Customarily, I like to bring the snark, as everyone knows. But not today. Today is for answering the question “Who is Brett Kimberlin?”
The Speedway Bombings (Speedway, Indiana) began in trash cans on September 1, 1978, just before 10:00 p.m. Three bombs in total were detonated the first night. Bombs were exploded on subsequent nights, with a police cruiser blown up on night number five. While there was significant property damage incurred at those explosions, it was not until the sixth night that it turned deadly. This time the bomb would explode after the Speedway High School football game, maiming Carl DeLong so severely that he later committed suicide from his injuries. While that would prove to be the last of the Speedway bombings, residents still lived in fear for months afterward.
This quick summary of the horrific events of 1978 in Speedway Indiana are significant because today, in 2012, the man convicted of those bombings, who served only 17 years of a 50-year sentence, is setting about a systemic campaign to silence his conservative “critics” (i.e., those who reference his career criminal record) through harassment via litigation and other means. That man, the aforementioned Brett Kimberlin’s, current incarnation is as the director of a non-profit venture, the “Justice Through Music Project,” which has collected $1.8 million tax-free samolias in the past six years from such entities as Fidelity Capital, the Tides Foundation and Barbra Streisand’s foundation. A look at the JTMP site reveals that it isn’t so much about music as it is about social activism of the progressive type. And they have tax-exempt status WHY? (It amazes me that 1%-ers love funding enterprises whose sole mission in life is to hasten their monetary destruction.)
So, it is in solidarity with his targets, notably bloggers and pundits — R.S. McCain, Patterico, Liberty Chick and Aaron Worthing — that Barbarian at the Gates, in conjunction with The Blogmocracy and Diary of Daedalus, is hosting, with permission, the following excellent video by Lee Stranahan, chronicling the career of Brett Kimberlin.
You can also read about Kimberlin’s exploits and systematic harassment of right wing bloggers and pundits by following the excellent links at The Bookworm Room here:
Friday is Everybody Blog About #BrettKimberlin Day *UPDATED*
As has been widely quoted on Twitter today – this is the most important post you can read today:
The importance of “Blogging about Brett Kimberlin Day” is to let him know that he can’t sue, threaten or harass all of us and that we stand united with our fellows in the conservative blogging community. Bringing up his criminal past is neither harassment nor a smear. And the truth is an absolute affirmative defense to any charge of so-called slander. It makes one wonder if Kimberlin’s real fear is that when his reputation as a convicted home-grown splodeydope gets around, Fidelity Capital won’t be whipping out the checkbook for him anytime soon.
And I would also like to make a call out to our conservative talk show hosts – Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Andrew Wilcow and others – why have you given no time on your shows to these issues? This story needs national attention, and so far the heavy lifting is being done by the conservative blogs such as Stacy McCain, Allergic2Bull, et al., and Twitter users, who have risked account suspension to discuss it from Kimberlin’s associates and allies. It’s time for you to take up the “laboring oar.”
Update: Kudos to Glenn Beck for mentioning this story on his radio show this morning.
A site has been set up to assist all bloggers being targeted by Kimberlin and his co-horts. You can donate here:
https://rally.org/bloggers
(cross posted from Barbarian at the Gates: Yoo Hoo! Look Over Here! No, Look Over Here! No…..)
update from savage: I edited the plain text at the links so now everyone can click on them without manually cutting and pasting them.
