Not Your Personal Army: How Unite Blue Ignited A War With Anonymous And Then Tried To Blame Their Critics

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The Anonymous hacktivist collective likes to say they are Not Your Personal Army (NYPA), meaning they do not care about your petty dramas and issues and will not respond to attempted incitement. Politically, Anons tend to fall into the libertarian-progressive space on issues such as internet freedom and equality, but Anons’ causes are mostly not political. A substantial affinity group of anti-pedophile Anons has been carrying out social media action with detached efficiency for years. Having first come to public attention with its awareness and protest campaign against Scientology, “The Hive” is clearly not afraid to make enemies, but it is choosy about them.

Unite Blue is Zach Green’s personal Twitter army, born in a state of hashtag war with uber-conservative #TGDN. For a founding mythology, the Unite Blue website presents a curious permutation of right wing Twitter conspiracy memes about Twitter’s spamblocking algorithm. Unite Blue uses operant conditioning to encourage reactionary behavior; for example, Unite Blue can tell you if your tweets are 97, 98, or 99% “progressive” according to Zach Green’s formula. Team Followback with all of your sock puppet accounts is actively encouraged. From the very beginning, Unite Blue has been built for “Twitter war.”

Perhaps that need for conflict explains why the Unite Blue “community” has landed in a Twitter flame war with Anonymous over a pedophile named William Talley. As a result of misplaced solidarity among a small group of highly-motivated, if not ably-guided Unite Blue members, Zach Green’s personal army has sparked conflict with Anonymous for weeks. The matter reached critical mass last Sunday when a prominent Unite Blue troll named Steven Hatlestad published a YouTube video that foolishly tried to tell Anons their business, violating the NYPA principle and prompting escalation by the collective.

A clique of Unite Blue enthusiasts — dubbed “#CauldronOfStupid” by one witty observer — rallied in solidarity over Mr. Talley, who plead guilty to possession of child pornography in February and then accepted a position on the board of Unite Blue. He was later outed by an Anon and Unite Blue critic named Trina Cuppett. Zach Green removed Talley from the board, but the very next day the “Cauldron” doxed Cuppett in retaliation.

Steven Hadlestad has become something of an enforcer for Unite Blue. He used fake “Anon” accounts to spread an attack blog containing fabrications, libel, and information about Cuppett’s family members. While some observers tried to stop the angry mob, the Cauldron of Stupid used Hatlestad’s attack blog to avenge themselves on Cuppett. Many of the same people who gleefully took part then are now wailing at the unfairness of Anons naming and shaming them in like manner for their support of William Talley.

Hatlestad’s video is included below in a slideshow detailing how this Twitter conflict began:

Absurdly, Hadlestad’s video flashes the Twitter avatar of @Shoq over the word “puppets” as well as “bullying and intimidation.” Talley was broadcasting this theme weeks ago, and his Twitter circle gladly repeats it. But @Shoq is not the commander of Anonymous. This gambit has succeeded in getting many obsessive @Shoq-trolls to become pedophilia apologists, but of course Anonymous saw right through the chaff.

Nor was the collective swayed when Janeal Eller @SDzzz tweeted Anon accounts to try and convince them that @OpTrollBill was Trina Cuppett, or that they were lying, “fake” Anons. In fact, @OpTrollBill is an experienced social media activist with years of law enforcement contacts from finding and stinging sexual predators. He is a dedicated volunteer. So is Trina, who canvassed Twitter last year to help Anne Onymous publicize his video of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks.

For the last few weeks, the Anons have been speaking out on Twitter to convince Talley’s Unite Blue “family” to disown him. Some did so belatedly, but the Cauldron has developed a grudge about it. They insist the Anons are covertly attacking Unite Blue, and that it is somehow a Twitter cat’s doing, and that I am somehow involved. The Cauldron maintained friendly relations with Talley, insisting for weeks that the public documents about William Talley are fake. They reject your reality and substitute their own.

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Posted in astroturf politics, progressives, Twitter | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Moments Brought To You By #StopRush: Limbaugh’s New Contract

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Even after admitting that #StopRush has ruined his advertiser base, Rush Limbaugh is deflecting blame for the resulting losses at Cumulus Media — and says that if the CEO doesn’t stop saying mean things about him costing the company money, why he’ll just disappear in a cloud of butthurt. POLITICO:

The news of Limbaugh’s possible departure comes one day ahead of Cumulus’s Tuesday earnings call, at which Dickey is once again likely to address the impact the Fluke controversy has had on advertising. The source close to the show described Dickey’s remarks about advertising revenue as unjustified, and said such “criticism” of Limbaugh had resulted in the consideration to leave the company.

Nothing is ever Rush Limbaugh’s fault, especially not the words that come out of his mouth. This story, which also ran at the New York Daily News website, is a desperate and futile attempt to puff up his deflated brand image. With his Cumulus contract running out this year, Limbaugh cannot justify his current compensation level when his presence hurts company revenues so badly.

Furthermore, even if Limbaugh changes networks it will not stop thousands of volunteers from switching stations and contacting his new sponsors. #StopRush is happy to help any radio network find out what the CEO of Cumulus Media already knows. And Limbaugh knows that.

Posted in rush limbaugh | 1 Comment

Cancer Truthers Become Kiddie Porn Defenders

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After a period of relative silence in the wake of the Cancer Truthers post, several proud participants in the @Shoq Twitter brigade have fallen all over themselves to attack the cat again over The William Talley Burn Notice. Because for some reason, whenever I blog about a man who has pleaded guilty to possession of kiddie porn, it’s all @Shoq’s fault. Because everything is always his fault. That’s how scapegoating works.

These slideshows demonstrate the bizarre double-standards of people so obsessed with hating someone that they defend the indefensible. The first shows how we got here:

Remember when an “#AbusiveFuck” hashtag trended because @Shoq had left his cyber-girlfriend a nasty voicemail eight months before? William Talley is an actual, real, not-imaginary abusive fuck. Every one of the hundreds of pornographic images of children found in his possession was a genuine abuse by an abusive fuck. Many of the people who propelled that hashtag now excuse Talley’s abusive fuckery and say it isn’t something to talk about, or at least something that shouldn’t be discussed on Twitter, because…well, because he isn’t @Shoq. See how that works?

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Posted in Burn Notices, Shoq Abuse | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Jason Wade Taylor Arrested, Held As “Fugitive From Justice” (UPDATE)

Jason Wade Taylor's mugshot from a 2007 arrest

Jason Wade Taylor’s mugshot from a 2007 arrest

Jason Wade Taylor aka “Randy Hahn” was arrested Saturday afternoon at an off-ramp on Interstate 25 in El Paso County, Colorado after assaulting a woman he had met online. While she did not press charges, he is being held as a fugitive from justice. A hearing will be held today in Colorado Springs and this post will update as further information becomes available.

Taylor is a career criminal who gained notoriety last year after his attempted “long con” of progressive Twitter communities was exposed as a fraud. Enabled by a compliant source, Taylor then engaged in doxing, harassing, and threatening activists in the #stoprush hashtag for several months. His forays into podcasting were all deleted by the host after he made drunken death threats against his victims, and many of his innumerable Twitter accounts have been deleted for Terms of Service violations. Taylor’s most recent return to the microphone involved live, on-air false police reports to harass his former girlfriend and co-host.

Hopefully this latest turn will bring an end to his social media psychopathy. It was only a matter of time before Taylor enacted his violent online fantasies in real life.

UPDATE 1: Taylor is “fugitive” from a felony warrant in Houston. His hearing today was on the bond for his local charge. As a previous bail-jumper with no visible means of support, it is very unlikely he was granted bail. He will have a second hearing, this time for the Texas warrant, on May 7th.

UPDATE 2: Taylor was not granted bond or bail. He will actually have two hearings on the 7th, a disposition hearing at 8:30 am and a pre-trial conference at 1:30 pm. There are indications that his Texas charge is for theft and is being dismissed. This post will update with clarification as soon as possible.

Posted in crime | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Sad Ending To Wild Baby Bunny Rescue

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My home was briefly blessed by the unexpected arrival of baby wild cottontail bunnies recently. We took in three survivors from a rescued litter and enjoyed six wonderful days with them happily munching clover and grass. We were prepared to release them in another week, but tragedy struck.

The baby bunnies enjoyed being with Bugatti, their “uncle bunny” who lives in the living room. He was fond and protective of them from the moment they arrived. We gave Bugatti cabbage on Friday morning, and we thought we had prevented the babies from being able to get into his cage to eat it with him. But the humans went out to deal with human things, and so learned to their agony that baby rabbits are tragically inventive and adventurous, able to climb gates, squeeze under doors, and team up to defeat obstacles.

By the time we found them, one was already dead and two were dying of gastric bloat from the cabbage. Emergency oral injections of simethicone did not succeed in saving them, and so the Black Rabbit of Inlé took the last one at twilight. All three were buried together in the backyard with much sorrow. Their scampering is missed.

Posted in Obituaries, Rabbits | 13 Comments

This Moment Brought To You By StopRush

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Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh admitted that the StopRush movement has virtually destroyed his advertiser base. He could no longer pretend otherwise, as 2,638 advertisers have dumped his show. This morning, David Corn reported at Mother Jones that Republican consultant Frank Luntz told a college crowd this week that Limbaugh’s polarizing influence has become a net negative for the GOP:

As he continued, Luntz … asserted that it had been irresponsible (and bad for the GOP) for right-wing talkers to pontificate about women’s bodies and birth control—an obvious reference to Limbaugh’s attacks last year on Sandra Fluke, a law student invited to testify before Congress on health insurance coverage of contraception.

StopRush set the tone for an election year in which Republican culture warriors consistently put their feet in their mouths with Limbaugh cheerleading all the way. Like an aikido takedown, our success has been possible because of his polarizing influence, not in spite of it. Volunteers share his reactionary rhetoric with advertisers verbatim; almost all companies wind up repelled by his show — and now it is clear even to Frank Luntz that voters also find Limbaugh’s brand of Republican politics repellent.

Partial audio of Luntz’s remark, via MoJo:

Posted in rush limbaugh | 62 Comments

The Margaret Thatcher I Remember

Over at The Daily Banter, Ben Cohen offers a great retrospective of his experiences growing up in Thatcher’s Britain. I visited there in 1984, just two years before culture warriors in Alabama radicalized me into joining the ACLU. I will never forget hearing the same people who wanted to ban my rock and roll telling me that Thatcher and Reagan were heroes of theirs for “restoring conservative values to Western civilization.”

In fact, my observation in 1984 was that the UK had become a police state, and that both Thatcher and Reagan seemed determined to force a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union which could hardly advance Western civilization. This popular poster, which I brought home on a postcard after my visit, is a classic take on the way “libertarian” social values and militaristic jingoism worked hand in hand:

gonewiththewindOddly enough, I find myself agreeing with Glenn Greenwald on the proper response to Thatcher hagiography:

There’s something distinctively creepy – in a Roman sort of way - about this mandated ritual that our political leaders must be heralded and consecrated as saints upon death. This is accomplished by this baseless moral precept that it is gauche or worse to balance the gushing praise for them upon death with valid criticisms. There is absolutely nothing wrong with loathing Margaret Thatcher or any other person with political influence and power based upon perceived bad acts, and that doesn’t change simply because they die. If anything, it becomes more compelling to commemorate those bad acts upon death as the only antidote against a society erecting a false and jingoistically self-serving history.

Titling his post “Margaret Thatcher Stole My Milk,” Cohen remembers the disastrous rise of economic inequality and austerity economics during her tenure in office. I remember the sense of decay I felt in 1984: half of London seemed to be covered in scaffolding, but no workers labored to fix the crumbling facades of empire. Argentina’s military junta had been stupid enough to lend Thatcher excuse for adventures, but the “triumph” of the Falklands crisis had not translated into a better Britain.

And at home, right wing authoritarians were having a great time. Goldwater’s brand of extreme conservatism would later manifest in the Gingrich revolution, the Bush administration, and then tea parties, but in 1984 it was already rising with a vengeance from the dark cellar where William F. Buckley had imprisoned it. For some reason, when the epistemic confrontation with Russia that fed their hopes and fears ended, the right wing never changed its behavior. Today, “militant Islam” and “shariah law” are the bogeymen that excuse fascism. The game has not changed.

Destroying the social fabric of America is still an objective in and of itself. It always happens under the shadow of Armageddon, genuine or imaginary, framed as “freedom” from the “oppressive” forces who might wish to share that freedom more equally. Thatcher, who famously said “there is no society, only families,” was mainly successful at atomizing and attacking the society she denied existed while pretending to fly a flag of freedom over it. That is hardly a claim to greatness.

Posted in Austerity, Authoritarianism, Obituaries, United Kingdom | Tagged | 8 Comments

The William Talley Burn Notice (UPDATE x11)

Update 1Update 2 - Update 3Update 4Update 5Update 6 Update 7Update 8Update 9Update 10Update 11

23be034William “Bill” Talley aka @Political_Bill on Twitter (pictured) is a convicted sex offender who has managed to delay going to prison through evidentiary appeals. During that time, he has emerged as a progressive voice on Twitter and even briefly enjoyed board status in a prominent netroots startup. His sentencing will take place in Nashville this Friday morning. (EDIT: see Update 2)

Talley was arrested for possession of drugs and hundreds of sexual images of children in August 2005. He appealed to quash the evidence on the grounds of an illegal search, but that appeal was ultimately denied by the Tennessee State Supreme Court in March of 2010. After a long series of legal maneuvers, Talley finally pleaded guilty to three charges, including Class B Felony Exploitation of a Minor, on February 8, 2013. The Class B conviction normally carries a sentence of 10-12 years in prison. He was allowed to remain free on bond until sentencing.

According to Twitter’s API, Talley created his Twitter account in October of 2008. Since then, Talley has ingratiated himself to many prominent progressive and liberal Twitter voices, some of whom still defend him. Talley was even able to insinuate himself onto the board of a new Twitter-based organization, creating damage and embarrassment when his conviction was publicized on Twitter.

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Posted in Burn Notices, crime, Twitter | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

A Chat Over The Wall With Ladd Ehlinger

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Ladd Ehlinger is a libertarian-conservative filmmaker responsible for some of the most controversial — and viral — campaign ads and videos of 2010. He was less active in 2012, and that may in part be because of his open opposition to National Bloggers Club President Ali Akbar. Ehlinger approached me last Friday to offer an interview by instant message. A barely-edited transcript of that exchange follows.

me: So how long have you known Ali Akbar?

Ladd: Ask me instead when I’ve ever met Ali Akbar.

me: When have you ever met Ali Akbar?

Ladd: Nevah! One time he walked past me and someone else he decided to piss on at CCRAP 2012. A party. Sat on couch, looked around, left. Awkward!

me: But you say you are familiar with his…behaviors?

Ladd: It alllll started back on the Rick Barber for congress campaign. {insert harp music and swirling video effects} I got hired to make some ads, I made them. Then all of a sudden I’m getting these weird rumors going around about Rick and his family. I’m like, what the hell? And then about me. And I’m like, what the hell? From the info I got, Akbar had been fired from Barber’s campaign a few weeks beforehand, so everyone on the team was fair game for crazed rumors, like the stuff he was trying to peddle against Libertarian Republican.

me: Did you ever confirm it was Akbar doing this? Or confront him?

Ladd: Oh yeah. No apologies. So apparently his MO is to trash people, I’m not the only one. I’m just one of the few who doesn’t care about being loud about it.

me: Did you ever find out why he was fired from Barber’s campaign?

Ladd: Yeah, his website apparently sucked. Like pretty much all of them. Uber guru don’t do html, also not too hot at getting good video done.

me: Do you have any theories as to how Akbar manages to keep getting work in conservative politics?

Ladd: LOL it’s not a secret chemical. First ingredient: don’t tell anyone you’ve got a felony. Second ingredient: if employer finds out, minimize it. Third ingredient: if client is still pissed, threaten to start trashing him. Fourth ingredient: Party! And there you go. There’s nothing magical about it.

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Posted in Dale Jackson is the Rush Limbaugh of Huntsville, Kulturkampf, movies | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments

Football And American Social Change

Alabama coach Bear Bryant is carried off the field by his players after beating Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl on January 2, 1978 to win the national championship in football. Photo by Jerry Lodriguss / The Times Picayune

Bear Bryant is carried off the field by his players after beating Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl on January 2, 1978 to win the national championship. Photo by Jerry Lodriguss / The Times Picayune

Overt racism and segregation died when Paul Bear Bryant announced he would no longer coach a segregated team in 1971. By the following year, the entire SEC was integrated, and George Wallace had opened up state government to African Americans at a rate faster than most Northern states or the federal government. In 1978 Bryant literally rode to a national title trophy on the shoulders of black players and “whites only” signage had completely disappeared from the American landscape. That same transformative potential exists again in the rumored “coming out” of an active NFL player:

Based on interviews over the past several weeks with current and former players, I’m told that a current gay NFL player is strongly considering coming out publicly within the next few months — and after doing so, the player would attempt to continue his career.

[...] This player’s true concern, I’m told, is not the reaction inside an NFL locker room but outside of it. The player fears he will suffer serious harm from homophobic fans, and that is the only thing preventing him from coming out. My sources will not say who this alleged player is.

There are few athletic cauldrons with the leveling power of American football, where performance is the final measure of star power. Colors disappear in the huddle at the goal line with seconds on the clock. We will see gay NFL stars — and then college stars, and then high school stars — making tackles, scoring touchdowns, and getting pats on the butt from their coaches. And we will cheer.

Posted in Football, marriage, sexual freedom | 231 Comments

The Brett Kimberlin Free Association Game

Brett-Kimberlin-1As I keep saying, last June a gang of Breitbart goons came into my Twitter timeline trying to push an absurd story about Brett Kimberlin into a story I was telling about Jason Wade Taylor, a con artist who had attempted to upend the StopRush movement by pretending to be a rich progressive philanthropist. Lee Stranahan was their point man. As the months passed, Stranahan continued trying to connect StopRush and a prominent Twitter volunteer named Matt Edelstein aka @Shoq to Brett Kimberlin.

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Posted in conspiracy theory, Piltdown politics, Shoq Abuse | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments