It's Saturday evening, all is quiet, and I can't stop thinking about BartCop. [View all]

[WilliamPitt]

I don't have a lot of words for this. His passing hit me in the heart.

All these years of slogging, many of them with voices of the online Left considered irrelevant...until we got a little more notice, and then a little more, and somewhere along the way, we started to throw some weight.

BartCop was the real beginning of that, I believe. He was the pioneer. Every day, day after day. He published me 16 years ago, before anyone had ever heard of me (or had any reason to). A lot of the leading lights of the online liberal community can say the same, as well as the folks who sent him an email which he posted and highlighted. BartCop made me feel like I wasn't crazy, and gave me a megaphone I never would have had otherwise.

He helped me learn to think.

I missed the Beatles craze, but in some odd way, I feel tonight the way Beatles fans felt when they heard that John Lennon had died. Maybe that doesn't make sense, and I apologize if that ruffles any Boomer feathers...but this is what I do, and this is who I am, and BartCop was the first of us. We are because he was.

And he will always be.