Standing in support of writers personally targeted by #BrettKimberlin (REPOSTING)
NOTE: Today is Blog about Brett Kimberlin Day, initiated to show support to bloggers, lawyers, and others on the right and left who have been viciously targeted by both Brett Kimberlin and his merry band of AnonyThugs who are using the First Amendment as a harassment tool against “enemies” of convicted domestic terrorist aka “Speedway Bomber” Brett Kimberlin. I wrote my original post a couple of days ago, and since then blogger Patterico has written a detailed account, published today, of some of what he, his family, his employer, and fellow bloggers/friends/associates have had to go through at the hands of thugs like Brett Kimberlin and supporters. READ IT when you’ve got a few minutes. You’ll see that both conservatives and liberals alike were targeted – the liberals because they refused to play along with Kimberlin’s disgusting tactics and game-playing.
When done, please make sure to donate to the National Bloggers Club’s fund for Patterico, Aaron Walker, and others who have been victims of vile, vicious PERSONAL harassment, stalking, intimidation and bullying to the point some of them were fired from their jobs or continue to be harassed at the one they have. These people also have reason to fear for their lives. Also, check the trackbacks to this post for other bloggers who are writing about Brett Kimberlin, and Michelle Malkin’s post as she is keeping a running update of those who are blogging about him. Also, if you DON’T blog but Tweet, make sure to use the hashtag #BrettKimberlin in your tweets so it can become a trending topic on Twitter. Thank you.
When you get into the business of writing about politics and current events, whether you do it for the love of it, the money, or both, you set yourself up for being a target of your political opposition. It is the nature of the beast. Most of the time if the opposition isn’t trying to counter your points respectfully, they’ll just laugh at you and/or call you nasty names over a period of time and move on. Other times they won’t move on, but they won’t carry it any further than just online word wars. But there are also cases where it can escalate way beyond that into territory it never should – where people’s families, homes, and livelihoods are directly targeted, threatened, and negatively impacted by thugs who have absolutely no concept of what “freedom of speech” means, and who believe there are no boundaries/limits whatsoever that they shouldn’t be allowed to cross in trying to “shame” those who they oppose. Such is the case with Brett Kimberlin, a despicable human being who has waged a disgusting campaign of legal terror and abuse against conservatives who write truthful articles about him and his domestic terrorism past. The man is vile. Absolutely vile:
Over the past year, Aaron Walker (who blogged as “Aaron Worthing”), Patterico, Liberty Chick, and now Stacy McCain have been targeted by convicted Speedway bomber Brett Kimberlin because they dared to mention his criminal past or assisted others who did. The late Andrew Breitbart warned about Kimberlin and company.
I have spoken directly with both Patterico and Aaron about their ongoing battles.
The mainstream press, not just the conservative blogosphere, needs to hear and report their stories.
This is a convoluted, ongoing nightmare that combines abuse of the court system, workplace intimidation, serial invasions of privacy, perjury, and harassment of family members. McCain was forced to move with his family out of his house this week, and has just gotten a small taste of what Aaron and Patterico have been enduring over the past year. Aaron and his wife were fired from their jobs after their employer feared the office would be targeted next. Convicted bomber Kimberlin has filed bogus “peace orders” against Aaron, when it is the Walkers who are the victims, not the perpetrators.
And Patterico’s plight will send chills up your spine when he is ready to tell it.
Institutional inertia, incompetence, and apathy among law enforcement officials on both coasts have exacerbated the victims’ suffering. It has moved far beyond a partisan or political story to a bottomless, Kafka-esque morass. And, via investigative journalist Matthew Vadum, it certainly doesn’t help that “progressive,” left-wing foundations that have funded Kimberlin continue to look the other way.
Ted Frank at Point of Law summed it up: “A scary tale of what can go wrong if one makes the wrong enemy of someone willing to persistently abuse the civil and criminal legal system, and how poorly the legal system protects those victims.”
Please read Michelle’s full post for background on what Walker and others targeted by Kimerblin have gone through.
Regarding the “peace orders”, Patterico points out:
It is beyond the scope of this post to detail every way in which Kimberlin’s peace order is misleading and deceptive. Kimberlin complains that Aaron spoke of purchasing a gun, implying that Aaron’s statement was aggressive — when Aaron actually said he had bought a gun to defend himself. Kimberlin claims that Aaron is responsible for “alerts” coming to his email inbox, suggesting Aaron is emailing him, when in fact the “alerts” Kimberlin is talking about are Google alerts. If you write about this guy on the Internet, he may run to a judge and say you are causing abusive alerts to come to his email.
You might say: what’s the harm in getting a peace order? I have watched this play out in other venues and I know just what Kimberlin is up to. As soon as he gets a “peace order,” he will run back to court the very next time Aaron mentions his name in public. That means that Kimberlin asserts the right to abuse the court process to harass Aaron — and if Aaron tells the world how Kimberlin is abusing the court process, Kimberlin will claim that as a violation of the peace order and try to have Aaron held in contempt of court.
Kimberlin and his crew have relentlessly harassed Aaron, me, and others over the course of the last several months. It is not harassment for us to tell the world what happened to us. It could happen to any of you. His supporters have outed or threatened to out commenters to this very site. They talk about wives, children, and fathers of bloggers and commenters. They ceaselessly abuse everyone they can who speaks the truth about Kimberlin’s past.
Ultimately, this is a free speech issue. Kimberlin and his group of thugs have done their level best to attack everyone in the blogosphere who wrote anything negative about him. Now the blogosphere is starting to wake up, and there are so many critics he can’t possibly intimidate them all.
I can’t wait to hear Patterico’s full story. In the meantime, would you hit Stacy McCain’s tip jar? He and his family could sure use the assistance right now. And prayers, too.
Friday, by the way, is “Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin” day – Lee Stranahan explains:
Here’s what you do to take part…
- Research Brett Kimberlin on your own. Don’t trust secondary sources; look for the orginal articles articles published about him, too.
- On Friday, May 25th — write an honest, factually accurate post about what you learned and what your OPINION is. Brett may try and sue you, so be accurate, factual and separate fact from opinion.
- The post doesn’t have to be long — ANYTHING helps.
- After you post, Tweet, share, whatever — get the post out there.
I know many of you don’t blog, but don’t worry – it really doesn’t have to be a post at all: Tweet about him, write about him on Facebook, post in comment threads and on message boards. I’m using the hashtag #BrettKimberlin at Twitter because no one has indicated otherwise about any other hashtag. Why do we need to do this? Because not only do we need to support our fellow conservatives, but it is also IMPERATIVE that we show Kimberlin via our words that we will NOT be intimidated by his bull sh*t attempts to squelch free speech.
Are y’all with me?