Post reporters saw her walking into the offices of Project Veritas
A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.
In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.
The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.
I’m being reminded of Chris Mooney and “Tom Johnson.” Remember that? It was such a long time ago. I’ve just been reading a couple of old posts on the third (fourth?) and final exposure of “Tom Johnson” – Wally Smith, and remembering that Chris Mooney never did really acknowledge what a credulous enabler he’d been. So unlike the Washington Post reporters.
But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias.
James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas who was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2010 for using a fake identity to enter a federal building during a previous sting, declined to answer questions about the woman outside the Project Veritas office, a storefront in Mamaroneck, N.Y., on Monday morning shortly after the woman walked inside.
Sleazy enough?
The group’s efforts illustrate the lengths to which activists have gone to try to discredit media outlets for reporting on allegations from multiple women that Moore pursued them when they were teenagers and he was in his early 30s. Moore has denied that he did anything improper.
Also to discredit the women themselves.
Ugh. This has been a day of disgust. The country is in the hands of evil stinking criminal people. And it goes on.
The tipster’s email came amid counterattacks by Moore supporters aimed at The Post and its reporters.
That same day, Gateway Pundit, a conservative site, spread a false story from a Twitter account, @umpire43, that said, “A family friend in Alabama just told my wife that a WAPO reporter named Beth offer her 1000$ to accuse Roy Moore.” The Twitter account, which has a history of spreading misinformation, has since been deleted.
They make the Watergate crew look like choir boys.
I still agree with Polly-O!
(No, not really.)
Well, that was a fun little trip through the archives I just took. Some things that jumped out at me:
1) How dubious “Tom Johnson’s” original anecdote was to begin with. After months of people tweaking Mooney and Kirschenbaum for failing to provide a single piece of evidence that Gnu Atheists are pushing moderate believers away from science, along comes “Tom,” conveniently, with a story in which his supposed superiors are openly mocking believers in a church. (It’s even funnier when you add in what we now know, that Wally Smith was in Alabama. I know that university towns are often patches of “blue” even in deep red states, but it’s even more ludicrous to imagine professors making enemies of their neighbors in such a way.) And one professor is described as behaving like some Jack Chick tract version of Richard Dawkins, traipsing through the church where he is a guest and declaring “what lies! Such ignorance!” at the top of his non-existent lungs. It’s really a deeply silly story. You have to really hate Gnu Atheists to believe such nonsense.
2) Mooney (and here I’m singling him out, because Kirschenbaum didn’t seem very involved in this part) doubling down when the story was challenged. He could have just said, “look everyone, it’s just one anecdote, you can believe it or not, I’m not going to spend my time investigating this.” Instead, he reassured his audience that he had spoken privately to “Tom” and checked out the story — which was either a lie, or a grossly incompetent “investigation.” And he continued to defend the story with comments about how Tom Johnson had “obviously touched a nerve.” Well, yeah. Blood libel touches a nerve, too, that doesn’t make it true.
3) Oh, the names! Is Anthony McCarthy still bemoaning the Gnu Atheist menace, or has he found a new hobbyhorse?
4) Although I have no desire to fully relitigate the Accommodationist Wars, I do wonder what the election of Trump tells us about it. On the one hand, it shows that you can be not only as mean and nasty as the Gnu Atheists actually were, but even meaner and nastier than they were even accused of being, and still attract mass support. You can even get religious people to abandon supposedly deeply held beliefs — that their public officials should behave themselves in a moral way. But maybe the accomodationist response would be: sure, but Trump never actually told those voters that their beliefs were wrong. He just motivated them to ignore or abandon those beliefs by offering them something they cared about more (tax cuts, sticking it to women, sticking it to blacks, sticking it to brown people, etc.)
Dog, but I miss the days when accommodationism was the worst thing we had to fight over. I’m struck by some of the names in that old B&W thread, who now seem to be bitter enemies. (It is, of course, entirely Rebecca Watson’s fault. Everything is.)
It’s quite a memories-trip, isn’t it. And yes, so many friends then who now aren’t.
You have misogyny on one side of you, trans-activism on the other, I’m surprised you’re still standing.
But there are quite a few of us who stuck with you.
#5
And some that turned up here because of that shite. I was a Greta Christina fan previously, but that episode revealed quite a few peoples’ true colours.
Well, I was reading Ophelia early on in her FTB manifestation (I had not found the blog in this format before she came to FTB, but I had read at least one of her books and was a fan). While this did not bring me to this blog, it caused me to move away from quite a few others, including Greta Christina. Just like the atheist predators sent me scurrying away from JTs blog, and a few others, because of their defense of sexual nastiness perpetrated by non-religious people, even while boosting every single story of a (male) youth molested by a priest. I might add, few if any of those priest cases had more evidence than the accusations against Shermer, and some of them had none at all (but at least a large portion were likely true, given the pattern). So they required videos, a signed confession, scars, and blood samples to even consider the possibility that an atheist might be a predator, but a young man saying he had been molested as a priest when he was a boy was all they required to convict and condemn.
I find Ophelia to be an oasis in a desert.