Yesterday, I cross posted an announcement for a billboard contest
here,
here,
here, and
here.
The contest was to help select the text of a new billboard for CO-6 candidate Bill Winter in his race against Tom Tancredo. The request was for people to send in statements that they wanted to 'Tell Tom'.
Last night I got a call from the Winter campaign saying they were going to shut down comments on the campaign blog for a while because of the threats that had started to be posted.
It looks like the contest has been targeted by websites who champion immigration extremist Mad Tom Tancredo
The explosion of wingnuttery began when MSU student Jason Miller of Grand Rapids, Michigan posted on his website
Smash Left Wing Scum a call to action for his readers to go to my threads and praise Tancredo. In my post I said I would collect together the entries from all of the threads, and I would post them on the
Winter for Congress website. Miller wanted to see if he could get me to post the positive ones as well, so he posted links to the MyDD, SquareState, and WinterForCongress sites.
In my diaries, I mentioned the places where I had cross posted, but I did not give links to the diaries themselves. Perhaps it is for that reason, or perhaps he was just worried about the Kos response, but Miller did not link to me here. Eventually, his folks found the Kos diary, because today the first pro-xenophobia post showed up here.
The SLWS people are not as stable as your average internet racist, and pretty quickly the tone started turning threatening.
One poster, who I am told is Joe Sylvester author of the Michigan Conservative Dossier, wrote in to say...
"You fucking assholes. Id like to beat your fucking skulls in with a ball pean hammer... That comment was directed to you anti Tancredo bastards"
I like to know who is threatening to kill me, so I found this picture of Joe on his blogger profile.
There were other comments equally foul, but right now I am thinking that Joe's picture and comment would really make the best billboard so far. It really gives you an idea of what Bill Winter thinks is worth changing in our country.
I would appreciate it if I could get some recommends on this diary.
At this time of day good ones fly by so quickly, and when the Right Wing starts sending their people to our sites to intimidate and threaten to kill us, I think it is something that the whole community needs to be aware of and respond to.
Update: In the comments, Shaking the Tree points us to this diary where the powerful and monied background to Smash Left Wing Sum is revealed by FergusonForCongress.