The problem is that true believers like Eno, Leahy, and others are prone to believe even the craziest things about those on the opposite political side.
Those on the left often fall into the same mindset and pass along equally outrageous claims. Few charges against Warren have been as cringe-inducing as the speculation among some Massachusetts Democrats that Brown invented the story of being molested, which appears in his memoir.
But, while both sides have grapevines through which bad messages travel, there is nothing on the left comparable to the national right-wing machine generating those stories.
There is no liberal equivalent to breitbart.com, or the American Spectator, or the dozens of other places employing teams of pseudo-journalists to generate dirt, out of whole cloth if necessary.
HOW LOW CAN IT GO?
The latest of these is the new conservative online publication Washington Free Beacon — a secretly funded multi-million-dollar operation run by former American Spectator editors.
The Free Beacon has run three dozen negative pieces about Warren's campaign since its mid-February debut. "It's a star-power race," says editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti.
One of these items was about a Warren staffer, who, according to the article, had mysteriously switched the setting of her old personal Twitter account to private, perhaps to shield scrutiny from her racially tinged tweets.
In fact, she changed the setting because the campaign grew concerned about an anonymous account harassing her with as many as two dozen tweets a day — some of which included personal information about her and her family. The anonymous Twitter account, which did not respond to requests for contact, has continued the barrage, and has tweeted personal information about at least one other Warren campaign staffer.
The Free Beacon story, which consisted entirely of material in those anonymous tweets, also linked to one of those tweets; Continetti says he does not know who the tweeter is.
Continetti |
"I stand by the story as it is," Continetti says. Public Twitter accounts are fair game, he says, and her turning it private raised questions and made it newsworthy — although not worth placing a call to the campaign first. "I literally put up dozens of posts a day," says Continetti, "all of them critical of Democrats in the news."That story was picked up on other conservative sites, most of which played up the supposed racism of the staffer, a racial minority. (Some of the comments, unsurprisingly, are ugly.) Massachusetts Republican Party Communications Director Tim Buckley called the story "more embarrassment (of the racial variety)" as he tweeted a link to the RedMassGroup post about it. The party's next weekly newsletter named it Best of the Blogs, and "a serious gaffe from the Elizabeth Warren campaign."
Buckley and the MassGOP declined to comment for this story. Meanwhile, Eno and others continue unapologetically digging up material about the staffer.
NO GROWN-UPS
To the credit of the Boston Herald and other local media, they resisted promulgating the attacks on the staffer, despite the state party elevating the story. They have also steered clear of the scientific fraud charges. Similarly, they held their tongues when a National Review writer charged Warren with plagiarizing, in a book actually published before the one she supposedly cribbed from.
