Replies

OK, here's what your complaints were:

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!

Here is what I just gleaned from Wiki

Berlet is a former vice-president of the National Lawyers Guild, a body described as pro-communist by conservative critics . . . He also became an active shop steward with the National Lawyers' Guild, a liberal bar association.

. . ..Berlet attended the University of Denver for three years, where he majored in sociology with a journalism minor. He left the university in 1971 to work as an alternative journalist. Berlet did not complete his degree.

And I note there is a whole section devoted to criticism from Horowitz

Now, if you got the new stuff in, good job. Seriously. But if they left out a quote or two that you wanted in, I can't get too hot about it and you shouldn't either.