Category: Neutral Objective Journalism

Has Bill Schmalfeldt Forgotten?

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Aaron Walker points out something about Bill Schmalfeldt’s harassment that had escaped my notice: When Schmalfeldt first began cyberstalking Walker, on June 3, 2012, it was only four days after Brett Kimberlin had gotten Walker arrested at a Maryland court hearing.

The judge at that Maryland hearing had ordered Walker not to write anything about Brett Kimberlin, and yet here was Schmalfeldt on Twitter, interrogating Walker about Kimberlin — as if attempting to bait Walker into violating the (soon-to-be-overturned) court order.

Maybe that was just a coincidence, eh?

Aaron also quotes at length some of Schmalfeldt’s symptomatic ravings. Any psychologist would note Schmalfedlt’s inability to accept responsibility for his own failures, and his habit of blaming all his problems on demonized scapegoats. Persistently ignoring the wrongs he has committed, he makes accusations of wrongdoing against others as justifying further sadistic harassment of his chosen enemies.

The clear evidence of Schmalfeldt’s madness, however, does not rule out the possibility that he has also been manipulated into joining an orchestrated campaign to harass Aaron Walker and other of Brett Kimberlin’s enemies. But at this late point in his descent into abject lunacy, I’m not sure that Schmalfeldt still retains enough of his mental faculties to remember what he has done or why he did it.

Read more at Aaron Walker’s “Allergic to Bull” blog.

 

Hoge’s Victory Lap

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After his stunning courtroom triumph today over the atrocious troll Bill Schmalfeldt, John Hoge recounts at length exactly what kind of atrocious troll Bill Schmalfeldt is:

On 14 February, I received 40 tweets in less than one hour from @BreitbartUnmask ranting about Lee Stranahan, Aaron Walker, and me. Just after midnight on 15 February, I posted a notice on this blog and on Twitter addressed to @OldUncleBastard, @BreitbartUnmask, and @OccupyRebellion demanding that they stop communicating directly with me.

Now this relates to two sections of Maryland law, Harassment (§3-803) and Misuse of Electronic Communication (§3-805), that Hoge had read and which apparently Schmalfeldt hadn’t.

Understand this: It is one thing to say mean things about someone, but another to say mean things to someone.

The use of e-mail or Twitter to communicate hateful messages to someone — when the recipient has demanded that you cease such communications, notifying you that further messages will result in a complaint under the above sections of the law — is quite foolhardy.

And . . . Bill Schmalfeldt is quite a fool.

Such a fool is Bill Schmalfeldt that he supposed he might bring legal action against Hoge — don’t ask me to explain that — and listened to some of his online friends (including “Breitbart Unmasked”) who encouraged him to think that he, Schmalfeldt, was actually a victim.

Sadly, no.

Friday afternoon I talked to a friend, an attorney of no small reputation, who was somewhat skeptical of the use of Maryland’s law in this manner, which he felt might establish a bad precedent — a chilling effect on free speech, as it were. And so I began to say in a very serious way, how deeply I was concerned about the possible infringement of Bill Schmalfeldt’s First Amendment rights.

Then I laughed and laughed and laughed.

After I’d finished laughing — it took a while, I gotta tell ya — I eventually went over to Hoge’s blog and hit the tip jar. Everybody should.

And then you, too, can laugh and laugh and laugh and . . .

 

Peace Order Against Bill Schmalfeldt: A Defeat for the ‘Troll Rights’ Movement

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Bill Schmalfeldt of Elk Ridge, Maryland

John Hoge has the peace order granted today by Maryland Judge Thomas Stansfield, forbidding Bill Schmalfeldt from contacting Hoge.

People who have followed this story know that, in June 2012, Schmalfeldt began cyberstalking Aaron Walker, whose legal conflicts with Brett Kimberlin had become a subject of widespread public attention. From there, Schmalfeldt steadily expanded his target range to include all of Walker’s supporters, including Hoge. By November, when Schmalfeldt took over the pro-Kimberlin site “Breitbart Unmasked,” he made himself a general nuisance. Schmalfeldt’s vicious attacks on Lee Stranahan’s family were particularly distressing. Did I mention that in July 2012, Schmalfeldt created a “Dead Andrew” site to mock the late Andrew Breitbart and disparage Breitbart’s conservative colleagues?

Trying to get judges to understand how the Internet works has proven problematic in the long struggle against Team Kimberlin. Today was a rare victory, as Aaron Walker reports:

Tae Kim showed up as Schmalfeldt’s attorney again, and did present the argument that electronic harassment is not harassment.  The judge rejected that out of hand.
It is also worth noting that Schmalfeldt was also subpoenaed to produce documents.  He refused to comply with that, a fact that Hoge’s able counsel, Zoa Barnes, exploited repeatedly to show that Schmalfeldt didn’t respect the law.
So the case was pretty straightforward from there.  Barnes established that Schmalfeldt had been told repeatedly to stop contacting Hoge and despite being told by numerous people (including a judge), he just kept going, even up until last night.  The judge found the conduct to be harassment, comparing it to junk mail, and granted the peace order.  For the next six months, Bill Schmalfeldt will be prohibited from contacting Hoge by any means.  He can talk about him—that is his First Amendment right—but he can’t actually contact him.

Something else Aaron Walker reports: Brett Kimberlin showed up in court for Schmalfeldt’s hearing.

This is something Schmalfeldt will not explain — this is what the document subpoena was about — because the facts would not likely be flattering to Schmalfeldt’s patron. It is a reasonable surmise that Schmalfeldt’s communications would show the extent to which his harassment of Hoge, Walker and others was undertaken with the encouragement of Brett Kimberlin and Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser. Walker and others believe they have been the targets of an orchestrated campaign of harassment aimed at Kimberlin’s enemies.

One might argue that Bill Schmalfeldt is merely a nutjob, but Kimberlin’s presence at today’s court hearing certainly suggests that the focus of Schmalfeldt’s madness was not entirely random.

Check John Hoge’s blog for further news.




 

 


Should IRS Standards for 501(c) Groups Require Proof of ‘Social Welfare’ Purpose?

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That’s what “many Democrats” seem to be saying:

“Partisanship or the perception of politics has no place in the IRS,” acting commissioner Steven Miller said in a brief opening statement to the Ways and Means Committee . . .
And many Democrats turned to what they saw as the bigger issue: A tax code that doesn’t make clear what kinds of political activities a tax-exempt social welfare organization can participate in.

Hmmm. My memory must be playing tricks on me these days. The phrase “tax-exempt social welfare organization” rings a bell, but for some reason I’m having trouble thinking of an example.

See, this “social welfare” aspect is very important to the IRS:

“. . . a paid employee of one of the nonprofits, Justice Through Music Project, a 501c3 ‘educational’ nonprofit. . . . Both JTMP and the other group, Velvet Revolution US, a 501c4 “action” nonprofit, are headquartered in . . . Bethesda, Maryland.”

“Justice Through Music . . . is a co-founder . . . of the Election and Media Reform organization, VelvetRevolution.us.”

“Election and Media Reform” are obviously the kind of social welfare purposes which legitimate 501(c)4 groups pursue.

An effort to “Prosecute Rove” is neither “transparently partisan” nor the action of a “tax-exempt  . . . racket,” right, Brad Friedman?

As the IG’s report details (to those who actually bothered to read it!), all of this was a part of the federal agency’s poorly executed attempt to screen a flood of incoming applications for tax-exempt 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) status in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. That infamous ruling, essentially paving the way for unrestricted money for campaign spending, resulted in an exponential increase in political organizations attempting to take part in a tax-exempt “social welfare organization” racket which illegally flooded the 2010 and 2012 election cycles with transparently partisan spending on direct political advertisements and other related efforts — in violation of the (unenforced) law.

Yes, it’s a terrible thing when people violate laws.

“Sandi Barton’s youngest daughter . . . was 14 when her grandmother, 65-year-old Julia Scyphers, was murdered — a crime that remains officially unsolved to this day.”

If only there were someone to call attention to these issues . . .

 

EVIL SHALL NOT PROSPER

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Neal Rauhauser was a speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference

“Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser recently admitted in a complaint to my office that he introduced [Nadia] Naffe to attorney Jay Leiderman . . .
“In the same document, Rauhauser declared that if Naffe is successful, he believes it will put an end to my career as a Deputy D.A.”
— Patrick “Patterico” Frey, Oct. 4, 2012


This is indeed very happy news, my friends:

Ken and I in particular got to face, not just criticism, but “vapid and dishonest partisan hacks” who criticized both of us for standing up for free speech — including “the greasy, demi-literate, demented Hutt who wrote an extended quasi-sexual fantasy about a mob murdering Patrick and me.”
Hi, Bill Schmalfeldt! I understand you were curious about the result of this case. I’m happy to be sharing that with you! And, your sick, twisted fantasies notwithstanding, nobody has yet beaten me or Ken with baseball bats or tire irons. No group of men has thrown us in front of a moving truck as part of a conspiracy to cause our deaths.

Now, it was actually Ken at Popehat who described Bill Schmalfeldt as a “demented Hutt,” but I read it at Patterico‘s so . . .

Why is this such happy news? Because this nuisance suit against Patterico was self-evidently part of a deliberate vendetta against one of Brett Kimberlin’s chosen targets, an attempt to silence Patterico and intimidate others, as I explained in October:

I can’t imagine any court finding Patterico guilty of anything, but this lawsuit is just another typical product of the Kimberlin-Rauhauser “accuse the accusers” strategy. Once they target someone, the accusations proliferate endlessly as part of an orchestrated effort to discredit anyone who might accuse them of wrongdoing.

Off the top of my head, I could name a half-dozen people who have been targeted in this manner by either Kimberlin or Rauhauser or the various sociopathic trolls in their online mob. This is not merely harassment and cyberstalking — although it is that — but it is in fact political terrorism, and this lawfare harassment of Patrick Frey was an effort to silence him for having said so:

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 . . .

Well, how’s that working out for you, Neal Rauhauser? Patterico promises to tell the truth — the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help him God — on Monday. Meanwhile, go hit Patterico’s tip jar, and encourage him to plunge the knife of truth as deep as it will go.

Evil shall not prosper, nor will the wicked triumph. Selah.

 

Dog Bites Man; Man Rapes Girl: Journalism and Other Crimes

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Just a couple of innocent victims of homophobic bigotry?

There is a basic rule of journalism — a rule that has nothing to do with politics whatsoever — that if a dog bites a man, that’s not news. News is when a man bites a dog. That is to say, newsworthy events are by definition unusual.

Some crimes capture widespread attention from the media and other crimes don’t, and this is not because editors have passed judgment that one crime victim is less deserving of sympathy than another, or that one perpetrator is more worthy of condemnation than another.

Usually, at least.

For example, I’ve never quite understood (and there was a lot of questioning among media-watchers at the time) why Matthew Shepard’s death became a nationwide cause célèbre, with nationally televised vigils and so forth. As murders go, Shepard’s murder wasn’t particularly unusual: Privileged college kid goes to a local pub, meets up with a couple of local two-bit hoodlums who decide to rip him off and, instead, the rip-off escalates into murder.

Nasty crimes like that are unfortunately not man-bites-dog news and, except for the fact that Shepard was gay, his death might never have made headlines outside of Wyoming. But of course, Shepard was gay, and so his death became a symbol of America’s Rampant Homophobia and — if you didn’t pay much attention to the details — you might have thought Shepard’s killers were right-wing fundamentalist Christians, rather than a couple of small-town petty criminals, both of whom had prior records for minor offenses including burglary and marijuana possession.

“True crime” has always been one of my favorite genres of literature. When I was in high school, one of the popular paperbacks was Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter. When I was a freshman in college, our reading list included Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. And the first book I ever read by Hunter S. Thompson was Hell’s Angels.

So I’m sort of an amateur authority on this kind of writing, to say nothing of my own adolescent experience hanging out with hoodlums, dealing dope and being in the vicinity of other criminal behavior of a type usually dismissed as “juvenile delinquency.”

The problem with such a dismissive attitude, however, is that juvenile delinquency is for too many youth the apprenticeship to a life of crime, and all three of the true-crime classics I cite — Helter Skelter, In Cold Blood and Hell’s Angels — focus on petty criminals who kept at it until they committed atrocities that became national news.

Charles Manson had been in and out of custody since he was a teenager until he was turned loose amid the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco and became a hippie guru whose followers eventually committed the Tate-LaBianca murders. Perry Smith and Dick Hickock both had lengthy criminal records before they met in prison and hatched the scheme that became the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas. And the Hell’s Angels were just one of several California-based motorcycle gangs until the 1964 Labor Day weekend in Monterey when they gang-raped two teenage girls.

Some crimes just lend themselves to sensational coverage, and others don’t. The question of political correctness in the selection of Big Headline Crimes nowadays is something that interests me and a lot of other people who believe that too many in the media nowadays are shaping coverage of news events in order to serve some kind of crusading do-gooder “make a difference” agenda.

Damn these wannabe humanitarians and philanthropists. If you want to work at the Ford Foundation or some other kind of charity, do it. If you want to change the world, run for Congress or join the Peace Corps. But stop bringing your missionary zeal into journalism, turning your pet “social justice” causes into crusades, and then trying to bully everybody else into supporting your cause.

So . . . rape.

Now, there is a basic rule of true-crime journalism: Crimes stories are not about victims, they’re about criminals.

Charles Manson is the protagonist of Helter Skelter. It’s not a story about Wojciech Frykowski, OK? Likewise, In Cold Blood is not “The Herb Clutter Story,” and we don’t even know the names of the two girls whose 1964 gang-rape by the Hell’s Angels turned into a magazine assignment for Hunter S. Thompson and eventually became his first book.

Rape stories are about rapists. The victim is usually never even named, unless she is also murdered, and rape-murders are actually common enough that you can’t even get a magazine assignment to cover a story like that unless the perpetrator turns out to be a psycho serial killer.

OK, so what if the rape-murder victim is a 13-year-old boy? That’s kind of a rare crime, and if the victim suffocated — bound and gagged — during an hours-long torture ordeal in which he was repeatedly sodomized, you might think a crime like that would be considered newsworthy.

But most people have never heard of Jesse Dirkhising, and there are those of us who suspect that maybe Jesse Dirkising is nearly unknown for pretty much the same reason that Matthew Shepard became famous: There’s an agenda.

Never mind whether it’s a good agenda or a bad agenda, it’s an agenda, and everybody knows what it is.

The point, from my perspective, is that news coverage is being influenced by a sort of consensus opinion among the influential elite of the journalism industry that some crime victims are more equal than others.

I don’t raise this topic randomly today, but because I’ve been called a “homophobic bigot” by a liberal blogger after I wrote about a case where a gay couple were accused of raping their adopted boys.

This might be a fair accusation if I’d never written about — to cite some examples — the rape and murder of Donna Willing, or the University of Massachusetts gang-rape, or the gang-rape of an 11-year-old girl in Texas, or the rape of an 8-year-old girl in Fairfax County,  Virginia, or the rape-gangs in England, or the 10-year-old girl recently kidnapped and raped in Northridge, California. These are just a few examples of heterosexual crimes I’ve occasionally written about, so I certainly don’t need any lectures from liberal bloggers about how common such crimes are.

No one could fairly accuse me of ignoring or minimizing heterosexual crime, including the case of Elizabeth Leigh Garner, the former Tennessee Titans cheerleader who tried to molest a 12-year-old boy — allegedly, I hasten to add, because Ms. Garner is presumed innocent until proven guilty. The same is true of George Harasz and Douglas Wirth of Glastonbury, Connecticut. For all I know, this couple may be the innocent victims of a homophobic witch-hunt, but nonetheless they are accused of raping boys as young as 6.

Look, if you want to call me names and deliver lectures about what an awful person I am in order to demonstrate (by the obverse, as it were) what a wonderful person you are for denouncing me as a “bigot,” OK. That’s your hustle, and if you’ve got a bunch of readers too stupid to see it as the hustle it is — “Admire me! I hate homophobes!” — then I congratulate you on your good fortune. A sucker is born every minute and, in 18 years, they can vote Democrat, too.

All the speculation and theory and research about this subject, as to whether homosexuals or heterosexuals are more likely to commit crimes against children, is immaterial to the news value of this crime in Connecticut, and if you want to see me get really angry about something, just try telling me I don’t know what is or is not newsworthy.

“They took turns raping me over and over”? If you don’t think that’s news, you need to find another line of work.





 

E-Mail From a Former Maryland Resident to Howard County (Md.) State’s Attorney

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REQUESTING STATEMENT ON HARASSMENT POLICY
Monday, April 8, 2013 1:22 PM
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Dear Sirs:
As I am certain you are now aware, it has been reported that the office of Howard County State’s Attorney has refused to prosecute persons accused of online harassment, in apparent contravention of Maryland Criminal Statutes 3-803 and/or 3-805. In fact, it has been reported that a member of your staff, Assistant State’s Attorney Jim Brewer, advised persons complaining of such harassment, “If you’re so concerned about your safety, don’t come to Maryland,” and, “Stay off the Internet if you don’t want to be harassed.”
While I understand that authorities have wide discretion in choosing which complaints to pursue as criminal matters, these reports of official indifference to online harassment are certainly disturbing, and I wish to verify their accuracy. Has your office issued any statement clarifying your policy on this matter, or do you intend to issue such a statement in the future?
I ask this question as a reporter, a career journalist with more than 25 years in the news industry, but also as a former Maryland resident who left the state last year to escape the increasingly hostile climate of harassment that is apparently tolerated by officials there. While I am not a lawyer, and thus not qualified to state whether any particular action qualifies as a crime under Maryland statutes, I know right from wrong, and the harassing behaviors complained of in these reports would seem clearly wrong.
If you have any comment, please contact me via this e-mail address, as I hesitate to include my phone number or address in communication with your office.

Sincerely,

ROBERT STACY McCAIN
Editor-in-Chief, ViralRead.com
Correspondent, The American Spectator
Blogger, TheOtherMcCain.com

————————

Today is Everyone Blog About the Howard County State’s Attorney’s Office Day. John Hoge lists the participating sites:

Monitor’s Access
R. M. Nixon (Deceased) / Dead Republican Party
Tanny O’Haley
The Other McCain
Batshit Crazy News
Grumpy Opinions
Ameryx le Gallois
The Lonely Conservative
Raging Against the Rhetoric
Joyce Junior
Allergic to Bull
Patterico’s Pontifications

Certainly, this list will grow longer before the day ends. Dustyn at Monitor’s Access reports that the number at the office of Howard County State’s Attorney’s Dario J. Broccolino is (410) 313-2108; the number for Wayne Kirwan, the public spokesman for the office, is 410-313-3002.

My object is to get some kind of official statement from Broccolino or his spokesman, as to why there seems to be no legal redress for those complaining of harassment. Readers communicating with Broccolino’s office should be civil and polite.

 

Harassment Is Not Journalism

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

“If you’re so concerned about your safety, don’t come to Maryland.”
— Jim Brewer, Howard County (Md.) Assistant State’s Attorney

People who don’t use Twitter may not understand what it’s like when someone starts sending to your “handle” unsolicited messages full of accusations and obscenities. This is what Bill Schmalfeldt does to people he targets for harassment: He monitors their Twitter account and sends harassing messages to them, as well as to people he sees associating on Twitter with his targets. It is the persistence of Schmalfeldt’s obsessions with his targets that qualifies what he does as cyberstalking.

I have previously described how Schmalfeldt began cyberstalking Aaron Walker in June, when he sent these messages to Walker:

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?

The nature of Schmalfeldt’s obsession became obvious when he began to escalate his campaign of harassment, expanding his target list to include myself and other of Walker’s friends. The situation gradually got bad enough that, on the Sunday before Election Day — while I was in Ohio covering the final push of the presidential campaign — I felt the need to call attention to what Schmalfeldt was doing: “Monsters on the Internet: Sociopathic Sadism and Bill Schmalfeldt’s Madness.” Three weeks later, during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, Schmalfeldt sent me more than 200 harassing Twitter messages in the span of 48 hours, including a message in which he threatened to contact my wife.

Schmalfeldt’s motives for this weird behavior have been a subject of speculation. There are those who say that Schmalfeldt is being paid by convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin, or by persons associated with Kimberlin, and that what Schmalfeldt is doing is part of a deliberate effort to intimidate or discredit those who write about Kimberlin’s criminal past as Indiana’s notorious “Speedway Bomber.”

I remain agnostic about these theories because (a) there is no firm evidence of any such payment, and (b) crazy people don’t need rational motives to do crazy things. So whether Schmalfeldt’s harassment is hired thuggery or amateur insanity is ultimately irrelevant to this fact: It is evil.

Evil, however, is not necessarily criminal. And describing the evil that Bill Schmalfeldt does cannot stop him from doing what he does.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, stalkers gotta stalk.

John Hoge and others have attempted to have Maryland authorities prosecute Schmalfeldt for his harassment, with no success so far. This illustrates a problem with law enforcement that has become increasingly apparent since I began covering the Brett Kimberlin story last May, namely the tendency to dismiss such harassment as “just a bunch of crazy people arguing on the Internet.” Which would be true, except:

  • Many of the people targeted as enemies by Kimberlin (and Kimberlin’s avowed associate, Neal Rauhauser) are being harassed for no other reason than the fact that they wrote about Kimberlin’s criminal past, or defended those who did;
  • The harassment is, to an extent, demonstrably an attempt to silence political opponents of Kimberlin, whose 501(c) organizations have been funded with more than $2 million in contributions under the pretext of pursuing various progressive “social justice” issues, including election-fraud claims and crusades against high-profile individuals and organizations including Karl Rove, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce;
  • To intimidate Kimberlin’s opponents, people have had their employment situations jeopardized and their reputations attacked with unsubstantiated accusations of criminal wrongdoing; and
  • Because many of the targets of this harassment are citizen-journalists who use Twitter as a vital tool for gathering news, communicating with sources, and promoting their work to readers, the constant barrage of unsolicited hostile Twitter messages from persons like Schmalfeldt hinders their ability to do their jobs.

Ask anyone who has been subjected to this pattern of harassment — Mandy Nagy, Aaron Walker, Patrick Frey, Lee Stranahan, Ali Akbar, et al. — what it’s like to be besieged by a swarm of Twitter trolls, knowing full well their malicious motives, and then to see friends turn their heads because they don’t want to get involved, or because the trolls have managed, through the repetition of accusations, to cast a shadow of unfair suspicion around their target.

You can call that whatever you want — I call it cyberstalking and harassment — but don’t you dare call it “journalism.”

In an effort to encourage officials to take this online evil seriously, John Hoge has declared Monday — tomorrow, April 8 — “Everyone Blog About the Howard County State’s Attorney Day.”

Do it.