Johnson threatens Malkin

Among the threads Charles Johnson posted on Saturday about Robert Spencer and the Pro-Cologne conference (here is VFR’s previous entry) was a comment by him that I missed or didn’t catch the significance of. He wrote:

There is a hell of a lot of stuff I have to use against both RS McCain [Robert Stacy McCain] and Michelle Malkin. Maybe it’s time to start taking the gloves off.

Now all Malkin had done was to link Robert Spencer’s entry on the subject. Yet Johnson threatens to use unspecified damaging material against her.

Johnson’s bizarre threat is discussed at length at the Atlas Shrugs site. However, while a screenshot of the Johnson comment threatening Malkin is posted, there is no link to it. It is comment #46. There is no such comment in the original LGF thread on April 25, “Robert Spencer Confirmed to Attend Eurofascist Conference,” nor in its follow-up, “Classic Misdirection from Spencer and Geller.” (Note: both LGF links can be clicked on safely.) I did a Google search of the LGF site for the text of Johnson’s comment:

“there is a hell of a lot of stuff I have to use” “michelle malkin” site:http://littlegreenfootballs.com

and came up with nothing.

So I assume that Johnson deleted the comment some time after he posted it. Meaning he’s rational enough to recognize how damaging it is to himself for him to threaten to harm Michelle Malkin with unspecified damaging information—and merely for providing a link to a discussion. But he wasn’t rational enough not to post the comment in the first place.

And by the way I hold no brief for Robert Spencer in all this. Starting in fall 2007 through much of 2008, he acted like a loyal Bolshevik under Stalin in the late 1930s, supporting and expressing extragavant praise for Johnson while Johnson was smearing other Islam critics as fascists. Only when Johnson called Spencer himself a fascist sympathizer and expelled Spencer from his world did Spencer start to criticize Johnson. So Spencer is without honor in this affair.

Meanwhile, Pamela Geller has never retracted her remark last summer equating me with Charles Johnson, a comment she made at a time when I had published numerous articles exposing the falsity of Charles Johnson’s smears of Jihad critics, and when Geller’s hero, Spencer, was still Johnson’s friend, flatterer, and ally.

- end of initial entry -

Alex K. writes:

AllahPundit, Malkin’s star blogger at Hot Air, is friendly with Johnson and sort of got his start through him when LGF linked his original blog back in 2003. They seem to know each other from when AP was an LGF commenter, even before he started his own blog and took the “Allah” name. AP supported Johnson in one of his purges last year or whenever it was. Anyway, I just wonder what happens now…

LA replies:

If AllahPundit supported Johnson’s purges last year, then he is in the same position I’ve already described, of an Old Bolshevik who continued to support Stalin even when Stalin being trying and executing the Old Bolsheviks on trumped up charges. Whatever AP is inclinded to do now, whether to side with Malkin or not, no honorable course is left to him.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 27, 2009 12:47 PM | Send