Popehat Seeks Help for Bloggers Sued by Brett Kimberlin, Receives Spam Attack
Regular readers will recall that Kenneth P. White (Ken from Popehat), and Ron Coleman (from Likelihood of Confusion) successfully defended me against a frivolous lawsuit brought by Nadia Naffe. Now Ken is putting out the Popehat signal for people who have been sued by anti free speech thug Brett Kimberlin.
The post is titled The Popehat Signal: Help Fight Evil In Maryland. The post opens in this way:
I could have titled this post with more subtlety. I could have said rather neutrally “Help Bloggers Sued In Maryland,” or the slightly more argumentative “Help Bloggers Fight Against A Frivolous Lawsuit,” or the more direct “Help Bloggers Fight A Career Vexatious Litigant” or “Help Bloggers Sued By A Convicted Drug Dealer, Perjurer, And Bomber.”
But sometimes only the most direct language will do. There is evil in this world. This is an example. The plaintiff in this case, Brett Kimberlin, has spent his life doing evil. The lawsuit at issue here is part of his pattern of abuse of the courts to silence critics of evil.
Will you help?
Ken’s post is clear-eyed, detailed, documented, persuasive, and sets forth a concise case for why many consider Brett Kimberlin to be an evildoer, and an enemy of free speech. I can’t do it justice. Read it all.
And then note this interesting coincidence:
Today Popehat’s twitter account got hit with about 20,000 spam followers in the course of a couple of hours. That attack followed, by about an hour, my posting the Popehat Signal seeking help for bloggers sued by Brett Kimberlin. Some of the bloggers sued by Brett Kimberlin have also been attacked by surges of spam followers.
But I’m sure all that is just a coincidence.
To be specific: I noted recently that Aaron Walker, William Hoge, and Stacy McCain have been sued by Brett Kimberlin. (Other defendants include Ali Akbar and an anonymous blogger called Kimberlin Unmasked.) Twitchy reported that, last week, Walker, Hoge, and McCain were subjected to spam attacks that occurred after the filing of the lawsuit. Twitchy also noted that, a couple of days ago, I was also subjected to a similar attack, after opining that this style of attack was characteristic of Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser:
I was at about 9200 followers last night. Today, with this spam attack, I have over 30,000. @delbius @support
— Patterico (@Patterico) September 16, 2013
This hasn’t bothered me, but I believe McCain and some of the others used Twitter’s email notification to be informed of new followers, and had their email accounts buried with thousands of emails. Having a large percentage of spam followers also puts your account at risk for suspension. McCain, Walker, and Hoge made their accounts private to deal with the situation. Since I don’t use email notifications, and have been assured by Twitter that my account will not be shut down because it has too many spam followers, I am not perturbed in the slightest.
But it is revealing as to the way that Kimberlin and/or his supporters try, in ways both large and small, to make life difficult for his critics. It is this type of activity — assuming, as seems logical, that it is not a coincidence — that causes so many people to consider Brett Kimberlin and his supporters to be censorious thugs who hate free speech.
Go read Popehat’s post now to see how you can help fight evil.