The Baloney Brigade Gets a New Recruit

Happy day! The anti-naked-shorting loons have a valuable new recruit to pump their discredited cause -- a far-right, Holocaust-denying, Jew-baiting, conspiracy-mongering wingnut by the name of Daryl Bradford Smith. 

 A reader points out that Smith has lately been promoting the baloney cause, and touted one of Patrick Byrne's more moronic interviews, in his website iamthewitness.com. It's right there on the front page, next to a "Jewish ritual murder" rant and the latest JFK conspiracy theories. 

 Smith is widely known in tinfoil hat circles and is on the farthest fringes of the conspiracy circuit, as you can see from the collection of trash on his website. He blames "Zionists" for 9-11 and asserts that the Apollo moon landings and the Holocaust never happened. All a conspiracy, you see. "They" are to blame. 

 A massive "stock market conspiracy" is right up his alley! 

 Not surprising that this kind of creature is crawling into the big Baloney tent. Judging from my emails, fringe characters and bigots stand tall among the ranks of the anti-shorting nuts. My favorite is the idiot who posts obscene rants as comments to my blog, and then whines on message boards about "censorship" when I delete them. 

Bigotry among the stock market conspiracy nuts is a well-established phenomenon. Blogger and investor Jeff Matthews first wrote about it in posts such as this one over a year and a half ago, resulting in vicious attacks against him by Phil Saunders a/k/a "Bob O'Brien," who handled the job of anonymously smearing Byrne's critics until the job was taken in-house by Judd Bagley. (Speaking of which, I wonder if the SEC is probing Byrne's links to, and possible compensation arrangements with, the kooky Saunders?) 

Hey, I don't blame the balonies for their infatuation with far-out causes. You know the old candy commercial -- sometimes you feel like nut, sometimes you don't. These mutts feel like a nut all the time, and for obvious reasons. 

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved. 

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6. Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.