In deleted post, AVFM’s Paul Elam threatens to spread dirt on journalists “like gonorrhea in a whorehouse.”

Elam offered no evidence whatsoever to back up these alleged facts, which appear utterly ridiculous on their face.

He also deliberately took a statement by Dan Perrins way out of context in order to defame him.

Here’s the statement Elam is evidently referring to, as Sharlet presented it in his GQ piece:

For Dan Perrins, one of the security black shirts, it was the day he ended up in jail, after he says he lodged a complaint against his ex, the beginning of a legal battle that led him to a hunger strike. “I should have killed the bitch five years ago,” he tells me. “I’d be out by now.”

I would be interested in seeing the “context” that Elam evidently thinks will make this statement smell better.

Elam continued with somewhat less lurid accusations against two other writers, charging Buzzfeed’s Adam Serwer with “blend[ing the] claimed woes” of former family members “with a pack of lies and us[ing] that to disparage me on Buzzfeed,” and Mother Jones’ Mariah Blake of doing “a complete con job … cherry picking everything she could in order to paint a false picture of myself and Warren Farrell.”

And then Elam, warming to his subject, laid out what he had in mind for these writers and others he feels have wronged him in print and online.

So far, we have only responded to all this treachery with refuting the material written about us on our page. This was far more civil than these people AND THEIR ENABLERS deserve.

In the months ahead we will be teaching some of these people, all that we can, a lesson or three about what happens when you go too far in provoking the wrong people.

So, you can bet right now that if Jeff Sharlet, Mariah Blake, Adam Serwer and a whole lot of other people have dirt in their backgrounds, we are going to dig it up and spread it around like gonorrhea in a whorehouse.

That goes for their family members and embittered exes as well. Two can play at that game and it is our turn.

Oh, but he wasn’t done. He also claimed he would go after

every employee, especially senior management, at publications like Mother Jones, GQ, Buzzfeed, Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Houston Press, Maclean’s Magazine, and many more.

And why stop there? Elam then threatened to bring his crusade not only to “[t]hose who have libeled us, or work for a publication that has libeled us” but also to “everyone they know,” whom he declared “fair game for a fair and certain return of what they have dished out.”

That’s right: everyone they know.

How exactly Elam figures that someone who happens to know someone who works for Time magazine, say, could possibly be held responsible for anything in that magazine is not exactly clear.

Elam went on to promise that “[u]nlike them, we will only print what we can prove,” a claim that seems rather dubious given AVFM’s long and unglorious track record with “proof.”

He then claimed to have connections to “some people with real reach” who would be able to bring his alleged “proof” to the world.

He ended with a virtual declaration of war:

We have tolerated this abuse for far too long. We are done playing nice with miserable, lying hacks.

And this creepy coda:

Now I can go on to have a fantastic day.

Apparently Elam gets quite a boost from threatening to ruin the lives of people who happen to know people who happen to know people he doesn’t like.

But this boost doesn’t seem to have lasted long. With even some of his supporters suggesting he was going too far, Elam deleted his post and replaced it with an apology of sorts, though he didn’t actually take back any of the accusations he had made.

Luckily for us, Google remembers what Elam would like everyone to forget.