“Sure as corn chiggers in August.”

When former U.S. Capitol Police officer Shauni Rae Kerkhoff filed a federal defamation lawsuit against me, Steve Baker and Blaze Media on April 21, I began the countdown. For as sure as corn chiggers in August, I knew the media blowback was coming.

How quick would the legacy media and allied left-tilting outlets be to declare victory for the plaintiff and condemn our coverage of Jan. 6 and the infamous pipe-bombs case? How quick would they be to ridicule us as incompetent boobs pushing “conspiracy theories?”

As it turned out, as quick as a jackrabbit on a date.

Corn chiggers and a jackrabbit. I tip my hat to Woodrow Huckleberry Tiberius Boyd, the Indiana-raised bartender at “Cheers,” and Jean Shepherd, the writer and narrator of the holiday cult film classic, “A Christmas Story.” Thanks for the inspiration. I digress.

The leftward media — also known as the Palace Guard, the former Mainstream Media, and the Drive-Bye Media — did not disappoint. They never do.

The pounce happened within hours of the lawsuit hitting the U.S. District Court docket. Then came the pile-on. It reminded me of playing backyard football as a kid. If you ever recovered a fumble, you knew the pile was coming for you. Oof! Oh! Ugh! Ouch!

Among the first contestants to play was The Bulwark. “Blaze’s Crackpot Reporting Prompted a Wild, Unnecessary FBI Raid,” harrumphed the publication led by former neocon and current never-Trump liberal, Bill Kristol.

Let’s not let facts get in the way of a good narrative.

“Crackpot” or otherwise, our reporting on Kerkhoff and the Jan. 6 pipe bombs was not published until as long as 36 hours AFTER the FBI’s visit to Kerkhoff’s home in northern Virginia. Kerkhoff was not identified in Blaze reporting until well after the FBI departed from her home.

The Kerkhoff lawsuit says the raid on her home was on Nov. 6. Capitol Police sources told Blaze News the afternoon of Nov. 7 that a raid was taking place. When Blaze editor-in-chief Chris Bedford visited the home the evening of Nov. 7, there was a significant law enforcement presence at and around the home.

If our reporting caused the FBI raid, it should have preceded the raid, yes? It should have preceded the FBI polygraph administered to Kerkhoff on Nov. 6 — nearly two days before our story was published. It should have preceded the FBI naming her as a person of interest in the case and opening a file on her on Nov. 7, according to a court filing.

It is amazing to think we could have such influence at the FBI, and their raid tactics should be laid at our feet. I saw no condemnation of the FBI for the show of force brought to Kerkhoff’s home, but a lot of wagging fingers saying it was all our fault.

The Bulwark continued in the subhead: “Quickly debunked reporting based on ‘gait analysis’ was enough to get the feds to descend with a helicopter on a falsely accused J6 pipe-bomber’s home.”

I’ll hand it to them. They squeezed three fat falsehoods into one sentence. Quickly debunked and falsely accused. Both are conclusions not backed by evidence. The FBI acted on a story that no one had yet seen? Ah, no.

No-effort debunking

Neither our Nov. 8 story nor the gait analysis has been debunked by anyone. Such a feat would require the investment of hundreds of hours of research to know the pipe-bombs case well enough to render informed opinion or pass judgment. It was clear in media coverage and social media commentary that most had not even read our extensive coverage of the pipe-bombs investigation.

But by all means, post your math and receipts showing how, when and where this debunking took place. I won’t wait. “Quickly debunked” is an empty phrase used to smear and discredit those whose ideas and views are disfavored by the left.

Our Nov. 8 story said Kerkhoff’s gait, or manner of walking, was a 94-percent match to that of the hoodie-clad pipe-bomb suspect shown on the (digitally manipulated) FBI video. The match was scored by an advanced computer algorithm run by a 30-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence community.

As we explained in Part III of our Brian Cole Jr. series, gait analysis—the study of how people move—has been used in criminal cases since at least 1840. It’s not bogus, voodoo science or discredited. United States military intelligence uses it. The FBI has long used gait analysis. One of those analyses was apparently done on Kerkhoff at the request of the FBI, according to court filings. Other federal law enforcement agencies also use gait analysis.

From the start of its investigation, the FBI noticed that the hoodie-clad suspect had a distinctive feature to his or her walk, according to Washington Post reporting done for the book, “Injustice,” and reported in the Post’s news pages on Nov. 14, 2025. The Post said the FBI had looked at a gym employee as a person of interest.

“The person came under further scrutiny after he initially lied to agents about a leg injury, according to people familiar with the investigation,” the Post article said. “Agents wondered if the injury could have accounted for the odd gait seen on security footage.”

The odd gait seen on security footage. An important detail. The FBI noticed the suspect had an “odd gait.” However, the published version of “Injustice,” by Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis, did not include this reporting.

It is ironic, but we tried to hire the same forensic podiatrist apparently engaged by the FBI to evaluate Kerkhoff. We described the work of Dr. Michael Nirenberg in our Brian Cole Part III story—long before we knew Nirenberg had been given surveillance video of Kerkhoff walking, “likely for a gait analysis.”

Because we say so

The most common tactic I saw in news coverage of the defamation lawsuit was the snap conclusion.

The New York Times said Kerkhoff was “wrongly implicated” in the pipe bombs case. Huff Post, once a staple in left-leaning circles, concluded that Kerkhoff was “falsely accused.” No hearing or research necessary. These are facts … because we say so…

Raw Story cherry picked a phrase from the lawsuit and made it the banner headline: ‘They simply made it up.’

Law & Crime jumped into the act, repeating the “made-it-up” calumny. Then they suggested Steve Baker was fired for the Nov. 8 story. Not true. His firing had everything to do with him bristling at internal censorship restraints, but was in no way a punishment for the story. Neither of these “made-it-up” standard-bearer publications bothered to contact us for comment.

British tabloid The Independent repeated the same aspersions, quoting the suit claiming we failed to “follow basic journalism standards.” Speaking of standards, The Independent misspelled the former police officer’s name as “Kerkhoof” in the subhead and the story. Oopsie.

MS Now repeated the popular “made it up” claim in a headline on Yahoo News. The outlet surprised on one point, however, using a fair description of me compared to the lawsuit’s laughable claim I was seeking “professional relevance.”

One thing you can get away with in lawsuits is to pile up defamatory statements against your target without fear of consequences. The “made-it-up” charge is not only nonsense and patently untrue, but it rises to the level of agitprop. They know better, because detailed information was supplied to them this past winter by Blaze attorneys. Narrative.

The lawsuit alleging defamation also commits it.

Julie Kelly, once considered the dean of Jan. 6 journalism, took things to an extreme, accusing us and Blaze of putting Kerkhoff’s life in danger with our “reckless” reporting. Julie got her timeline wrong. The Blaze story came as long as 36 hours AFTER the FBI raid and the Kerkhoff polygraph exam.

On Nov. 6, Blaze paused publication of the story after “an abundance of counsel” from “trusted parties within and outside the government…” That delay lasted some 36 hours.

These tactics are second nature to the left and its myriad mouthpieces. You can find inspiration for them in “Rules for Radicals,” a 1971 book by community organizer Saul David Alinsky (1909-1972). He dedicated the book to Lucifer.

Rule 11 of Alinsky’s dirty dozen says this:

The media have long used this to drive the coverage they produce.

Many of them climbed in bed with Big Pharma, elite scientists and government bureaucrats to freeze and polarize anyone who challenged the Covid narrative, the deadly “vaccine” and the massive medical and social fallout from the largest psyop in history.

Here are just a few of the favorite weaponized phrases and statements:

• Anti-vaxxer
• Conspiracy theorist
• Election denier
• Conspiracy theorist
• Insurrectionist
• Conspiracy theorist
• Rioter
• Conspiracy theorist
• Far-right media
• Conspiracy theorist
• “Ivermectin is just horse paste, y’all”
• Conspiracy theorist
• “Two police officers died on Jan. 6”
• Conspiracy theorist
• “Stormed the Capitol”

Get the picture? Just a few key phrases, wielded like a cudgel, to discredit, humiliate and silence those pesky conspiracy theorists.

If you don’t carry their water, you will be isolated and attacked. The ripple effects are sometimes huge, as hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants discovered by getting de-banked, their employers attacked by the rage mob, and facing coordinated smear campaigns on social media.

Ask the know-it-alls to do some original research on the pipe bombs and Jan. 6? That’s not likely to happen. But it’s not too much to ask: Don’t pass judgment on things you know next to nothing about.

Here is your reminder, dear reader: these folks are not your friends. Independent thinking and inquiry will not be tolerated. And in case you start following independent journalism, your superiors will be there to correct you. Or debunk you. Quickly.

You wouldn’t want to be called a conspiracy theorist, would you? •

P.S., Explore details from our years of reporting on the pipe bombs. Above: AI image by Grok showing Woodrow Huckleberry Tiberius Boyd on the farm in Hanover, Indiana.