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Notes -
Real mask-off moment from the author on Twitter:
Spoken like a fox on Rottnest Island. Of course this guy took the flimsiest possible excuse to list the worst things people he doesn’t like have ever said. That’s just “responsible journalism”. What you never get from these kinds of articles is any sort of intellectual curiosity about the ideas in question.
Also has this charming post where, in a reply to Passage Publishing, the "journalist" posted a picture of the Passage Publishing logo upside down, next to a photo of Mussolini hanging upside down after his execution. The message communicated clearly being "Passage Publishing are fascists who should be executed by firing squad."
No idea what they did to earn such a response, but I'd put money on it being boringly inoffensive.
Truly pulitzer-worthy "anthropological curiosity" on display, dedicated to broadening the intellectual horizons of his audience.
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"Don't be this kind of person" is really a skeevy way to put it (in my opinion).
He justifies his interference in their activities not because they've impacted him in any way, they've not directed a single iota of attention towards him and thus there's no impetus for 'smoke' in the first place. It's not a rap beef where they dissed his fashion sense or cursed his dead mother and thus justified a response.
But oh, they're the 'kind of person' who invites such scrutiny. Isn't it so handy-dandy that he's the one who gets to describe what 'kind of person' they are and the audience is supposed to just assume that BECAUSE he states this that they are indeed worthy targets of his uninvited ire. And if they disagree with how he characterizes them, that is further proof that they're the 'kind of person' who needed to be called out.
I'd also guess that what he means by "kind of person" is almost literally just "someone who believes things that I find offensive" and so really he has no external reason for it, and he sees this as perfect justification for swinging the hatchet their way.
These are the sort of moments, I've learned, where being a quokka doesn't quite pay off, and it would be useful to have the resources available to hit back hard enough to convince this person that it is indeed not worth the smoke but also doing it in such a way that you're not retroactively justifying the hit piece itself.
But I'm also inclined to inflict the greatest insult an enemy can suffer. To be ignored.
OK. Let's try to put our "recovering quokka" title to the test and say any response is on the table. Let's also pretend all resources are available to me. What's your solution?
It sounds to me like it's wishful thinking and cope.
First pass?
Just hire some research pros to dig into the background of any journos involved in the piece in question with the explicit goal of discrediting them, embarrassing them, or getting them fired.
Find any embarrassing or potentially criminal behavior they can, find solid evidence or cross reference it enough to prove it, then hire someone to write about it all in the most unkind light manageable. Then find the biggest platform for publication you can, and get ready to publish it.
Give the Journo about 30 minutes to respond to a request for comments before hitting 'publish.'
Kind of like how Christopher Rufo came after University Presidents and managed to get a few of them to resign merely by digging into their past scholarship and running it through a plagiarism detector. If it works on people in such positions of power, it'll work on Journos.
Or if they're too unremarkable and impotent for it to work, then yeah, revert to utterly ignoring them.
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Looking at his previous work, he appears to be a left-wing activist calling himself an "investigative journalist", so intellectual curiosity certainly cannot be expected. Kinda bad taste to claim he's just doing it for ragebait rather than the very important work of exposing the far right.
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