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In the world of vague, anonymous Internet threats, few profiles are written.

Here’s one of the rare exceptions: Dan Riehl, a writer for BigGovernment.com, says he tracked down Jim Shankman, the Madisonian who penned a threatening ultimatum for UW-Madison law professor and nationally-followed conservative blogger Ann Althouse. Big Government is a national conservative website that has covered the Wisconsin protests and was apparently worried about those threats to Althouse.

jim shankman

Shankman, according to Riehl’s profile, “is currently unemployed, claims to not be a member of a union and says he most often works as a dishwasher when employed.” Shankman’s political leanings are non-traditional. He says he’s a progressive or a “distributionist” who believes in re-distributing the world’s wealth to the poor.

He admits to writing a ranting threat to Althouse and her husband, Laurence Meade, who have covered the Madison protests – and not sympathetically – on Althouse’s blog.

Shankman has done some blogging of his own, but his former blog at the Scribd.com website is nowhere to be found, perhaps because, as Riehl writes, he intends “to pull back some from social media.” Shankman told Riehl that he has earned his own blog wars scars and has “felt or actually been threatened via multiple blog comments on conservative blogs over the years.”

His ultimatum to Althouse and Meade essentially asks them to either retract past statements about public employee unions, donate to some political causes of Shankman’s choice and stay at least 20 feet away from the statue of Civil War Col. Han Christian Heg outside the state capitol – or leave town. (Meade reportedly removed protest signs from the Heg statue.)

This upset Shankman, who wrote, “You don’t f—king touch Hans Christian. Ever.”

Shankman (and an unnamed group of others) also promised to hound Althouse at her favorite Madison haunts unless she agrees to his demands. “We will harass the ever loving sh-t out of you all the time,” Shankman writes.

And then he’ll visit her home, although it sounds like he took vandalism lessons from Wally Cleaver: “We will throw our baseballs in your lawn, you cranky old pieces of sh-t, and then we will come get them back.”

Althouse responds with a video posted on her website: “You don’t know at what point this edges over into real violence or whether it would inspire some other person to violence … Some people are not helping their own cause.”

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