Is Free Republic Down? It should be.
(Note:To show how irrelevant Free Republic has become, on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration the site was booted off line for the entire day. The ENTIRE day. One of the most important days for the center right movement and Free Republic was no where to be seen during the day’s events. What a joke.)
-By Warner Todd Huston
I hate it when conservatives attack each other, I have to say. The latest example of suicidal intra-conservative attacks is coming from Jim Robinson, the owner of the famed righty message board Free Republic. Sadly, Mr. Robinson has launched a campaign to harass and ultimately ban from his board all right leaning bloggers that try to post their items there.
Over the last three months or so what many Freepers thought was a self appointed band of FR-police began appearing and attacking posts by bloggers. Several screen names have been used to attempt to harass bloggers into quitting the board. The campaign has been successful in several circumstances, driving some bloggers to quit the board. In other cases, when the campaign wasn’t successful in driving the blogger to quit, Robinson himself has stepped in to ban the bloggers from posting on FR.
The sad thing is that none of these bloggers have been attacked and/or banned for the topics of their posts. All of these bloggers are good conservatives, none holding views which conservatives find antithetical to their ideology. These posters are not being attacked for what they posted but are being attacked for posting at all.
Worse, Robinson has allowed these “blog police” attackers to engage in some of the worst behavior imaginable calling bloggers homosexuals, attacking them personally, and even turning a blind eye to these attackers taking their attacks off-site and onto the blogger’s sites, the bogger’s YouTube comments sections, and other places.
Why Jim Robinson and his band of harassers have undertaken this anti-blogger crusade is hard to fathom and it pains me to even report this idiocy.
These attacks start by the “blog police” constantly posting comment after comment telling the blogger that it is against the FR rules to post a few paragraphs of a blog post and a link to the rest of the post, a link that leads the FR member to the blogger’s blog. This link practice is not against the FR rules as the rules currently stand and is a common practice throughout the board. How these “blog police” have decided which blogger to attack is really impossible to determine because many are ignored while others are attacked by dozens of posts daily. There really isn’t any logic to the attacks.
Most of these attacks are made by three or four FR screen names (the screen names humblegunner, DeoVindiceSicSemperTyrannis, eaker, and Larry Lucido seem to be the accounts often used to attack bloggers). They are made every day at all hours of the day and night and they are constant. It is a sustained campaign, not just a few honest FReepers that are unhappy with other’s actions.
I myself was a victim of these attacks. For five years I had posted on FR without a single complaint by anyone. I have posted hundreds, if not thousands, of stories, many of them a result of my own first-hand reporting made in Washington D.C. and other places. After two months of “blog police” attacks, I was kicked off FR after five years of posting the exact same type of posts without incident.
I am not the only one that has been kicked off FR. For one example, Anthony Martin of the Conservative Examiner was also summarily dismissed from the site despite a long history of posting on FR.
Currently a whole raft of FReepers are being harassed by this band of cretins. All you have to do is search for the word “blog pimp” on FR and you’ll see dozens of such attacks all made by the same few names.
And here is the shame of the whole affair. Every blogger that tries to defend themselves is told by Robinson that if they can’t “find a way to for posts to be acceptable to our readers” then the blogger should quit the board. And when the blogger refuses to quit, Robinson simple bans them.
Robinson is expecting these Freepers to stay silent in the face of daily attacks of being called homosexuals, thieves, and bad faith Freepers. He is standing on the word of the “blog police” that the bloggers are not wanted on FR. The slightest attempt by a blogger to stand up for himself is used by Robinson as an excuse for a banning.
But the problem here is that Robinson is not telling the truth at all. Each blogger on nearly every thread is being supported by FR readers. Many comments have been made telling the “blog police” that if THEY don’t like a blogger’s posts then they should not view them. So many, many FReepers are accepting of the blogger’s posts. Robinson is simply hiding behind a lie.
The odd thing here is that Robinson, a man with a reputation of standing up for his convictions, is hiding behind fake screen names to push bloggers off his board. I mean, why all the skullduggery and subterfuge? He owns the board! All he has to do is change the rules to reflect what he wants and then enforce it. What could be easier than that?
This strange disconnect is why I had at first thought that this “blog police” campaign was by an outside force, a left-wing force besetting Free Republic. I couldn’t imagine that Robinson would be so underhanded and weird on his own board. Turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong.
It’s just all so strange.
In any case, the facts seem to be that Jim Robinson is trying to eliminate all bloggers from his message board. Why he wants to silence the voice of countless conservatives on his board is simply impossible to understand. But, strange as it is, there you have it. Make of it what you will.
The whole affair saddens me, to say the least.
See Also
The Fall of Jim Robinson’s Free Republic Website.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.