Do you remember Gawker? It’s the trash liberal website that did the wet work of the Democratic Party. Actually, any person who wasn’t in line with their editorial direction was considered an enemy. They were revived in 2021, but we’ll get to that in a second. They have put Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) in the crosshairs. The Arizona Democrat has been put on the progressive hit list for derailing Build Back Better and for voting with the GOP in preserving the filibuster over her party’s federal election takeover bill. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) was her partner in crime, though he faces little to no fallout hailing from deep red West Virginia. The threat of a primary challenger is non-existent for Joe. It’s a threat on the horizon for Sinema. You know the far-left is gathering resources and doing candidate searches. Sinema was chased into the bathroom by activists. Now, it’s become something more serious as Gawker possesses her social security number. Yet, they can’t do anything with it. As some noted on Twitter, it’s like posting an article declaring that you know who someone’s license plate number. Who cares? They did a public information request about her divorce and all this stuff tumbled out:
Last month, we filed a public records request for Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s divorce papers. The request came back with many enlightening insights, such as that the Congresswoman — who wrote the book Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions That Win and Last in 2009 and then declined to unite with her colleagues in passing the Build Back Better legislation that would have funded climate and social benefit infrastructure — kept her 1997 Nissan Maxima SE when she divided and conquered her marriage in 1999.
The records also included some other intriguing information. Specifically, they included Sinema’s social security number, bank account information, and drivers’ license number. It’s possible she has since changed one or more of these (her office did not respond to Gawker’s request for comment). Typically, documents requested through open records law come with sensitive personal information redacted. But in this case, the inclusion of Sinema’s personal information was not a clerical error on the part of the Maricopa County Court; we checked. (For the record, out of respect for Sinema and because we like our jobs, we won’t be publishing her number. The number above is from the Soulja Boy song “Kiss Me Thru the Phone”).
Because the documents were filed in 1999, they were not subject to the county’s current secure system for logging and storing confidential personal information. And because of Arizona’s public records regulations — which make legal documents much more accessible than those in the supposedly liberal states of say, California or New York — the clerk’s office said they were under no obligation to redact that information without a court order. On the whole, this is pretty good for transparency and what remains of the free press. The fallout is that anyone modestly familiar with navigating legal databases can obtain a United States senator’s social security number for $11 in processing fees.
[…]
You can do a lot with a social security number. Unfortunately, if the number in question isn’t yours, most of what you can do with it is a felony. For example, we were hoping to run a credit report on Sinema. But that seems to be illegal if you are not, per Legal Beagle, “a business or individual qualifying a person for a job, insurance, government benefits or tenancy.” (One might argue that any of Sinema’s voting constituents are technically “qualifying [her] for a job,” but none of us is registered to vote in Arizona). We also considered wiring a deposit of $0.69 into her bank account. No theft there. It’s more like a campaign donation and every dollar counts. But the legalities seemed iffy, and none of the lawyers Gawker contacted for comment were interested in indulging our largely stupid game.
New Gawker's sad, desperate, lonely struggle to be noticed. pic.twitter.com/8H3VcwrW7j
— Leighton Woodhouse (@lwoodhouse) February 7, 2022
Not going to link, but Gawker is still made up of complete lowlifes. They are trying to tell people how to obtain the social security number of a US Senator because they don’t like some of her policy preferences.
— AG (@AGHamilton29) February 7, 2022
I won’t be too upset when they are all unemployed again. pic.twitter.com/1WgbIf1onh
We’re the new Gawker. We’re worse than the old Gawker. But we’re all girls.
— Joe Gabriel Simonson (@SaysSimonson) February 7, 2022
Perhaps Gawker still isn’t “nice” pic.twitter.com/jVpFVLwviy
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) February 7, 2022
That’s all this story is. They did a records request that revealed her SSN, and now they want a cookie for doing “real journalism”
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) February 7, 2022
Gawker clearly didn't learn their lesson. https://t.co/HVQ5HnNy6w
— Alex "The Hatman" Baldwin (@TheHat2) February 8, 2022
Gawker be like: We got sued out of business last time as a company.
— Ese (@EseConActitud) February 8, 2022
But... pic.twitter.com/Hz9d9Q7IGB
“Ladies and gentlemen, we got her”
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) February 7, 2022
The best part is that they explain the history of the social security number in this piece. What in the fresh hell is this trash?
It seems Gawker has returned to its origins. Billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel was outed by them. Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against them for posting a sex tape of the former professional wrestler is what ruined them. The judgment against them totaled some $140 million. They had to file for bankruptcy which they did in 2016. Gawker was dead. In 2021, it was revived by Bustle Media under new editor-in-chief Leah Finnegan (via NYT):
From 2003 to 2016, Gawker sometimes spoke truth to power, and other times exposed people’s private lives or sex tapes for no reason. It evolved with the internet, moving from a kind of gleeful nihilism to a brand of self-righteous left-wing politics, breaking some news and shaping online discourse along the way.
When Gawker returned in July, Ms. Finnegan posted a note to readers that, in a revisionist interpretation of what the site had been in its heyday, emphasized a side of it that tends to be forgotten: It was funny.
She also listed, in a document intended for freelancers, the sorts of things Gawker was no longer interested in, including articles that are “sanctimonious,” or “cruel,” as well as any piece that uses the word “neoliberal.” That is to say — quite a bit of what Gawker used to be.
I’d asked to meet Ms. Finnegan at her office, but she works from home and so I found myself at the small dining table in her second floor walk-up.
“I’m not interested in ruining people’s lives,” she said in a flat tone.
That marks a notable change from her time as the features editor of Gawker, in 2015, when her indiscriminate brutality included describing an infant as “hipster scum.” That one prompted a rebuke at the time even from Gawker’s rather coldblooded founder, Nick Denton, who wrote in the site’s comments section that the headline was “just nasty” and that she would regret it. Ms. Finnegan responded that she was speaking “my truth.” (Asked about the new version of the site he founded, Mr. Denton told me in a text: “Finnegan’s take on Gawker not my thing, back in 2015. No opinion on the 2021 revival.”)
Well, that was a lie. Gawker is scum. Its people are scum. Period. I never thought I’d be rooting this hard for a Democrat, but I hope Sinema survives all the challenges and gets re-elected. The re-election of Sinema, a Democrat, is apparently now a triggering event for liberals. What a messy, unhinged, and immoral philosophy we tolerate with these people.
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