I’ve been a strong proponent of Louise Mensch for many months now, and I’ve gotten a lot of heat for it here at dkos. I’ve written several posts supporting her.
She and Claude Taylor have been way ahead of the MSM on most of the TrumpRussia news. A lot of her detractors say that they have just had lucky guesses, but I do not believe that to be the case. I believe she is getting leaks from the intelligence community—presumably British and other non-American Five Eyes sources who would not be bound by our laws regarded classified info. And I think that the reason those sources leaked to her was because of her enthusiastically embraced role as psyops—to put psychological pressure on Trump underlings to flip.
Both she and Claude Taylor have Twitter accounts and her Twitter feed seems to support my theory. She has often been wrong in her Twitter feed, but always on the side of “immediate arrests are coming”, “Feds closing in”, etc. I’ve lost a couple expensive bets because I believed her Twitter feed, but I don’t hold it against her, especially since it does look like Trump minions have flipped on him. If her lies help bring down Trump she has my admiration and support.
In addition she has both done her own very important TrumpRussia research and led several fruitful crowdsourced journalistic endeavors, like tracking the planes of TrumpRussia players and tracking obscure Internet connections between hackers and TrumpRussia. She also publicized the scoop of Russian hosting of Wikileaks, discovered by a journalist who specialized in the hacker community, Laurelai Bailey, and has helped push other important independent journalists who have uncovered damning evidence against Trump.
Even if she had done none of that, the fact that she published a news article about the FISA warrant BEFORE the presidential election when it could have done some good means that she has earned my support.
She has been relentlessly attacked. Not only have Russian sources and of course many Putinbots attacked her, some of her attackers pretend to be part of the Trump Resistance. As an author of a controversial book, I have been on the receiving end of similar public attacks, although on a much smaller scale, and she has my full sympathy and understanding. She blocked three of my Twitter accounts. During the early months of 2017, she was tricked by the Jester Actual, a notorious hacker, and ended up blocking a lot of people who were her supporters. This gained her enmity among the Resistance community. In addition, Naveed Jamali publicly outed himself as one of her early sources. Since he leaked to her, he has relentlessly attacked her. He has also posted a lot of sketchy things in his Twitter feed and has strenuously pushed the “move along, nothing to see here” line with respect to TrumpRussia. Because he’s a regular guest on JoyAnn Reid’s show, Mensch put Reid in the Russian deza camp, along with Malcoln Nance, Seth Abramson, Sarah Kendzior, Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange (Greenwald and Assange she has considered deza since Ed Snowden).
At first I only believed her about Jamali (and Greenwald and Assange, after the Wikileaks news), but I have to say with the recent activities of the others, she has me convinced. I’m still on the fence about Kendzior, but for someone who purports to be a serious journalist it was weird to read her recent tweets about high death rates from Hurricane Irma—extremely irresponsible.
And I think it’s that civil war brewing in the Trump resistance that is the real reason Mensch is so reviled here on dkos. And I get that. The people she has accused of being deza have a lot of ardent Democratic followers, and it does look on the surface like she is trying to foment division. But those other people are equally attacking her, and I’m on Team Mensch.
In addition, yes, Mensch is a conservative Republican, was a conservative politician in Great Britain, was a recent employee of Rupert Murdoch, and was photographed last summer with Milo Yiannopoulos. I completely understand why people here would think she is the enemy. But she did feature the journalist Laurelai Bailey on her blog, a socialist trans woman. She has publicly repudiated Milo. And she has never hidden her strong Republican views. She is quite upfront about them, but willing to ally herself with anyone who sincerely wants to take down Trump. I believe she is honest in this, and understand her motivations.
All that said, this will be my last diary on her at dkos. I make the one exception—if we do end up with President Hatch or President Mattis. Both are extraordinary predictions and deserve credit if they pan out. On my last diary here I had issued a challenge. I made a distinction between her Twitter feed which she was clearly using for psyops and her patribotics blog. On her blog, even if she made it seem like arrests were imminent, she was also careful in her specific wording to report accurately. I challenged commenters to find an error in her blog. People said she deleted on her blog, but I knew that to be untrue. She has issued three corrections—one correction where she misstated one country in a list of countries, a correction in a blog where she consistently typed “March” for “May” (due to lack of sleep, or it might have been the other way around), and a correction about the age of Weiner’s latest victim. I thought it was a pretty good track record for someone investigating, reporting and running a blog single-handedly. I had both been avidly following her blog and watching the news and had not caught any errors. However, fellow Kossack lothos found this:
This is the source blog from Mensch:
patribotics.blog/…
I have independently verified that these cases do exist. In the Eastern District of Virginia, “Case Name Not on File” was filed on April 17th, with the Movant listed as the U.S. Government.
In the Southern District of New York, also on April 17th a RICO case was filed, with the plaintiff not listed. In the Eastern District of Virginia, the Movant is publicly listed as the US Government – there is less information in the New York Southern District Court.
That is not the work of a journalist. A journalist wouldn’t say “I have independently verified that these cases do exist.” A journalist would say “Two cases that fit the description of these cases exist in the EDVA, I found through my own independent research.”
I agree that it’s important that dailykos has accurate information. If Mensch was not working as a journalist I would give her a pass. For example, Claude Taylor does not claim to be a journalist and has said that he will make mistakes (and has). But Mensch claims both to be a journalist and have a 100% correct reporting rate on her blog. Both need to be called out, and because of those claims I should not have reposted her information here at dkos.
That said, as both a pundit and a republisher of leaks, I think she is spot on. And I will be eternally grateful to her for giving me hope during those dark days after the election. And if she was instrumental in persuading underlings to flip, we all owe her a debt of gratitude.
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