Update 1 – Update 2 – Update 3 – Update 4
Professional hater Robert Stacy McCain denies the existence of this document.
Professional hate merchant Robert Stacy McCain is having a bad time. Now that he is a defendant in two different lawsuits by Brett Kimberlin, he’s desperately lurching from allegation to allegation in search of something, anything that might prove his hypothesis that the website Breitbart Unmasked is a criminal conspiracy against him. To that end, he spent more than a week insisting that a woman in Washington, DC named Melissa Brewer writes at the site as Xenophon. After I talked to Xenophon and announced that they are not Melissa, McCain spent most of Sunday ranting at me on Twitter and calling me a liar. That evening, he posted a bizarre screed which suggests that Craig Gillette, an employee of Kimberlin’s Justice Through Music Project, is the Watchful Avenger of Breitbart Unmasked. But I have spoken to both Gillette and the Watchful Avenger on the phone before, and can say with certainty that they are not the same person.
Of course, McCain will now respond that I am a liar and a terrible human being, but this is the same line he uses on everyone who gets in the way of his hate. Lying to his readers — and more importantly, his donors — is easier than admitting to the world that he has ever been wrong. But he is wrong.
And yes, McCain has been lying to his readers. In May of 2012, he told his readers that he had to flee his home in fear of harassment, bravely leaving his family behind to protect themselves. He has relentlessly raised funds on this narrative while his wife continued working in the cafeteria at the Seventh Day Adventist compound where they still live. Recently, McCain was reached by Brett Kimberlin’s process server at the Hagerstown, Maryland address he supposedly left; that’s the documentation of delivery up there. His continued habitation on Academy Drive has been known and discussed for some time. But ever since he was served, McCain has denied the existence of the above document in his blog and on Twitter, daring me to produce it. Challenge: accepted!
Of course, now McCain will retreat into denial: either I have faked the document, or someone else has faked it and I am a fool for believing them, or he does not know why some stranger at a Hagerstown address would accept delivery of his certified mail seventeen months after he supposedly moved out. Then McCain will angrily denounce me for communing with Evil Gods in order to obtain this, for “doxing” him by showing the address, and so on. He may even bargain for mitigation, but McCain has no time to acknowledge grief honestly, so he never actually gets all the way to acceptance. His readers should simply accept that he’s a fraud, just like Lee Stranahan, whose wife-pimp and pornography careers McCain blithely advises his readers to ignore.
McCain styles himself as a moral crusader bravely taking on the Evil of Brett Kimberlin, the Evil of Neal Rauhauser, and the Evil of a
pro-Kimberlin troll mob — including Bill Schmalfeldt (now @LobotomyRadio), R.J. Sterling (@AdversAerial), Matt Osborne (@OsborneInk) and @BreitbartUnmask
Notice how anyone who stands in the way of McCain’s hate for Kimberlin becomes part of a “pro-Kimberlin troll mob”? You see, “Evil” does not have a right to free speech, which is why McCain has called Kimberlin Satan more than once in his blog. Don’t listen to him, he’s EEEEVIL! is a very convenient motif for Robert Stacy McCain, who wants people to stop speaking back to him and simply kneel before Zod while he defames and harasses the random Twitter users who incur his wrath by tweeting links to a website he despises. How dare anyone speak back to Free Speech Superhero Robert Stacy McCain!
McCain managed to make Melissa Brewer so disgusted that she turned her Twitter account over to a group of friends, one of whom has already been confused with Rauhauser because of their writing style. Indeed, more than one person has abandoned Twitter because of the abuse received by anyone mistaken for Rauhauser, which is funny because McCain claims that he has been harassed by Rauhauser (how is not entirely clear, even in McCain’s own narrative). As an act of blogtivism and friendship with Melissa, I am leading this group account effort, so some of the @catsrimportant tweets that McCain thinks are Rauhauser’s are actually mine. LULZ!
In other words, not only is McCain lying, but he is wrong, and wrong about so much, and has an audience of highly-activated trolls to make social media hell for anyone who tells him so. It is necessary to constantly feed this audience with red meat, so McCain has speculated in his blog about the meaning of “Hard Candy,” the new name my friends and I have given the @catsrimportant account. Is it a reference to pedophilia, a crime McCain sees going on everywhere, and all the time, in a conspiracy involving Brett Kimberlin and the entire history of the gay rights movement? (I am not making that up, McCain is.) Or is “Hard Candy” a subliminal threat of some kind, a criminal act so weird that only Robert Stacy McCain can understand it?
Never considered as a possibility: “Hard Candy” is a movie about the torture of a suspected sexual predator starring Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page.
Hackery bordering on delusions of reference is just one reason that McCain is listed as a hate speech advocate on the Southern Poverty Law Center website. When you ask McCain about his listing, he tells you that the SPLC are liars, and evil, and you should hate them because their website is an assault on his free speech. See how that works? Anyone who tells you the truth about McCain is Evil incarnate, a Satan-worshiping terrorist.
McCain’s Manicheanism is fit for the Dark Ages: the world has been overrun by barbarians, and the saints not holed up in safe towers are all being massacred. This may explain why he lives on a church campus in the woods, but his pretense of living somewhere else is not about protecting his family. It’s just fraud. McCain is not upset that @catsrimportant has tweeted an address, he’s mad that the account says he still lives there. McCain is so full of concern for his family that he leaves them behind to run to safety; so eager to claim martyrdom on behalf of his family that he shows the address in his own blog…But he won’t go home, see, because of the demons who torment him on Twitter.
And I am tormenting him now. I admit it. I have had enough of Robert Stacy McCain’s fraudulent fundraising on a bullshit tale of woe — and his shameless trolling, then whining when he is trolled in return. All my friends have seemed to land in his crosshairs over Kimberlin-related nonsense since May of 2012, and in McCain’s reporting our efforts to understand why this was happening have all been “evidence” of our perfidious Evil. Enough is enough; too many people are being smeared by this lying hack.
McCain is desperate to conceal a fraud, the very fraud that Brett Kimberlin alleges of McCain in his RICO lawsuit. Robert Stacy McCain’s donors are suckers in that fraud. His faithful readers are suckers in that fraud. Those who follow and retweet McCain, especially in support of his attacks on “Team Kimberlin,” are suckers in that fraud. And if his legal defense is as bad as his lying or as fact-free as his blogging, McCain will be the sucker in court. Demonology does not suffice as grounds for discovery.
UPDATE 1: Desperately moving the goalposts, McCain responds as if I am not the source of the document:
Hasn’t Bill Schmalfeldt just proven he is part of “Team Kimberlin”? I mean, he’s got privileged access to Kimberlin’s legal proceedings.
Conspiracists have a hard time recognizing competence in others, but especially in those they despise. Bill Schmalfeldt got this document from me, not the other way around. Get it straight, Robert!
Tell me, dear reader: does it make ANY sense at all that a secretary at the Seventh Day Adventist church would accept certified mail for someone who didn’t live there? If you moved out of an apartment, do you suppose the manager would sign for a certified letter addressed to you seventeen months later? It doesn’t pass the sniff test. McCain is just lying, the end.
UPDATE 2: In a fresh attempt to deflect the issue of his fraud, last night McCain reached all the way back to June of 2012 for a post at Roger Shuler’s Legal Schnauzer blog regarding the rumors of a gay affair between Ali Akbar and Karl Rove. McCain quotes a comment I left under that post in which I linked Rove to the origins of the National Bloggers Club. Of course, when I published this post about the NBC at Crooks and Liars eleven weeks later, Rove only merited a tangential mention. That’s because by then, I had learned that Rove was not a key figure in the NBC after all, whereas right wing billionaire donor Foster “aspirin between the knees” Friess definitely was.
Proof that knowledge and understanding can change significantly in a short time, or “proof” that I was conspiring in a secret cabal with Neal Rauhauser last June? McCain prefers the latter explanation, of course. But how is this new permutation of his previous conspiracy theory supposed to dispel the fraud he has committed on his readers? How does he think it will stop people from noticing that he only ever pretended to leave his home? Simple: McCain thinks he can blow enough smoke to cloud out the truth. From what I can tell, he has already lobbied the folks at that address to help him with his smokescreen.
Requests for comment have met dead ends. Why will no one at Highland View Academy take simple questions about McCain and his certified mail? If he had really left seventeen months ago and was never around anymore to get his mail, don’t you suppose they would just say “he’s not here” rather than refuse to comment altogether? McCain offers his own satirical take on this issue in his post: “Tell the bomber where you live, Stacy! And while we’re at it, let’s talk about your wife and children . . .” Which points to just how weak and lame his paranoid narrative really is. McCain is dodging legal process, not bombs, and if he was so afraid for his family then why didn’t he take them with him to that “secure and undisclosed location”?
The Karl Rove-Ali Akbar story didn’t pass my sniff-test, either. While it is clear that they know and have met one another, no evidence exists that they were ever romantically involved. The source of the story, former Republican Governor Bob Riley’s ex-mistress Dana Jill Simpson, is a problematic one at best. Whereas McCain would like his readers to believe I’m just an empty vessel that some nefarious actor has filled with lies about his employer Ali Akbar, clearly the truth is otherwise. I am quite capable of making my own mistakes and doing my own work, thank you, Robert. Now answer the question: have you been served?
UPDATE 3: When I updated yesterday, I had not had time to fully absorb the news about Roger Shuler. If you haven’t heard, he was arrested — and apparently beaten for resisting arrest — on Wednesday evening. The arrest was effected on a warrant for failure to appear before a specially-appointed judge in a sealed proceeding brought by Rob Riley, a powerful figure in Alabama Republican politics and the son of former Alabama Governor Bob Riley, who seems to be writing the court’s orders. For weeks, Shuler has chronicled uniformed law enforcement officers attempting to serve him with process papers in Riley’s civil defamation case. Shuler has committed the “crime” of blogging about Riley’s reported affair with a lobbyist leading to her divorce and an abortion. Prior restraint, anyone?
Initial reports I got on Friday morning led me to believe incorrectly that Shuler had been arrested Thursday night, but in fact his wife found his car in the garage amid signs of a struggle a short time before midnight Wednesday. After I alerted Bill Schmalfeldt with the incorrect time of arrest, he posted this op-ed at digitaljournal which originally pointed to a peculiar coincidence with other events on Thursday. The post has since been changed. That is the sort of mistake we routinely see in breaking news coverage, but it doesn’t diminish the oddness of the corrected timeline. Consider:
- Roger Shuler is arrested Wednesday night
- On Thursday, McCain’s employer Ali Akbar cajoles Bill Schmalfeldt into calling his podcast and asks him about the Karl Rove-Akbar “gay romance” story which Shuler first broke, and Schmalfeldt then covered
- On Thursday night, McCain publishes a post about Shuler’s reporting, focusing on a comment I left on the Legal Schnauzer blog sixteen months ago
It is not hard to formulate a hypothesis from that sequence of events. Akbar has longstanding ties to Republicans in Alabama. Did he learn of the arrest and decide to capitalize on Shuler’s plight in his ongoing war with Schmalfeldt? Occam’s Razor says yes, that Akbar saw a chance to conflate his Kimberlin war with events in Alabama, but of course McCain jumped at the chance to refute a conspiracy that no one had actually alleged:
Strange as it may seem, both Rauhauser and Bill Schmalfeldt tried Friday to claim that Schuler’s arrest had something to do with me. Ridiculous, right?
It would indeed be ridiculous to suggest that McCain or Akbar is responsible for the arrest of Roger Shuler; Rob Riley is responsible for this travesty, which McCain actually defends. But McCain does have a responsibility to Akbar, who tells him what to write about. Conflation achieved! This is not rocket science.
Equally worthy of mockery: McCain tries to make Shuler’s arrest prove some point about his legal troubles with Brett Kimberlin. He may scream “harassment” all he likes, but so far all anyone has done to Robert Stacy McCain is send him documents in the mail. No one has given him a black eye, for instance. You want oppression? This is what it looks like:
UPDATE 4: Last Thursday, when Ali Akbar cajoled Bill Schmalfeldt into calling his podcast, he unexpectedly gave an honest answer that might be an admission of fraud. Remember, this guy is Robert Stacy McCain’s boss, and he seems to be admitting here that his National Bloggers Club has been cheating its donors by claiming 501(c)(3) status, or that it was “pending,” without ever actually applying for nonprofit status. These people are frauds all the way to the core, and so are their narratives:
