Throughout my time at DU I have been very appreciative of the support this community has given me. Throughout my time here I have never been one to shy away from taking a controversial stand, and more often than not I have found that people here have been very respectful of me even if they disagree with what I have to say sometimes. Since joining DU the community has often been so supportive of me that not only have many of my posts made it to the top of the greatest page, but I have found that people have been sending them out in e-mails to their friends or linking to them on their own blogs. As a result of the support the DU community has given me some of my writings here have reached thousands of people, and you have all shown me that I can have a voice in this world of ours.
While I am very grateful for the voice that DU has given me, that voice has not come without consequences. There are some people out there who do not like what I have had to say in some of my posts, and some of those people have been trying to smear my name on other websites. Last year I even found a site which posted a threat of violence against me in response to a post I had written on DU, and I have found multiple cases in which other blogs have accused me of lying about my status as a former right-winger who converted.
I can assure you all that I am not making any part of my story up, I was a dues paying member of the Libertarian Party from 1997 to 2001 and I even attended two of their state conventions. No one has ever provided a shred of evidence to dispute these facts, they simply post their doubts online and don’t bother to provide any proof to back up their allegations against me.
The truth is that the story of my conversion is threatening to a lot of people not only on the right-wing, but also to those in the Democratic Party who think we should be reaching across the aisle and working in bi-partisan fashion. I have made it very clear that the DLC’s strategy of triangulation and finding a so-called “common ground” only strengthened my right-wing beliefs because as they moved closer to my position they only reinforced my belief that my views were right as even the opposition was moving towards them. What got me to change was not those who tried to pander to me, it was those who stood up for what they believed in and told me that I was wrong. Once I was exposed to the damage that right-wing policies have had on our nation I could no longer be a right-winger and I moved to the left very quickly.
When I first became a progressive I didn’t discuss the fact that I was a former right-winger with many of my new progressive friends because I was worried they would be suspicious of me if they knew about some of the extreme positions I had held in the past. I knew I had changed, but I was worried that I would not be able to convince them that I had changed so I just kept quiet about it. After a few years of activism in the progressive community however I decided that it was time to speak out openly about the changes I had went through. While I was nervous about coming forward, I was floored by the positive response I received from my progressive friends when I did. I received a great deal of positive support, but the more supporters I had the more others started to view me as a threat and it was not too long after I spoke out that I began seeing the first smears being made against me.
Now let me be clear to all those who attempt to smear me; you are not going to shut me up you are only going to make me louder. Anyone who posts smears about me on their blogs or anywhere else can expect that I will be standing up for myself, and if they are going to make false accusations about me or engage in character assassination then they can expect that I am going to fight back.
The
latest attempt to smear me comes from a supposedly progressive blog called the Progressive Daily Beacon. The administrator of the site points to a
recent post I made here on Democratic Underground which related to my past conversion from the right-wing, and gives my viewpoint on why Obama’s decision to have Rick Warren speak at the inauguration will do nothing to bring the right-wing to Obama’s side.
The content of that post is hardly relevant to anything the administrator of the Progressive Daily Beacon wrote about me though, because rather than addressing the actual content of my post he chose to engage in personal attacks on me by comparing me to Fox News, George Bush, and the Israeli Defense Forces. Yes, because I wrote a post about how progressives should stand up for their principles rather than compromise with the right-wing that apparently makes me like George Bush. Just as a reminder George Bush is responsible for the deaths of a million Iraqis, the shredding of the Constitution, torture, the collapse of the US economy, and countless other disastrous and often criminal policies. Yet somehow I am like him. Why? Because I apparently am unwilling to listen to the other side.
Now of course I was once on the other side so I know their viewpoints pretty damn well, and considering I still spend a fair amount of time keeping up on right-wing ideals I know my enemy. I am more than willing to engage in dialogue even with those on the extreme right, but what I am not willing to do is I am not willing to cave in on my principles.
If the Administrator of the Progressive Daily Beacon thought I needed to engage in more dialog with people I disagree with however I thought he would be more than willing to engage in dialog with people he disagrees with and talk about the vile things he publicly posted on his blog about me. I attempted to contact him and his response was that he stood by his comparison of me with George Bush but that I should not worry about it because he had made the post a week earlier and I did not say something to him soon enough. Of course the smears he wrote about me are still on his site so the fact that it took me a week before I noticed them hardly seems relevant. I told him that telling me to move on was not an adequate response, and if he wanted me to engage in dialog with people like Rick Warren then he should engage in dialog with me as well. I promised him I would be polite if he was willing to talk to me, and I intended on keeping that promise. Instead of engaging in dialog however he made numerous personal attacks against me before deleting all my attempts at responding to his smears. He told me I needed mental health counseling, and accused me of criminal activities such as “stalking” simply for not letting him off the hook when he told me to move on (for the record all of our interactions were made over a period of only a few hours through comments on his website all of which he has now deleted. Spending an evening defending yourself on a blog that is personally attacking you is most certainly not stalking yet he chose to accuse me of a crime). He told me that I had a chance to make my point when I made the post here on DU a couple weeks ago, and he had his chance to make his point when he attacked me through his website and that the “dialog” was now over. I told him that if his definition of dialog is publicly smearing someone and then deleting any response they try to make from the website, then I would have to defend myself elsewhere. He told me that if I were to write about him in any other forum that I was using “crazy, insane and emotionally distressing” Rovian tactics. Apparently it is OK for him to use his website to attack me, but in his world if I respond to his attacks I am no different than a mentally deranged Karl Rove. I gave him a chance to remove the smears from his website, but he chose not to do so and now I am keeping my promise to him and defending myself in another forum.
Here is the thing, people can fling accusations at me, and they can try to smear my name all they want, but when they attack they better be prepared because I am going to fight back. I am more than willing to engage in dialogue with those who disagree with me, and I don’t mind if people post blogs that express disagreement with me. There is a difference between a disagreement and a smear however, and I will not let those who publicly smear me off the hook. The first piece of hate mail I ever received I wore with a badge of honor, the first couple blogs I found posted which attempted to smear me I ignored, but when I keep finding more blogs which smear me without giving me a chance to respond I know that I can’t ignore this any longer. I may not have taken the threat of violence that I received last year after posting something on this site about my conversion from the right-wing too seriously at the time, but as I keep finding more venom posted about me on other sites I am going to start taking things a lot more seriously now. Taking things seriously does not mean that I am going to back down however, it means that I am going to get louder and if it pisses off the people who post these blogs about me even more then good. I am not going to allow these people to intimidate me, I am going to stand up to them and make sure they know that I am not going to accept their crap.
I need to ask a favor of all the DUers who have supported me over the past couple of years, all I ask is that if you ever find a blog which attempts to smear my name please let me know about it. I have been very grateful for all the support people here have given me in the past, and I will be even more grateful for your support in the future.
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