Imagine a group of people so gripped by fear of an idea, they needed to spend every single day compulsively attacking it. Mind you, by "attacking" I don't mean rationally debunking and refuting the idea -- in which case one refutation would be enough -- but rather persistently inventing new, ever-more egregious lies about the idea, and smearing proponents of the idea with the worst accusations. An attack so systematic, it's hard not to conclude that the group's goal is to absolutely poison any thought involving the idea that others may have.

You don't need to imagine it, though, because that idea is libertarianism, and we have not one but two groups of sick people preoccupied with doing exactly that. Those groups are Salon and Alternet. Let's examine their track record by looking at a reprint from a post by Radley Balko.

As you read what follows, do note these two groups' sick, unscrupulous obsession with abusing the minds of their own readership. They invent lies about libertarianism -- making their readers believe lies. They pull no stops in their attempts to associate libertarianism with repulsive beliefs -- manipulating their readers into feeling negatively about libertarianism. They falsely associate libertarianism with people who not representative of libertarianism but definitely are hated / envied by lots of people -- making their readers erroneously think that libertarianism is for "bad people". No emotional hotword is absent from this compendium of deceit. The behavior of these two groups is not consistent with honest journalism and rational scrutiny -- but it is consistent with instructions one can draw straight out of any disinformation manual: