Daily Kos founder and Vox co-founder Markos Moulitsas has a history of maliciously smearing conservatives, but some bizarre tweets he put out on Saturday afternoon are perhaps his most ridiculous smears to date.
Moulitsas tweeted that Joshua Goldberg, the internet troll who was arrested on terrorism charges earlier this week, is a “Breitbart writer.” He isn’t.
Breitbart writer arrested for terrorism, for trying to help terrorists build bomb http://t.co/R7ZM19cnSa via @thedailybeast
— Markos Moulitsas (@markos) September 12, 2015
The Daily Beast article he linked to makes no mention whatsoever of Breitbart. Because the troll never wrote for Breibart. The article did list the websites Joshua Goldberg wrote for under various pseudonyms, and one of those websites happens to be…the Daily Kos.
Goldberg had several online personas: an Islamic radical who was popular in ISIS social media; a white supremacist on hate site Daily Stormer; a feminist on Daily Kos; a radical free-speech advocate on Q&A site Ask.fm, and a sympathizer with GamerGate. Goldberg is also accused of being behind a Times of Israel blog post that called Palestinians “subhuman.”
The Brisbane Times also had an interesting article on Saturday about Goldberg’s prolific trolling and terror supporting activities — but nothing about him blogging at the Breitbart website.
At the Daily Kos, Moulitsas described Goldberg not as a writer, but as a “source”: “Breitbart source arrested for terrorism, tried to incite 9-11 terrorist attack.”
It’s clear conservative are fervently praying for another terrorist attack on US soil they could pin on President Barack Obama and Democrats. It’s the only card they have left to play. And now we’re seeing one actively help a would-be terrorist build a real bomb, to kill real Americans, in a real American city.
And for what? So they can get their war on, one that kills thousands more Americans (not to mention countless innocent civilians)?
That’s modern conservatism for you, sick and corrupted, and it’s no surprise that Breitbart is in the middle of it, catering to that very crowd.
On Twitter, Moulitsas obnoxiously tweeted that terrorism is a “conservative thing.”
I don’t have to worry about dKos writers getting arrested for trying to incite terrorism. That’s a conservative thing http://t.co/yYtGW1FIzC
— Markos Moulitsas (@markos) September 12, 2015
Moulitsas is basing his assertions on the fact that Goldberg had emailed Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos about a story Milo was working on regarding BlackLivesMatter organizer Shaun King. Last month, Yiannopoulos broke the story that King is not black, or even bi-racial, but a lily-white poseur a la Rachel Dolezal. Moulitsas is fallaciously claiming, based on a few emails, that Goldberg was the source for that story.
At Breitbart, Yiannopoulos set the record straight:
Today, a new conspiracy theory emerged from progressive campaigners, who accuse Breitbart of using Joshua Goldberg, a white supremacist ISIS-impersonating troll, as a source for our story. They point to emails between me and Goldberg, who was just arrested for domestic terrorism.
They say, wrongly, that our source for the Shaun King story was Goldberg, and that this throws doubt on our conclusions. Their claims are preposterous.
Like most well-known journalists I receive hundreds – on some days, thousands – of emails a day from sources, readers, fans and other strangers. I received one such email from a person called Joshua Goldberg who had a long history of provocative, thought-provoking columns on Thought Catalog. I had no reason at the time to think anything was amiss.
Goldberg, we now know, is a troll, a fantasist and a liar with a horrible double life. If the FBI arrest is anything to go by, Goldberg is a deplorable human being. No one knew this before today. He was a prolific and successful troll, even fooling the Times of Israel into posting something under a third party’s name, which that newspaper now calls a “foul, hoax blog.” But he had no input in, or impact on, our Shaun King reporting.
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