Category: Shoe Leather Fund

Just Got Off the Phone . . .

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. . . with the press spokeswoman for Marianne Williamson’s presidential campaign, to whom I found it necessary to explain:

  1. How I managed to pick not one, but two dark-horse candidates (first Herman Cain and then Rick Santorum) who became contenders in the 2012 Republican primary campaign;
    and
  2. I don’t do “gotcha” journalism. I’m not hunting for scandals, I’m a guy doing old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, and my biases are so obvious, I can’t be accused of having a hidden agenda.

As I explained, I believe the way to cover a presidential campaign is to start with a candidate that all the big-name pundits don’t take seriously. This means I don’t have to worry about being one of 30 reporters in a scrum following the candidate around on the campaign trail, and can thus cover the grassroots effort at close range.

This is the Gonzo way, and there’s no reason a conservative journalist can’t cover a Democrat primary, considering that the liberal media expect to be taken seriously when they cover Republicans. So this morning, I booked my hotel (two nights in Myrtle Beach for $165.76) and reserved a rental car ($175.68 for four days, Friday through Tuesday) for a South Carolina trip made possible by the tip-jar hitters.

Great minds think alike, and Professor Ann Althouse also took notice of Marianne Williamson’s campaign yesterday. There is an inarguable logic to this: If the Republicans could nominate an outsider from the world of business, why can’t Democrats nominate Oprah Winfrey’s “spiritual guru”? Last month, ABC’s Nightline featured Williamson:

 

My wild hunches have a strange way of becoming reality, and you never know where my ambition to become ambassador to Vanuatu might lead. I’m already looking at the April calendar for an Iowa trip, where I’ll save money by crashing on Cynthia Yockey‘s sofa, but airfare and a rental car will still be necessary for that trip. Meanwhile I’m on deadline for my next American Spectator column, so I’ll conclude quickly by reminding you that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Readers in South Carolina should sound off in the comments. It’s possible I might get thirsty Saturday night in Myrtle Beach.

UPDATE: Just by the way, the cheapest round-trip flight to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with a departure April 1, if I booked it today, would be $428. So if you guys want to send me racing around Corn Country chasing Democrat candidates, that’s the next fundraising target. As I say, Cynthia’s offered to let me crash at her place in Fairfield, “a rural town that is home to the Maharishi University of Management and has a thriving community of practitioners of transcendental meditation,” i.e., the natural habitat of Marianne Williamson supporters.



 

#Marianne2020: Let’s Make This Happen

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Lawrence Person has a roundup on the emerging Democrat 2020 presidential field and, buried deep down in his massive linkfest is the news that Hillary Clinton’s former “spiritual adviser” Marianne Williamson has launched a campaign for president. He links this news article from the Keene (N.H.) Sentinel Source:

Hoping to bring “a massive infusion of love” into the country’s politics, Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson held town halls in two area communities Sunday.
Roughly 60 people filled Keene State College’s student center for the late-afternoon event, which was sponsored by the Campus American Democracy Project. Williamson also stopped by the Hancock Town Library earlier Sunday and spoke to a similarly sized crowd. . . .
[M]uch of Williamson’s stump speech at Keene State centered on how to “wage peace” and ensure the country’s international and domestic policies are morally sound.
She offered four steps in a quick how-to guide to world peace: expand economic opportunities for women around the world; expand educational opportunities for children globally; reduce violence against women; improve unnecessary human suffering wherever possible.
“But as we know, doing those things does not produce corporate profits,” she said.
The U.S. needs an integrative model of politics that considers how hope, despair and love operate, she said. “We need a massive infusion of love for our children, a massive infusion of love for each other, a massive infusion of love for the rest of the people in this world, which is the only way we will survive the next century.”

The Concord (N.H.) Monitor reports:

Author Marianne Williamson built her career providing guidance on relationships, health and work to Americans through her writing, which caught the attention of celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, who calls her a “spiritual guru.”
Now, she’s hoping to apply that same knowledge in her campaign for president.
“Whether you are healing a life, or healing a nation, the same spiritual and moral and psychological principles prevail,” Williamson said, speaking to a crowd of about 50 people at New England College in Henniker on Tuesday. “All a nation is, is a group of people.”
Williamson, the author of 12 books who announced her candidacy for president in January, said she thinks about taking care of American democracy a lot like she thinks about taking care of the human body.
A healthy democracy, like a healthy body, needs to be nurtured and continually monitored over time, she said.
“You can’t take your health for granted, or you just might lose it,” she said. “You have to take care of your democracy too or if you’re not careful you just might lose it.”
Williamson said America has come very close to losing its healthy democracy. She described President Donald Trump as an “opportunistic infection” the country became exposed to because of its “weakened immune system.”

 

After being interviewed on CBS Interactive, Williamson wrote:

I’m delighted to be sharing a different political conversation than the one we have been having, and grateful for the opportunity to do so. America is in crisis and our politics is a symptom as much as a cause. Addressing our deeper problems only on the level of what we currently think of as the issues 1) will not fundamentally put our country on a different track, and 2) will not defeat the current occupant of the White House. We need a whole-person, multidimensional discussion of what truly ails is. What we think of as the issues are not always the deeper issue. Americans are in chronic tension and anxiety, often exacerbated by economic conditions, chronic injustices, the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the lack of moral compass guiding our journey as a nation. “Qualified politicians “ have brought us to where we are, and we should think about what qualifications are most needed now. What we could use in a president is someone who understands the deeper crisis, and has had a decades long career in helping people and groups transform conditions from the inside out. We need more than a new president. We need a new political conversation, a new dimension of citizenship among all of us, a new awakening of the American spirit, and a recognition that this country should not be run like a business. It should be run like a family. We need someone to connect the dots, to bring wisdom into the conversation, and break the chokehold of our current political mentality. We have turned market forces into a false god, and the corruption is destroying us. The corruption could never have taken hold had women been more empowered, and freer to say what we truly think and feel. Our children, our health, our families, our very earth are suffering under the weight of a late 20th Century political and economic mentality that puts the short-term profits of large multinational corporations before the well-being of people and planet. We should be saying this and standing for this. I am willing to do so, and I hope you will too.

To put it bluntly, Marianne Williamson makes Beto O’Rourke seem like a paragon of gravitas by comparison. She is exactly the kind of lightweight “fringe” candidate who needs to make it to the Final 8 round of the Democrat primary campaign. She’s got more than 2.6 million Twitter followers, and if she can leverage her Oprah-certified celebrity status into an effective fundraising operation — say, $75,000 a month in small donations — she could run a grassroots campaign appealing to a core constituency of “feminist spirituality” enthusiasts who, it must be said, are no more irrational than people who think Bernie Sanders could be elected President. It’s like when Jesse Jackson ran for president; there was no way he could win, but his campaign was symbolically important.

A bit of Googling is all that is needed to find fundamentalist Christians denouncing Marianne Williamson as a “New Age Witch.” If ever there was a candidate whose influence could convince evangelical voters that the Democrats are beholden to satanic powers, she’s the one.

All Marianne Williamson needs is a chance to connect with her natural constituency by appearing in the televised Democrat debates. But gosh, what could help boost her candidacy? If only some veteran journalist could give her campaign the kind of coverage she deserves . . .

 

You see, Marianne Williamson has announced a schedule of events this weekend in South Carolina, and it’s been a while since I’ve been out on the campaign trail, but if readers want to send me out on the road again to cover the 2020 Democrat primary race, this would be a nice start.

It’s 491 miles to Myrtle Beach, S.C., where Marianne Williamson will be speaking Sunday to the Horry County Democratic Party, so that’s a 1,182-mile round trip, and at 20 cents a mile, that’s $263 in the Shoe Leather Fund. Two nights in a Myrtle Beach hotel would cost about $175, so there’s no reason I couldn’t spend three days following Marianne Williamson around — she’ll be at the South Carolina Democrat Party executive committee meeting Saturday, and appearing at two events Monday in Georgetown, S.C. Next month, she’ll be traveling to Iowa, where a friend has offered me couch-sleeping privileges, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, eh? It should take about $450 to make this South Carolina trip happen, so if 30 readers could contribute $15 each, or if 15 readers could contribute $30 each, I can go ahead and book that hotel.

 

Is it possible Marianne Williamson could emerge as an unexpected dark-horse challenger in the 2020 Democrat campaign? It’s not impossible, considering what a clown-car crowd of flakes and phonies are being taken seriously by the media as 2020 contenders. South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg is polling at 1.3% in the Real Clear Politics average, and his sole qualification is, he’s gay. John Hickenlooper, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand — when you get down into the lower tier of 2020 Democrats, none of them poll as high as 3% nationally. Also, none of those candidates have 2.6 million Twitter followers and are on a first-name basis with Oprah Winfrey, both of which qualifications Marianne Williamson brings to this campaign. She’s a bestselling author whose campaign has been written up by BuzzFeed and, as I say, all she needs to do is qualify for the televised debates in order to get her shot at connecting with a larger audience of Democrat voters. My hunch is that, in such a format, her mystical rhetoric and charismatic personality will earn her a surprising amount of support and favorable media coverage. She is the most serious of un-serious candidates and, if she can clear the first hurdle, its entirely possible she could make it to the Final 8, where the cutoff might be as low as a 5% national-poll number.

 

The best way to cover a presidential campaign is at the grassroots level with a long-shot candidate so low in the polls that they’re not surrounded by a swarm of major media. So I’m looking at this South Carolina trip, and the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

What splendid mischief — let’s make this happen.

UPDATE: “Just Got Off the Phone . . .”



 

CPAC: The Final Wisdom

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NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland
Another year, another CPAC, more liberal media lies, and now another Sunday afternoon hotel checkout. I’ve been doing this annual ritual since 2006 — my 14th consecutive CPAC — and there’s a certain familiarity about the routine now. However, there’s a difference in recent years. President Bush never spoke at CPAC, whereas President Trump has been a regular the past three years, and his speech yesterday was a doozy:

President Trump invited a conservative activist who got punched in the face at the University of California-Berkeley to share the stage with him during a two-hour CPAC speech in which he promised to sign an executive order protecting free speech on campus.
“He took a punch for all of us,” Trump said of Leadership Institute organizer Hayden Williams, who was attacked last month on the Berkeley campus while recruiting students for Turning Point USA. Comparing him to boxing legend Muhamad Ali — “He could take a punch” — the president said “the good news” is that Williams is “going to be a wealthy young man” after he sues the university and the man who attacked him. Police have reportedly arrested Zachary Greenberg, a 28-year-old former university employee, in the Feb. 19 assault that was captured on video and went viral online.
“Today I’m proud to announce that I will be very soon signing an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research dollars,” Trump told the crowd of conservative activists packed into the Potomac Ballroom of the Gaylord Hotel. “If they want our dollars, and we give it to them by the billions, they’ve got to allow people like Hayden and many other great young people and old people to speak. Free speech. If they don’t, it will be costly. That will be signed soon.” . . .

You can read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.

Having said all that needs saying, I again conclude by reminding you that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

 

CPAC 2019: Wednesday Scenes — Don’t Hate Me, I’m Only the Media

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The National Affairs Desk for the next four days.

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland
Just after 2:30 p.m. today my son dropped me off in front of the hotel and I checked into my room, unloaded my luggage and immediately went over to pick up my media credentials for CPAC. Even though the sign said check-in wouldn’t begin until 4 p.m., they were already issuing credentials and the line was forming up. Fortunately, I’d brought the email confirmation with a bar-code, so all I had to do was scan that in, show my ID and — zoom! — I was off, an official member of the media.

 

Which isn’t really an honor. Americans hate the media, and I don’t really blame them. American journalism is a disgrace, and its practitioners deserve all the opprobrium heaped upon our collective head.

With the legendary Phil Kent.

Immediately upon leaving the media check-in, I ran into my old friend Phil Kent, who used to be Strom Thurmond’s press secretary back in the day, became a regular at the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle and on the popular statewide politics show The Georgia Gang. He runs Inside Advantage and, like all great Americans, is hate-listed by the SPLC.

 

The line for CPAC registration was out the door.

Is CPAC attendance up or down this year? I have no idea, and don’t actually care. Whatever the trend may be, there are thousands of people in attendance, and it’s the biggest gathering of conservatives in the country. And there are lots of cool people here besides me and Phil.

Say hello to Rick Harrison of ‘Pawn Stars.’

After I’d completed my media sign-in, I headed outside to have a smoke, turned the corner and there in the smoking area was History Channel star Rick Harrison of Pawn Stars fame. He’s a big Trump supporter and will speak Thursday here at CPAC. Rick was talking to a couple of “Angel Parents” whose kids were killed by illegal aliens. One of them was Steve Ronnebeck, whose son Grant was a convenience store clerk murdered over a pack of cigarettes in 2015 by Apolinar Altamirano, a criminal who was facing deportation but had been released from federal custody.

The handsome and charming Jacob Wohl.

Old guy interviewing Jacob Wohl.

I met up with friends, including podcast partner John Hoge, for dinner and found myself talking to Jacob Wohl, a 21-year-old Trump supporter who just got banned from Twitter yesterday. I had no idea how notorious Jacob was until I came back to the National Affairs Desk and started Googling him. He was banned from Twitter after giving an interview to USA Today in which he described his plans to troll the 2020 election.

Student activists gather around Turning Point USA leaders.

After dinner, I headed downstairs where there was a reception, but quite by accident stumbled upon an interesting scene, where about 150 college students were gathered around for a pep talk from leaders of Turning Point USA. So if you want to get punched in the face . . .

Well, I’m credentialed as a correspondent for The American Spectator, and that midnight deadline isn’t going to meet itself, so I’ll have to get cracking on that part of the job now. Ciao.



 

WHOA! PayPal Working With SPLC to Enforce Ideological Conformity?

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This is very troubling in many ways:

PayPal CEO Dan Schulman admitted during an interview with the Wall Street Journal that PayPal works with the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) when it considers blacklisting conservatives. , , ,
PayPal has blacklisted WikiLeaks, Infowars, conservative commentator and Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, political activist Tommy Robinson, investigative journalist Laura Loomer, blogger Roosh V, free speech social network Gab, YouTube alternative BitChute, and a black metal music label.
Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch, and Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative were also temporarily blacklisted by PayPal, before being reinstated.

I’m also troubled by Schulman’s statement, “Probably the most important value to us is diversity and inclusion,” in support of his company’s decision to cancel a planned investment in North Carolina due to that state’s so-called “bathroom bill.” Whatever problems anyone might have with the North Carolina law, the boycott of the state was led by transgender activists promoting a very dangerous ideology, so that Schulman and his company have made themselves de facto ideological enforcers. Y’know, Hollywood produces a lot of entertainment I deplore and employs a lot of people whose opinions I despise, but I don’t go around organizing boycotts, nor do I demand government intervention to suppress bad movies, or wage campaigns to destroy the careers of people in show business, because I sincerely believe what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty:

“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.”

This is the purest possible expression of a profoundly American principle we usually call “the marketplace of ideas,” and as many injuries as I have suffered in the fight for freedom, I count them as nothing compared to the value of what I seek to preserve. There are perhaps many reasons to criticize what Roosh or Tommy Robinson have said, and people are “permitted freely to contradict them.” Yet it would seem that the Left is unwilling to extend the same liberty to its opponents, and by labeling opposition “hate speech” have succeeded in convincing companies like PayPal to deprive the Left’s opponents of economic support.

One of the great ironies of my career is that I have been criticized for quoting my enemies, in effect publicizing their opinions. Because of the “hive mind” effect in online discourse, where people wall themselves off in cliques and cults and echo-chambers of like-minded lunatics, the kook fringe are not accustomed to having their opinions brought to the attention of people who disagree with them. So when I call attention to, for example, a deranged “queer feminist” Tumblrina, this is often perceived by them as “harassment.” But the person to whom I am calling attention is getting free publicity, and if their ideas were persuasive, my readers might choose to become “queer feminists” themselves. The fact that the Left wishes to silence its critics — that they try to get conservatives banned from social media, and engage in financial blacklisting of antagonists — tells you that the Left understands that its opponents would win in a truly free “marketplace of ideas.”

Well, so long as I maintain my liberty, I’ll continue telling you that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Thanks for your continuing support. If I ever get a chance to speak to Dan Schulman, I’ll try to make him see the light.



 

Living Well Is the Best Revenge

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Friday morning I went to the airport to pick up my 18-year-old son, who was returning from a trip to our oldest daughter’s house. She lives in a crucial swing state, near the beach, and the high temperature there today is forecast at 74°F. Our youngest daughter, who recently turned 16, accompanied me to the airport, and was subjected to a few of my paternal lectures along the way. We’d left the house early, seeking to beat morning rush-hour traffic, and were so successful in that regard that we arrived at the airport more than an hour before my son’s flight arrived, and so I bought us breakfast at an airport restaurant — $27.68.

 

Was that too much to pay for breakfast? Yes, but I don’t spend enough time with our kids. They’re busy with school and their friends, and I’ve always got my head stuck inside the computer, trying to solve the world’s problems and/or staring into the abyss. So I wanted to do something nice and, while most people wouldn’t consider breakfast at a restaurant in the airport as something special, most people don’t have six children, and our kids have grown up with fewer of the luxuries that some other kids take for granted, including restaurant meals and vacation travel.

The cliché of “quality time” was invented by Baby Boomer yuppies in the 1980s to rationalize the way their lifestyles deprived their children of so many traditional childhood experiences. Whereas most Baby Boomers grew up in traditional families — perhaps our parents were not as perfect as Ward and June Cleaver, but we still had the basic security of a stable home life — many of the Boomers sadly failed their children in this regard. If you’ve read Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s book The Divorce Culture, you understand how the cliché of “quality time” insinuated itself into the vocabulary of parenting. The working mother might not be able to give her children the kind of daily supervision and care she’d like to give them, but she could take them on a three-day vacation to Disney World and say they’d had quality time together. The divorced father might only see his kids one weekend a month, but he could take them out jet-skiing at the lake and tell himself that this quality time made up for the absence enforced by the custody settlement.

Rationalizations are a psychological defense mechanism — the ego defending itself against negative feedback — and everybody has to do whatever it takes to stay sane in difficult circumstances. Even if we have been able to avoid the worst impacts of cultural decadence in our own lives, most of us have friends and relatives who’ve been directly affected by the unraveling of our social social fabric. Divorce, suicide, drug addiction, criminal violence — the kind of stuff Tucker Carlson was talking about Wednesday night — are both cause and effect of the downward spiral that has been destroying American culture for the past 50 years. My work involves constantly staring into the abyss, looking for the latest bizarre deviance to emerge in the years since our decadent elite opened the Pandora’s Box of atheistic perversion. And I don’t know how to explain why this swirling catastrophic collapse has left my own family unscathed, except to say that God answers prayer.

Being blessed with a good wife, and watching our children grow into caring, responsible adults, is not something I could ever deserve, and too often I take this evidence of God’s grace for granted.

 

 

We have had a happy holiday season, and being a ’Bama family means it’s not over until the Crimson Tide wins the national championship.

It’s important not to take our blessings for granted, of course, and just as I try to remind myself to be grateful for Alabama football, I am also thankful for simple blessings like a trip to the airport and breakfast with my daughter. Watching my kids grow up — and now, watching my grandchildren grow up — is a blessing for which I’m especially grateful, when I consider all the ways in which wicked people have endeavored to destroy my family’s happiness. When I mentioned how the “social justice” trolls attacked Jordan Peterson’s daughter, this was something I felt very personally, because of how my own family has been attacked by these monstrous hate-filled perverts. And speaking of Heidi Beirich . . .

 

My Thursday post about Dr. Beirich got linked Friday morning by Stephen Green at Instapundit, and I didn’t even realize it until today. Sometimes I get so focused on productivity, and the endless hunt for Strange and Savage Tales of Fear and Loathing, that I feel worthless on those days when I don’t publish anything, which was the case Friday. Overall, my productivity the past couple of weeks has been substandard, and I was feeling bad about it until I woke up this morning, checked the site stats and saw that we’d just had our best traffic day since November. So my worst day ironically turned out to be one of my best days.

God bless you, Vodkapundit! This takes us back to September 2009, when I spent the morning on the phone reporting to Steve the massive Tea Party rally in D.C., which prompted the attack by LGF’s Charles Johnson that inaugurated a memorable blog war. Nearly a decade later, it’s possible for me to go months at a time without thinking back to that ordeal, mainly because most people have forgotten that Little Green Footballs ever existed. How bad is LGF’s decline? Well, in spring 2015, Charles announced a GoFundMe to subsidize his project of “exposing” the “conspiracy theories and . . . hate speech” of “the right wing.” The stated goal was $20,000, but so far it’s raised less than $9,000 in 44 months, i.e., a little over $200 per month. Sucks to be you, Charles.

Sometimes, survival is victory. When people quite literally want you dead, every day you stay alive is a win. And I’m still hanging in there.

While my daughter I waited for her brother’s flight to arrive, I suggested she should plan a trip to visit her sister for spring break. She started saying something about her other plans and I was like, “What’s the matter with you kids nowadays? Your sister lives at the beach and you’ve got other plans for spring break? Are you crazy?”

Anyway, if she booked her flight now, it would be about $350 roundtrip and, while that’s nearly twice what LGF’s GoFundMe page raises in an average month, I figure if 10 readers could kick in $35 each, or if 35 readers could donate $10 each, that would suffice and I don’t think it will take more than a couple of days to raise it. God bless all of you who remember The Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

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!