Live Through This And You Won't Look Back

Nearly 7 years ago, I left Florida, the place of my dreams. I moved there because I was in love with sunrises over Sebastian Inlet, catching snook under the lights at nights, and the Orlando nightlife. I was very happy there, and I had no intention of ever leaving, but life decided otherwise.

In 2006, after a series of failed relationships, I met my ex-wife while working at Sprint in Orlando. It was a good job, not one that I was excited about, but it paid the bills. Very quickly, she moved in and promised me that she would be the best thing I would ever have. Within no time at all, thanks to her, I was in two car accidents in three days.

In a fog of pain pills, I agreed to marry her. I never planned on having kids, but she did, and made sure that she was pregnant before I slipped the ring on her finger, even though I didn't know.

It wasn't long before we hit financial issues. Once she realized that she couldn't stay unemployed, she took off and I didn't see my children for nearly a year after they were born. An old Navy girlfriend and I lived together for a couple more years in Florida, but I wasn't happy and decided to set off for greener pastures somewhere else. My job at Sprint had hit a dead end because I blew the whistle on fraud after 4 years of service.

A family member told me they could help me start a new life in San Francisco. I didn't want to leave my kids behind and Florida was where I was happy. Unfortunately, due to the poor job prospects and the threat of Florida's government to throw me in jail for being in arrears on child support, which I was paying, I hopped on a plane to California.

That quickly fell apart. Within two weeks, I was on a bus to Lafayette, Louisiana with just enough money to hit the dollar menu at the various McDonald's the Greyhound bus stopped at.


My luggage was stolen or lost in Houston. The only things I had left was a few t-shirts and some underwear when I was finally rescued by my mother in Lafayette. There was no money, no car, no job - but it was time to start all over again.

For the first few weeks, I had nothing. I picked pecans from the yard to buy some cheap beers from the store that was a mile away. I eventually landed a job back in the restaurant industry that I had hoped to never work in again. When I got my tax return the following spring, I was able to buy an old Honda and started looking for work elsewhere.

I finally found a niche job in the tech industry here and started rebuilding my credit. In 2014, I was in a horrific car accident where I was hit by a drunk driver, and the settlement allowed me to purchase a new vehicle and pay off some old debts. I then moved into an apartment, then purchased my own home. I've eaten some tremendous Cajun food and put on a few pounds, then trolled the ever-loving fuck out of our local bigots on our news channels.

Through all of this, I supported my kids. Not long after I moved here, I went on a blind date to a hockey game, and we've been together ever since. Her son is like my own. When we first got together, he associated my visits with a trip to the local crawfish joint, which is the cutest thing ever in my mind.

I purchased my home in the hopes that someday I would have custody of my children who were still in Florida. Their mother has an ongoing drug problem and had the kids removed from her custody multiple times before. Back in March, DCF finally stepped in again, and eventually released them into my custody on June 20th at the New Orleans airport.

My house is full now. We have three kids, two cats, and a dog who sleeps between us every night. We aren't rich financially, but we are comfortable in a house we own. We can afford the things we need and we have family that cares about us. I work for the local union and fight for worker's rights, writing some satire for The Red Shtick, along with running the website and the progressive Facebook pages I own. On days that I'm not at work, I whip up meals from my imagination and years of restaurant experience for my family - which gives me incredible joy.

All of those years ago, a friend introduced me to this song and said it would help me get through. He said that one day I would live through this, and I would look back one last time. How right he was.

Yes, Virginia, There Are Liberal Bullies

Over the past few years, a number of people, especially my friend John Henry, have been singled out for harassment by a group of people who call themselves liberal page admins or liberal trolls. Other people like the owner of Americans Against The Tea Party were the targets of extortion attempts which tried to get them to turn over the access to their Facebook page.

These attacks are nothing new, and have existed from the beginning of our page, but they have ramped up their efforts to include attempting to breach the website instead of simply being a nuisance and insulting myself and friends of mine.

As one example, here is a recent screenshot of yet another Facebook page created solely to annoy John Henry, and nothing else.

Why would they do that? Because these individuals are obsessed with harassing us and anyone who stands in their way.

My friend Erin Nanasi has also been bullied by anonymous Facebook pages with names like "Pot Meet Kettle" (now offline) who have mocked her and her family - all in an attempt to force her and her blog off Facebook, even after she stopped writing for my former website, Forward Progressives.

Since that time when I first called out these "liberal" websites and others like them for being as unethical and slimy as the conservatives they blog about, I have had my personal Facebook suspended multiple times after waves of false reports, as has John Henry and other people in our circle of friends.

Why do people who call themselves liberals do such things and why would they perpetuate falsehoods, distort the truth, or be just as ugly as the right-wing Tea Party conservatives they claim to be better than? It's simple, it's all about profit, and not furthering the liberal cause.

In the liberal blogosphere, it is a cutthroat game of tentative alliances between page owners who work together to maximize page traffic to their websites - or take payments from site owners to post their links. These are people who promote themselves as champions of the liberal cause against the right-wing, but care more about the money they can make from web traffic to their articles instead of publishing factual information that would further the left's agenda - the same thing Gawker has done with scandal stories for the past 12 years.

Utilizing these sketchy SEO tactics isn't a unique thing, other liberal bloggers like Lou Colagiovanni, Omar Rivero of Occupy Democrats and Samuel Warde (they all know each other) have all resorted to proxy alliances with a group of individuals that will harass and falsely report people who will not work with them, especially anyone who is critical of their brand of hyperbolic and false "liberal news."

Around the same time we were hit with the cyberattacks on the website I formerly wrote for, we were also the subject of an article by a blogger we believe to be the leader of the group that was originally hired by the folks at Addicting Info to target my Facebook page for harassment. Thomas Clay, Jr of American News X wrote a blog which falsely accused Forward Progressives of being a Tea Party plant, and relied on falsely reported Zoominfo data to make their claim.

In fact, they even boasted about it on one of a number of pages that have been blocked from interacting with mine and Forward Progressives.

Seriously, who sits around all day and makes up Bitstrips mocking people in hopes they can drive that person to the point of quitting political blogging? As I've said before, these aren't conservatives to the best of my knowledge, these are individuals who portray themselves as valiant liberal writers leading the charge against the Tea Party and the GOP. Except they aren't. They're really little more than political grifters hoping to make some easy cash off gullible liberals who will believe anything they see on social media.

In fact, one of the writers for American News X is one Steve Ahearn, the owner of a Facebook page called Stop Telling Lies About Liberals And We'll Stop Telling The Truth About You, and a former admin of my old Whiskey and the Morning After Blog page. He was finally removed from my page after he and others mentioned continually harassed an acquaintance of mine, David Haberman, over starting a GoFundMe account to be able to afford dental surgery. This is all while Steve Ahearn constantly begged for money over a period of years, claiming that his children were hungry, his car was out of gas, or that their power was about to be shut off. This is why he continually makes pages just troll mine, because former drug addicts who believe in conspiracy nonsense are so reputable, right?

Mr. Ahearn, along with his friends who include Kevin Plamondon, Thomas Clay, Jr and Sean Conners of American News X have apparently been working together to harass anyone who will not work with them. They claim I am "jealous" of their "success" but these are people who gauge their accomplishments on the size of their pages, and the size of the ad revenue checks they receive each month.

It's a sad story for liberal politics when people are so driven by profit and notoriety that they resort to the attacks that I and other have dealt with for the last 3+ years. The problem is it isn't going to stop anytime soon, as you can see by the obsessed comments from Sean Conners below, which I am screen-capping in chase he decides to delete them.

Bullies try to use back channels and they try to isolate people so that they can win. I have been the recipient of these attacks ever since I first started calling out Being Liberal and their friends back in 2012.

In case they want to continue their campaign of bullying and extortion attempts, I have many more screenshots of their antics that I will be more than happy to post as updates to this story.

I am never, ever going away. After 3+ years, I'd think you would have learned. UPDATE 10/11/2016: My email account is being spammed for porn and other subscriptions by a Louisville, KY IP address. I have reached out to the IP provider.

@TWC_Help @TWC the owner of IP address 74.141.223.101 is harrassing me and spamming me with porn subscriptions. Please address this. pic.twitter.com/CDymYKSgo6

— (((Manny Schewitz))) (@MannySchewitz) October 11, 2016

12/21/2016: I am now being slammed with trolls and writers from some of the same sites once again. One of them is Tiffany Willis of Liberal America who claims she never heard of Ed Brayton from Patheos who called out her site, yet here she is in the comments of that article.

Update: http://traffic.libsyn.com/podcastfakenews/Episode20420-206_3_172C209.2420AM.m4a

Once Again, I've Been Plagiarized By Fellow "Liberals"

I've been running this blog now for a little more than 5 years. Since October of 2010 when I ended up in Louisiana due to a series of events that included the economy, my rocky relationship with Sprint, and a bitter divorce - I've managed to crawl my way back to a position I never imagined possible when riding that Greyhound bus from San Francisco to Lafayette, Louisiana.

I ended up here with a quarter left in my pocket, and relied for almost a year on my conservative Republican mother who I love dearly, despite our disagreement on issues like abortion, or the fact that Bobby Jindal sucks. Since the day I stepped off that bus, only to find all of my luggage was stolen, I've worked my way back to a life better than the one I left behind in Florida.

In this time, I developed a following for my personal thoughts here on Whiskey and the Morning After, as well as my regular contributions on Forward Progessives which I have been doing for almost three years now.

When I first started, I was surprised that people beyond my small circle of friends which includes people of all political persuasions, wanted to hear what I had to say. Five years later, we've grown Forward Progressives to over 300,000 followers, my public Facebook page to over 30,000 - and have seen people from all around the world leave comments on my latest musings about science, religion, and whiskey.

It's also both flattering and maddening when other individuals with little or no creative abilities have decided to take my original content and pass it off as their own. As an example, today I found out that far-left/libertarian website Free Thought Project basically plagiarized my story about Muslim clerics rejecting extremists. Then another site that has previously plagiarized my material copied their story, and also passed it off as their own.

As a writer, I fully understand deadlines and presenting stories that your colleagues have missed, but representing someone else's story with little or no credit is plagiarism - especially when you take their story and just change a few words.

I've dealt with this for years, and my long beef with Being Liberal and their website Addicting Info goes back to 2012 when images I had made were being used to promote their page, with no credit to me. Since I've called out Addicting Info, Occupy Democrats and other people in their circle of friends for not properly crediting sources, or just for widely exaggerating stories for additional traffic to their websites - I have periodically been subjected to mass reports against my page and harassing emails.

These aren't angry conservatives who are upset about my ruthless fact-checking of their lies, these are people who call themselves liberals or progressives who want to easily profit off the hard work and creativity of others - without giving the original creator any credit.

These organizations do not care about advancing liberal causes as much as they care about putting money in their pocket monthly from ad revenue checks - and they don't mind ripping off original content creators to do so.

Banned from Facebook for speaking out about rape?

A fan sent this to us. Apparently you can make nasty jokes about raping people, threaten to rape someone or post photos of a woman passed out drunk saying "she asked for it".

However, God forbid you post a status or comment such as this, which earned them a Facebook ban, simply because someone felt some type of warped outrage that someone would try to stop it.

And Mark Zuckerberg is wondering why his stocks continue to tumble.

Here's the picture that got me the last Facebook ban

I got banned from Facebook for 3 days for making fun of the KKK. Apparently it is ok for people to post racist pictures, post links to porn or even have a fan page devoted to the recent mass murderers in Wisconsin and Colorado. However, make fun of racist assbags and find yourself in timeout. This is the second time I have gone to Ban Antonio for mocking the KKK specifically.