How Two ‘Progressive’ Women Slut-Shamed A Women’s Rights Activist

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A Cautionary Tale of Infiltration, Betrayal, and the Activist Community

by Melissa Brewer

I've been busy with worky stuff, so I didn't have time to blog Melissa's moving, informative, and maddening essay when it was first posted. I apologize to her for that. She wrote an important introduction and overview of the noisy Twitter conflagration that made her life a living hell, and has embroiled me and hundreds of other people for months. It is best read together with Matt Osborne's tidy little synopsis of this Ratfucking* of the stopRush effort and me.

Although they'd like everyone to think that what they did was just about me, what Heather E. Chase (@heatherEchase) and Imani Gandy (@angryblacklady) did had an impact on many people. Particularly affected by their selfish machinations were about 3000 #StopRush volunteers, but also several other women who have spent their lives fighting for women's rights. And their fight was much greater than building a small wiki project that died only a few months later when it's founder was able to leverage the attention she received into a paying contractor's job with a bona fide and well respected women's rights organization. Evidently, they made this acqui-hire before Chase and Gandy had admitted what they'd done to us. It might have made a difference in their decision.

Of course, many other people—even well branded bloggers—who never bothered to research any of the story before "defending their friends," were lured into that embarrassing trap based on their modest acquaintances, and these women’s shrieks of "conspiracy theory! conspiracy theory!"  They have been quiet lately, probably due to the fact that their friends, the  purported "victims," Chase and Gandy admitted doing exactly what we said they had done.

Melissa's story will explain a lot of things to you. I urge you to read it. Some highlights:

I’m writing this post today to tell you a story. It’s the story of a man who wanted to “infiltrate” a movement and manipulated many people so that he could “make his way” as the next Breitbart or James O’Keefe.

I felt good about my involvement in StopRush. I was true to the boycott, too. In fact, because of StopRush, I’ve learned how to vote with my wallet in a number of ways. I’m a conscientious consumer. I have StopRush to thank for that.

As depressing as it’s going to sound, this story is also about hypocrisy in its very core form. While #TeamUterati “worked” to further “women’s rights” and decry slutshaming on a public level, none of the “TeamUterati” women seemed to think twice about aiding and abetting Jason Wade Taylor in his “war”. The women targeted in his ruse included… (emphasis mine).

If this story doesn't open your eyes to the dangers of bloggers acting as careerists, using any means necessary to promote themselves at the expense of other progressive causes and the broader public interest, nothing will.   

I'd like to be able to say Melissa's post has led to better relationships between like-minded people on Twitter, particularly those who are more than sick of the drama these people continue to flog every day. Unfortunately, all it's done is bring her more strident and vitriolic attacks from those who are now so thoroughly invested in all these manifestations of Internet Disinhibition run amok.

*A Note About The Term “Ratfucking.”

Chase and Gandy and their supporters lamely try to deflect from the selfishness of their deed by saying that Matt Osborne and I have claimed that what they did was "political."  Why? Because Osborne used the term "Ratfucker."  This is a typical Breitbartian trick where you try to obfuscate the guts of a story by picking off tiny tangents that you hope the gullible will be distracted by.  It was just more of the spinning and manipulation that these two cunning women have used since they first started denying that they did anything at all (most stridently argued to friends in private). They had been slowly backing away from their denials before finally admitting what they did—but only after we published hard evidence that proved it.  They excused it all with still more cover-ups, unsupported assertions about my "bullying and abusing women," and of course, their ongoing use of other people to mask their duplicity. Along the way, they shamelessly encouraged their vicious supporters to attack mine (ironically, often women themselves).  

But back to their tangent:  Not only did the term "Ratfucker" long ago escape its Watergate-era boundaries and come to mean any dirty trick done for any kind of gain, but even at face value, it was appropriate  Chase and Gandy were played by Jason Wade Taylor,  a con-man who absolutely had a political agenda and used their greed and epic ethical fails to assist him.  Their motives were never political, and no one ever said they were.

Rather, their motive was to raise funds to pay their salaries in a quick-and-dirty advocacy effort that designed to do just that. I know. I was there when it was formed. In those days, I spoke to Gandy nearly every day. Out of work, and out of money, her constant refrain (very closely paraphrased) was "I have just enough cushion to last until maybe October. I need to make this work or I will need to find a job."

Ratfucking me and StopRush, apparently, was part of "making this work."

Please read Melissa's story in its entirety. It's an important one with many lessons for social media activists.

Update No. 1 

The always dishonest and complicit @MiltShook (a blogger of such stature, he writes his own reviews on Amazon), who continues to deny—and conceal—his major role in this drama, has been spouting off on Twitter about how "Shoq wrote Melissa's piece." This is typical of Shook, who makes straw assertions like these about me almost every day since I eviscerated a truly ridiculous undocumented hit piece he wrote about me on behalf of Chase, Gandy, Jessica, Padilla, and Himself.. Shook postures that he wants all this to stop, while tweeting almost hourly about me. A few examples.  Had I written Melissa's essay (replete with tales of her rape and abuse), I would hardly have been as fuzzy about the perp's motives as she was. She gives them wiggle room. I don't. We already know and proved exactly what their motives were.

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Nothing Says “Fight The Abuse Of Women” Like Abusing Women Who Disagree With You

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Read this:

  • When Feminists Turn "Mean Girls"  — A series of tweets from just a few of the more obsessive beasts who have trolled my Twitter stream since last August, blathering baseless allegations that I "abuse women."  

    Each of them are frequently encouraged and retweeted by  @angryblacklady, @honeybadgerLA, @vdaze, @semishark, @dvnix, and many others actively engaged in harassing me on Twitter, even having contests to see who can drive down my follower count the fastest. Seriously.  Their goal has been to cover-up their own malfeasance and contrived scandals meant to mask it and they have literally shat on thousands of twitter relationships to do it. Fortunately, as the chirpstory shows, they are now revealing themselves to be incredibly manipulative and vicious, further discrediting their phony narratives. And people are finally starting to  get it and push back.

And then this to explain the horror that you just read: 

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What just happened, and why I am being attacked (again) on Twitter.

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  • Today, Breitbart Blogger Lee @Stranahan claimed he got a threatening phone call from the infamous Jason Wade Taylor, aka Randy Hahn
  • Shortly thereafter, @HeatherEChase shows up on his radio show to say that yes, that was ABSOLUTELY JWT on that tape.
  • The problem is that a dysfunction monkey with a hearing disorder could tell that it wasn't him.
  • JWT has threatened me many times. No one loathes him more than I do. But I know what he sounds like, and this "caller" not only wasn't him, but he sounds an awful lot like the so called "Swatter" that Stranahan has made a career out of talking about.
  • Someone will soon put up a side-by-by side comparison of the the caller with JWT and you can judge for yourself. They are similar as Milk and Gatorade.
  • So many of us asked, in effect,"Why did professional liar Stranahan set this up? We know they both want JWT to go away, but why such a badly acted show like this, that is so easily debunked with the naked ear, let alone professional audio forensics?
  • Matt Osborne started blogging about the incident.
  • Well, it turns out, they talk often, Heather and Lee. Huh. The guy who defends James O'Okeefe. Alrighty then… but
  • Why is she FORCING people to believe this "threat" was by JWT, when it so clearly wasn't?
  • Because she's desperate to show that JWT is threatening her, when there has been no other evidence of that any of us have seen. Supposedly, she'd been working with the Houston Police to file charges against someone she has been speaking to regularly. I told Stranahan to press some today. He won't, because the penalties for false police reports are STEEP.
  • Heather told Lee (earlier on this show) that she expected ME to provide MY evidence to the houston police. (I never said I filed a report)
     
  • All of this is an ongoing Web of lies Chase has told to escape one simple reality. She was conned by JWT, as many were.
  • She felt he was a rich dude who would fund her projects with Angryblacklady. They were conned. Simple. No shame in that. We all were.
  • The problem is, they provided recordings and emails to him, then lied and said they never asked him for money. They did.
  • JWT has claimed that he has recordings of her proving that she did. He has already played 1.5 of them and promises more soon. It is essential to Chase's entire career (in her mind), and perhaps AngryBlackLady, that JWT (and me) be discredited. So she keeps pushing these yarns about everyone connected, hoping most people think she's "too nice" or "too woman" to do such a dastardly thing.
  • The smartest thing she could do is just admit it, apologize to Osborne, Me, Karoli, Vdaze, HoneybadgerLA, and Angryblacklady for her horrible bungling of everything she's touched  (except wiki software, which she is good with) since last January.
     
  • JohnGcole (owner of Balloon-juice.com(a fine blog), befriended Chase after Angryblacklady introduced them,
  • Having no information to work with, Cole is simply defending someone he believes in, but has no evidence to exonerate. Admirable, but misguided.
  • Cole has made the unfortunate mistake of attacking me personally, and my cancer, to try and shut me up, He's admitted this in his stream.
  • Cole used to attack me routinely because I criticized his friend Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher. Apparently, John wants everyone to like his friends.
     
  • All of this is connected to an 11 month long drama that began on the woeful day that a woman named Heather E Chase conned her way into my life, and then proceeded to do her level best to destroy it, while freezing the StopRush effort in its tracks and disrupting the lives of dozens of people and some really good twitter communities.  
  • I suspect when her real story is known, we will know that this is not new for her. She's a former video gamer, They can sometimes create real-life villains to battle, just like they used to do in virtual fantasyland.
  • So now do you get it?
 

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Rachel @Maddow Is Thankful For Much. I’m Thankful For Her And @MSNBC. Here’s Why

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Many of us in the liberal/progressive space have spent years decrying the pathetic state of the corporate news empires that govern our daily lives now.  We know what they are doing to us, and there's rarely much we can do to stop it.

Perhaps ironically, and due to the very market forces we often renounce as ineffectual, things are happening that promise to restore at least a semblance of intelligent and responsible balance to the media's scales.  Probably without initially intending to, @MSNBC, chasing that almighty dollar, has begun a steady transformation of cable news that seems to be on the verge of making real reporting, careful research, thoughtful analysis, and strong voices stylish and marketable enough for prime time.

Whether in the form of  Rachel Maddow, Chris L Hayes, Melissa Harris Perry, Krystal Ball, Lawrence O'Donnell, Steve Kornacki, Martin Bashir, or many of the fine contributors, panelists and guests they are bringing forth each day, such as Joy Ann Reid, Joan Walsh, Goldie Taylor, Anthea Butler, and Ari Melber, @MSNBC is steadily elevating the national discourse by producing segments like the one below. 

It takes a lot of thought to produce a tribute like this, but you can't do it unless you care. MSNBC has assembled a lot of fine people who care. They may not get us out of this mess, and Comcast may yet put the brakes on their development, but for now, they sure are a step-up from where we've been. I'm thankful for all of them.

The Maddow Show Gives Thanks

 

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Three Views On The Crazy: Our Republican Party Problem

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Here are three articles I've ready in the past 24 hours that each sum up our "Republican Party Problem" in differents ways.  The first and last are brief. The one in the middle is deeper, but a crucial read.  All of them taken together provide a damn good panoramic view of the landscape of Republican crazy.  And I don't call it that to mock it. I call it that because we need to fear it. I am not one to take comfort in this mess we're in. Desperate animals do desperate things, and the animals who fund these lunatics are very rich, very powerful, and very willing to say and do anything to keep it that way. They have the money to adapt and survive. We cannot let a great Obama win delude us into thinking a war has been won. It was merely a battle.

Leonard Pitts On What They Do That Is So Crazy

The GOP has become it's own worse enemy —  So while the grownups in the party may be reading the writing on the demographic wall and believe it calls on them to abandon extremism, there is every reason to believe the rest of the party will think that writing requires them to double down on it instead. Read

Frank Rich On Why What They Do Is So Crazy

Fantasyland — Daniel Patrick Moynihan might be surprised to learn that he is now remembered most for his oft-repeated maxim that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Yet today most Americans do see themselves as entitled to their own facts, with one of our two major political parties setting a powerful example. For all the hand-wringing about Washington’s chronic dysfunction and lack of bipartisanship, it may be the wholesale denial of reality by the opposition and its fellow travelers that is the biggest obstacle to our country moving forward under a much-empowered Barack Obama in his second term. If truth can’t command a mandate, no one can.  Read

Dan Hodges On What Keeps All The Crazy Going

Fox News Is Killing The Republican Party — As we saw with Benghazi, rather than try to penetrate mainstream media outlets, there was a clear tendency for Romney advisers to do easy "hand-offs" to Fox on issues they wanted up and running. It reminded me of when we in the Labour Party used to just drop our best material in the laps of the Mirror; they would run it big, and we’d think we were talking to the whole country. In fact, we were talking almost entirely to our own supporters. Read
 

For The Record: Matt Edelstein Never Made Any ‘Illegal Phone Recordings.’

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Introduction

In early June, right wing bloggers were having a field day blathering about what they claimed was an “illegal recording” which I had made of a conversation with a right wing operative named Jason Wade Taylor (JWT) aka Randy Hahn,  @farRightOfLeft, et al), now made infamous by Matt Osborne’s several articles about him.  The recording in question was passed to JWT by two women who were conned into thinking he was a rich progressive philanthropist from Texas. They were led to think that if they helped him, it would result in funding or other assistance for their advocacy efforts. Neither of them have ever publicly confirmed or denied these charges.  But my purpose here is not to speculate about why that is, nor rehash any of the broader details again, but only to set the record straight with these three key points about this purported “illegal phone recording.”

 

1. Recording this scoundrel was necessary

What I did was a simple “sting,” or “scam baiting,” in law enforcement parlance. I pretended to believe a con man’s lies so I could lure him into exposing those lies to our associates in the the #stopRush effort, the progressive community, and possibly law enforcement.  JWT was extracting personal, financial, and strategic information under false pretenses. His targets included me, Matt Osborne (@OsborneInk), Julie Sigwart (@jsigwart), and other #stoprush volunteers. Moreover, by this time JWT had extended his contacts throughout the progressive Twittersphere, turning him into a more general threat. That community lacked any hard information to guard itself against his maneuverings and I needed to gather some.

In the recording, any reasonable listener could  hear me trying to get JWT to admit his role in several mysterious fake Twitter accounts, and his many false postures, pretenses, and credentials. That was the sole purpose of recording the call.  It was our only way of documenting his lies, because he never put much in writing. Today, most people know JWT was and is a fraud, but back in that day, while we suspected it, we couldn’t prove it. The purpose of the recording was to do that. Period.

2. The recording was completely legal

According to Florida Supreme Court, my recording of the call was entirely legal. JWT was not a Florida resident, and the point of interception was not within the state of Florida (as defined by Florida statute, originally crafted for ordinary wiretaps,and then expanded rather imperfectly, “interception” takes place only where the words are uttered, and not where they are received).  Source

Even though I’d quickly learned that the opinions of illegality being offered by several people were flat-out wrong, and my first reading of Florida law had been correct, I decided to not speak about the recording at all and see what came of all the noise and tree shaking. Once JWT and several right wing bloggers had worked themselves into a comical lather over it, new information (and informants) started pouring in from many quarters, and I just decided to let it all pile up until I could decide what outcome I wanted to see come from all of this.

Meanwhile, I quietly consulted with media and communications lawyers who assured me that my actions were perfectly legal, no matter how many ridiculous assertions and opinions were being spewed to the contrary out there on the Internet

 

3. What may not have been legal was this:

The women and JWT both distributed and/or published recordings they did not own, and had no right to transmit to others in any form. The recording was my property, and in some applicable states, the distribution—and certainly the publication—of confidential communications without the consent of the parties is a crime—even a felony.

The #StopRush effort still goes on, but over 1500 volunteers were harmed by this pointless and unnecessary drama caused by a combination of a con-man’s machinations, false assumptions, rash actions, and self interest. I still receive threats from him like this one (and worse), either directly, or via numerous Skype-calls he's placed to my 85 year old mother.

Whether anything else comes of this sad drama of dishonesty, manipulation, greed, and betrayal, the fact remains that I never made any “illegal recordings.”  The larger teaching moment for me, and anyone else involved is simply this: be wary of whom you invest your  trust, especially the ones who call you “friend.”

 

 

Canadian Journalist Unpacks 180 Years Of Mormonism… and Romney’s Monsters Within

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  (1 of 8 original blog posts. See PDF below for compilation)

LISTEN:  Amy Macpherson is a Canadian Journalist for the CBC,  formerly of Huffington Post, who has spent a sleepless month doing some breathtaking original research on Mitt Romney and his Mormon Church's intricate machinations throughout our society.  She has barely had time to edit this work, and while it will surely become a book, she wanted people to know what she's learned before they vote on Tuesday.

While it's been seen by some big dogs, few have had the courage make noise with it this late in the game. I was only handed it 90 minutes ago, I had merely skimmed it, but I found it so compelling, I got several people to start breaking it down to see if any of it can be used to bring down this scary cult-spawn named Mitt Romney. 

I wish it were shorter, but I mostly wish we had it a week ago. Karoli has compiled all 8 parts of the series  into one PDF for your reading pleasure (and haste).

Please share this widely.Comments are open.

 

 

The Asshole Demographic: Why The Buttheads Seem To Rule America

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http://www.alternet.org/media/how-fox-news-created-new-culture-idiots

I've said for quite a few years now that Fox News was making the douchebags and assholes among us into a mainstream demographic.  And while a brilliant essay on so many levels, I will always cherish it for this brief synopsis of the social psychotic named Roger Ailes, who is single-handedly taking down America for his own amusement and enrichment..  Not for nothing does this scumbag travel in a 9-person security cocoon. 

It is not just Fox News commentators but Fox News itself that has the appropriate, in-your-face, I’m-entitled-to-do-this,especially-because-you-dislike-it vibe. Which should not be surprising from a tightly controlled outfit in which everything flows from a single source, chairman Roger Ailes. Ailes has personal flaws that do not necessarily make one an asshole but that clearly shape the coverage, including his paranoia and his extreme politics. We find more telling evidence by considering the man in a happy moment, a victory lap. In an event celebrating Fox News’s success, Ailes said of the competing networks’ talent, as though sharing in the agony of their defeat: “Shows, stars, I mean it’s sad, you know? . . . I called and asked them all to move to the second floor wherever they were working. Because when they jump, I don’t want it to hurt.” By which he meant that he wouldn’t mind at all if his competitors not only lost the contest but felt humiliated enough to kill themselves. He meant of course to gloat but also to show his contempt. He meant to broadcast his contempt and to have a laugh about his being in a position to advertise it.

The comment was at least poor sportsmanship. A longtime practitioner of blood sport media politics, Ailes has emerged as its undisputed heavyweight champion. Politics is indeed a rough sport, but there are still boundaries that while crossed are nevertheless there, or sort of there. It is possible to have a minimal sense of respect among fellow sportsmen, seen as equals off the playing field, and even to display grace in both victory and defeat. Ailes’s comment suggests that he makes little effort at this, even as he does make an effort to draw attention to the fact that he cares not. He keeps it personal, on and off the court.

Ailes is a poor sport but not in a set contest fairly won. His main victory was to redefine the whole sport itself — that is to say, to redefine news. While American TV journalism has always walked a fine line between informing the public and satisfying media capitalism’s demands for viewers, ratings, and ad dollars, the line was more or less there, and it represented respect for what some regard as the fourth branch of government and a democratic society that depends on real news. Ailes obliterates that line with his “orchestra pit theory,” which he puts as follows: “If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?” The implication of course being that TV can and should cover the sensation rather than the substance, that it should move still further away from professional journalism and toward infotainment in a pure ratings contest. Fox News has changed the game and won, with an ever-thinner pretext of service. (It has very little actual news gathering and reporting staff; it freely crosses its own purported division between reporting and editorializing; and it now boosts for and even instigates protest movements and financially backs specific political candidates.) For its loyalty and attunement to its fans, it has been richly rewarded with outsized profits and unprecedented political influence.

If we ask why Ailes fought so long and so hard for all this, however, the answer is not simply the ample rewards. His victory lap comment also suggests fundamental contempt. It suggests contempt not just for his competitors but for a society of people who have always counted on news with a lot of information shaped by a good-faith attempt at impartial presentation. Our fundamental need in a democratic society, for each of us to make up our own mind, now goes unmet by the whole media environment. It reflects not the minds of equals deliberating together about what together to do but the tenor and voice of a single asshole’s mind.

Read it all at Alternet

Of Flying Cars…Two Essays About Change… Or Maybe Not So Much

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These are two of the more important essays I've read this year. I got tired of tweeting them separately, so this post will make it easier to distribute them as a pair. I urge you to read them both because they each offer a fresh perspective on the root causes of our growing global socio–political dysfunction. Flying cars may always have been a fantasy, or they may simply not be something our plutocracy run amok cares much about. 

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

by David Graeber (co-founder of Occupy Wall Street)

Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?

And a response to it… 

Jetpacks versus Power Point Decks 

by @root_e  (armchair economic thinker and all-around smart dude.)

David Graeber wrote the first old school left wing essay I have seen in years and it makes the flabby, stale quality of much of what passes for left-wing analysis all the more apparent. Graeber asks what happened to the optimism, the technical ferment, the rapid changes and extensions of prosperity that people in the first world used to assume were inevitable:

VIDEO: Why Obama, And Why Now? Because History Says So, That’s Why!

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A lot of people have missed this excellent little movie about the history that brought us here. People mock Mike Huckabee's ludicrously partisan history texts, but those people are educating a new generation to think like they do. Progressives should be spending billions on short educational blips like this one that get their message across with an economy of words and ideas. They are dirt cheap to produce, but just look at the page views. That's how it's done, folks. We need to fight this culture war in the trenches, and videos like this make great bullets.