Bloggasm

Chez Pazienza woke up one morning earlier this month and found an email from Andrew Breitbart — Matt Drudge protege, founder of Breitbart.com and other right-wing news sites — waiting for him in his inbox. He was immediately suspicious of its authenticity; the email was riddled with typos, devoid of capitalization, and apparently mailed at 3:30 in the morning.

“I went and checked the email address to see if it was him, because my first thought was, ‘why the hell would he bother with me?’” he told me in a recent phone interview.

The email responded to a post Pazienza had written on his blog, Deus Ex Malcontent, referencing a Salon article that had accused James O’Keefe, the ACORN-punking “pimp” that Breitbart has invested serious time and money in promoting, of being a racist. The Deus Ex Malcontent post wasn’t particularly critical of Breitbart or O’Keefe — it simply opined that whether O’Keefe was a racist was irrelevant because both sides of the political divide had already made up their minds — but that didn’t stop Breitbart from treating it as if it was.

“you’re insinuation that james is a racist is equally egregious,” Breitbart wrote. “does it ever dawn on you that we conservatives can’t fathom how lefties can’t see how horrible their social policies have turned out to be for poor and minorities.”

The 3:30 a.m. email bizarrely ended with a reference to the movie Footloose.

“It was weird, it caught me off guard,” Pazienza told me. “I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what Breitbart would want with me.”

But this kind of Breitbart-launched offensive is nothing new or out-of-the-ordinary. While much attention has been given to the conservative’s attacks on traditional media outlets –through his Big Government site, interviews on MSNBC, and speeches at CPAC — he has been actively and aggressively going after bloggers and social media users who criticize him, a trend that has only intensified as more and more controversies surround James O’Keefe III in the wake of his arrest in Louisiana.

“There’s no question that when O’Keefe got busted trying to tamper with a US senator’s phone, it kind of freaked Breitbart out,” Brad Friedman, who owns the progressive Brad Blog, told me. Friedman has been on the forefront of reporting on issues and revelations surrounding O’Keefe, including the recent bombshell that the young conservative never actually dressed as a pimp when he went into ACORN offices, a fact that even Breitbart has been forced to acknowledge. He has also been a frequent recipient of the conservative’s scorn, especially via @ replies on his Twitter account. At one point he even jokingly suggested that Friedman should be subjected to capital punishment.

“We’re his only threat,” Friedman said, referring to progressive bloggers. He cited the New York Times’ reluctance to offer retractions for its erroneous reporting on O’Keefe’s pimp outfit as an example of the traditional media’s hesitation to go after Breitbart. “[The mainstream media's] scared to death of him, because they don’t know how to stand up to bullies. And Breitbart is a bully, make no mistake … Unfortunately, the progressive blogosphere and the readers who write letters to the [Times'] public editor, demanding a correction, we’re the only threat to Breitbart.”

Lately, Breitbart has been increasingly retweeting links from his detractors, links that often lead to blog posts and articles that are critical of him. Though he doesn’t offer commentary with the retweet, his followers often do so for him. Pazienza, for instance, was surprised one day when he received a flurry of angry @ replies from Breitbart’s followers after the conservative had tweeted a link to a Deus Ex Malcontent post critical of his Big Hollywood site.

“The thing about him beating up on little people on Twitter, that’s not new,” said Tommy Christopher, a correspondent for Mediaite. Chistopher was one of several bloggers who engaged in heated debates with Breitbart during CPAC. He recalled an incident several months ago in which Breitbart retaliated against a Twitter user who had bashed him by posting personal information about her and making vaguely threatening statements. “I spoke to him for like three hours that night, and he got really worked up about it. At the end he admitted that he stepped over the line a little bit, but this is something he does. When people attack him, he basically fights back just as hard.”

Christopher attributed much of Breitbart’s aggressiveness to “paranoia,” something that runs so deep that he’ll lash out at even the smallest criticism, even if it’s coming from someone who doesn’t have much of an audience.

“He’s definitely heaviliy invested in ACORN and O’Keefe and obviously in the outcome of whatever happens to O’Keefe in Louisiana. He has definitely racheted up the belligerence, because he stepped up with the intensity of the attacks. The encounter we had in the hotel [at CPAC] was quite a bit different than any time I’ve intereacted with him in the past.”

Of course, it hasn’t escaped me that this article I’m currently writing isn’t exactly flattering to Breitbart, so forgive me if I indulge in my own paranoia for a moment:

What will happen if and when he reads it?

Follow me on Twitter

Last weekend, Bil Browning received an email from John Aravosis, a gay activist and blogger for AMERICAblog. Aravosis and other bloggers were organizing something called a “blog swarm,” an attempt to essentially create a firehose of public outcry aimed at a single target: the Human Rights Campaign, considered by many to be the most influential LGBT lobbying group. With over 700,000 members, the organization wields significant power, a clout that extends into the White House and Congress.

And, according to those who participated in the blog swarm yesterday, this clout has not been put to good use, specifically in how much pressure it has placed on President Obama to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. “HRC may argue that it’s already told the President it would like to see DADT repealed this year,” Aravosis wrote in his post announcing the swarm. “Well, that’s not enough.”

“I think it’s always a good idea, especially as bloggers and community journalists, to keep our own organizations on the right path,” Browning, who runs the LGBT blog The Bilerico Project, told me in a phone interview. He said that the goal of the project was to create a flood of communication — phone calls, emails, blog posts, and articles — aimed at HRC to convince them that more firm action should be taken on DADT.

Citizen journalists using the web to funnel outrage to a small, influential group of individuals have had mixed results in the past. While a campaign organized by Color of Change recently led to several sponsors reneging their support for far-right extremist Glenn Beck, a similar campaign launched by the popular Consumerist blog aimed at NBC execs did not stop the company from letting go Tonight Show host Conan O’Brien.

Browning told me that their cause was aided by the fact that several more mainstream liberal blogs — outside of the LGBT-specific niche — had joined in on the swarm. “I think we’re all part of a larger progressive community and I think one of the problems that we’ve had in the LGBT organization, is that we haven’t reached out to the allies who write about labor, heath care reform, immigration reform,” he said. “There are a lot of areas that affect LGBT people too, but we just seem to be kind of off on our own working on our own thing. It can’t keep going on, and this is a good example where working in a coalition with other progressive blogs and organizations works.”

Those non-LGBT blogs range from Daily Kos to Taylor Marsh, and since the blog swarm launched yesterday, dozens of bloggers and hundreds of Twitter and Facebook users have joined in, indicating a critical mass in which the momentum of the swarm became self-perpetuating.

It has been a little over 24 hours since the swarm launched, and already the HRC has issued responses, mainly defending itself. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has to be repealed this year,” a spokesman told POLITICO. “That has been the Human Rights Campaign’s position from the start, and at this point there is no one in the White House who does not know it … We have been lobbying the White House relentlessly, and we’ve seen more movement in recent weeks than in the previous 16 years.”

So while the HRC may not necessarily be promising a change in strategy, they certainly are listening, and as expected the blog swarm is in effect spilling over into the mainstream media and adding to the national conversation. Sometimes, it’s not just about influencing a single organization, but bringing once-private discussions out into the open. Given the recent drove of news reports about increased pressure to repeal DADT, these bloggers could not have picked a better time to turn up the heat.

Follow me on Twitter

Follow me on Twitter

“I am not all bad,” writes the Twitter handle @demonsheep. “For instance, I enjoy flying kites. Kites made from the skin, bones and sinew of small children.”

The account issued its first tweet about 20 hours ago, shortly after the launch of the now Internet-famous Demon Sheep ad created by the Carly Fiorina campaign. In that time it’s amassed over 850 followers and is quickly growing. Quite frankly, it’s hilarious.

The account is run by a 30-year-old conservative named Shayne Rivers. The Twitter user, who also runs his own personal account, works in health care, though he said he didn’t want to divulge too much information about himself.

“When the Carly ad exploded on Twitter, one of my followers, @rjhornsby, snatched up the @demonsheep username,” Rivers told me via email. “He asked @leonwolf, a blogger at RedState.com, to help him manage it. In turn, @leonwolf recruited me(@knifework), and the three of us started mocking Demon Sheep to the best of our ability. We had over 300 followers in under 7 hours. The fact that the #demonsheep hashtag started trending on Twitter did not hurt.”

Rivers said that all three of the people involved with the account are conservatives.

“And as conservatives, we are skeptical of all politicians and don’t mind mocking any of them…no matter their political affiliations.”

Follow me on Twitter

Earlier today, Salon’s Max Blumenthal published a piece making seemingly disturbing accusations against James O’Keefe, the ACORN-punking self-described “investigative journalist” who was arrested recently for alleged phone tampering in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office. The story made a number of allegations ranging from his involvement in an event where “O’Keefe was manning the literature table at [a] gathering that brought together anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism,” to supposed instances in which the young conservative expressed dismay at having to share living space with black people in college.

I’ve taken particular interest in the O’Keefe story because he sent me a few emails before he became famous for his ACORN video; he had somehow heard that I specialize in digital PR and wanted to know if I could help him spread some videos he had made. After the exchanges I promptly forgot about him until later when his name was splashed all over the news.

Following his arrest and subsequent release I sent O’Keefe a few instant messages on G-chat, hoping to get some quotes from him about the incident, but received no response. But today I tweeted a link and headline to the Salon article, and several hours later received this email from O’Keefe:

you do realize onepeoplesproject is a fringe, radical group raided by the fbi, right?
that article is libelous guilt by associationm will be retracted and its pathetic someone like you linked to it

(Before I go on I should note the irony that O’Keefe pointed out the fact that One People’s Project was raided by the FBI when he, himself, was arrested by the FBI and has seemingly tried to claim that the agency’s charges are groundless.)

I immediately responded to O’Keefe that I would be glad to run a response to the Salon piece on Bloggasm. He responded with a link and the words “Looks like entire story was bogus and based on false sources, with the source admitting as such.” The link he gave led to a David Weigel piece in the Washington Independent in which Weigel doesn’t necessarily deny claims in the Salon article, just says that he couldn’t corroborate whether O’Keefe was sitting at a table handing out racist literature.

I responded to O’Keefe’s email, saying, “just to clarify: you weren’t at the table?”

He followed up with a link to a Big Government article in which he actually does deny sitting at a table; the piece also says that O’Keefe was at the event to watch a debate between panelists with radically different views, and that he wasn’t there to represent any particular viewpoint.

It should be noted that Blumenthal reached out to O’Keefe’s attorney with no response. Also, there are several other claims in the piece aside from O’Keefe’s attendance of the event. However, now that O’Keefe has officially responded to at least some of the accusations, I think it would certainly be fair for Salon to update the article, not only linking to O’Keefe’s response but also quoting the most pertinent parts.

Follow me on Twitter

When the news broke last week that Amazon had removed Macmillan books from its available inventory, the publisher’s authors first expressed confusion and then, when it became apparent that the move wasn’t a glitch, anger. But now many of these writers are experiencing genuine worry for their own careers.

Speculative fiction author Jay Lake, who has had three books published by Tor with a fourth out soon, told me today that Amazon’s dominance when it comes to online book orders means that being blacklisted from the site can put a serious dent in a midlist author’s sales.

“The worry would be if I had a book released last Tuesday or this,” he said. “A significant portion of my initial sales velocity comes from the first days on Amazon. Writers like me sell relatively few books so that missing a few hundred initial sales, and the related rise in sales ranking and attention, could be damaging, quite possibly seriously.”

I asked if Tor had reached out to its authors at all during this entire ordeal to address any concerns that they may have. Lake said that it hadn’t, and that he had heard from a source that “Macmillan has instructed the entire staff from the top down not to speak on the record.”

In a blog post titled, “A Call For Author Support,” Tor author John Scalzi, while asserting that he was confident that he could weather the Amazon storm, said that there were no-doubt authors that would be affected.

“Many if not most of these folks do not have the financial cushion I do, and the sales that they are getting cut out of here are going to make a real and concrete difference to them when it comes time to tally up royalties, and when they’re trying to sell that next book,” he wrote. “I have friends who are deeply worried right now about what this thing is doing to them, and they should be worried, because it’s going to hurt them if it drags out. Amazon is not the entire sales universe, to be sure, but it’s a significant chunk, especially for genre writers who build their communities online and sell a large percentage of their work online (and thus through Amazon) because of it.”

Scalzi claimed that by waging war on Macmillan, Amazon was also waging war on Macmillan’s authors, and by extension their fans. Because of this, he said, people should “support the authors affected. Buy their books.” That is, in non-Amazon outlets.

Tobias Buckell, who has written several Tor titles, said that the extent of the damage depends on how long the dispute lasts.

“I have a fairly large online presence, and my print books are sold at Amazon obviously,” he said. “And for the past five or six years I’ve worked really hard to send people from my website to Amazon because it’s the dominant online book store. It has a tremendous impact because all my sales for my original Tor books will be dropping by 80% probably.”

Buckell noted that the effects on an author’s career can be more widespread than a temporary drop in sales. He pointed out that the print runs for future books — or even if an author can sell future books — are partially based on the sales of previous books, so that if a first-time author experiences weak sales, “down the road that affects their second book.”

Of course, authors may wake up tomorrow and find their books suddenly available for purchase at Amazon. But given how willingly it removed their titles, such an event wouldn’t put them completely at ease. The online retail giant has demonstrated that it’s willing to play hardball to settle pricing disputes, and book titles caught in the cross hairs are simply collateral damage.

Follow me on Twitter