Recently, Brooks Bayne published Direct Messages we exchanged on Twitter as it regarded the Breitbart writers, staff, and their actions over the past two years. He did not post the entirety of the Direct Messages we exchanged. He left out his assertions that he had hacked emails from Mandy Nagy, showing her collusion and collaboration with Neal Rauhauser.
Brooks and I came into contact after my initial post on Neal, and like many others, he was complimentary of the piece. He wanted me to share information on Neal. He told me that Matt Hogan was assembling a centralized store of research on Neal, his actions, and his associates that consisted of all of the research everyone had done over the past two years and beyond. I was fine with sharing information, but I wanted to organize it first. What I had was a year and a half's worth of everything that showed up on the Internet about Neal, plus other items I was finding by going deep into online forums.
Our association was civil and motivated by a mutual desire to see Neal held accountable for what he had done to various people over the past two years. I was not part of this until February of 2011, when another Twitter user under the handle @solaar tweeted "certified faggot alert in my feed." When I checked his feed, what I found were threats towards another person I knew named Greg W. Howard. By the end of everything, @solaar was revealed as a convicted felon out of Florida named Brett Warren.
The issue became Neal Rauhauser when Neal insisted on intervening on behalf of Brett Warren to make false allegations that I had threatened and harassed him to my law school. He also threatened to put me on a hate crimes watchlist. I told him I would sue him for defamation if he insinuated in any way that I supported racism.
For a while, that was it. I always intended to come back to Neal and put an end to this if no one else had done so.
I started writing about what I'd compiled and I did a few interviews before the first post. Those interviews led to more and more interviews, and so on and so forth. I felt the angle to pursue was Neal's background before Twittergate, both in order to understand his actions and to differentiate my writing from that of others.
I had no problem with Brooks until he started to engage in a line of behavior that I felt was unwise and just plain rude. Referring to people as cocksuckers when those people are working on the same story and towards the same ends as you is just childish. I was also starting to question Brooks's assertions that he had hacked emails demonstrating Mandy Nagy's collusion with Neal Rauhauser. When I looked at what was going on on the Trenches, I didn't see where what they were publishing tied into those emails. In point of fact, I felt like a lot of the writing on the Trenches was a rehash of what was already known, and a game of making fun of Neal Rauhauser.
Neal is not a joke. He shouldn't be trivialized. This man singlehandedly coordinated an online attack against Tea Party supporters and managed to get funded as a result. Twittergate made him. Everything he did afterwards tied back to that one effort.
He ruined reputations, harassed people to no end directly and indirectly, and he coordinated with other people to do more of the same. It isn't funny. It has never been funny.
His actions merited a serious, rational, and logical examination and treatment. Brooks didn't seem interested in doing that. He certainly didn't seem interested in doing the legwork to really document what Neal had done. He liked making insinuations, drawing conclusions from the limited documentation that he presented which were easily refuted by anyone who knew this story, and trolling online.
And when you didn't get in line with Brooks's agenda, no matter if you were working towards the goal he said he wanted, which was Neal Rauhauser held accountable, you were his target. Brooks tried to tell me that I could not tweet Lee Stranahan and remain in his good graces. He tried to tell me that I couldn't talk to his team if I tweeted my material to Lee.
Brooks Bayne was never my boss. He was never my employer. He had known me for all of about two weeks. He was out of line. I wrote pieces to encourage civility, but it became apparent that those pleas were not going to be received. In point of fact, Brooks seemed emboldened. I came to see Brooks as a right wing equivalent of Neal Rauhauser. He wasn't going to be stopped through rational discourse, or discouraged by pleas for civility. Brooks was only going to be dissuaded if you confronted him forcefully and effectively by tearing his arguments to pieces and highlighting his methods for what they were: bullying.
He knew that Lee Stranahan couldn't respond to him because Lee was an employee of Breitbart, and Lee's editor wouldn't tolerate a Breitbart employee getting into an online war with someone. Brooks felt like he had a free pass to go off on Lee to his heart's content. Brooks did not tell the truth about the circumstances surrounding Lee's departure from the Trenches. He represented that he had a contract with Lee Stranahan when he did not. He insinuated that Lee had bashed his new management without ever presenting a shred of documentation. He neglected to mention that Lee's resignation emails specifically cited Brooks's behavior towards Occupy Rebellion, including a tweet where Brooks says that he supported violence and owned a weapon.
I'm in law school. In another year, I'll be applying for a law license. I can't be associated with a guy who tweets that kind of rhetoric. I will not be asked to answer for that kind of talk. Brooks insists that he meant the tweet in reference to self-defense, but the tweet doesn't say that. It's tailor made for Neal Rauhauser or his followers to manipulate it into a full on threat.
Lee felt the same way. He resigned because of it.
Brooks went beyond that tweet to go on a two week tear, concluding with a slam of my work via one of his researchers named Michelle. You know her as ZAPEM. She insinuated and outright alleged that I had plagiarized her work through Mandy Nagy. This was untrue. As proof of her allegations, she presented three tweets from over a year ago, none of which substantiated her claims.
I let Brooks and Michelle have it. I called him on the Nagy emails and told him to put up or shut up. We now know that many of us saw him tweet about those emails, that some of us were DM'd about the emails, and that Brooks has subsequently gone back and deleted those tweets and DMs. He now insists that he didn't tell anyone about having Mandy's hacked emails in his possession, despite the fact that multiple people saw those tweets. I heard Brooks say that he had those emails the first night we talked on the phone.
I have always been honest about what I write, how I source it, and what my motivations are. I answered every single specious allegation Brooks and his team made with one simple request: put up the proof. They never did.
I started The Benches to give Brooks's sloppy, unethical, and illogical reporting the critical once over it deserved in a humorous manner. Instead of acknowledging that many of the criticisms were valid, Brooks kept going. Just as Brooks lied about Lee Stranahan, he lied about Neal Rauhauser in his latest post. Neal never admits to have national security secrets. Brooks's writing is defamatory, downright dishonest, and unethical as hell.
I don't like Neal Rauhauser, but I'm not going to lie about him. The ends do not justify the means, and the truth about Neal is so compelling that lying about him is pointless. We have before us the means to put Neal in jail, and from there to move to discovery for various criminal and civil infractions. Those means are unpaid child support, and Neal's actions have given rise to both federal and state criminal liability. Over the past week, things have been set in motion to get warrants issued for Neal's arrest. His time as a free man is almost up.
No one else documented this information and worked to get Neal held to an account for it via warrants and a future arrest. For a year and a half, most people just sat around and wrote about what a terrible individual Neal was. They rehashed his actions over and over again, to no avail.
Neal's arrest, and the confiscation of his computers, servers, and hard drives are the key to unraveling who funded him and to what end. It's the key to finally holding him accountable for his actions.
I objected to Brooks, and in the past I objected to Andrew Breitbart. While people were getting hurt by Rauhauser's online campaign of intimidation, harassment, and defamation, he sat by and watched. It was unconscionable. I was initially inclined to excuse it in part because of the manner in which certain people requested, no, demanded his help. But over time, I came to have suspicions about Andrew Breitbart's motivation, especially when one of his writers popped up as an intermediary between Mike Stack and Neal Rauhauser. Granted, that writer didn't get her contract renewed until after Andrew's death, but it didn't wash with me and several of the people I'd known from Twittergate.
Likewise, I found the entire explanation by Mike Stack of Weinergate to be implausible. If someone asked me to tweet about an impending sex scandal, I'd want to know who and why. I wouldn't do it without clarification and confirmation. When the details of Mike Stack's background came out, and I later realized what kind of issues were in his past in examining this entire story again beginning in June, I had questions. Mike was supportive of what I was doing, but I just couldn't buy that a porn site moderator would be all that concerned with conservative politics and the sex scandals of a politician. The DUI conviction was another red flag for me as well. His domestic issues had been dismissed, but those issues along with revelations about his financial history bothered me.
As I began vetting people who were supposedly on my side, what I found bothered me even more. It seemed like I was the only guy without multiple judgments, liens, arrests, and convictions in my background. I understand that people make mistakes. I understand that things happen. However, there were so many things.
And then there was Dan Wolfe's re-emergence and his admission of child custody issues, drama with an ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend, all on a liberal website. It seemed asinine of him to re-emerge and disclose this information to the Smoking Gun, but that's what he did. And then he had the temerity to blame the media for not focusing on Anthony Weiner when he'd given them all the distraction they could ever use. It wasn't Anthony Weiner who got the media to focus on Dan Wolfe, it was Dan Wolfe.
Mike Stack's explanation just strains credulity. Some guy, whose identity he doesn't even know, pops up and asks him to tweet about an impending sex scandal involving a Congressman. Mike does so, Dan retweets, and never once does Mike clarify that Dan started the entire thing until after Weinergate happens and the heat comes his way. Both of these guys display advanced knowledge three weeks before Weinergate breaks, purportedly from a top conservative blogger who never blogs once about the scandal in the three weeks after their initial tweet.
There's no doubt in my mind that Anthony Weiner is guilty. There is a doubt in my mind as to Mike's explanation of the events that led to his resignation. It just doesn't make sense.
I've never hidden what I thought of Andrew Breitbart via my own interactions with him online. To this day, I believe that Andrew supported James O'Keefe, a man who ALLEGEDLY (there, Adam) violated wiretapping laws and used dishonest editing to misrepresent what actually happened in his videos. Do I think ACORN was a liberal machine engaged in unethical and possibly illegal activity? Yes. Do I think James O'Keefe's dishonest video editing serves as proof of that? No. As for Shirley Sherrod, the full video of what she said completely negated the portrayal offered by Andrew Breitbart. She rightly filed a defamation lawsuit against Breitbart because he did defame her.
These tactics, rooted in an ends justifies the means ideology, are typical of Breitbart and others who worked with or for him. I don't agree with these tactics. I will not lie, and I will not do anything illegal to get a story. I will not omit facts to get context that portrays my targets in a negative light that is also a misrepresentation of what they said and did. It's wrong, and it's of the left. I am no leftist, and I will not resort to their tactics in what I write or report.
When I DM'd Brooks Bayne about Breitbart's writers, it was under the impression that Brooks had definitive proof of one of those writers colluding with Neal Rauhauser. To me, this was confirmation of what I had suspected given Breitbart's willing association with James O'Keefe and his questionable methods in the Sherrod video, as well as his involvement in outing a picture of Anthony Weiner's erection.
As time went on, I became convinced that Brooks was lying and I challenged him to put up or shut up where the emails were concerned. He did not, and I now believe that he cannot.
I believe that Brooks Bayne point blank lied about having those emails in his phone conversations with me and his tweets. I believe Brooks is willing to resort to reporting half truths and omissions to get the conclusion he wants. I also believe that Brooks is dangerous to this story, because his sloppy and dishonest work can be seized upon to discredit the legitimate work done by others whose only crime is association.
There are those of you who wanted me to set aside my differences with Brooks and work with him against the left. Brooks doesn't work against the left, he works for himself. The differences we have are too fundamental to be resolved. I don't lie in my work. I don't omit facts to arrive at conclusions that are unfair and defamatory to Neal Rauhauser or anyone else I write about. Brooks does.
He isn't one of us. Brooks isn't all that interested in seeing Neal held to an account. Neal is a useful boogeyman for Brooks, someone he can malign endlessly and blow up into a caricature. The truth about Neal needs no embellishment. It's horrifying. He's a man who has no issues whatsoever with attempting to destroy the lives of people whose only crime is holding to a different political ideology than his own. Brooks sees Neal as one thing only: a means of getting attention for himself and his site. He does not care how dishonest, deceitful, and defamatory his coverage of Neal Rauhauser is, because Brooks has no sense of an obligation to treat his enemies truthfully and ethically. He has no sense of an obligation to his readers to give them the truth of what he's writing about.
I just got back from a party, and I spent my night enjoying something other than my computer and wading through Neal Rauhauser's life for a change. I'm addressing The Trenches' post about my Direct Messages to say one thing: if the worst thing you can say about me is that I disagreed with Andrew Breitbart while he was alive, and even now after he is dead, I think I'll be fine. If the worst thing you can say about me is that I object to people who self-identify as good guys colluding with Neal Rauhauser to defame one of their own people, I'm going to be all right.
It was a nice try by Brooks to change the subject. For two days, he's been getting his ass kicked over his reporting on a parody website I started. He has yet to address the criticisms I offer in that regard because he cannot. They are legitimate and truthful.
Lee Stranahan responded to my tweet about an earlier article on Andrew Breitbart I did with a comment in which he told me that I didn't know the man. He insists that there are some things I wasn't aware of, and that those things might change my mind. I'd like to invite Lee to write about those things on this site. That's a story that needs to be told.
As for Brooks Bayne, I think it is apparent to everyone who watched his online conduct for the past week just what Brooks Bayne is, and just how much credibility he ought to have in the future. My point has been made. Despite what Patrick Read had to say about me via tweets this past week, I bear him no ill will. I look on the dissolution of our association with considerable sadness because I knew Patrick for a year and a half. I knew Brooks for three weeks. It's no great loss to lose a Brooks Bayne as a friend, but it is a loss to lose Patrick Read as a result of some misguided loyalty to the likes of a small, petty, vindictive liar like Brooks. I would apologize, but I can't be a team player with people who resort to the methods employed by Brooks Bayne. My loyalty is to my sense of right and wrong, and no true friend would ever ask me to do something that violated my sense of ethics or morality.
As for the rest of The Trenches, I'll always think well of Stevie for having the balls to stand up to Brooks, even though she had to do so alone. Matt Hogan might have been a guy I had a beer with under different circumstances. Michelle is just Michelle, and she's spent the last two years earning every bit of the reputation she has.
As for the rest of you, the fight to bring Neal Rauhauser to culpability and unmask the people who supported, directed, and funded his actions continues. I go forward to see him held to an account for his actions as a deadbeat dad and an libelous online bully. If he was involved in the SWATtings, it is my hope that we can prove it and have him held accountable for his actions there as well.
Enjoy the show.
Brooks and I came into contact after my initial post on Neal, and like many others, he was complimentary of the piece. He wanted me to share information on Neal. He told me that Matt Hogan was assembling a centralized store of research on Neal, his actions, and his associates that consisted of all of the research everyone had done over the past two years and beyond. I was fine with sharing information, but I wanted to organize it first. What I had was a year and a half's worth of everything that showed up on the Internet about Neal, plus other items I was finding by going deep into online forums.
Our association was civil and motivated by a mutual desire to see Neal held accountable for what he had done to various people over the past two years. I was not part of this until February of 2011, when another Twitter user under the handle @solaar tweeted "certified faggot alert in my feed." When I checked his feed, what I found were threats towards another person I knew named Greg W. Howard. By the end of everything, @solaar was revealed as a convicted felon out of Florida named Brett Warren.
The issue became Neal Rauhauser when Neal insisted on intervening on behalf of Brett Warren to make false allegations that I had threatened and harassed him to my law school. He also threatened to put me on a hate crimes watchlist. I told him I would sue him for defamation if he insinuated in any way that I supported racism.
For a while, that was it. I always intended to come back to Neal and put an end to this if no one else had done so.
I started writing about what I'd compiled and I did a few interviews before the first post. Those interviews led to more and more interviews, and so on and so forth. I felt the angle to pursue was Neal's background before Twittergate, both in order to understand his actions and to differentiate my writing from that of others.
I had no problem with Brooks until he started to engage in a line of behavior that I felt was unwise and just plain rude. Referring to people as cocksuckers when those people are working on the same story and towards the same ends as you is just childish. I was also starting to question Brooks's assertions that he had hacked emails demonstrating Mandy Nagy's collusion with Neal Rauhauser. When I looked at what was going on on the Trenches, I didn't see where what they were publishing tied into those emails. In point of fact, I felt like a lot of the writing on the Trenches was a rehash of what was already known, and a game of making fun of Neal Rauhauser.
Neal is not a joke. He shouldn't be trivialized. This man singlehandedly coordinated an online attack against Tea Party supporters and managed to get funded as a result. Twittergate made him. Everything he did afterwards tied back to that one effort.
He ruined reputations, harassed people to no end directly and indirectly, and he coordinated with other people to do more of the same. It isn't funny. It has never been funny.
His actions merited a serious, rational, and logical examination and treatment. Brooks didn't seem interested in doing that. He certainly didn't seem interested in doing the legwork to really document what Neal had done. He liked making insinuations, drawing conclusions from the limited documentation that he presented which were easily refuted by anyone who knew this story, and trolling online.
And when you didn't get in line with Brooks's agenda, no matter if you were working towards the goal he said he wanted, which was Neal Rauhauser held accountable, you were his target. Brooks tried to tell me that I could not tweet Lee Stranahan and remain in his good graces. He tried to tell me that I couldn't talk to his team if I tweeted my material to Lee.
Brooks Bayne was never my boss. He was never my employer. He had known me for all of about two weeks. He was out of line. I wrote pieces to encourage civility, but it became apparent that those pleas were not going to be received. In point of fact, Brooks seemed emboldened. I came to see Brooks as a right wing equivalent of Neal Rauhauser. He wasn't going to be stopped through rational discourse, or discouraged by pleas for civility. Brooks was only going to be dissuaded if you confronted him forcefully and effectively by tearing his arguments to pieces and highlighting his methods for what they were: bullying.
He knew that Lee Stranahan couldn't respond to him because Lee was an employee of Breitbart, and Lee's editor wouldn't tolerate a Breitbart employee getting into an online war with someone. Brooks felt like he had a free pass to go off on Lee to his heart's content. Brooks did not tell the truth about the circumstances surrounding Lee's departure from the Trenches. He represented that he had a contract with Lee Stranahan when he did not. He insinuated that Lee had bashed his new management without ever presenting a shred of documentation. He neglected to mention that Lee's resignation emails specifically cited Brooks's behavior towards Occupy Rebellion, including a tweet where Brooks says that he supported violence and owned a weapon.
I'm in law school. In another year, I'll be applying for a law license. I can't be associated with a guy who tweets that kind of rhetoric. I will not be asked to answer for that kind of talk. Brooks insists that he meant the tweet in reference to self-defense, but the tweet doesn't say that. It's tailor made for Neal Rauhauser or his followers to manipulate it into a full on threat.
Lee felt the same way. He resigned because of it.
Brooks went beyond that tweet to go on a two week tear, concluding with a slam of my work via one of his researchers named Michelle. You know her as ZAPEM. She insinuated and outright alleged that I had plagiarized her work through Mandy Nagy. This was untrue. As proof of her allegations, she presented three tweets from over a year ago, none of which substantiated her claims.
I let Brooks and Michelle have it. I called him on the Nagy emails and told him to put up or shut up. We now know that many of us saw him tweet about those emails, that some of us were DM'd about the emails, and that Brooks has subsequently gone back and deleted those tweets and DMs. He now insists that he didn't tell anyone about having Mandy's hacked emails in his possession, despite the fact that multiple people saw those tweets. I heard Brooks say that he had those emails the first night we talked on the phone.
I have always been honest about what I write, how I source it, and what my motivations are. I answered every single specious allegation Brooks and his team made with one simple request: put up the proof. They never did.
I started The Benches to give Brooks's sloppy, unethical, and illogical reporting the critical once over it deserved in a humorous manner. Instead of acknowledging that many of the criticisms were valid, Brooks kept going. Just as Brooks lied about Lee Stranahan, he lied about Neal Rauhauser in his latest post. Neal never admits to have national security secrets. Brooks's writing is defamatory, downright dishonest, and unethical as hell.
I don't like Neal Rauhauser, but I'm not going to lie about him. The ends do not justify the means, and the truth about Neal is so compelling that lying about him is pointless. We have before us the means to put Neal in jail, and from there to move to discovery for various criminal and civil infractions. Those means are unpaid child support, and Neal's actions have given rise to both federal and state criminal liability. Over the past week, things have been set in motion to get warrants issued for Neal's arrest. His time as a free man is almost up.
No one else documented this information and worked to get Neal held to an account for it via warrants and a future arrest. For a year and a half, most people just sat around and wrote about what a terrible individual Neal was. They rehashed his actions over and over again, to no avail.
Neal's arrest, and the confiscation of his computers, servers, and hard drives are the key to unraveling who funded him and to what end. It's the key to finally holding him accountable for his actions.
I objected to Brooks, and in the past I objected to Andrew Breitbart. While people were getting hurt by Rauhauser's online campaign of intimidation, harassment, and defamation, he sat by and watched. It was unconscionable. I was initially inclined to excuse it in part because of the manner in which certain people requested, no, demanded his help. But over time, I came to have suspicions about Andrew Breitbart's motivation, especially when one of his writers popped up as an intermediary between Mike Stack and Neal Rauhauser. Granted, that writer didn't get her contract renewed until after Andrew's death, but it didn't wash with me and several of the people I'd known from Twittergate.
Likewise, I found the entire explanation by Mike Stack of Weinergate to be implausible. If someone asked me to tweet about an impending sex scandal, I'd want to know who and why. I wouldn't do it without clarification and confirmation. When the details of Mike Stack's background came out, and I later realized what kind of issues were in his past in examining this entire story again beginning in June, I had questions. Mike was supportive of what I was doing, but I just couldn't buy that a porn site moderator would be all that concerned with conservative politics and the sex scandals of a politician. The DUI conviction was another red flag for me as well. His domestic issues had been dismissed, but those issues along with revelations about his financial history bothered me.
As I began vetting people who were supposedly on my side, what I found bothered me even more. It seemed like I was the only guy without multiple judgments, liens, arrests, and convictions in my background. I understand that people make mistakes. I understand that things happen. However, there were so many things.
And then there was Dan Wolfe's re-emergence and his admission of child custody issues, drama with an ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend, all on a liberal website. It seemed asinine of him to re-emerge and disclose this information to the Smoking Gun, but that's what he did. And then he had the temerity to blame the media for not focusing on Anthony Weiner when he'd given them all the distraction they could ever use. It wasn't Anthony Weiner who got the media to focus on Dan Wolfe, it was Dan Wolfe.
Mike Stack's explanation just strains credulity. Some guy, whose identity he doesn't even know, pops up and asks him to tweet about an impending sex scandal involving a Congressman. Mike does so, Dan retweets, and never once does Mike clarify that Dan started the entire thing until after Weinergate happens and the heat comes his way. Both of these guys display advanced knowledge three weeks before Weinergate breaks, purportedly from a top conservative blogger who never blogs once about the scandal in the three weeks after their initial tweet.
There's no doubt in my mind that Anthony Weiner is guilty. There is a doubt in my mind as to Mike's explanation of the events that led to his resignation. It just doesn't make sense.
I've never hidden what I thought of Andrew Breitbart via my own interactions with him online. To this day, I believe that Andrew supported James O'Keefe, a man who ALLEGEDLY (there, Adam) violated wiretapping laws and used dishonest editing to misrepresent what actually happened in his videos. Do I think ACORN was a liberal machine engaged in unethical and possibly illegal activity? Yes. Do I think James O'Keefe's dishonest video editing serves as proof of that? No. As for Shirley Sherrod, the full video of what she said completely negated the portrayal offered by Andrew Breitbart. She rightly filed a defamation lawsuit against Breitbart because he did defame her.
These tactics, rooted in an ends justifies the means ideology, are typical of Breitbart and others who worked with or for him. I don't agree with these tactics. I will not lie, and I will not do anything illegal to get a story. I will not omit facts to get context that portrays my targets in a negative light that is also a misrepresentation of what they said and did. It's wrong, and it's of the left. I am no leftist, and I will not resort to their tactics in what I write or report.
When I DM'd Brooks Bayne about Breitbart's writers, it was under the impression that Brooks had definitive proof of one of those writers colluding with Neal Rauhauser. To me, this was confirmation of what I had suspected given Breitbart's willing association with James O'Keefe and his questionable methods in the Sherrod video, as well as his involvement in outing a picture of Anthony Weiner's erection.
As time went on, I became convinced that Brooks was lying and I challenged him to put up or shut up where the emails were concerned. He did not, and I now believe that he cannot.
I believe that Brooks Bayne point blank lied about having those emails in his phone conversations with me and his tweets. I believe Brooks is willing to resort to reporting half truths and omissions to get the conclusion he wants. I also believe that Brooks is dangerous to this story, because his sloppy and dishonest work can be seized upon to discredit the legitimate work done by others whose only crime is association.
There are those of you who wanted me to set aside my differences with Brooks and work with him against the left. Brooks doesn't work against the left, he works for himself. The differences we have are too fundamental to be resolved. I don't lie in my work. I don't omit facts to arrive at conclusions that are unfair and defamatory to Neal Rauhauser or anyone else I write about. Brooks does.
He isn't one of us. Brooks isn't all that interested in seeing Neal held to an account. Neal is a useful boogeyman for Brooks, someone he can malign endlessly and blow up into a caricature. The truth about Neal needs no embellishment. It's horrifying. He's a man who has no issues whatsoever with attempting to destroy the lives of people whose only crime is holding to a different political ideology than his own. Brooks sees Neal as one thing only: a means of getting attention for himself and his site. He does not care how dishonest, deceitful, and defamatory his coverage of Neal Rauhauser is, because Brooks has no sense of an obligation to treat his enemies truthfully and ethically. He has no sense of an obligation to his readers to give them the truth of what he's writing about.
I just got back from a party, and I spent my night enjoying something other than my computer and wading through Neal Rauhauser's life for a change. I'm addressing The Trenches' post about my Direct Messages to say one thing: if the worst thing you can say about me is that I disagreed with Andrew Breitbart while he was alive, and even now after he is dead, I think I'll be fine. If the worst thing you can say about me is that I object to people who self-identify as good guys colluding with Neal Rauhauser to defame one of their own people, I'm going to be all right.
It was a nice try by Brooks to change the subject. For two days, he's been getting his ass kicked over his reporting on a parody website I started. He has yet to address the criticisms I offer in that regard because he cannot. They are legitimate and truthful.
Lee Stranahan responded to my tweet about an earlier article on Andrew Breitbart I did with a comment in which he told me that I didn't know the man. He insists that there are some things I wasn't aware of, and that those things might change my mind. I'd like to invite Lee to write about those things on this site. That's a story that needs to be told.
As for Brooks Bayne, I think it is apparent to everyone who watched his online conduct for the past week just what Brooks Bayne is, and just how much credibility he ought to have in the future. My point has been made. Despite what Patrick Read had to say about me via tweets this past week, I bear him no ill will. I look on the dissolution of our association with considerable sadness because I knew Patrick for a year and a half. I knew Brooks for three weeks. It's no great loss to lose a Brooks Bayne as a friend, but it is a loss to lose Patrick Read as a result of some misguided loyalty to the likes of a small, petty, vindictive liar like Brooks. I would apologize, but I can't be a team player with people who resort to the methods employed by Brooks Bayne. My loyalty is to my sense of right and wrong, and no true friend would ever ask me to do something that violated my sense of ethics or morality.
As for the rest of The Trenches, I'll always think well of Stevie for having the balls to stand up to Brooks, even though she had to do so alone. Matt Hogan might have been a guy I had a beer with under different circumstances. Michelle is just Michelle, and she's spent the last two years earning every bit of the reputation she has.
As for the rest of you, the fight to bring Neal Rauhauser to culpability and unmask the people who supported, directed, and funded his actions continues. I go forward to see him held to an account for his actions as a deadbeat dad and an libelous online bully. If he was involved in the SWATtings, it is my hope that we can prove it and have him held accountable for his actions there as well.
Enjoy the show.
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