How does Ben Penn sleep at night?

He is, as John Podhoretz put it, a miserable prick, either stupid or utter garbage.

He caused a guy to lose his job over a blatant mischaracterization:

"Establishment RINO corporate tool Paul Ryan was finally brought to heel in tonight’s primary election," Leif Olson wrote on Facebook in August 2016. "The guy just suffered a massive, historic, emasculating 70-point victory. Let’s see him and his Georgetown cocktail-party puppetmasters try to walk that one off."

Olson went on to exchange with another Facebook user an obvious joke, based on the conspiracy-laden and anti-Semitic online following of Ryan's opponent, that Ryan must be secretly Jewish, a fact proven (obviously!) by the media's failure to report that he is a Jew.

Based on all this, we conclude that Olson has a pretty wry sense of political humor. But Bloomberg reporter Benjamin Penn thought differently. He chose to "unearth" the above Facebook conversation by maliciously misconstruing it. And because his editor foolishly allowed him to frame it dishonestly as an anti-Semitic remark, Olson felt compelled to resign his post at the Department of Labor rather than cause controversy. 

This must not be allowed to stand. We hope that Olson will be restored to his position and in the most public way possible. Think of it as a needed a dagger through the eyeball of online "cancel culture" and a way to humiliate those who traffic in it.

Without the full contemporaneous context, the hilarity of Olson's Facebook post might go unappreciated. So let's go back in time to 2016.

Olson was referring to Speaker Ryan's overwhelming primary election victory on Aug. 9, 2016, against a kooky fringe Republican primary challenger named Paul Nehlen. Although it was only later that Nehlen outed himself as an overt anti-Semitic white nationalist, his fans — there were many online, but not so many in the electorate — were already mostly racist alt-right fanatics who disparaged Ryan in obscene terms as a traitor responsible for all sorts of nefarious conspiracies. 

Nehlen never had even the slightest chance in his 2016 race against Ryan. Most thinking people weren't surprised when he finished with just 16% of the vote. Yet over the course of the four months leading up to the election, Nehlen had been built up into a folk hero of the online far Right, mostly by the editors of Breitbart.com, who published more than 70 articles about his campaign. (Of course, some liberal outlets also tried to build Nehlen up and exaggerate his chances.)

Just hours before the magnitude of Nehlen's humiliating loss was to be laid bare, Breitbart's Matt Boyle wrote this ridiculous sentence: "The sitting Speaker of the House, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), has been brought to his knees, bowing down before the almighty nationalist populist movement, as his life’s work -- a career in politics -- flashes before his eyes." 

From this, you get some idea of just what Olson meant with his withering sarcasm after Ryan won by a mere 70 points. In fact, in a follow-up post at the time, Olson pointed to that specific Boyle quotation as the inspiration for his initial post. 

This must be fought not only for Olsen's particular situation, but because the enemy would have had significant success in eradicating sophisticated satirical writing from the public square, in dumbing down our culture even more.

Did I say "enemy"? Damn right I did. This is war.