There’s a term called the “heckler’s veto” which describes how lunatics are able to stifle normal public discourse. Colleges will not invite Ann Coulter to speak anymore because the lunatics are so disruptive the school fears harm could come to their students. The crazies over at Media Matters and The Southern Poverty Law Center work from this premise. In both cases it is a small number of people, but they make such a ruckus it is easier to go along with their racist demands than do the right thing.

The thing is, Media Matter and all of the other Cult pressure groups rely on mass media to pull their stunts. One of the weird consequence to the technological revolution is we now have the lunatics veto and the stupid person veto to go along with the heckler’s veto. Because we made it so easy for the stupid and crazy to reach a broad audience, we are more aware of them than at any time in human history. Matt Osborne, in another age, would have passed the time playing checkers with the other patients at the local asylum. Today he participates in public debate.

Steve Sailer has a post about the increasing number of two-digit IQ’s writing for popular websites. That column by Daisy Hernandez is funny, but it is also a good example of the the stupid person veto. Daisy is probably a nice girl who is kind to puppies and children. Her bio suggests she is clever enough to fool others in her slice of the bell curve, but she is not adding anything to the stock of human capital. In a different age, she would be a secretary at an office somewhere or at home raising children. She’s also not a “woman of color” but she’s smart enough to know that’s how stupid people gain a toe-hold in the opinion rackets these days. Liz Warren got a job at Harvard once she became a fake Indian.

Reading her column, you see a familiar game. Some self-described victim declares herself to be a moral authority. That gives her a veto over the rest of us. After all, the only reason her “white male editor” spiked her asylum story is he is a racist. His pointing out the idiocy of such a proposal is the proof. After all, only “skinny white guys” notice that dimwits like Ms. Hernandez have heads for of goofy ideas. Because it is so easy for blockheads like Daisy to get on twitter and Facebook, they can now shout down everyone else.

I’m fond of pointing out that the mouth breathers on MSNBC were not allowed on TV and radio thirty years ago. The men running television and radio, sympathetic to the causes of these lunatics, were still responsible enough to keep these nuts off the air. They rightly feared the consequence. Even now, without mandatory cable fees MSNBC would go out of business in a week. technology has flung open the asylum doors and we are awash in dimwits and lunatics. The sane and sober are drowned out and the results follow.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald supposedly said the “rich are nothing like us.” I remember hearing that a million times in my youth and it was always attributed to Fitzgerald. I have no idea if he said it and I’m too lazy to look it up. The fact is the rich do live different lives than everyone else. For most people, money is the thing you never have enough of and so you are forever fussing over it. It is always at the heart of your decisions. Rich people have excess and so they don’t spend as much time fussing about money in their daily lives. Money discussions are done quarterly with their accountants and brokers. That leads to lives that are strangely different than the rest of us.

In February I gave an interview to Vice UK to help promote a film I had written and financed called The Canyons—I did the press because there was still the idea, the hope, that if myself or the director Paul Schrader talked about the film it would somehow find an audience interested in it and understand what it was: an experimental, guerilla DIY affair that cost $150,000 dollars to shoot ($90,000 out of our own pockets) and that we filmed over twenty days in L.A. during the summer of 2012 starring controversial Millennials Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen. The young journalist from Vice UK asked me about the usual things I was preoccupied with in that moment: my admiration of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street—the best film I saw in 2013 (not great Scorsese, but better than any other American film that year) and we talked about the movie I’m writing for Kanye West, my love of Terrence Malick (though not To The Wonder), a miniseries I was developing about the Manson murders for FOX (but because of another Manson series going into production at NBC the miniseries has now been cancelled), the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast (link), the possibility of a new novel I had begun in January of 2013 and that I lost interest in but hoped to get back to; we talked about my problems with David Foster Wallace, my love of Joan Didion, as well as Empire versus post-Empire (link) and we talked about, of course, The Canyons. But the first question the young journalist asked me wasn’t about the movie—it was about why I was always referring to Millennials as Generation Wuss on my Twitter feed. And I answered her honestly, unprepared for the level of noise my comments caused once the Vice UK piece was posted.

Bret Easton Ellis is not a billionaire, but he lives a life of leisure. His books and the movies from those books have made him millions. His fame means rich people looking for cultural trinkets are willing to pay him to hang around them. That’s why his opening paragraph resembles something you would expect from a patient at the local psych ward. The name dropping and impulsive self-reference is strange enough, but the volume of it is not like anything you find in normalville.

I have been living with someone from the Millennial generation for the last four years (he’s now 27) and sometimes I’m charmed and sometimes I’m exasperated by how him and his friends—as well as the Millennials I’ve met and interacted with both in person and in social media—deal with the world, and I’ve tweeted about my amusement and frustration under the banner “Generation Wuss” for a few years now. My huge generalities touch on their over-sensitivity, their insistence that they are right despite the overwhelming proof that suggests they are not, their lack of placing things within context, the overreacting, the passive-aggressive positivity, and, of course, all of this exacerbated by the meds they’ve been fed since childhood by over-protective “helicopter” parents mapping their every move. These are late-end Baby Boomers and Generation X parents who were now rebelling against their own rebelliousness because of the love they felt that they never got from their selfish narcissistic Boomer parents and  who end up smothering their kids, inducing a kind of inadequate preparation in how to deal with the hardships of life and the real way the world works: people won’t like you, that person may not love you back, kids are really cruel, work sucks, it’s hard to be good at something, life is made up of failure and disappointment, you’re not talented, people suffer, people grow old, people die. And Generation Wuss responds by collapsing into sentimentality and creating victim narratives rather than acknowledging the realities of the world and grappling with them and processing them and then moving on, better prepared to navigate an often hostile or indifferent world that doesn’t care if you exist.

People who make their name in response to popular trends always come to bad ends. Comics rarely have careers into their fifties for this reason. Once you hit your 40’s you begin to lose touch with pop culture. By your mid-50’s you have no idea who most of these people are even if you try. The aging comic’s references become sad and dated. The aging satirist starts to sound like a retired athlete. Ellis appears to be heading down that road where he compares everything to his generation.

That said, what a strange man.

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A very long time ago when I was a young man, I knew a girl who worked for the NSA. She was an “escort” which meant she escorted people around the facility. She stood at one door. When someone came through that door, she would check their ID and walk with them to their assigned area. Apparently, this was a common way of handling internal security back then. I have no idea if it remains in place, but it sounds like a bureaucratic solution to security. I had a client that did security work for the Feds and they had a similar setup so I’m guessing it is common.

More recently, I knew a guy whose daughter worked for the CIA. She started as an intern in college. Her studies had nothing to do with security. She was a theater major. She was also as dumb as a goldfish and about 150 pounds overweight. After college, she got a full time job at the CIA and they sent her all over the world. She worked in Baghdad and Kuwait during the last wars there. Once she started having kids she was sent back home. What a fat stupid women could possibly do for the CIA is a mystery, but she got to pretend she was  Mata Hari. Probably still does.

Back in the 80’s, it was revealed that the number of paper pushers to field agents in the CIA was something like 150-to-1. They had an army of people who spent all day reading foreign newspapers and categorizing the stories. If you spoke Russian, you would sit there all day listening to Russian TV and radio, cataloging the details. All of those people need coffee and they need managers. They all got to tell people at dinner parties that they worked for the CIA. The fact that they put that on the credit card applications and had it on their parking stickers did not make it less mysterious, I bet.

The point being is we have thousands of people working in the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies who are just cubicle jockeys. Most of what they do is pointless. Some of it is useful and some of it harmful. The fat girl in the CIA most likely spent her days filling out forms and reading e-mail. Like the “escort” I met in my youth, she was as much of a spy as the janitors or coffee jerks working at the CIA Stabucks.

The new supervisor thought his idea was innocent enough. He wanted the baristas to write the names of customers on their cups to speed up lines and ease confusion, just like other Starbucks do around the world.

But these aren’t just any customers. They are regulars at the CIA Starbucks.

“They could use the alias ‘Polly-O string cheese’ for all I care,” said a food services supervisor at the Central Intelligence Agency, asking that his identity remain unpublished for security reasons. “But giving any name at all was making people — you know, the undercover agents — feel very uncomfortable. It just didn’t work for this location.”

This purveyor of skinny lattes and double cappuccinos is deep inside the agency’s forested Langley, Va., compound.

Welcome to the “Stealthy Starbucks,” as a few officers affectionately call it.

Buck Sexton likes to brag about working for the CIA. His act on Glenn Beck’s network is to be the national security guy. One look at him says he was never a field agent. Unless we go to war with the Boy Scouts, a guy like Sexton is not needed in an under cover role. Red Eye has another fake spy on named Mike Baker. He actually did field work, but it was drug cases and that’s more like police work than espionage. He pretends to have been a government hit man on TV. Both are entertaining, but the tough guys stuff is a little silly.

The comical part of the Starbucks story is that no one buying coffee there is a ever going to be a field agent. Maybe they get out into an embassy job, but they will never go under cover. Driving into Langley with your CIA badge and CIA parking sticker on your car is a terrible way to maintain your cover. Yet, everyone in the place, including the guys emptying the trash barrels, carries on like they are Maxwell Smart. I bet you could make a money selling them show shoe phones and cones of silence.

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The Bush years, I suspect, will be studied by historians for a long time. It’s not that Bush was all that interesting. It’s that he and his band of neoconservative fanatics sent so many people into a permanent state of insanity. Most of the old paleos went nuts over the war mongering. Many eventually embraced the weird anti-Israel paranoia that used to be the private domain of the Lyndon LaRouche followers. The Left, of course, was taken over by the Cult of Modern Liberalism. I tend to think the collapse of the Old Right open the door for this new Rousseau-ist religion we call liberalism in America, but that’s a topic for another day.

There were minor figures who also went bonkers. Rod Dreher was a conventional Catholic Conservative in the Sam Francis vein. Then he started getting squirrelly, writing about “crunchy-cons” and then he wandered off to find himself. His work today has all the hallmarks of a man who was defined by his faith and then lost his faith. There’s a maudlin obsession with suffering. The source story is here. My bullshit meter is at eleven on this one. Poor people don’t write books, even in England. A little google work and I see it is a hoax.

The fact is we have four types of poor people in America. The first and most common is the dependency class. Unless you’re like me, these are the folks you never see. They live in the bad areas or what you assume to be bad areas. In the ghetto, the women get on the dole and the men sell drugs, get high and get in trouble. There are some of the other type of ghetto dweller. This is the working poor. These people have jobs and try to live decent lives. Ferguson Missouri was full of this sort until the liberals moved a section of the St. Louis ghetto to Ferguson.

Then you have the temporary poor. These are young people starting out and divorced mothers trying to bounce back. The former often made some poor early choices and are struggling to recover. They do and it builds character. The latter are women who end up divorced with kids and living in an apartment. Again, it is temporary. Eventually their salary rises and the kids move on or they find a new man. The thing with this group is they just don’t have money. That’s different than poverty, which has a behavior component. Give these people more money and they put it away for a rainy day. Give the ghetto dweller more money and they blow it on drugs.

The final category of poor people are the imaginary ones. These are the poor the SWPL-types like Rod Dreher read about or see on TV. The imaginary poor are designed to elicit feelings of pity followed by an urge to “get involved.” The tale offered up by Linda Tirado, for example. hits all the current fads in SWPL-ville. She smokes and eats junk food. SWPL’s are big into self-denial. She prefers abortion to motherhood, but the closest abortion mill is too far away so she has kids she does not want. The whole point of the thing is to function as a morality play for the types of people who think religion is for losers.

This weird form of Mercerism would be harmless if not for the fact public policy is all geared toward helping the imaginary and temporary poor. Rod Dreher spends hours coming up with ideas to do something about the imaginary poor. Democrats in Washington are always championing polices to help the temporary poor, but end up writing laws for the imaginary poor, cause that’s where the emotion lies. It is why Mao packed off the intellectuals for the rice paddy. Not only did it feel good to see these barnacles humiliated, there was some hope they would learn something useful about the people.

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A bit I’m stealing from Steve Sailer is pointing out whenever people on the big stage “borrow” my material. I think it is funny how fringe material eventually finds its way into the hands of the more buttoned down types. Anyway, Jonah Goldberg has borrowed one of my lines for his latest column. If you put “pale penis people” into a google machine, I turn up a lot. It’s a line I started using on a mailing list back in the 80’s. The best bits are the ones that make a point and make you laugh.

This blog gets 20,000 unique visitors a month now. It is a small crowd compared the big sites, but I’ve been at it for just a year. Plus, I’m anonymous and have done little to promote the site. That’s a good number under the circumstances. I’ve been linked to some popular sites and a couple of famous people have mentioned the blog. I’m not in it for any reason other than my own entertainment so organic growth is fine by me.

I installed some tools last month to analyze my traffic. One of the strange things is the number of UK-based readers I have. Someone e-mailed me a while back and said something to the effect that my brand of content is not permitted in the UK so people go on-line to find it elsewhere. Apparently, the UK polices their part of the Internet. I don’t have anyway of know if that is true, but it makes some sense. I read the British tabs for the same reason. American papers don’t cover the stuff people find interesting. Instead they proselytize.

Of course, now that the maniacs from the Cult have discovered me, I may get unwanted attention. Kooks like the #stoprush crowd have been known to stalk bloggers. Many years ago when I had a blog (before there were bloggers) I had a stalker. The guy was a harmless nut, but you never know. The guy I just linked to is the type that ends up in the police blotter or the morgue. But, we’ll take that as it comes. Giving these crazies the heckler’s veto was always a mistake and one I would never go along with under any circumstances.

For now, a specter is haunting the ‘Net— the specter of the z-blog.

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I post a lot of lunatics. It is a weird hobby, I admit, but it is good material. The lunatic lacks the internal brake that keeps most of us from lurching off into extreme opinions, beliefs and actions. I think MSNBC is full of demented crazies, but I’m not starting a website to denounce them. I’m not going to quit my job so I can stand outside their studies screaming “MSNBC Lies!” That brake in my head tells me to let it go and forget about it.

Anyway, this turned up in the comments of my Limbaugh post.

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.

It’s obvious that Matt Osborne is a nut. Sane people just turn off the radio, but lunatics like this guy quit their job and spend all day stalking Limbaugh’s advertisers. His website should be enough to have the guy committed if anyone were to bother. I’d say there’s a pretty good chance he has a long list of medications to take every day. These guys with these obsessions usually have a long list of other issues.

My former lawyer is one such guy. He was fine for a long time. He was prone to crazy talk about politics, but he did not obsess over it. Then he slipped a gear, quit his job and now he won’t shut about the imaginary right-wing conspiracy. My guess is this Matt Osborne guy went down a similar road. Back in the Bush years he jumped the track and now spends all of his time harassing people on-line.

That said, it would be awesome if Limbaugh dragged these guys into court. That would be great TV.

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Many of us out on the fringes have been pondering the series of weird moral panics and cultural shifts that have been coming at us for a long time now. The weird thing is the culture war seemed to be running out of steam in the Clinton years. He was a degenerate, but not much of a culture warrior. Polling showed the public had turned on the family issues like abortion and divorce. Even Bubba was talking about abortion being rare.

Then things went bonkers again. Homosexual rights quickly sprung up with groups like Act Out and then, of course, homosexual marriage was on us. That was 15 years ago, maybe? That fight raged and then the ground shifted again. The trannies were suddenly in the street demanding I’m not sure what. Today brings news that the Feds are suing a company for discriminating against trannies. It won’t be long before they are forced to make cakes for them.

It’s easy to let the freakishness of it all distract from what’s really going on. Many on the right make that error, thinking the issue is the issue. They never stop and wonder why these issues. Steve Sailer has written about the bigger picture, but I suspect he just finds it all too amusing to waste much time on it. Frankly, I fall into this trap as well. The material is just too rich to leave untended. The jokes write themselves.

In my more lucid moments I used to think it was all part of the suicidal impulse of the Left. As I’ve written before, people join movements out of self-loathing. They seek to replace their identity with that of the group. It is a form of self-obliteration. Get enough of these people together heading in the wrong direction and they are soon shopping for alien abduction insurance and Phenobarbital. In a political cult like Liberalism, they try to tear down the structures of civil society. In other words, all of these causes are a means to an end and have little to do with helping the oppressed minorities, real or imagined.

Sitting atop a mountain, cross-legged in quiet contemplation, it occurred to me that the latest rounds of moral panics about the big bad NFL are a piece with the current war on normal. We have male players acting poorly towards women and children. Further, we have alpha male owners not disciplining those players to the satisfaction of the Cult. Worse yet, the big dog at the top of the NFL has not been groveling sufficiently. Compounding it is the fact the NFL is a tough guy, manly man league. It ain’t soccer.

Outside of football, the sporting press is forever ranting about fighting in hockey. They want the beaning of hitters in baseball eliminated. They hate the physical play in basketball, a sport no one would confuse with a tough guy sport. Boxing, of course, has been pushed to the fringes.of course, you have the berserk fanaticism on the Left for chav ball. It is the one sport that boys and girls can play together.

Outside of sports, you have the mania for doping up boys so they don’t act like boys in school. As soon as a boy shows some spunk a bureaucrat is racing to the scene with a handful of Ritalin to “fix” the boy and make sure he stops acting like a boy. This story the other day on NRO is emblematic of the war of males congregating without women. The insanity of forcing “fraternities” to admit women is no impediment to the war on men.

It is the one thread you see running through all of this. I’d include the war on women nonsense that was a part of the last campaign. All of these things are a reaction to and a rejection of what has been a part of western culture’s sense of masculinity. The new religion of America is going to be a feminine religion, one where women and the traits of women are dominant over men and the traits of men. That’s why the hysterical response to the NFL. It’s attempts to attract women and appeal beyond working class males is a threat to the new religion.

Interestingly, the other great religion of our day is Islam, an over the top masculine faith. From the start it has been about the dominant males dominating the other males. Women have no place in Islam. They have a minimal role in Islamic life. If you look at old photos from Muslim countries, you see women dressed like normal women of the day. That was a time when Islam was on the wane. Once Islam revived, the women were put  back in their bags and into the back rooms.

If you look at how Islam polices itself, it is hard not to see the parallels to what is going on in America. The two religions are mirrors of one another. In Islam, heretics and enemies are not just killed, they become trophies. Throughout history, the victor has held up the severed head of the vanquished. The loser has offered his neck to the winner. The last act of an honorable man, who has been defeated, is to offer up his neck to his better.

On the other side of the coin, we see heretics and enemies humiliated and forced to grovel. They are not confronted or physically harmed, they are shamed and forced to confront themselves through the public apology. Shame has always been the way women were punished in western societies. A man would get a beating, while a woman would be publicly humiliated with the scarlet letter or a turn in the dunking chair. That’s what we see with the Cult today. The accused is forced to recant in public and grovel for mercy.

We’ve had a glimpse of the end game for Islam. In Iran, where Islam is absolute, fertility rates have collapsed. David Goldman claims there are more prostitutes in Tehren than mothers. That may be an exaggeration, but the TFR is 1.8, well below replacement. When you net out the non-Persian in the hinterland with their high fertility, the numbers are worse. Across the Islamic world, the rise of Islam brings a fall in fertility. That can only go on for so long before it all falls apart.

Similarly, the West has seen fertility rates collapse. The argument from the Cult is rising education levels result in fewer children. That does not change the fact that fewer children means fewer people. The logical end is no people. I’ve written before that we are living in a different sort of Iran. Ours is a highly feminine version where women seek to dominate men. The results appear to be similar. The difference is the West has a store of value built up over 500 years of progress. Otherwise, our mullahs wear pants suits.

A good way to get yourself sent off to the reeducation camp is to point out the dysfunction in black America. The only acceptable opinion is that blacks are the victims of white racism. Full stop. No matter the topic, if it includes black people the answer is racism. Even blacks are shackled to this rule.

There’s some truth to it, but the reason for that is the insane rule itself. This story about the deranged mayor of New York City is a good example.

A senior adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio is in a serious relationship with a convicted killer and interstate drug trafficker whose most recent run-in with the law happened late last year — when he nearly ran over a New Jersey police officer while driving her car, records show.

Rachel Noerdlinger, the chief of staff to first lady Chirlane McCray who has attended top-level NYPD meetings, has been romantically linked to Hassaun McFarlan since 2010. Court and police records show that the two have lived together for nearly two years.

McFarlan, 36, has been arrested at least five times, including for the fatal shooting of a teenager over a down jacket, records show.

Two of the arrests occurred while he was dating Noerdlinger, a former aide to the Rev. Al Sharpton. While they’ve been an item, McFarlan has also trashed police officers on his Facebook account, referring to them as “pigs” in two posts.

In one online rant, McFarlan said, “I cant come outside without the pigs f—— with me in the hood.”

Most black people, especially black women, are law abiding, peaceable people who just want to live their lives. Rachel Noerdlinger is obviously a bright and hard working women. If she were your co-worker or neighbor, you would probably like her. The trouble comes when the violent, out of control boyfriend arrives. They almost always arrive. That’s the problem and it is a problem for the majority of black people. They are forever terrorized by this subset of the black community.

Whites are good at dealing with their trouble makers. Violent and lazy whites are shunned by respectable whites. Even in the lower classes, the criminal element is segregated from the rest. Blacks don’t do this and it harms all black people. Rachel Noerdlinger will most likely get fired. She will pay the price for her criminally violent boyfriend.

This is why segregation is still common. A black family moves in and the whites are thrilled to be diverse. Then the ghetto friends of the black family show up one night and party until four in the morning. The next week all of those white people with their “coexist” bumper stickers are calling the Realtor. The rush to get out is on and the original black family finds themselves living in the old neighborhood again, just in a different location.

One of the benefits to be an aging crank is you get to point out the foibles and missteps of others with impunity. In the age of mass media, those foibles are replicated and exaggerated. Some guy on TV says something clever and you hear it repeated a million times over the next week. Some phrases, like “the Chicago way” become catch phrases for the more pedestrian pundits like Michelle Malkin. She’s well intentioned and on the right side of things, but my goodness. Sarah Palin saying “crony capitalism” is another one that makes me grit my teeth.

Anyway, I thought a listical of things I hate would be a fun post.

1) Reach out and touch base: At least once a day, some young fellow calls in to let me know he is touching base with me. How I became his base is never discussed. I guess I’m supposed to be flattered. I have no idea where this came from or how it became a standard greeting, but I hate it. What bugs me about it is the dishonesty. You’re not checking on my wellbeing. You want something from me. That’s why you’re calling me.

2) The on-line symposium: I’ve been to a lot of symposiums, as in the ancient Greek sort. We did not call them that. We called them drunken arguments, often held at the pub, but sometimes around the kitchen table at three in the morning. You can’t do this on-line. Sure, I often get drunk reading the Interwebs and have even posted while drunk, but that’s not a symposium. That’s a drinking problem. What’s really irritating is these on-line things are always feminized. The participants care more about flattering one another than scoring points.

3) Pronouncing foreign words with a foreign accent: The idiot in the White House has this habit. He speaks one language, American English. He’s not exactly a word smith either. Yet, the guy will pronounce foreign words with what he thinks is a native speaker’s accent. I bet if ever had a reason to say “Slim Jim” he would try to sound like an Indian convenience store clerk. It is a ridiculous affectation that says the speaker is a punk and a nitwit.

4) Make statements into questions: This is one that millennial pansies love using. I used to love going off on them at Marginal Revolution. Smarmy, left-wing 20-something boys do this exclusively. They lack the guts to make declarative statements so they opt for the passive-aggressive approach. Lines like “you know [fill in tantrum]?” is the standard form. The precious little snowflakes want you to know they are vexed by your opinions and want you to explain yourself. It’s the result of over investment in children. The resulting sense of entitlement give them a veto over the world around them.

5) Demand a link: Many lunatics are so thoroughly marinated in the Cult of Modern Liberalism, things the rest of us take for granted are a mystery to them. Somehow, it becomes your responsibility to provide them with material on what most of us already know. I get the sense sometimes that these people have never heard of Google. Whenever I run into something unfamiliar or objectionable, I look it up. If I choose to rebut the claim, then I post the link.

6) Ignorance as argument: I wish I had a nickel for every time someone posted “I’ve never heard of ….” It would be nice if it were methodological solipsism, but it is really just navel gazing. When presented with information or opinions that don’t fit neatly into the person’s world view, they deny its existence by claiming to have never heard of it. The implication is that the argument must be false because they are unfamiliar with it or unfamiliar with your facts. By extension, their point of view or opinion must therefore be the correct one.

7) Being right by default: Every liberal I know does this. They stake out some position and demand you convince them they are wrong. Homosexual marriage is a classic. Instead of making the affirmative argument, they demand an explanation as to why they should not push forward with it. I guess I can’t blame them, given the direction of things. Still, it is an infuriating pose. If you want to change something, it is your job to make the case. It is not my job to stop you from believing stupid stuff.

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.

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