Tortious Interference

Maybe it was here or maybe somewhere else, but I have wondered why people don’t sue these nuts who organize campaigns to get people fired. In the law, intentional interference with the contractual relationship of another person is a tort. Commonly, causing someone to not fulfill their contractual obligations is actionable. Going to customers or vendors of a business, under false pretenses, in order to get those customers and vendors to stop doing business with that business looks like a slam dunk to me. When the tortfeasor admits in public to the act, it should be automatic.

The recent campaign to silence conservative radio legend Rush Limbaugh is led by ten liberal activists engaged in a more than four-year long effort to destroy Limbaugh by targeting his advertisers, including a Media Matters executive vice president.A former Kent State university professor even targeted a small businessman advertising on Limbaugh’s show using her official university email account.

Information compiled by Limbaugh’s team — and first provided to The Daily Caller — demonstrates that nearly 70 percent of the tweets targeting Limbaugh’s advertisers come from the same ten Twitter users, all of whom are actively involved in the “Stop Rush” campaign, which keeps a database of all of Limbaugh’s advertisers.

Now, there’s a difference between a group of people posting their complaints and a group of people conspiring to cause harm. I suppose the argument, from a free speech perspective, is that these people are conspiring to get the public to tune out Limbaugh by convincing the public he is in error.

But, that’s not what we see here. These people are misrepresenting themselves to one party of a business relationship. Their singular purpose is to disrupt that business relationship. If Limbaugh was a donut shop and these guys were claiming Limbaugh stirs the dough with his junk, he could and certainly would sue their ass off.

While the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is presenting its current anti-Rush campaign as a genuine repudiation of out-of-context remarks Limbaugh made on his radio show (replete with a fundraising email from Sandra Fluke), the Stop Rush effort is small, organized and existed long before the most recent controversial Limbaugh comments.

The activists even use technology to “machine-tweet” anti-Rush comments in robotic fashion to ensure maximum Twitter exposure for their insular group’s efforts.

“Angelo Carusone is the self acknowledged originator and head of the StopRush protest, in his professional role as executive vice president of Media Matters for America,” Limbaugh spokesman Brian Glicklich told TheDC. “But since they prefer it look grassroots and made up of real customers, he faded into the background long ago, reemerging only this week as he senses the danger of this illicit scheme being exposed for the fiction at it’s heart.”

Conrad Walton, owner of the emergency supplies company Survivor.com, revealed in a blog post that he began receiving emails from the small group “within 20 minutes” of his local advertisement airing during Limbaugh’s show on the Los Angeles station KEIB.

“It seemed to be a very organized campaign, from people who don’t listen to the show and know nothing about our company,” Walton wrote. “I just checked and they put one of my responses on their site, with my phone number.”

“Please stop advertising on Rush Limbaugh’s program,” former Kent State University professor Nancy Padak wrote to Walton using her “kent.edu” email address. “He stands for hatred and bigotry. Do you want customers/ potential customers associating your business with these values?”

Padak told TheDC that she has been retired from the university for four years.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with a pissed of person calling a business and giving them what for. If the reason for being pissed off is the business supports a heretic, that changes nothing. Getting your friends together to pretend to be something you’re not in order to pressure a business to end their business with another business is fraud, at the minimum. That’s clearly what we have here and it should be actionable.

As an aside, I love how the Daily Caller does things like this. They put the names and background out there, inviting people to let these idiots know how they feel about it. It is a trick they borrowed from the Lefty press.

Here are the names of the Stop Rush Ten, as identified by Limbaugh’s staff:

Angelo Carusone: Executive vice president of the George Soros-funded liberal attack group Media Matters for America. “Stop Rush, I initially rolled it out in late 2009 and early 2010,” Carusone told the Village Voice in 2012. “At the time, the Beck work was doing well…I started Stop Rush in 2009, 2010, and when I went to register the domain, I saw that Rush owned StopRush.com.” Carusone also agreed with the Village Voice that Sandra Fluke represented Limbaugh’s “Waterloo.” Carusone is responsible for leading the Stop Rush efforts and then “handing off” responsibilities to less well-known activists to create the appearance of grassroots outrage, according to Limbaugh’s staff.

Matthew Mitchell: An Altamont Springs, Florida resident who tweets as @CaptMurdock.

Nancy Padak: A former Kent State University education professor who emails advertisers about Limbaugh from her official university email account.

Jason Rey: Georgia resident who tweets as @FranticQuark.

Lauren Reynolds: Los Angeles resident who uses Internet rating systems to downgrade companies for advertising on Limbaugh’s show.

Cherie Richards: Ohio resident and fellow Internet rating aficionado.

Sarah Smyea Rivers: California resident who actively tweets as @eurekasue49.

Dennis William Rohner: Florida resident.

Linda Kotsenburg Swanholm: California resident responsible for creating “target lists” of businesses linked to Limbaugh.

Carol Kernahan Wallin: California resident and anonymous Daily Kos writer who tweets as @Flushfools and @hrhprincess.

4 thoughts on “Tortious Interference

  1. What I really love is how so many self-taught constitutional scholars suddenly appear to declare that what StopRush does is somehow illegal or immoral. When did it become a crime to ask a company to divest from misogyny and bigotry? After all, it was fine with right wing nutjobs when it happened to Howard Stern. It was happening to MSNBC with #OpSlam right before Limbaugh went off on his “slut” rant.

    But for some reason, Rush is a special person who gets special protection from the law…despite the fact that neither you, nor Rush’s favorite legal professor, nor Brian Glicklich can cite any actual laws to back this assertion.

    About those names you’ve reposted: they are already getting threats, and if history is any guide they will now be subject to identity theft, real-life stalking, and smears. That’s what happened to the first cohort of volunteers on Twitter, which is why these volunteers were operating under pseudonyms. But I’m sure that liberals are just fair game…because of some imaginary law that none of you can cite.

    Just to give you one example of how incorrect Glicklich is, we have volunteers in radio markets around the country listening to his show so that we can identify and contact his sponsors — but these volunteers are not accounted in his math, are they?

    Our volunteers currently have a database of nearly four thousand companies that have divested from Limbaugh’s hate-radio show. We have been so successful that we now have to focus on his PSAs because there are no paid ads left. This took thousands of people, and not one of us has ever seen a Media Matters personality in the Flush Rush Facebook group. Not ever.

    So you can continue to believe what you want, but the laws say otherwise, and so do the volunteers of a movement that is succeeding in its mission. This is why his fans’ hatred for us is so vile and disinhibited: we are effective, and it causes them tremendous butthurt. They are such wonderful people.

  2. Perhaps a policy of IMMEDIATE confiscation of institutional “.edu” status, upon abandonment of actual
    “.edu” function may be a start.
    This includes union janitors, Blah blah blah emeritus, and “administrators” as well of course.
    Let them stand on what “the public’ believes their BA, MA, or PhD, “credentials” are worth.

  3. It must be nice to be a fascist and seemingly get away with it. I hate to go all ad hominum but I’d bet donuts and dollars the women in this cabal are a bunch of pinch faced shrews who couldn’t get the dog to kiss them with a pork chop tied around their neck. Seig Heil feminazis!

  4. Whether a lawsuit against a boycott or promotion of a boycott would be successful, probably depends a great deal on whether some laws were broken in the process.

    There have been some court cases, mainly involving Israeli boycotts. Including one in Washington state, where a Superior Court judge dismissed a lawsuit against the Olympia Food Co-Op, saying its decision to boycott products from Israel was protected free speech.

    SodaStream won a case in France against Association France Palestine Solidarite (AFPS). “The court concluded that a boycott, even if instituted for political or moral considerations, must be “fair” and not abusive, a condition that AFPS violated by defacing a SodaStream advertisement and covering it with an image of blood as part of its smear campaign.”

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