I remember Ben Domenech from the early days of the blogosphere, around 2002. At the time he was about drinking age and was a wunderkind junior contributor at National Review. He also ran a blog of his own.

I got in a blogwar with Ben, way back in the day. We were arguing about the ethics of stem cell research. Ben was a pompous jerk about it. At one point he even called me a racist, as though I give a flying fuck that Ben’s a spic. I was so annoyed with his dickery that I nicknamed him “Genital Ben”.

A year or two later, Ben got busted for plagiarism. It was a stale bust, for some inconsequential thing he did in his teens, but it was plagiarism and Ben had to go away for a while. I popped a little schadenboner over it, because Ben had pissed me off before.

A few years back, Ben’s byline began to appear in respectable company again. At first I was miffed and wanted to know if anyone other than me remembers anything. But Ben’s publication, The Federalist, was turning in valuable work.

Valuable work is anathema to the left, of course. So NBC created a task force to stamp it out. This week that task force narced out The Federalist and Zero Hedge to G**gle on some risible claim or other. It’s not yet clear what’s going to happen to The Federalist; Zero Hedge appears to have been successfully demonetized.

That’s right. A seller of news dialled up the advertising monopoly and politely requested that accounts be cancelled for a couple of competing sellers of news. And the monopoly appears to have complied most willingly, on the flimsiest of rationales.

I have no love for Ben Domenech, but at this point I’d take a bullet for him. Nobody deserves to be persecuted like this.

(As a show of support, I have added The Federalist and Zero Hedge to my blogroll. Stop by and give ’em a dime.)