OK, hello. Nice to see all of you again. That’s me there in the middle, at my first Netroots Nation back in 2009. I know Ben Masel passed away in 2011, not sure how many of the other Kossacks in that photo are still around.
I used to write here under the name Stranded Wind, but I got suspended in 2011 for fighting with some Breitbart cyberstalker types. Then came Breitbart Texas head Brandon Darby’s attempt to set me up for politically motivated swattings in 2011/2012, which led to an OIG complaint against the Dallas FBI field office. That situation escalated when Andrew Breitbart dropped dead from a heart attack in the middle of a fight with me in February of 2012. The snivelers that got me suspended show up in the OIG complaint — they made a spectacular discovery error, giving me 262 pages of email that detailed their efforts to frame me. The lawyer who did that was Dan Backer — the same guy who registered Women For America First, the organization that sponsored the January 6th Ellipsis rally.
A federal informant named James McGibney filed a frivolous lawsuit against me in 2014, which has led to a precedent setting 1st Amendment case with my name on it — Rauhauser v. McGibney. This case has dragged on, it’s now in its eleventh year, as he desperately tries to avoid paying me the $480,000 the court says he owes.
I spent a bit of time talking with Markos at a fund raiser for Lauren Windsor back in August of 2021. He was a little bemused by the whole saga, and he said it would be fine if I returned. The next month one of my codefendants in the Texas case was stabbed to death at his front door. The #1 suspect in that case is the former counsel for the Proud Boys, Jason Lee Van Dyke. I decided it was best to keep my head down.
But now things have changed. Thanks to Joe Biden stepping down and Kamala Harris stepping up, I get the feeling we’re going to preserve our democracy later this year, and I’ll actually be able to publish a book about my (mis)adventures some time in 2025. Reviving this account is one of a number of things my literary agent wants me to do for the sake of promotion.
So that’s that. I write regularly on my Substack rauhauser.net, which focuses on the online aspects of 21st century conflicts. I’m going to look around for a while with an eye on what I do that might be of interest to Kossacks.
I run a document search service called Disinfodrome that has things like the entire set of Congressional Trump Russia documents, 425,000+ pages of Trump’s FEC filings, and the 33,000+ page Arizona state FOIA response related to the Cyber Ninjas fraudit. There was nothing good on TV, so some of my NAFO associates dug up the payroll files and phone logs for Iran’s PressTV, which led to this article in the Washington Post. I got a request to preserve video content from something called The Courage Tour, which led to this article in Washington Spectator. We caught a large right wing think tank spending $1M+ pushing Kremlin talking points, I finally got a reporter to start digging into it, but I’m not sure it’ll ever get past the editors. There’s other stuff like this in the queue, but I try to let reporters have the first shot, for the sake of broader distribution. Maybe I will post deep background on how these things get done, after the stories break.
Some things have changed, but some have remained the same. I imagine this story will quickly get noticed by a mentally ill former journalist who lost his executive editor position at Raw Story fourteen years ago, and he hasn’t had any sort of a byline in the last decade. There’s a paid troll in Florida who lives in the hip pocket of the guy who sued me in Texas and he’s in the habit of infiltrating Progressive spaces. Hopefully the people here in charge of the banhammer will strike quickly if they do turn up.
TTFN
Neal
