No, none of the above. He’s too well-known now to try to slip into a new identity. The libertarian community is where virtually all of his bread is buttered. He has nothing else. It’s not like he could just pivot to some other field of focus, or some other audience, or even some other line of work, really. All he knows is how to quote Austrian economists. So there’s really no way for him to try and start fresh with something else. Plus EPJ is too popular to walk away from (especially at this point), even with everything seeming to be crumbling.
I seriously doubt he’ll confess, but he’ll no doubt just keep pumping out posts on EPJ. That’s what he always does. It sure seems like it’s all he does. It’s all he knows.
There’s no way to try to spin this; no matter how you go about it, it looks bad…so he’ll just do the obvious and ignore it.
But yes, I foresee his traffic diminishing, and EPJ perhaps surviving for quite some time, but as a shell of its former self. I have little doubt he won’t see the kind of income he’s seen in the past, and certainly not the growth. He may find some way to sensationalize something every now and then and get some attention, but he’s far too limited in range and skill to really branch out in any other way…which is why even after so many years, and building up essentially a bare-bones default Blogspot template to one of the most traffic-ed libertarian websites, his greatest accomplishment is giving a speech at the LvMI. (And another to two guys in the Liberty Room of the Federal Reserve building over lunch, of course.)
Diddo, but honestly to the degree I feel bad, it’s only out of a general human sensibility, deep deep down. Overall I feel that he’s getting only a small portion of what he deserves (although I admittedly do not know the full extent of everything going on with his life). He brought all this on himself. It’s his castle of shit that he built, and now that the wind started blowing a little, it’s (predictably) turning into a shitstorm. That’s what happens. And what’s more, he’s the one who voluntarily started heating the air, with all his childish attacks and tirades, and never being able to leave anything alone and move on.
He basically asked for this.
I suppose that’s what happens when someone with a self-esteem/ego problem, who has to make up identities to throw against the wall to see what sticks, and make up lies to try and gain traction, finally starts getting some of the attention they crave…it gets to their head, and they get sloppy and careless. And start digging their own grave.
Bingo.
