Nothing succeeds like success. Mrs. Vanderboegh's wayward son makes the collectivist Mother Jones.

Meet the Former Militiaman Behind the Fast and Furious Scandal. Pretty funny. Of course they wouldn't use the headline "Meet the Ex-Communist behind the Fast and Furious Scandal." The quotes are more or less correct, although the PC MJ apparently choked on the term "gun queer" by which Second Amendment activists are known inside the ATF. "Barrel sucker," though was okay, apparently. My point was that prior to being brought together by the various ATF scandals, both sides had looked at the other as cartoon characters, not as people. We still disagreed philosophically, but could find common ground on the truth and the antiseptic qualities of sunlight in the federal bureaucracy.

The author sat behind me at the hearing, and admitted she'd never read Hayek's Road to Serfdom. "Try it," I urged, "you'll never go back to the dark side." She just smiled.

Among other things, I take issue with this paragraph:

After the 1993 ATF-led siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, ended in the deaths of 76 people, including 20 children, Vanderboegh joined the militia movement in Alabama. During that time, he wrote "Strategy and Tactics for a Militia Civil War," a document that, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "discussed the utility of 'snipers using violence carefully targeted'" at war criminals, secret policemen, and militia watchdogs who'd been keeping tabs on him. Later, Vanderboegh became an anti-immigration crusader. In 2005, the SPLC included Vanderboegh in a report on the then-burgeoning nativist movement, noting his involvement in Minutemen patrol groups that attempted to police the southern border.

Quoting SPLC on anything related to the militia and the truth is like consulting Carrie Nation on the various flavors of sipping whiskey -- it gets lost in the dialectic. The Brown Scare folks of SPLC and ADL make a big deal of "Strategy and Tactics for a Militia Civil War," a very early piece of mine but the fact is it had nothing in it that was personal from my point of view about "militia watchdogs" (here we see the clumsy hand of Mark Pitcavage, now of ADL, who back before he sat on Sparky the Militia Watchdog was providing names of "dangerous" militiafolk he gleaned from the 'Net to the FBI). The whole point even mentioning such regime assholes was to warn them that they were aligning themselves with a losing side of history and would be held accountable in the event of more federal attacks -- sort of a "useful dire warning" on the order of a "Bridge Out Ahead" road sign. A worse slander in the article is that committed against Larry Pratt, again quoting SPLC, characterizing him as an anti-Semite and supporter of death squads. Bullshit, but often repeated Brown Scare bullshit it is.

And I wouldn't say I was an "anti-immigration crusader." In truth, I hardly did anything at all to help the Minutemen, compared to what I should have done. In October 2005 I helped Bob Wright with one border vigil by leading a small recon contingent at Hachita, NM. Others of my 1ACR "boys" helped out later that month. I also helped organize some protests here in Alabama. That, plus the couple of essays I wrote at the time, does not a "crusader" make. I viewed it at the time as simply what one citizen should do to support the rule of law. Sort of natural, like breathing.

The part I liked was this:

Vanderboegh is now working on other big scoops. In late November, Newsweek/Daily Beast published a story about a man who worked as a paid FBI informant in the 1990s, going undercover among neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. But Vanderboegh says Newsweek didn’t run the full story, which he says included damning information about an FBI operation in the 1990s called PATCON (for Patriot Conspiracy) that allegedly involved giving weapons, explosives, and money to neo-Nazis as a way of infiltrating their networks.

Vanderboegh snagged an unedited copy of the Newsweek story and posted it on his blog under the title, "Hiding mass murder behind 'national security.' What Newsweak & the FBI didn't want you to know about PATCON and the OKC Bombing." Vanderboegh claims that the FBI had a role in repressing parts of the Newsweek story, and he's confident PATCON is going to be the next big scandal. (Asked whether the FBI pressured the magazine to cut references to PATCON, Newsweek spokesman Andrew Kirk said, "Of course not." He wouldn't comment on how Vanderboegh might have gotten the story.)

It would be easy to dismiss Vanderboegh's obsession about this latest FBI "scandal" as the healthy imagination of a conspiracy theorist with too much time on his hands. But then there's Fast and Furious.

Hey, doubt my ancestry if you wish, but doubt doubt my footnotes or my sources. I also told her how ironic it was that "the left" was now in the position of defending the FBI because it was now "their FBI". "Don't you remember COINTELPRO?" I asked. But hey, at least they spelled my name right.