Free Talk Live's Meg McLain Versus Yasha Levine and Mark Ames of The Nation

Occasional Free Talk Live co-host and FreeKeene.com blogger Meg McLain, who was recently smeared (along with another hero John Tyner) by The Nation (specifically the rag's writers Yasha Levine and Mark Ames) in a piece entitled "TSAstroturf: The Washington Lobbyists and Koch-Funded Libertarians Behind the TSA Scandal," has authored a response to the statist liberal clods behind their invective-laced hit piece.

Incidentally, on November 24 (exactly on National Opt-Out Day), The Nation's top blogger Jeremy Scahill lambasted the writers for engineering this pathetic-joke-of-a-smear via a tweet on his Twitter page,in which he writes:

The article my magazine, The Nation, published about John Tyner is a shameful smear.

(More to the point, these ludicrous, irresponsible, and unfair acts of name-calling, libeling, and smearing show how partisan and political Ames and Levine really are and are endemic of the so-called journalists' ulterior motives.)

(Thankfully, Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com authored a blog post to chime in on the uncalled-for smearing of McLain, Tyner, and the vile authors' libelous, pernicious, and baseless smears aimed at other libertarians in the movement over the TSA hubbub. Levine and Ames followed up with a response to Greenwald's piece, in which they claim that they didn't intend to smear Tyner, which is a baldfaced lie. Greenwald rebuts their rebuttal perfectly in Update III of his blog post, exposing their hateful, spiteful, and malicious lies, ill-intentions, and partisan biases all the way.)

Nonetheless, here's Meg's wonderfully-drafted response to The Nation regarding their hit piece targeting her in part.* (While there are some grammatical errors in the piece, and she didn't proofread it, that's not a major concern to me, as she brilliantly gets her message across to her readers about her experiences with the TSA [which I will include in a follow-up blog post about the TSA] and sets the record straight on the accusations that have for nearly a month sullied her good name.)

My Response to The Nation's TSA Articles

by Meg McLain

I was appalled at the absolute strait out lies The Nation found the balls to print about me, and I thought I would finally sit down and respond, both publicly and to the writers/editors at this abysmally written rag.

As there are now 2 articles (one making bold face lies about me, and another confirming their position on those lies); I have decided to start this response with a line-by-line deconstruction of the section that mentions me in the 2nd article. This pretty much sums up their stance in the first article, so I can give the broader answers here.

The Nation: "We also documented the story of the first “victim” of the TSA—a libertarian named Meg McLain"

First line, first lie. I am not a libertarian. I do not claim to be a libertarian. At no point during any interview did I say I was a libertarian. I find party politics of any kind to be repugnant, and 'libertarians' are a political party. I consider myself to be a sovereign human being who interacts with people on a voluntary and consensual basis. Politics have nothing to do with me, and I want nothing to do with them.

The Nation: "—who was found to have lied about being sexually molested by TSA agents."

I never stated, insinuated, claimed, or even came close to accusing the TSA of sexually molesting me. The whole reason I was kicked out of the Florida airport was because I was uncomfortable with the new "enhanced pat-downs", and I attempted to ask some questions to see if we could come to a compromise that would show I wasn't a threat but not require me to endure something I was personally not ok with. After asking the questions, the TSA blew things out of proportion, and assumed I had refused the pat down, so I was eventually escorted out for not completing screening. Moreover (and to the great embarrassment of this magazine's crap 'journalists') the TSA never claimed I lied about them sexually molesting me. Because I never said they did.

After my incident became public, the TSA posted up two security videos from my encounter with the TSA. They never outright said my story was untruthful; however, they insinuated it by saying something to the effect of "We'll let you [the viewer] decide what happened." The only problem is these two videos do not cover the entire encounter. The portion missing includes a few of the events I had spoken about on the radio that were never captured in the two videos posted (both from cameras angled away from that area). Nothing I said was a lie; however, much of what I said was misquoted, distorted, or even made up by the media.

I attempted to make a clarification after I listened to my original interview (which I had done less than an hour after the incident occurred). This was not to "cover up a lie", but rather to explain that when I said "nobody else was taken through the advanced screening" or sometime like that, I was trying to convey that nobody else was brought into the secondary screening area I was in. This was not an admission of lying, this was an attempt to clear up something that I misspoke on and could have worded differently to be better understood. But because I was telling the truth, the TSA and police couldn't even say I was lying when asked point blank. All they said was, "We cannot confirm or deny anything". It was purely an attempt on someone's part to sway the discussion of my incident from the real issue at hand to whether or not my story was even real. It was. And if you're going to take two videos without timecodes or full coverage of the incident as evidence of a "lie", at least have the intelligence to figure out the lie I'm accused of making.

*I would also like to add that the entire description of my version of what happened is so appalling misquoted, and so far off from what I actually said that I'm really wondering if the "journalist" even bothered to listen to the audio, or if he just read things and made it up himself. I also find it comical that the author was too stupid to realize he based the claim that nobody screamed "Opt Out" by referencing a video with no sound.

The Nation: "Before Tyner, McLain was being heralded by the same right-wing PR network, particularly Matt Drudge and Koch-funded libertarians, who later promoted Tyner to fame and who last year led the PR drive promoting the Tea Party movement. McLain’s ties to the Koch brothers are well-documented in our piece—and Greenwald, for reasons unclear, studiously avoids rebutting any of our evidence."

I have no idea who any of these people are, with the exception of John Tyner, whom I first discovered and met online well after both our incidents occurred.

Now here are some additional quotes from The Nation's original article that give more detailed lies to it's readers.

The Nation: "McLain is an occasional co-host of a libertarian radio show out of a libertarian quasi-commune located in Keene, New Hampshire."

I do not believe Free Talk Live is a libertarian radio show. It is the show a friend of mine hosts, and I enjoy the discussions and subject matter, so I sit in as a co-host from time to time. I have no idea where this quasi-commune thing came from. I live in a damn house with a roommate and a dog. Since when is that a commune? Because I have a roommate? Because once in a while we share our food? Really? Thats just flat out stupid writing intended to be offensive for no reason, and with no basis.

The Nation: "As reported in theWashington City Paper, the libertarian "Free Keene" movement where McLain makes her home is yet another libertarian project tied to the billionaire Koch brothers, the prime backers of the Tea Party campaign, through the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University."

How exactly is Free Keene tied to these guys I've never heard of? Does it go any further than 'the Koch brothers have mentioned it once'? If they do have some financial ties with Free Keene, I would like to know, cause I am poor as crap and don't make a dime off that website.

The Nation: "By her own account, McLain was down in Florida visiting a pair of traveling libertarians who were spreading the word of libertarianism in what they billed as "Liberty On Tour," funded at least partly by Koch-backed organizations like "Students for Liberty."


The Nation: "George Donnelly, a libertarian colleague of McLain's who writes that he "loves" her traveling libertarian friends in Florida and "learned a lot" from them, also happens to be one of two men behind the WeWontFly.com, one of the main websites pushing the "National Opt-Out Day" movement. The domain was registered on November 3, 2010, five days before McLain's fake airport incident. Donnelly provided McLain with the funds to return back to her libertarian commune in Keene, New Hampshire, after the (fake) incident."


You know why I was in Florida? The trip was an f-ing birthday gift from my mother, so I could visit a boy I had a crush on. I was going to see a boy I liked. Thats it. And it actually didn't work out that well for me in the end, in case you'd like to rub some salt in that wound too.

Before I had booked the trip, I checked on the TSA's website to determine which airports had body scanners, and Ft. Lauderdale was not listed. I had actually gone to the airport assuming I had done my due diligence to ensure I wouldn't have to encounter one of these machines. When I was chosen for the body scanner, I honestly had no intention of not going through screening; however, I WAS very nervous and uncomfortable with both the options the TSA were giving me, so I attempted to ask a few questions to remedy my discomfort. What happen as a result of those questions was not only unintended, it was downright frightening.

I didn't even know if the friends I was visiting were still in the area, and I could have easily gotten stuck sitting outside the airport with no money, and nowhere to go. I was lucky enough to get ahold of them, and they rescued me from the horrible incident. I was asked to call in to Free Talk Live shortly after and tell the story of what had just happened to me, so I did. I never expected it to be put in the media spotlight, as I didn't think it was that big of a story.

It wasn't until the next day that I even "met" (online only) George Donnelly, who had heard me on FTL the night before, and made the audio into a video for his website. While I didn't mind him doing that, I didn't want the attention of the media (The Nation's article is a glaring example of why entering the public eye is a horrible idea). I did the first few interviews simply as a way to raise funds so I could get back home, by promoting a chip-in that many people were kind enough to donate to. However, after the media started, I began getting thousands of emails. While many of them were less that friendly, much more of them were from victims of TSA abuses writing to tell me about their experiences and offer their moral support. It was these hundreds of heart breaking responses that made me continue responding to media after raising the money to get home. These people were hurting, and they had no voice to express that. I didn't want to be that for them, but I had to do something. If nothing else, shed light on the issue. I was fully aware that it meant more long hours, headaches, and enduring more of the most hurtful and mean things ever said to and about me.

This whole thing was never an intention. I never sought out fame over a situation I never wanted to be in to begin with. I haven't gained anything from it. And I sure as hell was never asked to do it, or offered payment for it. I have had weeks of stress, hate mail, heartbreak, and a massive loss in productivity, which has taken a financial toll on me. I marvel that The Nation would be so brazen and heartless to make up an entire story about a nice young girl from a little town in Oregon, and turn her into some key player of a domestic terrorism conspiracy, which now puts me at risk for any number of horrific consequences including government investigations, personal attacks, and other such nightmares. All this without making one effort to contact me to confirm the facts.

So all I have left to say to The Nation Magazine is:

Your journalistic integrity is an embarrassment, and you should be ashamed.

[*Note: Thanks is given to Meg for allowing me to reprint her piece on my blog.]

Why Should We Care About Juan Williams and His Firing from NPR?

National Public Radio's (NPR's) most recent decision to terminate Juan Williams' contract because of his incendiary rhetoric towards Muslims on The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News certainly exemplifies the paranoid paradigm of today's mainstream conservatives and their cronies on the network. It also epitomizes how viscerally prejudicial and bigoted the "feelings" of commentators like Juan Williams and Bill O'Reilly are towards the Muslim community, especially when the 9/11 hijackers were not from Iraq or Iran but from Saudia Arabia, Egypt, and a few other regions of the Middle East. It's convenient for the Right to ignore Williams misrepresenting the views of Times Square bomber Faisal Shazhad, who has gone on record stating the following:

[T]he past nine years the war with Muslims has achieved nothing for the U.S., except for it has waken up the Muslims for Islam. We are only Muslims trying to defend our religion, people, honor, and land. But if you call us terrorists for doing that, then we are proud terrorists, and we will keep on terrorizing until you leave our land and people at peace.

It should be noted that the Associated Press reported Shazhad's statement in quotes at his sentencing May of this year. Sadly, the Washington Post, like other media sources that wanted to spin the issue and take Shazhad's statement out of context, took it and deliberately misquoted it by stating:

We are only Muslims . . . but if you call us terrorists, we are proud terrorists, and we will keep on terrorizing you

The Washington Times, as another example of the mainstream media lying about and doctoring the quote, took Shazhad's publicly-entered statement and distorted it, saying:

'We are only Muslims … but if you call us terrorists, we are proud terrorists and we will keep on terrorizing you,' he told U.S. District Judge Miriam Cedarbaum.

USA Today has committed the same offense as the other sources:

'We are only Muslims ... but if you call us terrorists, we are proud terrorists and we will keep on terrorizing you,' [Faisal Shazhad] said.

But let's get back to the Williams-NPR mess.

The most salient point about the Juan Williams-NPR matter is: why should we care about this "issue" in the first place? Conservatives like Sarah Palin, Newt Gringrich, and Republican Congressman John Boehner are up in arms over the firing in the first place, considering that "liberal" Williams' views are more in line with the conservatives than the progressives, despite his claim to the contrary.

More to the point, the above-mentioned party wants NPR defunded by an act of congressional legislation, as though they are suggesting the state continues to fund the organizational machine itself. The fact of the matter is that the federal government does NOT fund NPR at all, at least not since the early 1980s. While principal funding did come directly from the state from the 1970s to the beginning of the 1980s, that simply ceased to be the case in 1983 when corporations, charitable foundations, and private individuals account for 40 percent of its budget. Only 16 percent of NPR's revenues - 6 percent coming from local governments and the other 10 percent coming from the federal government as CPB grants - are doled out by the state. That's a meager amount of tax dollars being spent on an organization that may or may not be politically influenced by George Soros and MoveOn.org (although I would agree that such funding from those sources should cease), as Bill O'Reilly and his co-horts allege. (The operative word being "allege" here.) The rest of its funding comes from annual fundraising drives that keep the company in business. Let's not omit the fact that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which does receive federal subsidies, only grants 1.5 percent of its funds to NPR. So the conservatives have no solid legal grounds to stand on with regards to their smear against NPR surrounding its alleged federal funding. (Fox News' claim that its "federal funding" has gone down from its previous fiscal year and that the Obama administration has sent $50,000 in grant funds to NPR to "retain an arts desk reporter" is very dubious, given that there is no viable, proven source to verify that nonsense.)

As for Williams' firing, the jury is in regarding this ruckus. Williams did state the following:

When I get a plane, I gotta tell you. If I see people in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried, I get nervous.

That constitutes a "feeling," which is highly irrational and nonsensical (although it is somewhat less insidious than what O'Reilly would say about the Muslim world). I, for one, live in the Metro Detroit area in the Southeastern Michigan region (in the suburbs of Detroit), and I can emphatically declare that I myself don't "get worried" about and "get nervous" around Middle Easterners in public, even if they are clad "in Muslim garb." Are the conservatives tacitly claiming that the 9/11 hijackers wore such attire? If they are, then they are fundamentally wrong. The terrorists on board those planes were dressed in Western clothing. How would the right-wing talking heads know otherwise? Are they privy to some clandestine information that we know nothing about? Besides, why should Williams care about what Muslims wear? He's been handed a $2 million, 3-year contract by the conservative network; thus, it's not as if he really lost everything and should be worried at all. With that in mind, he had nothing to lose simply by voicing his anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Sad to say, many Americans share Williams and O'Reilly's viewpoints. (Unsurprisingly but still unfortunately, one of the Morning Joeys agreed with Williams' sentiments. It doesn't help that Pat Buchanan came to Williams' defense over his remarks.) It doesn't even help further that Joe Scarborough, the head talker on Morning Joe, states that the country's "prejudice" towards Muslims is "natural." I hate to rain on Scarborough's parade here, but it is not such a thing by any stretch of the imagination. It's an artificial construct, thanks to the hysteria created by the state and its pervasive discriminatory and hateful sentiments and views towards Muslims and Arabs in the Middle East and suppression of the Arab-American and Middle Eastern peoples' reactions to the U.S. federal government's diabolical invasion and occupation of Middle Eastern terroritory (specifically Iraq and Afghanistan). Worse, Iran and Pakistan (the latter of which has been the target of Obama's drones within the last year and a half) have long since been added to the list of targets as part of the Leviathan's list of the Axis of Evil. (Remember that, people?)

Sure, NPR CEO Vivian Schuller apologized for the way she spoke out against Williams, and yes she remains unapologetic about her decision to terminate Williams' employment. (I give it up for conservatives to criticize Schiller for her indecent comments about Williams keeping his comments between him and his psychiatrist, but that's as far as I go with that.) So what? Once again, why should we care about Juan Williams being fired from a network that simply was well within its legal rights to disassociate itself from a commentator who made some inflammatory statements about Muslims, despite the fact that he did argue with O'Reilly's smug, arrogant contention that "Muslims attacked us on 9/11." (By engaging in that discussion, Williams was showing that he wanted his cake and eat it too.)

After all, Schiller did mention that Williams was asked repeatedly by her and the NPR powers-that-be to knock off using NPR's name to identify himself on his Fox News appearances last year. Obviously, he refused to listen. And this business coming from the Rightists that Williams was "censored" is poppycock. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment. Censorship, despite what the Fox News gang and many talking heads across the political spectrum say, isn't the issue. NPR was well within its rights to get rid of Williams, and so it did.

As far as I'm concerned, Williams, O'Reilly, and those who are defending and tolerating anti-Muslim bigotry across the spectrum (like Whoopi Goldberg) are self-righteous jerks who are full of themselves. It is the height of smugness, hubris, and vanity of these pundits to embrace the irrational, racist, and prejudiced logic of Williams and Co.

It's too bad that many writers and other bloggers, with the dazzling, spectacular, and brilliant exception of Salon's Glenn Greenwald and Sheldon Richman, are not speaking out against this.