Back when I was a mere lad, I thought it was a bad thing to be on the receiving end of an MSM attack.
And in early 2005, was I ever getting bombarded. I had a bestselling book that told forbidden truths, so I was to be destroyed -- in the New York Times (on the editorial page!), the Boston Globe, and other prominent outlets.
Some things they said were outright lies, which shocked me. (What can I say? I was naive.) Other things were just plain name-calling -- but career-destroying names, so still pretty serious.
Other things had a grain of truth to them, but explaining myself would have taken time, looked contrived, and kept the controversy going. My defense would have had to be: yes, X is true, but here's why X isn't really what they say it is.
That wasn't going to help.
Fair-weather libertarians didn't know what to do with me. The head of a public-policy think-tank I'd written for suddenly scrubbed me from its website. (Years later, when everyone liked me again, he acted as if nothing had happened. I decided to let bygones be bygones.)
Around that time I had dinner with Pat and Shelley Buchanan in Washington, D.C. Pat had been friendly, singling out my book on The McLaughlin Group and featuring me on MSNBC when he was filling in for Joe Scarborough.
I told him what was going on.
His response: "Where there is no solution, there is no problem."
He told me that at public lectures of his, there would be hostile people in the back distributing some column he'd written in 1977. There ain't nothing you can do about people like that.
What can you do?
Keep producing content. Keep churning out bestselling books. That, he said, is the best revenge. Screw these people. Just keep doing what you're doing, and be consistent.
Well, there's one thing I did a lot of. And it won me a big audience, one that has stuck with me through thick and thin.
This thing I did is good for a lot more than just recovering from a massive MSM attack, which of course few people ever experience. It can make you stand out, it can increase your income (by a lot, if you know what you're doing), and build you your own audience.
If you're not doing it, you're sabotaging yourself. I don't know how else to put it.
It's this: