Help! Far left politico Chip Berlet caught editing his own article at WikiPedia

February 24th | Me

[MrSanders]

Hello - this is my first post so I apologize if the formatting is wrong. I've been a Republican for over 20 years and listen to Limbaugh and Hannity, and I've read your site before.

I want to alert you to something that is happening at Wikipedia and ask for your help because I've been overrun by leftists! There's this radical liberal nutcase named Chip Berlet who is a pundit on the far far far left wing that some of you may know of.

If you don't know him here is conservative author David Horowitz's profile on who he is - http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1243

Anyway, two days ago I read some stuff by this thug who thinks all conservatives are little Hitlers and I went to find out more about him at Horowitz's site. What was there didn't surprise me but it showed how awful this guy is. He's a shill for the National Lawyers Guild and was an apologist for the communist Enver Hoxha dictatorship in Albania, plus an activist with just about every left wing and communist cause in the U.S. possible. Berlet writes articles for all the fringe newspapers on the far left like High Times and the Southern Poverty Law Center report and is hooked up with all these socialist groups.

Google led to his article at wikipedia but when I read it something struck me as wrong -- the wikipedia article had almost NOTHING about Berlet's real history and was overwhelmingly positive. There was only one tiny paragraph about his kooky left wing politics and everything else looked like his personal resume. It also made him sound like he was a lawyer even though he's a college dropout.

So I sign up at Wikipedia and decide to add some of the facts about Berlet from Horowitz and the other places on the internet I'd read to balance it out. At first it works fine, but then the next day things start going sour. First a cabal of liberal editors shows up and censors out just about EVERYTHING I added. One guy deleted the entire paragraph and another tried to hide the fact that Berlet is not an attorney even though his resume of involvement in the National Lawyers Guild - a liberal bar association - was worded to suggest that he was.

Then it got even worse. Chip Berlet himself showed up and started directing what content could and couldn't appear in his article (which I previously had thought was a no-no at Wikipedia). First Berlet makes a vitriolic post against me accusing me of fabrications and all sorts of other stuff. Then he demands that anything negative about him be purged...and the liberal editors there who are all his willing accomplices take his orders and purge the thing.

At first I tried to fight back and restored the material he ordered purged - an embarrassing but fully documented quote by Chip Berlet where he more or less said the entire slate of 1992 presidential candidates except for his hero Bill Clinton were all fascists who had secret connections to Mussolini (this guy's like Michael Moore - one of those "Bush is Hitler" nuts). That got the leftists all mad at me and one of them - a Wikipedia sys-op named Gamaliel posted a nasty note threatening to ban me for "incivility" for simply saying that they were censoring negative material about Berlet and that Berlet himself was aparantly urging them to do it!

So I do some more research and lo and behold all the people in Berlet's little cabal are Wikipedia sys-op administrators and liberal ones. When a non-liberal sys-op showed up and favored restoring the stuff they deleted, they even overruled him at Berlet's behest.

I'm posting this to alert any Free Republic wikipedia users out there about this guy and to alert everyone that yet another left wing personality has been caught manipulating his own wikipedia article.

If you want to see it all the article is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_Berlet

Chip Berlet himself posts as "Cberlet"

[Tribune7]

I guess we have a new trend. Sign up and bash Wikipedia.

IBTZ

[mnehring]

Isn't that the point of Wikipedia? It's a dynamic, publicly controlled encyclopedia. If someone doesn't like his changes, they can change them. I would fault no one for editing their own article.. If it is incorrect information, the community will change it.

[Puppage]

[mnehring]

Lets let this run instead of zotting.. I already know where they are trying to lead this, and it isn't going to work..

[Guyin4Os]

Don't get mad; get even. Write an unbiased, highly-informative article about who Chip Berlet really is. And then post it to wiki. Check the entry daily to make sure he doesn't go back and skew it to his own favor. If he does, just redo it.

[Puppage]

I already know where they are trying to lead this, and it isn't going to work..

Care to enlighten the rest of us? Pleeease?

[MrSanders]

That's the problem though - all the information about Chip Berlet was correct and factual. He didn't like it though.

He doesn't want people to know he was a shill for Enver Hoxha or that he's a marxist kook.

So he rounded up a gang of other liberals in the wikipedia community to censor out the bad stuff about him.

[djl_sa]

ping

[reagan_fanatic]

[indcons]

IBTZ?

[IllumiNaughtyByNature]

Sign up and bash Wikipedia.

The poster is right though, wikipedia is being edited by revisionists all the time. I assume both sides are doing it. I don't think a ZOT is in order, but the humor for the noob will be fun to watch, as they are all the time. If this person starts replying coherently they may make it. If not, ZOT-AT-WILL.

[mnehring]

See post #6 for a solution.

[binkdeville]

Whats the point or use of Wikipedia anyway if anyone can write anything and then other contest it? Sounds like a useless site to me .

[MrSanders]

Actually it's called signing up and alerting other people who are supposed to be conservatives what the left is doing on Wikipedia.

You are a conservative, aren't you?

And if so, don't you have a problem when some leftist like Chip Berlet tries to censor out all the negative facts about him on his own Wikipedia article? And to the point that he's recruited enough fellow leftists over there to enforce his censorship? I told you - even a wikipedia sys-op tried to add back in the facts about Chip Berlet but they censored him too!

[binkdeville]

Who would listen to a grown man named Chip anyway ?

[goldstategop]

An open source encyclopedia has its share of problems. One of them being the fact people can write articles that bear very little resemblance to the truth. So Wikipedia has to be read with some skepticism about the objectivity and veracity of its online content.

(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")

[Puppage]

Chip Berlet:

He has also served as a paralegal on other intelligence abuse and civil liberties cases filed against local police, the FBI, CIA and Military Intelligence on behalf of groups such as the Spanish Action Committee of Chicago, National Lawyers Guild, American Indian Movement, Socialist Workers Party, Christic Institute, and American Friends Service Committee.

Berlet is a paralegal member of the National Lawyers Guild, was for several years an elected vice-president of the NLG, and currently serves as Co-chair of the NLG's Civil Liberties Committee. Berlet is a co-founder and member of the editorial board of the legal newsletter Police Misconduct and Civil Rights Law Report, published by Clark Boardman Callahan of New York. He works closely with the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation and for several years served on the board of advisors to the Chicago-based Bill of Rights Foundation.

[mnehring]

A few weeks back, some Republican staffers were caught doing the same thing on their bosses pages on Wikipedia (completely fine to do in my book), but of course, the left went into an uproar of 'censorship' and their usual 'big brother' crap.. DU and MOn have tried to plant 'hypocrisy' threads many times on the subject to lure right wingers to call it censorship or worse when the left does it so they can use their words against those on the Right who did it..

[MrSanders]

I wish it would work but I can tell you it won't. Berlet's got a cabal of liberal enforcers over there who do his dirty work for him. 2 or 3 of them including this particularly nasty guy called Gamaliel are also Wikipedia sys-ops and they use their powers to ban and harass conservatives.

Gamaliel even had the audacity to claim he was non-biased, but when you go to his sys-op page its covered with notes about how he's a huge Democrat!