The 12th Anniversary of Killgore’s Midnight Run & Charles Johnson’s Foray Into Astroturfing

The following is a repost from 18 September 2016.

There he goes again, fighting a dead man.

Andrew Breitbart enhanced Charles Johnson’s blogging career by introducing him to the players who in turn promoted Little Green Footballs and escorted Johnson into the Big Tent with fanfare. Instead of walking away with dignity, Charles chose the path of the pissant. Not only did he shun his former mentors, he turned on them, created and promoted lies, reposted invented unsubstantiated claims, and astroturfed his benefactors. Then, like a true coward, he still plays the victim when others call him on his own hypocrisy.

On 13 September 2016, Charles tried once again to erase his own history of astroturfing, but let’s roll back the clock to 18 September 2009.

Seven years ago today The Flying Monkeys of Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs began an astroturf campaign against HotAir. With no evidence to back up Johnson’s accusation that HotAir was a racist website, LGF operative Killgore Trout paid them a visit while the moderators were asleep and provided the “evidence” himself by posting offensive racial comments and daring the moderators to delete them… beginning at 12:34AM and running to 2:01AM. You can read the full diatribe here, but here’s a snippet:

Killgore’s Midnight Run set a precedent for Little Green Footballs that was recognized throughout the political blogosphere, and the running joke was that if racist comments showed up on someone’s website it was due to Charles Johnson and Little Green Footballs.

Charles Johnson continuously accused Breitbart and others of not policing comments on their websites. Little Green Footballs typically garnered a couple of hundred comments, and Charles employed volunteer “Monitor Lizards” to do it for him. Breitbart’s “Big Journalism” had well over ten times the number of comments per post than Little Green Footballs, so it was impractical to expend the effort to review and/or edit all of them.

And Johnson’s astroturfing didn’t stop there.

Johnson holds the 2 of Clubs and four Post-It Notes, then claims he has 5 of a kind. The first liar never has a chance, Charles.