Immediately after I tweeted about my intention to go dark on Friday with Ace and Stranahan and McCain and all the others, I received a reply asking why I would do that, and suggesting that it was giving in to Kimberlin’s tactics. I’m just a ground squirrel. So allow Dedicated Tenther to explain:
I Get It Now. Blogger Day Of Silence
A couple of days ago, Ace mentioned the idea of a national Blogger Day of Silence to show solidarity with Aaron Walker, Patterico, and other Bloggers who have been targeted by Brett Kimberlin’s associates and cronies for intimidation. His suggestion was to post a single post that day specifying our grievance and the reasons behind it. Then we would go dark.
I did not like the idea. It would be giving in, it seemed to me. And then I read this post from RS McCain. Go read it, because it’s too good for me to deny him the traffic by quoting extensively.
Blog silence day is not about showing Brett Kimberlin anything. It is not about, in fact, any specific thing that Brett Kimberlin has done. It is about the deafening silence we receive back from our elected representatives about this vital issue.
As Stacy points out, it is bloggers like Ace who largely fueled the 2010 races. It has been bloggers like Patterico and Ali Akbar who have helped lead the fight against the online left. It is the “dextrosphere” in general which has hijacked hash-tag after hash-tag on Twitter to blunt, and sometimes even reverse, the narratives offered by the Democrats.
On any given day there are hundreds, if not thousands, of us on blog, Twitter, and on news sites combating the Left in a way we’ve never been able to fight before. And all we ask from our Representatives is that they protect us from intimidation and physical harm. We don’t ask for their money. We don’t even ask for their acknowledgement, most of the time. But on this; for this one thing, we demand they break their own silence.
And so, we will be silent. When David Axelrod and @TruthTeam on Twitter spout lies and distortions on Friday, we will not be there to refute them. When Valerie Jarrett and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz take to Twitter to spin some narrative, or float some piece of misdirection, we will not be there to ridicule them. When a news piece is obviously biased, or when a lefty blogger post something disingenuous, we will not be there to defend the politicians of the Right.