NewsRealBlog's Smear Campaign Continues
Dan Riehl of RiehlWorldView.com, to whom I responded on Twitter last night after a NewsRealBlog contributor named Lisa Graas tweeted him a list of NewsRealBlog hit pieces on me, penned this about me this morning:
Good grief, Alex. Sorry, I'm not prone to generous moods when inexperienced, young no nothings who fancy that they know it all include me in their tweets, or force me to read the irrelevant Frum Forum.
Great, I no sooner get done with Conor with one N, again, only to find out he has a younger and just as pretentious brother. Go away, Alex, you bore me. My God, does every idiot college kid with a PC have to make himself known on-line? Go look at porn, or something else more constructive and befitting your age
Just stay away from the kiddie stuff, I wouldn't want to see you end up in jail; though, given the company you keep, ... well, I wouldn't rule anything out one day. David Frum must be down to luring them in from campus with candy at this point.
This is what earns a person a guest slot on Hannity nowadays? If left-wingers stood around in a laboratory, piecing together every crude stereotype and mean caricature of the right-wing in order to discredit conservative thought, they'd emerge having created Dan Riehl.
Riehl has been persuaded of this, if one can call it that, by David Horowitz's NewsRealBlog cult.
Most of the time in journalism, when a writer is dismissed from an outlet, the parting of ways is the end of the relationship. Whether that parting was friendly or chilly, there's a general expectation that the relationship was professional, not personal, and should always be considered so.
When a person is booted from David Horowitz's NewsRealBlog cult, however, the parting of ways is only the beginning. Every month since my firing this July from the cult (I was too harsh on Ann Coulter, who, it was explained to me, is “a friend of the David Horowitz Freedom Center”), at least one NewsRealBlog contributor has engaged in bizarre, obscene allegations against me on prominent conservative websites.
Their tactics are relentless, like something out of the Church of Scientology -- their rants about me have been Google-bombed to the top of the search results of my name, user-friendly sites that cater to ideologues such as RedState and FreeRepublic have given them platforms, and, between all of the hit pieces, the list of pejoratives employed against me seems almost endless. Since my reputation has not been damaged -- who, outside of David Horowitz's own circle, takes such nonsense seriously? -- the cycle keeps repeating itself. In November, I can probably expect another attack.
Quite a few of NewsRealBlog's contributors have been complicit in spreading this vicious nonsense, and not a single one of them has expressed any credulity toward the cult narrative. How could they, after all? They're not dumb people: they know that they have to fall in line, or they're next. John Guardiano, a fellow FrumForum contributor fired for his political views but smeared for his personal behavior, can attest to that.
The unfortunate truth about David Horowitz is that he never really departed from his far-left methods: he still believes, with all of his heart, that politics is war, and that the ends always justify the means. This is an idea that he instills into all of his disciples -- not that they have much choice in the matter.
This behavior cannot be legitimized. Horowitz has one last lesson from the 1960's to unlearn: Politics is not warfare. The slogan “by any means necessary” is the slogan of anti-democratic conspirators, not for people who defend a free society and constitutional rules.