Walker emphasized the importance of the First Amendment issues involved. “Free speech isn’t just for people we like or opinions we agree with,” Walker said, mentioning his personal dislike for Alex Jones. Walker made reference to Supreme Court cases including Brandenburg v. Ohio. “Today, it’s Alex Jones, but tomorrow it could be the New York Times.”

 

I made this trip with John Hoge of Hogewash, who made a guest appearance in court as an easel, holding up a large display poster that Walker had prepared for the case. He summarizes today:

The Plaintiff’s attorneys spent most of their time trying explain why the case should be left standing in spite of the facts and law.
The judge did not rule from the bench, so it will be a while before we know whether the case will go forward.

As longtime readers know, Hoge, Walker, Stranahan and I were all co-defendants in lawsuits filed by convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin, whose pro se shuttuppery LOLsuits failed miserably. Whether the current Gilmore v. Jones et al. litigation has more merit than Kimberlin’s nuisance suits is a matter of opinion, but the whole point is that as Americans we are entitled to express our opinions, and the Gilmore suit might conceivably infringe our rights . However, while we still have our freedom, I wish to remind you of an important truth, that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Speedway Bomber: 40th Anniversary of Brett Kimberlin’s Notorious Crimes

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‘Speedway Bomber’ Brett Kimberlin was sentenced to 50 years in 1981

My podcast colleague John Hoge reminds me that this weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the Indiana crime spree that made Brett Kimberlin notorious. Two videos from WRTV:

 

 

 

The summary of Kimberlin’s crimes:

A six-day bombing spree rocked the town of Speedway, Indiana in September 1978. The bombings began the evening of Sept. 1 and did not end until Sept. 6.
A total of eight bombs exploded. Two people were seriously injured in the final bombing. 
The first explosions rocked three different locations in Speedway on Sept. 1. The bombs hidden inside of trashcans caused damage, but nobody was seriously injured. One witness said the explosion, “…moved me back about a foot and it felt like I guess like you were shelled like a bomb just went off.” 
The bombings continued into the next week.
The tactics of the Speedway Bomber escalated on Sept. 5 when a parked Speedway Police cruiser was targeted. Again, nobody was injured in the bombing, but that would soon change. 
On Sept. 6, 1978, an abandoned gym bag blew up in the parking lot of Speedway High School. Multiple people were injured, including Carl DeLong. DeLong’s injuries were so severe that doctors had to amputate his right leg.  
Authorities soon offered a $2,500 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for the eight explosions.  
Later that month, a former Broad Ripple ‘Businessman of the Year’ named Brett Kimberlin was arrested on unrelated charges. Police executed a search warrant but did not immediately charge Kimberlin in the Speedway bombings. 
Kimberlin was eventually charged in the bombings and went to trial in 1981. He was convicted by a jury of 12 and sentenced to 50 years in prison. 
Kimberlin was released after serving 15 years. He continues to deny any involvement in the Speedway bombings.  

Never mind that Kimberlin was also a major drug trafficker, and let’s not even mention that little girl, Debbie Barton, who was called “Jessica” in Mark Singer’s 1996 biography of Kimberlin, Citizen K:

From the beginning of his friendship with Sandi [Barton], Kimberlin said, her younger daughter developed an attachment to him. Sandi would come to Eagle Creek, to tend his horses and ride her own; Jessica would tag along, and “she used to hang on me, she didn’t want to let me go.” Jessica was ten years old and Kimberlin was twenty. . . .
For three consecutive summers, 1974 through 1976, they took vacations of a week or longer in Disney World, Mexico, and Hawaii. Sandi couldn’t get time off from work, so on these summer trips it was just the two of them — Brett and Jessica.
Eyebrows levitated. A drug-dealing colleague had memories of conversations with Kimberlin that struck him as odd: “We’d see a girl, who was pubescent or prepubescent, and Brett would get this smile and say, ‘Hey, what do you think? Isn’t she great?’ It made me very uncomfortable.” Another recalled Kimberlin introducing Jessica as “my girlfriend,” and if irony was intended, it was too subtle to register. To a coworker . . . Sandi confided that Kimberlin was “grooming Jessica to be his wife.” . . .

Just coincidentally, the girl’s grandmother was the victim of an unsolved murder, and when police began investigating, the bombings started.

“Sue Me Again, You Evil Liar.”



 

 

Just Some Headlines

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Those are just a few of today’s headlines from the stack at the Drudge Report. Because I’ve spent the past 36 hours working on a long and complicated post about Third Wave feminism, I felt a need to get some content up for y’all to talk about while I keep slaving away.

 

Further Correspondence Regarding Deranged Ex-Professor Deborah Frisch

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Deborah Ellen Frisch, Ph.D., after her Jan. 5 arrest in Bend, Oregon.

Effective written communication requires attention to details of spelling, punctuation, capitalization and grammar. These orthographic details may seem insignificant, and are something we often take for granted until we encounter writing full of obvious errors. People who write badly create a negative impression of themselves, and so we must choose our words carefully when conducting important correspondence:

Date: Thursday, 11 Aug 2018 8:24 am
From: Robert McCain
To: [15 Addresses Redacted]
CC: Jeff Goldstein

To whom it may concern:
Deborah Ellen Frisch, I am informed, is free on bond pending an October sentencing hearing in Weld County, Colorado, after previously pleading guilty to felony charges. She has sent me no fewer than 18 emails during the past 48 hours. She falsely accuses me of crimes against her, as a result of my reporting about her continued online harassment of myself and others (see “Email to a Lawyer Regarding Deranged Ex-Professor Deborah Frisch, Ph.D.,” Aug. 8, 2018). You are receiving this email because you were among more than a dozen people she has CC’d on these messages, by which she has endeavored to defame and further harass me.
Among those CC’d in Dr. Frisch’s torrent of obscenity-filled emails was Ryan Chun, a prosecutor in Weld County whom she has previously made the target of racial slurs. Similarly, she has called me an “IRISH CATHOLIC FAGGOT” (all caps in original) although I am neither Catholic nor homosexual. In another email, she described me as the “lover” of Jeff Goldstein (CC’d), the blogger she has been harassing since 2006. It should go without saying that this is also merely another of Dr. Frisch’s deranged insults.
It is my understanding that Dr. Frisch’s defense attorney has requested that he be removed from her case, and that she has been scheduled for a hearing later this month (Aug. 31) to change conditions of her bond. While I have no direct knowledge of the purpose for this hearing, it seems reasonable to suspect the court will order Dr. Frisch to discontinue her pattern of online harassment aimed at Weld County officials and others.
Anyone reading Dr. Frisch’s lunatic email diatribes, full of obscene insults and orthographic errors, must be disturbed to think that a former university professor who holds a Ph.D. in psychology could have deteriorated to such a level of crudity and incoherence. Some of those she has CC’d on these messages may become concerned that Dr. Frisch’s condition has reached the point that she is now a danger to herself and others. It has been suggested to me, by acquaintances who have professional experience dealing with the criminally insane, that Dr. Frisch exhibits symptoms of a chronic degenerative neurological condition, from which she is unlikely to recover. While I am merely a journalist, unqualified to provide a professional assessment of her mental health, I think anyone concerned for Dr. Frisch’s well-being should consider her recent irrational behavior symptomatic, perhaps necessitating a period of supervision and psychiatric evaluation in an institutional setting.
Sincerely,
Robert Stacy McCain

Gonna file this one under Neutral Objective Journalism.



 

 

Please Help My Brother Kirby: Strange and Savage Tales of ‘Backroads’ McCain

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Kirby as a senior at Douglas County (Ga.) High School, 1975.

My older brother Kirby is a legend to those who know him. Did I ever mention, for example, that he once dated Miss Teen Georgia?

Kirby was working at Six Flags Over Georgia, operating one of the trams that conveyed guests from the parking lot to the park entrance. In those days, there was a spiel that the operators delivered over the loudspeakers on the trams (“Welcome to Six Flags, ladies and gentlemen …”) and there must have been something about Kirby’s delivery, or perhaps it was his ice-blue eyes, that captured the attention of the beauty queen who was visiting Atlanta that day and the rest is, as they say, history.

Click here to donate to Kirby’s medical emergency fund.

Kirby is a proud man, a hard-working long-haul truck driver, and it has been difficult for him the past few weeks as he’s been caught in a nightmare of medical bureaucracy, a Catch-22 situation.

Ten years after he underwent bypass surgery, he was diagnosed with another problem and the doctor refused to certify him to keep driving. Kirby had to undergo some very expensive tests and treatment, and still the doctors wouldn’t sign off on letting him get back on the road. When this first happened in April, Kirby hoped he’d be back to driving — he routinely earned $800-$900 a week — within a couple of weeks, and he feels fully capable of doing it, but the doctors said no. Well, OK, so Kirby had insurance that included short-term medical disability coverage, and he asked the doctors to approve him for that. They said no!

This is insane — a total Catch-22. The same doctors who say Kirby is not healthy enough to return to work nevertheless won’t approve him for disability under an insurance plan he paid for?

Click here to donate to Kirby’s medical emergency fund.

Me (left) and Kirby as crew-cut boys in 1963.

Y’know, I hate the heck out of blegging. Rattling the tip-jar for my blog is just a necessary part of the business, but I regard that as honest capitalism, a fee-for-service arrangement with readers who enjoy the work I do. Rather than poor-mouthing hard-luck tales of self-pity — which I instinctively despise — my occasional direct appeals to the tip-jar hitters are always delivered with a Gonzo sensibility. So let me tell you about Kirby’s nickname, “Backroads” McCain . . .

Continue reading Please Help My Brother Kirby: Strange and Savage Tales of ‘Backroads’ McCain →

The Freedom to Hate

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Phil Donahue debated Jared Taylor on MSNBC in 2003.

Jared Taylor won a court victory Thursday in California, when Judge Harold Kahn rejected Twitter’s motion to dismiss Taylor’s lawsuit claiming the social media giant acted illegally in banning the American Renaissance publisher, along with other “white nationalist” accounts:

Taylor claims Twitter permanently suspended accounts belonging to him and hundreds of other far-right users in December based solely on their political views and affiliations.
The judge described Taylor’s case as a “classic public interest lawsuit” and said it “goes to the heart of free speech principles that long precede our constitution,” according to a transcript of the hearing.
“Now, it may be speech that you and I don’t wish to enjoy, but that’s not germane to the determination of whether it’s public interest. Public interest doesn’t have a flavor of ideology to it; public interest is whether it benefits the public,” Kahn said. . . .
Taylor is a Yale-educated, self-described “race realist” who founded an Oakton, Virginia-based, tax-exempt nonprofit called the New Century Foundation. He operates American Renaissance, an online magazine that touts a philosophy that it’s “entirely normal” for whites to want to be a majority race.
Taylor’s lawyers argue access to Twitter is “essential for meaningful participation in modern-day American democracy.”
“At all times, Mr. Taylor has expressed his views with respect and civility,” they wrote in a court filing. “At no time did Mr. Taylor or American Renaissance engage in insults, threats, or harassment, nor did they ever encourage anyone else to engage in such activity.”

Permit me to vouch for Jared Taylor’s “respect and civility,” as I have known him for 20 years. He is remarkably well-mannered, which made an impression on me the first time I met him. He is fluent in multiple languages, having grown up in Japan, where his parents were Christian missionaries, and he engaged in postgraduate studies at the Sorbonne. He speaks with a noticeable formality, which at first struck me as stilted or artificial, but which I eventually realized was simply a matter of lifelong habit. As to Taylor’s “race realist” identification, he is not a David Duke-type personality. Taylor is not a conspiracy theorist or a hate-monger, but is instead devoted to calling attention to facts about race relations in America (and elsewhere) that the liberal media ignore.

Before there was Twitter or Facebook, before there was a blogosphere, before there was Breitbart or InfoWars or any other online venue for reporting facts about immigration and crime that the liberal media wanted to suppress, there was American Renaissance (AR), a small monthly magazine that was usually just 16 to 24 pages, but wow! AR was covering the problems related to immigration in Europe 15 years ago, before most Americans imagined how bad the situation had become. Indeed, it may be said, liberals might not have been so dumbfounded by the rise of Donald Trump and the so-called “alt-right” is they had paid attention to what Jared Taylor was publishing 15 or 20 years ago.

As I’ve told Taylor more than once, I disagree with some of his opinions and ideas about policy, but his mastery of facts is beyond dispute. Liberals are so eager to suppress Taylor by smearing him as a proponent of “hate” because they cannot stand the truth. One of his legendary exploits was in 2003, when Taylor was invited onto Phil Donahue’s MSNBC program and absolutely ran circles around Donahue. It was the biggest blowout since Georgia Tech crushed Cumberland 222-0. Taylor had spent more than a decade accumulating facts, and was thoroughly prepared to rebut Donahue’s arguments. This clearly flustered the liberal host, which caused Donahue to invite Taylor back for a rematch, and again Donahue suffered an embarrassing defeat.

What are the consequences of ignoring unpleasant facts, and basing public policy on wishful thinking? If some facts are deemed “racist,” and therefore excluded from discussions about issues like immigration, welfare, crime, education, etc., what will be the result? What problems will be caused by policies based on childish make-believe?

You can disagree with Jared Taylor’s opinions about race and public policy, but it is foolish to ignore the facts to which he calls attention.

“Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself . . . [Truth] is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson

There is no one with whom I agree 100% about everything. There are regular commenters here whom I consider friends and allies — people who’ve hit my tip jar to keep me going — who disagree strongly with me about all kinds of subjects. I have Catholic friends, but I’m against Catholicism, and I have gay friends, but I’m against homosexuality. Believe it or not, I even have friends who are Democrats!

Long before I ever imagined my career as a journalist, my teachers taught me that journalism is about facts — who, what, when, where, why and how. It was in defense of an unpopular cause — British soldiers accused of murdering innocent civilians in Boston — that John Adams famously said: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” As I argued in the case of Tommy Robinson (“Why Freedom of Speech Matters (And Why ‘Hate Speech’ Is Protected, Too),” May 31), the dangers of suppressing free speech are certainly not limited to issues of race:

What has happened . . . is that our institutions of higher education have been taken over by soi-disant “progressives” who have taught a generation of young Americans to believe that certain facts are “hate speech.” This problem has concerned me ever since I began researching radical feminism four years ago, and discovered how far academia has gone to enshrine Third Wave feminist “gender theory” as an Official Truth which no one on campus is permitted to criticize. . . .
The suppression of disagreement and criticism as “hate speech” on university campuses has had consequences far beyond academia.

The fact that radical feminist Julie Bindel was writing more than a decade ago about the same issues that got Tommy Robinson arrested, and that Bindel is banned from British university campuses because she is a critic of “gender theory,” should make intelligent people pause to think. What results from suppressing unpopular facts as “hate speech” is that the people who make the rules (on university campuses, on Twitter or Facebook, in newspaper offices or TV news studios) thereby create a bubble of unreality, an echo chamber of ideological conformity that excludes dissent and thereby gives rise to a cult mentality.

Once you stop drinking the liberal Kool-Aid, there is a danger that you might become a “far-right” extremist, and I’ve seen a few sad cases of people who got sucked into the gravitational vortex of the lunatic fringe. What I have tried to do is to protect the right flank, so to speak, of the larger conservative movement. There is an unfortunate “urge to purge” tendency on the Right, where respectable conservative intellectuals begin to care more about their respectability than they do about actually conserving anything. William F. Buckley Jr.’s purge of the John Birch Society in the 1960s has become an inspiration for some of Buckley’s would-be heirs (looking at you, Bill Kristol) who seem to believe that a successful political coalition can be built by a process of subtraction.

Welcome to the Trump Age, my friends. Say what you will about our President, he doesn’t care about “respectability.” He’s about winning.

My friend John Hoge has the transcript of the Taylor v. Twitter hearing, and I’m sure we’ll discuss this tonight on The Other Podcast.