Glenn Beck vs. Little Green Footballs

Tundra Tabloids just further expanded its “Under the LGF Bus” picture, because Glenn Beck has now been identified as a dangerous right-wing extremist by Charles Johnson. Welcome to the club!

But Glenn isn’t taking the slurs quietly:


Here’s a quote from the video:

Quite honestly, it’s a destructive attempt to silence free speech. That’s something blogger Charles Johnson should know about, since he’s been called an anti-Muslim bigot by most of the same people that unfairly said the same things about me.

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I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of our readers, tipsters, correspondents and contributors who have stood by Gates of Vienna since the whole LGF mess started a year and a half ago.

Back then Atlas Shrugs and our blog seemed to be standing alone fighting the slurs, fabrications, distortions, and cheap shots coming from Little Green Footballs. It didn’t matter what the truth was. It didn’t matter that Charles Johnson was as mistaken about some of his “facts” as Dan Rather was about his memo. The larger blogs were unwilling to stick their necks out and risk the Wrath of the Lizard.
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But the truth has a way of seeping out.

It has taken eighteen months, but common sense concerning these issues is finally emerging. Now that Glenn Beck has unmasked LGF’s disinformation on national television, does this mean Pamela and I can come in from the cold? Are we no longer “fascist-enablers” and “apologists for European neo-Nazis”?

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For most of last year our blog was a near-pariah in the American blogosphere. The links from major blogs all but ceased, and only the Europeans and some of the small right-wing American blogs — God bless them! — were willing to take sides.

Presumably the blanket of silence on this issue was due to fear of the Lidless Eye and the havoc Charles Johnson could wreak. Woe betide any American blogger who drew his baleful gaze! Perhaps that is why Dr. Sanity, ShrinkWrapped, and others sided with Charles. There were exceptions, one of them being James Lewis at American Thinker. He was willing to examine Charles’ errors and his naïveté in being used by Swedish and Belgian black psyops.

Now some of the more important and popular media voices are pointing out the nature of LGF. Notice the issues that Glenn Beck has with Charles Johnson:

1.		His seemingly willful misrepresentation of the facts.
2.		His willingness to take questionable information at face value without doing the most basic due diligence to check its accuracy.
3.		His refusal to make any public correction of errors arising from #1 and #2, and
4.		His habit of issuing vicious personal attacks that poison public discourse and polarize people who are essentially on the same team.

Do you see a pattern here?

These were exactly the same issues that arose during the Vlaams Belang controversy. Charles Johnson posted slurs, rumors, innuendo, material taken out of context, and outright falsehoods about Sverigedemokraterna and Vlaams Belang. He presented the material in a nasty, divisive, and vitriolic manner. And then he refused to back down and publicly withdraw any of his gross errors and misrepresentations when they were pointed out.

In a watershed moment, some of the major players in the media and the blog world are now willing to acknowledge that the Lizard Emperor has no clothes. But it took eighteen months for the truth to become glaringly apparent.

Those eighteen lost months sucked up energy that would have been directed towards our common cause. Charles Johnson damaged reputations and created fractures within the anti-jihad movement, some of which may never completely heal.

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Our time in the wilderness was instructive.

It taught me that the large blogs are scarcely more principled than the MSM — they were unwilling to stand up publicly for the truth in the face of possible damage to their traffic and their ad revenues. It should have been obvious — we’re all fallible human beings — but it was still a sad lesson to learn.

It reinforced my sense that a distributed network of less prominent players is a better way to accomplish our purposes. Information spreads more reliably and action can be coordinated more effectively when “celebrities” aren’t part of the process. As I’ve said before, we’re an army of midgets. No one will get rich or famous doing this, but the job will actually get done.

Our excommunication became complete when Pajamas Media — unable to distinguish between descriptive and normative prose — told us that we were no longer welcome as affiliates. Once PJM gave us the boot, we experienced the freedom of having nothing left to lose. No more worrying about ad traffic or offending the folks at headquarters — we could call the shots as we saw fit. Our readers promptly stepped into the breach with their generous financial support of our blog.

We stuck to our guns. I’m grateful to those who stayed with us during our sojourn in the Outer Darkness.

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This past January, members of the Belgian Left in Antwerp — including Social Democrat politicians — marched side-by-side with Muslims who chanted, “Hamas! Hamas! Jews to the gas!”

During that time Filip Dewinter was the only leader of a major political party in Belgium to stand up publicly for Flemish Jews. He and other leaders of Vlaams Belang did so vehemently and repeatedly. Mr. Dewinter demanded on the floor of the Flemish Parliament that the government aggressively investigate and prosecute the murderous thugs who attacked Jews and firebombed synagogues. He pointed out the essential anti-Semitic nature of many of Belgium’s Muslim immigrants.

No other Belgian political party did these things. Only Vlaams Belang.

This is on the public record. It was reported in the Belgian media and appeared in English translation on this blog and other sites. But Charles Johnson has never retracted his scurrilous attacks on Filip Dewinter as a “neo-Nazi”. He and many others in the vast anti-European echo chamber continue to repeat the same nonsense.

It’s unfortunate, but Mr. Dewinter acquired the unfair “neo-Nazi” slander in the American media, and nothing seems to be able to shake it loose.

I’m sure Glenn Beck can sympathize with him.


Thanks to Vlad Tepes for YouTubing the video segment.