Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, the right-wing zealot and anti-education activist, has gained attention in the past for neat stuff like suggesting that uneducated people are so useless they should be burned. Well, Byrne has a new gambit at present, and it’s slimier than ever.
In an effort to divert attention from his company’s latest brush with the law — a criminal investigation of its advertising practices by the Marin County DA and four other California counties — Byrne has enlisted a former editor of Columbia Journalism Review’s online “Audit” column, an eccentric ex-journalist named Mark Mitchell, to smear critics of his company.
