If you haven't read the takedown article on Blake Neff, I highly suggest it.

This was a targeted assassination. A way of tainting the new king of cable news by taking down a member of his court.

It's not like Neff made it hard for them. What a colossal fuck-up this guy was:

CNN Business was able to positively identify CharlesXII as Neff by reviewing messages he has posted throughout the years on the forum and matching them up with publicly available information about him.

Oh really? Like what?

Among the details which make clear that CharlesXII and Neff are the same person: CharlesXII indicated on the board that he had gone to Dartmouth; Neff is an alumnus. CharlesXII said he had been working for nearly four years in his current journalism job in Washington DC; Neff has been working for Carlson at Fox in Washington since February 2017

Well... that doesn't sound so bad. It's all just circumstantial evid...

Even more clearly identifying, however, were photos that CharlesXII posted to the forum in 2018 to the forum after visiting a museum in Egypt. In three of the photos, a reflection of Neff is visible snapping the pictures in the artifacts' glass enclosures.

Jesus fucking Christ. My apologies to tradcath readers, but honestly, I don't understand how these people can be so fucking sloppy with their lives, their language, their careers, and most importantly, with the people's lives who went out on a limb to hire them.

You get a job as a writer putting words in the mouth of an anchor that reaches millions of people each night, a voice that shapes the national conversation, a direct line to the fucking POTUS, and you risk everything to engage in some Middle-School-level racist shitposting for the accolades of strangers? And top it off by posting some selfies for good measure?

Fuck it. Forget I said anything.

Yes, he was stupid and vain and irresponsible, but in the end, does it matter? Should it? Eventually it will be all of us. Having a controversial opinion isn't a crime, or at least they haven't been able to make it one yet. But it's getting awful close. Once upon a time in this country, you were allowed to be a human being, with all the glorious messiness and contradiction that entails. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

Society everywhere is in a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.[...] Whoso would be a man, must be a non-conformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

If you would be a man speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

When does the CNN article canceling Ralph Waldo Emerson come out?