Category: Neutral Objective Journalism

Jennifer Emick Profiles Neal Rauhauser

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(NOTE: When I first began reporting on “The Kimberlin Files” in May, the involvement of Democrat consultant Neal Rauhauser struck me as particularly newsworthy. Rauhauser gained notoriety for his involvement in the 2010 “TwitterGate” episode, and the report that Rauhauser was involved in Brett Kimberlin’s harassment of Aaron Walker indicated a potential link between Kimberlin’s activities and the official Democrat Party political apparatus. For the past five months, Rauhauser has been constantly attempting to smear and harass individuals he has targeted as critics of Kimberlin and himself. In recent weeks, it appears, Rauhauser’s tactics have increasingly targeted Jennifer Emick, a well-known online researcher who has helped expose criminal hackers associated with “Anonymous.” Last week, Ms. Emick contacted me and offered to provide her own assessment of Rauhauser’s activities, which she has consented to publish here. — RSM)

By Jennifer Emick

Neal Rauhauser is a self-described left wing political activist and “consultant.” He is close to activist and convicted high school bomber Brett Kimberlin, who is also his sometime employer.

He is also involved, since 2008 or so, with the Anonymous hacktivist collective, trolls from Encyclopedia Dramatica, and the Occupy Wall St. movement.

A number of conservative bloggers claim he has targeted them for harassment, and there seems to be good evidence that many of these claims are true. He is certainly intolerant of opposing points of view.

Neal is reportedly a diagnosed sociopath and narcissist. His whereabouts are generally unknown, as he appears to be an under-employed itinerant who takes great pains to conceal his location. He appears to have no fixed address, and claims to move around a lot, primarily between Illinois and Washington, DC.

He describes himself as a hacker, and frequently writes about his fascination with the romantic portrayals of hackers in novels like Snowcrash and Neuromancer. He is very proficient technologically, and has worked in IT for many years.

Neal is a prolific blogger, who produces up to several dozen posts per day on a number of topics. Most are rambling, expansive conspiracy theories involving people in politics, government, and defense. Sometimes, he makes threats that would get most people visited by the Secret Service.

Neal keeps extensive online enemies lists, where he profiles individuals and organizations he believes are part of a conspiracy against himself, his employer, or various political figures on the left. Of course, he has much to fear, as his targets are all “mental patients.” He exhibits extreme paranoia about being spied on by the government and right wing political operatives.

He simultaneously claims that people he has targeted for his attentions are “stalking” him, while making overt admissions he is deliberately provoking and harassing them. Neal’s MO seems to be to fixate on an individual or group as responsible for one of more conspiracies, write extensively on these people, and then claim victimhood when one of his targets takes notice. Continue reading Jennifer Emick Profiles Neal Rauhauser →

Neal Rauhauser, Fugitive?

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Mike Stack was the original target of “SWATting” in the wake of the Anthony Weiner scandal. Stack’s Twitter contact with the mysterious “Dan Wolfe” made him a target, and he has subsequently become the focus of Neal Rauhauser’s persistent obsessive interest.

Stack ultimately filed harassment charges against Rauhauser, but was persuaded to submit the case to court mediation and, at a May 24 hearing in New Jersey, an agreement was reached in which Rauhauser agreed to very specific prohibitions against future harassing behavior. Rauhauser has repeatedly violated the terms of that agreement and has, in fact, recently escalated his online harassment of Mike Stack.

So today, Stack posted a copy of an arrest warrant for Neal. The warrant was issued Oct. 11, which means that Rauhauser has basically been a fugitive from justice for the past two weeks.

The interesting angle is that Rauhauser is also a co-defendant in the Virginia civil case of Walker v. Kimberlin, et al. (See continued coverage of that case by William Hoge.) One would imagine that Virginia courts would be obliged to recognize the New Jersey warrant. Therefore, if Rauhauser were to show up in court to contest Walker’s lawsuit, he would likely be subject to immediate arrest.

UPDATE: On the one hand, Neal is as crazy as a fruit bat and his behavior is wildly unpredictable. Continue reading Neal Rauhauser, Fugitive? →

Is ‘Jailhouse Lawyer’ Brett Kimberlin Heading to Grief in Virginia Case?

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Those who have read Mark Singer’s 1994 book Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin, know that while Kimberlin was imprisoned for his 1978 Indiana bombing spree, he became an adept “jailhouse lawyer,” who filed more than 100 legal actions on his own behalf, while also providing quasi-lawyerly assistance to some of his fellow inmates. But proceedings in the Virginia case of Walker v. Kimberlin, et al., indicate that Kimberlin is out of his league there.

William Hoge has obtained Kimberlin’s latest filing in the case and reports that it is “chock full of information that was under seal and that has been improperly incorporated into a public filing.”

The judge in the lawsuit brought by Aaron Walker will almost certainly learn of this impropriety, and it’s not likely the judge will be in a mood to do Kimberlin any favors when there is a key hearing in the case Friday in Manassas. A contempt of court finding is not out of the question.

UPDATE: A reminder that it was Walker’s May 17 post about how he said Kimberlin tried to “frame” him for a bogus assault charge that prompted renewed attention to Kimberlin’s activities. Eight days later, because of the concern about the threat to First Amendment rights, “Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day” made this saga the top 8 threads at the blog aggregator Memeorandum.

Obviously, everybody’s now gripped by the two-week run-up to Election Day, but I’d urge you to visit Aaron’s “Allergic to Bull” blog and hit the tip jar to help fund his legal fight for justice.

Your Honor, May I Direct the Court’s Attention to Exhibit J, Please?
UPDATE: Who Is ‘Forced to Engage’?

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

In the case of Walker v. Kimberlin, Exhibit J is an e-mail that Brett Kimberlin, acting as his own lawyer, sent to Aaron Walker’s attorney Dan Backer, stating in part:

I don’t know what kind of litigation you think this is but I see it as a form of harassment. You are trying to get discovery in a case that fails to state a valid legal claim, that is whole frivolous and malicious, and which,  if you proceed, will subject you to sanctions.
You have filed for default against people you haven’t served and who have no assets whatsoever. Ok let’s take this to the next step. You get default, then what? Get a hearing on damages? Go after their assets? They have none. So really you are just harassing them. You should really be ashamed of yourself for being party to such reprehensible conduct.
As I said, I have chosen December 15 because, inter alia, I am coopering with nthe 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.

Let’s point out a few things, shall we?

  • Aaron Walker has said that Kimberlin, among other things, tried to “frame” him for a bogus assault charge.
  • Kimberlin is an expert on “frivolous and malicious” legal actions, having filed more than 100 actions on his own behalf as a “jailhose lawyer” while he was imprisoned for the 1978 bombing spree in Indiana that earned him the sobriquet, “The Speedway Bomber.”
  • Kimberlin dares speak of “harassment,” when Kimberlin has sued blogger Seth Allen and threatened to sue journalist Mandy Nagy and blogger Patrick Frey for nothing other than the fact that they have written about Kimberlin’s notorious criminal history. Furthermore, Kimberlin has made spurious complaints in an attempt to get Frey fired from his job.
  • Kimberlin refers to (but does not name) his co-defendants, Neal Rauhauser and Ron Brynaert, asserting that they “have no assets whatsoever” — how does Kimberlin know this? How is it that he is privy to the financial condition of Rauhauser and Brynaert? And what business of Kimberlin’s what sort of motions Backer has filed against Rauhauser and Brynaert?

The alleged relationship between Kimberlin, Rauhauser and Brynaert is at the very heart of Walker’s case. Continue reading Your Honor, May I Direct the Court’s Attention to Exhibit J, Please?
UPDATE: Who Is ‘Forced to Engage’? →

Neal Rauhauser, Who Drove Barrett Brown Off the Deep End, Continues Unrelenting Harassment of His Targets

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Neal Rauhauser was a speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference

“There’s nothing stopping them. They feel like they have the right to do anything they want to anyone who gets in their way.”
– Jennifer Emick, describing the online savagery she’s experienced since exposing “Anonymous”

When last we took note of Brett Kimberlin’s evil minion Neal Rauhauser on Oct. 2, Rauhauser had helped instigate Nadia Naffe’s lawsuit against Patterico. Being busy with campaign coverage, I overlooked Patterico’s Oct. 4 post about that lawsuit:

Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser recently admitted in a complaint to my office that he introduced Naffe to attorney Jay Leiderman:

I brought this situation to the attention of Los Angeles attorney Jay Leiderman, then introduced he and Naffe, and he is now representing her in a civil case against Frey.

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.:

[T]he lawsuit he faces from Nadia Naffe is another matter and it is understood that if she prevails that may put an end to Frey’s career in the DA’s of?ce.

That’s how Rauhauser operates: Once he targets somebody as an enemy, he becomes fixated and obsessed, and endeavors to get others to assist him in harassment of the target. Be sure and read the entirety of Patterico’s post, and especially notice the March 23 Tweet from the “Breitbart Unmasked” account.

Keep in mind that Rauhauser’s implacable hatred of Patterico dates back to July 2011, in the wake of the Anthony Weiner sex scandal when (a) Patterico was “SWATted,” and (b) Rauhauser posted a series of diatribes at Daily Kos under his “Stranded Wind” alias:

In a July 27 post, “Weinergate Perps Pay Dearly,” Rauhauser said Patterico “looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate.” Rauhauser has never produced a scintilla of evidence to support that bizarre accusation. Weiner had resigned from Congress on June 16, 2011, after admitting “he had in fact sent the [Twitter] image and had had inappropriate online exchanges with at least six other women. ” So there was no reason at all — in late July, six weeks after Weigner resigned — for anyone to imagine a “planner/operator” as being “behind” the scandal, let alone to accuse Patterico.

Rauhauser was Patient Zero in a weird epidemic of left-wing paranoia that became known as “Weiner Trutherism.” Rauauser’s irrational demonization of Patterico might be laughed off, were it not for the fact that several people — now evidently including Nadia Naffe and attorney Jay Leiderman — have assisted Rauhauser in his harassment of Patterico. And what Rauhauser has done to Patterico is typical of what he does to everyone he targets.

Take, for example, Jennifer Emick, an online researcher who last year helped expose members of the “LulzSec” criminal hacker conspiracy, a rogue offshoot of “Anonymous.” Rauhauser discovered that Emick was an acquaintance of Aaron Barr, the former CEO of HB Gary Federal, a security firm that had unsuccessfully sought a contract to provide its services to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which had been targeted by “Anonymous.”

Rauhauser magnified the association between Emick and Barr into one of his typical conspiracy theories. It was apparently Rauhauser who got Barrett Brown so stoked up with paranoid rage last month that Brown unleashed a crazed video rant that got him arrested for threatening an FBI agent:

“I got to find out, thanks to a hack — thanks to another f–king stroke of luck, thank God — that HB Gary, since mid-February, had hired an FBI informant . . . making up reasons to raid Barrett Brown and get his information. . . .
“It turns out — from the e-mails that were stolen two months ago and that, thank God, I have — that that guy was an old military buddy of HB Gary executive Jim Butterworth. . . . I know what’s been done to me by these f–king contractors . . .
“FBI agent Robert Smith is a criminal who’s involved in a criminal conspiracy that has, thank God, been revealed, part of which was evident months ago, because I told the f–king FBI agent Daniel Forseck . . . when his f–king little Jennifer Emick — f–king informant, HB Gary employee — bragging about the sh-t, she gave me the number. I guess she wanted to talk to me and see what I’d say.”

The derangement evident in Brown’s 13-minute video reflected many of the same weird obsessions — HB Gary, Team Themis, Tom Ryan — that have crowded Rauhauser’s mind since his “Kookpocalypse” rant in February. (See my June 19 post, “Neal Rauhauser: Internet Super-Spy!” Patterico also has more background on Rauhauser’s “Kookpocalypse” episode.) Given that Barrett Brown had also been attacking Rauhauser’s enemies (me and Patterico) a couple weeks earlier, it was obvious who was feeding Brown’s paranoia.

Since Brown’s arrest in September, the harassment of Jennifer Emick has escalated and Neal Rauhauser has directly involved himself in this harassment, filing a false report with the city where Emick lives and sending defamatory e-mails to the sheriff’s department in the county where Emick lives. In his report to the city, which he posted on his blog, Rauhauser wrote:

I am being harassed by a mentally ill resident of the city . . .
I have worked as a political consultant since 2010 and Emick is one of a handful of deeply disturbed persons who have become fascinated with me. This all seems to be connected to events in the spring of 2010, when I worked for the primary challenger to pro-life Democrat Bart Stupak in Michigan’s 1st Congressional District.

This is a bald-faced lie. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Bart Stupak campaign, Emick never wrote a word about Rauhauser until he began attacking her — because of her online acquaintance with Rauhauser’s nemesis “Zapem” — and his claim that Emick is harassing him is the exact opposite of truth.

We are looking at another classic example of Rauhauser’s “accuse the accusers” strategy: Malign the target to pre-emptively discredit them, and to create confusion on the part of courts and police as to who is the victim and who is the victimizer.

Rauhauser’s assertion that Emick is “mentally ill” or “deeply disturbed” is part of this strategy. Rauhauser himself is a twisted Gordian knot of sociopathic tendencies, exhibiting habitual dishonesty, narcissistic grandiosity, persecutorial delusions and a sadistic delight in inflicting suffering on others. He has the sociopath’s cunning intuition, an ability to spot weak-minded people who are vulnerable to his manipulative behavior, and to solicit their assistance in his various schemes.

Neal also has the narcissist’s arrogance, so that he boldly lies to law-enforcement officials without any apparent fear of apprehension, because he thinks himself infinitely smarter than those to whom he lies. And why shouldn’t he believe this?

Rauhuaser has sent his conspiracy-theory treatises — filled with all manner of false and defamatory assertions — to the FBI, to various state and local law enforcement agencies, and even to members of Congress, and never once suffered any serious legal consequence for this peculiar habit. Probably, officials receiving his e-mails dismiss Rauhauser as a harmless kook, and underestimate the harm done by his online behavior. (Cops are apt to view such conflicts as  “just a bunch of crazies arguing on the Internet.”) 

One of the best analyses of Rauhauser’s personality is Ladd Ehlinger Jr.’s “A Breathtaking Lack of Empathy.”

Rauhauser seems incapable of caring about the harm he does to others. Barrett Brown is now in federal custody, and perhaps headed to prison, because of Neal’s manipulations, yet rather than acknowledge his role in inciting Brown’s meltdown and repenting of his evil behavior, Rauhauser just moves on in search of other targets to menace and manipulate.

Soon, however, a Virginia court may bring a certain amount of justice to Rauhauser, who is a co-defendant in Aaron Walker’s lawsuit against Brett Kimberlin. William Hoge has been chronicling the procedural progress of that lawsuit, and if you have followed the case, you know that at the next court hearing on Friday, Oct. 26, it’s possible that Kimberlin will be held in contempt of court.

And those who have studied Rauhauser’s modus operandi will perhaps not be surprised to learn that Neal has begun touting the “Kookpocalypse Konclusion . . .  I just got the word – close of business next Friday it’s all gonna happen,” with a countdown clock to Friday, Oct. 26.

So Rauhauser’s recent flurry of online evil — the “doxing,” the posting of photos of his targets and their homes, the e-mails to law enforcement, et cetera — could be interpreted as reactions to the legal pressure being brought to bear against Rauhauser’s client/associate Kimberlin. Neal exhibited a similar pattern of behavior in the weeks before the March raid on “LulzSec.”

Weird things involving Rauhauser’s targets are happening on a daily basis, and these things should not be dismissed as coincidences.

‘Someone Trying to Breathe Life into a Three-Year Old Dead Horse’

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Thus does John Fund dismiss an attempt by Nadia Naffe to create controversy around James O’Keefe III over a planned “sting” video that never happened, as embarrassing as the details may be.

O’Keefe, as you certainly know, is the young activist who became famous for his collaboration with Hannah Giles in the 2009 undercover videos that destroyed ACORN, and which sparked the successful launch of Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website. Naffe is a former Republican operative who worked with O’Keefe until, in March of this year, she accused O’Keefe of sexual harassment and worse.

Naffe had been “terminated” by the Florida GOP in 2004, which led to a lawsuit that, if O’Keefe knew about it before he hired her, should have given him pause. Who would knowingly hire anyone whose former employment resulted in litigation? And this is especially true of someone whose work would require a high degree of confidentiality.

So now Naffe has made herself a weapon with which O’Keefe’s enemies seek to destroy him. She has made league with Neal Rauhauser — assisting Rauhauser in an attempt, on behalf of Brett Kimberlin, to get access to e-mails that Naffe wrongfully obtained from O’Keefe — and is now apparently ready to file a lawsuit against Patrick “Patterico” Frey:

Rauhauser has been obsessed with Patterico for more than a year, going back to the 2011 WeinerGate scandal, when Rauhauser (under his “Stranded Wind” alias) published a series of posts at Daily Kos accusing Patterico of all manner of wrongdoing:

It was in the aftermath of the WeinerGate scandal that Rauhauser evidently joined forces with Brett Kimberlin and Kimberlin’s tax-exempt 501(c)4 group Velvet Revolution. Kimberlin had his own grievance against Patterico dating back to October 2010, when Kimberlin threatened a lawsuit against Patterico.

Similarly, both Rauhauser and Kimberlin had been striving for some time to destroy Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe, which is how Nadia Naffe’s complaints against O’Keefe brought this together with their grievances against Patterico. When Naffe made her accusations against O’Keefe in March, Patterico raised questions about Naffe’s story and subsequently discovered the public-record documents relating to her 2004 lawsuit against the Republican Party.

Patterico’s criticism of Naffe and his publication of those documents is, so far as I can tell, the only grounds for complaint Naffe has against him and 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. (See my June 17 article, “‘Scrubbed’ Writings Show Kimberlin Associate Neal Rauhauser’s Obsessions,” for some relevant examples.)

Remember that Rauhauser solicited the same California attorney, Jay Leiderman, in an attempt to get SWATting target Mike Stack to file a nuisance suit against Patterico.

It is most unfortunate that Rosie Gray of Buzzfeed has assisted O’Keefe’s enemies in what is, in fact, nothing more than the latest manifestation of a bizarre personal vendetta. “Dead horse” though the story may be, innocent people still suffer real harm from these deliberate attacks. Assisting sadists in the satisfaction of their depraved appetites is not properly the business of a journalist.

UPDATE: Linked by Jackie Wellfonder and Bill Hoge — thanks! — and thanks likewise to the commenter who points out that Jay Leiderman is also the attorney who represents imprisoned former “Anonymous” spokesman Barrett Brown.

Brown’s involvement with Rauhauser became public last month when Barrett threatened me, then published a series of private online chats he had with Patterico, evidently in an effort to defame Patterico as being party to a (wholly imaginary) conspiracy.

Brown’s motives in that incident are impossible to determine, nor do we know what (if anything) connects that failed smear with Barrett’s subsequent public meltdown that led to his arrest. Absent such knowledge we can only observe that, in general, bad things happen to people who actively ally themselves with evil.

 

The Best Revenge: Ohio-Bound

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By the time you read this, I should be within a couple hours of Lima, Ohio, where Paul Ryan is due for a 2:30 p.m. rally. Right now — as I’m writing this — it’s about 2 a.m. and I’m awaiting my ride while laughing at the latest ridiculousness from Neal Rauhauser:

McCain has never filed for a peace order. McCain has never shown a police report. McCain has only misrepresented his change of address and sudden need for a much higher income as a threat from another victim of the fringe right’s obsession, rather than the inevitable outcome of his indecent behavior. He is defrauding the Tea Party masses with his act, a common tactic for the people he associates with, such as Ali Akbar.

You see? It is absolutely true that I’ve never filed for a peace order, I’m neither a plaintiff nor a defendant in anyone’s lawsuit, and there is no police report — why would there be?

This whole sue-me, sue-you game may be fun for civilians, but I’m a professional journalist and it would be impossible for me to report on a story while simultaneously suing (or pressing criminal charges against) the subject of the story. One of the reasons my location remains undisclosed is to prevent any sort of incident that might involve me in such legal hassles and interfere with my continuing coverage of The Kimberlin Files.

My “indecent behavior … defrauding the Tea Party masses”! These heinous slurs are outright lies fabricated from whole cloth, a classic example of the “accuse the accusers” tactic that Rauhauser and his client Brett Kimberlin have been using for months.

You know the Miranda warning? Well, whenever you’re targeted by the Kimberlin-Rauhauser Axis, everything you say can and will be used against you in their next vicious smear. They accuse, accuse, accuse, expecting their targets to deny, deny, deny — or to explain, explain, explain — so that they can then twist the target’s denials and explanations as “evidence” for their next accusation.

Screw that. I’ve been very careful not to play that game (also not to sue anybody or to file any criminal complaint), leaving them with nothing else to do except recycle old smears. And my “much higher income”? Yeah, armagnac and decolletage!

What I am paid to do is cover the news. These distractions from Rauhauser aren’t going to stop me from earning my pay, and so I’m off to Ohio to cover the Romney-Ryan bus tour, thanks to those who’ve contributed generously to the Shoe Leather Fund: Charles in Georgia, Jackie in Salisbury, William in Dallas, Mike in El Segundo, Jeff in Chesapeake, Jack in Oklahoma, Geoffrey in Washington State, Sean in Connecticut, Richard in Hollywood, Diana in San Francisco, and Jeff in Walla Walla.

Do any of you guys feel “defrauded” by my “indecent behavior”? I think not. And here’s my latest American Spectator column:

The Romney-Ryan campaign kicks off a three-day bus tour through the key swing state of Ohio today. Folks arriving early at the Republican rallies who pay attention to the warm-up music played before the events may hear an old blues-rock tune that has become a staple in the rotation, the first verse of which proclaims, “I was born lonely, down by the riverside. Learned to spin fortune wheels and throw dice.”
“Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” was the title track of Bob Seger’s 1969 debut album. It was incorporated into Mitt Romney’s campaign-rally music back in February when the candidate was fighting a GOP primary battle against rival Rick Santorum in Michigan, home state of both Romney and Seger. No one has ever confused the Republican presidential nominee with the rock singer, but Seger’s lyrics might offer some valuable inspiration to Romney as he rambles across the Buckeye State this week, trying to beat the increasingly long odds in his campaign to defeat Barack Obama.
To listen to some people, in fact, you might get the idea that the campaign is already over. Last week’s Romney “gaffe” — the secret video that was, in fact, recorded in May — was supposedly the fatal blow to the GOP challenger. The liberal media said so, as did certain Republican commentators who were vehemently denounced by Rush Limbaugh. “The glitterati, the intelligentsia, the stars inside the Beltway think Romney lost the election yesterday — they really do,” Limbaugh told his nationwide radio audience Wednesday. “I never met a bunch of quitters like these in my life. I never met a bigger bunch of defeatists! We haven’t even had the debates. It’s not even October yet.”
Indeed not, but the time is getting short. Election Day is six weeks from Tuesday, early voting has already begun in half the states and, after a month of non-stop negativity from the media, Romney needs to recapture the excitement generated by his Aug. 11 announcement of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate. . . .

Read the whole thing. Me? Babe, I gotta ramble . . .


Neal Rauhauser’s Crazy-Evil Obsession

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Neal Rauhauser was a speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference

“I’ve been all over Patterico for the last several weeks, as he looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate . . .”
— Neal Rauhauser (“Stranded Wind”), Daily Kos, “Weinergate Perps Pay Dearly,”July 27, 2011

“Frey is often at the center of questionable activity, lending undue legitimacy to things that border on criminality . . . I have long felt that he was misusing his position and abusing the public’s trust, and these logs presented me a chance to file a formal complaint.”
— Neal Rauhauser, “Pat Frey – Safe, At Least For Now,” Sept. 21, 2012

Why did Neal Rauhauser become obsessed with Patrick “Patterico” Frey? Well, Patterico had done valuable work writing about the Anthony Weiner cybersex scandal, but you see that he assumed an inordinately large significance in Rauhauser’s mind. Why?

Long story short: It’s the day job, stupid.

It seems that once Rauhauser learned that Patterico works for the L.A. County District Attorney’s office — which was not a secret, by the way — this offered what must have seemed to Neal a chance at an easy “win”: He would get Patterico fired, and this scalp on his belt would then become the symbolic trophy that certified Rauhauser’s vindication.

Neal was Patient Zero in the epidemic of Weiner Truther madness on the kook fringe of the Left. Rauhauser had convinced himself (and staked his credibility on the claim) that Weiner was the victim of a heinous conspiracy.

“Congressman Weiner was stalked and set up by a Christian Infowar Militia cell based largely in Oklahoma City,” Rauhauser wrote at Daily Kos under his “Stranded Wind” alias on June 4, 2011.

Looking at the elements of that accusation — “Christian,” “Militia” and “Oklahoma City” — you have a tight cluster of right-wing demons, calculated to inspire Fear and Loathing in the hearts of the type of liberal who, as soon as Gabby Giffords was shot, leaped to the conclusion that her killer must have been a deranged Tea Party extremist. (Jared Lee Loughner was, in fact, a psychotic 9/11 Truther obsessed with the cult conspiracy film Zeitgeist.) This is where we arrive at a basic point of debate about Neal Rauhauser: Crazy or Evil?

That is to say, in examining his behavior, we are forced to consider two alternative explanations:

A. He’s crazy. Rauhauser seriously believes the lunatic conspiracy theories he promulgates online.

or

B. He’s evil. Rauhauser is a vicious cynic, who creates elaborate fictions carefully calculated to appeal to the kook-fringe types, thus enabling him to manipulate them for his own selfish and malevolent purposes.

Of course, we cannot rule out the hybrid theory:

C. He’s both crazy and evil.

At some basic cognitive level, Rauhauser appears aware that his conspiracy theories are ludicrously false. There are times when the cynicism is so apparent — e.g., Neal’s manipulation of his gullible Twitter defender (and devoted Weiner Truther) “Occupy Rebellion” — that it seems obvious that he knows it’s all nonsense.

So that would seem to support the “evil” theory, but the “crazy” explanation is bolstered by Rauhauser’s strange persistence in his obsessive pursuit of certain targets. More than two years after the 2010 TwitterGate scandal, for example, Rauhauser still continues to lash out compulsively at “Zapem,” the woman whose research did so much to expose Rauhauser’s role in that bizarre episode.

No rational person would continue pursuing her in the same mad way Don Quixote pursued windmills, as Rauhauser has done. And I think that Ladd Ehlinger Jr. came closest to identifying the exact nature of Rauhauser’s madness:

[Rauahsuer’s behavior] displays a breathtaking lack of human empathy. He thinks of people as playthings to be toyed with. By categorizing them as “trolls” he can do to them whatever he wishes, and creates all sorts of elaborate games to entrap them. His revelry in their misery is quite apparent, justified by dehumanizing those he manipulates.

In other words, Neal Rauhauser is a sadistic sociopath who enjoys inflicting suffering on others, for whom he is incapable of feeling empathy. Furthermore — and I’ll ask readers with psychological training to tell me how common this is — Rauhauser’s sociopathic tendencies are closely associated with narcissistic grandiosity and paranoia.

He is a sort of cyber-serial killer, stalking prey on the Internet, seeking to inflict on them virtual torture and destruction.

Rauhauser thinks of his evil acts as heroic, avenging the wrongs he alleges have been done by the dehumanized scapegoats whom he alternately diminishes (as insignificant “trolls,” etc.) and magnifies as dangerous enemies, as suits his selfish purposes. And so we go back to the WeinerGate scandal and the beginnings of Neal’s obsession with Patrick Frey. Patterico was targeted in multiple July 2011 posts by Rauhauser (“Stranded Wind”) on Daily Kos:

Unlike some other of Rauhauser’s targets, Patterico has the kind of day job where such defamatory accusations can cause him real harm. Although his supervisors seem to understand that the false accusations against Patterico are just psychological side-effects of Rauhauser’s conspiratorial fixation — Patterico is never going to get fired because of this crap — being the target of an obsessive cyberstalker’s repeated attacks is nonetheless harmful and annoying.

Furthermore, the rational (evil, not crazy) side of Rauhauser’s mind functions well enough to inform him that his target’s ability to retaliate is impeded by the very fact that Patterico has a day job with serious responsibilities.

Whereas Neal can spend all day every day smearing Patterico, Patterico cannot turn around and do the same to Rauhauser. And while Neal has been able to incite his own basement-dwelling troll army (including “Occupy Rebellion,” among others) to parrot his smears against Patterico and other targets, Patterico’s potential allies are for the most part responsible job-holding professionals who would think it unseemly to spend time refuting the crazy-evil lies of such an odious and obscure person as Neal Rauhauser.

The advantages enjoyed by Rauhauser in such a situation — what we might term assymetric online warfare — are not neglible, and his sadistic personality delights in nothing so much as the cruel exploitation of such an advantage. Crazy evil is like that.