A guy who doesn't know shit from Shinola talks to another guy who has both shit for brains & an agenda to craft an expert opinion about . . . me.

A photographic scorecard for this story:


This is Shinola.


This is Tim Steller of the Arizona Daily Star. (Tiny head evidently actual size.)


This is a self-posted Facebook image of ADL attack blimp Mark Pitcavage. He used to troll for names on the Internet to provide the FBI back in 90s.


This is Sparky, the Militia Watchdog, from back during the Clintonista Regime. Last seen almost a decade ago, rumor has it that Pitcavage sat on him and didn't notice for a week. Poor Sparky. He even looks sad, do you notice? Almost as if he knew his fate.

I assume y'all know what shit looks like, gentle readers, so I'll skip that illustration.

The headline: "The blogger who broke Fast and Furious prepares for US revolution."

The story, with my comments ad seriatim:

The Republic published a long, interesting story Sunday on Operation Fast and Furious, and it included interviews with Mike Vanderboegh and David Codrea. These are the two pro-gun-rights bloggers who first opened the window on the disgraced ATF investigation in late December 2010.

As often happens when you break a story, the scoops have kept coming, and Vanderboegh in particular has become a go-to source for information on the Fast and Furious scandal. What newcomers to his Sipsey Street Irregulars blog may find surprising is the broader theme of the blog, which perhaps can be summarized as: The out-of-control federal government is poised to start a new American revolution among gun owners.

"A new American revolution"? Not my words. Long-time readers will recognize that the only "revolution" that I believe has been going on here is that of a Gramscian nature waged by domestic enemies of the Founders' Republic against that system of government and the rule of law. We are fighting for a restoration of that republic against the revolutionaries of collectivism. Had the sentence stated "civil war with the American armed citizenry" then it would have been accurate.

While Vanderboegh has done a good job exposing Fast and Furious in the last year, he remains what he was before: A man so convinced that the federal government has turned totalitarian that he has declared himself willing, even occasionally seeming eager, to engage in war against it. As with many gun-rights activists, he foresees the moment of truth as when the feds come to take Americans' guns — that's when the shooting war would begin.

"Eager"? Is there anyone here who has read my stuff who believes that I am "eager" for civil war? Or that I have ever seemed "eager"? What a lying sack of shit.

I've emailed Vanderboegh some questions about his views outside of the Fast and Furious case and am awaiting a response. I'll update when I get it.

I get a crapton of email a day, and I didn't recall this one, so I just went back and looked over my new and old email files and on a quick scan I can't find any such email. I delete far more emails than I read, but it would be very unlikely for me to delete one of Steller's unread, for I know who he is. With that caveat, I'm not willing to call him a liar on that. Perhaps he should re-send it. Or, he could have done due diligence and cast around to find other reporters for my phone number. He must not have been that curious about my responses to his questions. It is easier to write a story with its meme unchallenged.

Vanderboegh may have first come to the attention of Southern Arizona residents last year during the debate over health-care reform. On March 19, 2010 he posted this blog item, encouraging "all modern Sons of Liberty" to break windows at Democratic Party offices around the country. Two days later, the glass door at U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' Tucson office was smashed. It was one of about a half-dozen such incidents in the days after his call.

Vanderboegh was involved in the militia movement of the 1990s and appears to blame the U.S. government for the excesses that came out of that movement. Not only was the Waco disaster the government's fault, according to Vanderboegh, but the Oklahoma City bombing was as well. He calls it "The greatest crime ever perpetrated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

Actually, I was referring to PATCON, of which the OKC bombing was only a part, and no, I don't believe that the FBI blew up the building or even wanted the building to blow up. I think that it, unlike the Gunwalker Scandal, OKC and the Aryan Republican Army actually was a "sting gone bad." J.D. Cash believed that, and so do I. The language here is curious: "Vanderboegh was involved in the militia movement of the 1990s and appears to blame the U.S. government for the excesses that came out of that movement." He then refers to Waco and OKC. Uh, ascribing blame for Waco as "an excess that came out of the militia movement" when Waco actually pre-dated the constitutional militia movement and was the direct cause of its organizing is a bit bizarre to say the least. And as for the OKC bombing as a representation of "militia excesses" when McVeigh, to my knowledge, was thrown out of the only Michigan Militia meeting he ever attended, is part-and-parcel of what Professor Robert Churchill called "The Narrative of 1995." Perhaps Steller should read Churchill's book.

This was Vanderboegh's first claim to fame, says Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League, who has been aware of Vanderboegh for 15 years.

"He became a big early proponent — and this is where he got his notoriety in the 1990s — of Oklahoma City conspiracy theories. 'Timothy McVeigh was a patsy. The government was actually involved.' He did a lot to popularize this," Pitcavage said.

Ah yes, Pitcavage. Mark Pitcavage used to troll the Internet and sell names of "militia threats," including mine, to the FBI. He ran a site called "The Militia Watchdog" and Sparky (as seen above) was his logo. We crossed swords many times, Spitcabbage and me. His FBI "confidential informant" file would make interesting reading. He parlayed this into a job with ADL as their "militia expert."

Here's an old militia joke from the 90s:

What is the difference, if any, between Mark Pitcavage and the Hindenburg?


This is Mark Pitcavage in his natural element.


This is the Hindenburg.

Answer: There are two. First, although both are gasbags and serve the commercial interests of a nascent collectivist tyranny, the Hindenburg was a dirigible whereas Pitcavage is a blimp. Second, Pitcavage has not yet spontaneously burst into flames.



Hope springs eternal.

Pitcavage's next description of me is hardly accurate, but it is all we who have followed his lying career over the years have come to expect from Sparky's erstwhile master.

"In the late 90s and early 2000s, the militia movement went into a tailspin. It was at that point that Mike jumped ship. In the mid-2000s, he became involved in the Minutemen."

The truth is the constitutional militia movement, as opposed to the "millennials" (again, see Churchill's "To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face"), didn't suffer any "tailspin," and I only stepped down as commander of 1ACR when it was obvious that I was too old, fat and infirm to lead troops. 1ACR, in its component parts under subordinate leaders, still exists, and as for "jumping ship," Pitcavage knows that that is a damn lie. Throughout the early 2000s I contributed in a hundred ways to the constitutional militia movement overall, picking up the description from a "main-stream" reporter as "The Grey Eminence" of the movement. When my old friend Bob Wright got involved in the Minutemen in 2005, I took elements of 1ACR and went out to help him in October of that year. I saw this, then and now, as simply an extension of the militia citizenship ideal.

"He rode that pony for a while. More recently, he dropped that and started his Sipsey Street Irregulars blog. He started the Three Percenter concept, which has caught on among anti-government extremists."

Pitcavage, whose personal relationship with ponies involves frightening them to death whenever he nears with the prospect that he might actually try to ride them, implies some sort serial inconstancy on my part as if it is notoriety I am seeking through a variety of failed enterprises. Nothing that I have done since 1993 is inconsistent with my own belief in the efficacy of the armed citizenry to deter tyranny and work toward that end -- with pen, or rifle, or, in the case of the Minuteman vigil in 2005, with seismic intrusion detector and night vision device.

Pitcavage also tips his hand with that old Brown Scare bromide "anti-government extremists." The advocates and lickspittles of the Federal Leviathan (of which class Pitcavage is surely one) always classify their opponents as "anti-government." I know of no one, save unthinking self-proclaimed anarchists (and there are thinking anarchists who are Threepers), who is actually "anti-government." Now I am anti-BIG government, anti-DANGEROUS government and anti-TYRANNICAL government. It is no accident that collectivist pukes like Pitcavage and Morris Dees seek legitimacy for their own vision of government and heap scorn on their opponents who do not share it through misuse of language. That is the oldest collectivist trick in the book. (Reference: "Arbeit Macht Frei.")

The Three Percenter idea derives from the fact (as Vanderboegh explains it) that at the time of the American Revolution, only three percent of the population fought against the king. Vanderboegh explains the present-day Three Percenters this way:

"We are committed to the restoration of the Founders' Republic, and are willing to fight, die and, if forced by any would-be oppressor, to kill in the defense of ourselves and the Constitution that we all took an oath to uphold against enemies foreign and domestic."

Most recently, Vanderboegh was in the news when four Georgia men were arrested and accused of plotting terrorist attacks against the federal government. A book Vanderboegh has written, titled Absolved, inspired the men, though Vanderboegh said he has never communicated with them. The U.S. News and World Report had this interesting story on the case.

Fair enough.

Why does all this background on Vanderboegh matter? Well, I enjoy reading his blog, and have found in my couple of months following the Fast and Furious story that he has often been first in putting out details of the scandal. (He also had an impressive scoop last week when he published what he said were portions of an original draft of a Newsweek story about a man who for years worked as an FBI informant among white supremacists.)

"What he said were. . ." Don't you just love the weasel words? Actually, I have been waiting for Newsweek to deny my article so I can print emails with their addresses on them in refutation. This squirrel of a "reporter," who lives in Arizona at Gunwalker Ground Zero, can't find a nut of his own in a forest of oak trees and then casts doubt on MY journalistic skills? Hey, you can doubt my ancestry, Steller, but don't doubt my footnotes.

But I read the blog just for new facts on Fast and Furious and as a measure of what is interesting gun-rights fundamentalists. I often find Vanderboegh's interpretation of the facts to stretch the limits of credibility and to derive from his view of himself as a rebel leader in the run-up to the next American revolution.

Sorry, I've run out of enough spittle to dignify that last bullshit with the contempt that it deserves.

But, hey, Steller, if you actually want to communicate with someone you write about like any other reporter, why don't you give it a try? I ain't going anywhere. And my exclusives will keep on coming, whether you like the source they came from or not.