The tweet was clearly meant to scare me. Jack Posobiec, an alt-right bottom-feeder best known for promoting the Pizzagate and Seth Rich conspiracy theories, issued this ominous warning on November 25:



It will soon be @HeerJeet’s time in the barrel — Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) November 26, 2017

Posobiec is an ally of the notorious Roger Stone, famed for his political dirty tricks, and the tweet echoed the phrase “time in a barrel,” which Stone had tweeted prior to scandals breaking out about Democratic Party bigwig John Podesta (the Wikileaks email leak) and Senator Al Franken (the accusations of sexual assault). I wondered what Posobiec could possibly have on me. The most shocking thing about my emails is my tardiness in answering them; I have hundreds of orphaned missives in my “drafts” folder. My sex life, for better or worse, is hardly tabloid material. And I have never sexually harassed anyone. Maybe Posobiec, being a fabulist, was planning on inventing a lurid tale of depraved behavior?

Posobiec’s smear job, which came a few days later, was weak tea. He had dug up some tweets I had written in 2014 and 2016 offering a partial defense of conservative political scientist Tom Flanagan and fired Nintendo employee Alison Rapp, both of whom had heterodox opinions on child pornography. In my tweets, I argued that the law should distinguish between child porn that is a work of the imagination (where no one is harmed in the production) and child porn that is a work of reproduction (where actual children are hurt); that possession of child porn might best be dealt with through therapy rather than jail; and that Flanagan and Rapp shouldn’t be fired for arguing for changes in child porn laws. Posobiec spun this into a defense of child porn, and argued that I was a hypocrite for criticizing Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore, who faces multiple credible accusations of child molestation.

We live in an age of weaponized outrage, where bad faith actors use out of context statements to get people fired. But I had little to fear from Posobiec’s attack, not just because he was attacking perfectly reasonable opinions. I was also safe because my employer, The New Republic, is secure in its identity as a journal of opinion and has owners who can recognize a right-wing character assassination when they see it.

Sam Seder hasn’t been so lucky. An MSNBC contributor, he was the target of a mudslinging campaign by alt-right media personality Mike Cernovich, a Posobiec ally and fellow Pizzagate fabricator. The campaign against Seder followed the same script as Posobiec’s smear job against me: digging up an old tweet and accusing Seder of alleged hypocrisy for criticizing Roy Moore and President Donald Trump for their sexual offenses. But Seder’s bosses at MSNBC didn’t stand by him, revealing an increasing danger to free speech in the age of the internet troll.