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Louise Mensch is a hack conspiracy theorist.not a journalist
Posted on: November 14, 2018 at 10:28:52 CT
Spanky KU
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Even 'ThinkProgress' dismisses her as a loony tune.
https://thinkprogress.org/blue-detectives-collapse-trump-russia-a42a94537bdf/
year ago, as Donald Trump prepared to take office, a new crop of self-proclaimed investigators burst forth to unspool the Russian conspiracy they claim launched Trump into the White House. Leaning on Twitter as their preferred platform, these voices worked to unwind the Kremlin ties that, in their mind, cost Hillary Clinton the election.
Led by British gadfly Louise Mensch (269,000 followers on Twitter currently) and going by a handful of names and hashtags — including #TeamPatriot — this coterie largely avoided any kind of original reportage, instead opting to try to piece together open-source information that they believed journalists elsewhere had overlooked. In the early days of the Trump administration, they were, as BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel wrote, a “mooring force” for the anti-Trump “Resistance.” With Mensch’s 2017 op-ed in the New York Times on Russian hacking, this group — which Warzel termed the “Blue Detectives” — appeared ascendant.
A year on, though, the group is in tatters, roundly mocked by experts on Russian-American relations, ignored by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his staff, and barreling quickly toward irrelevance. Where these “Blue Detectives” once looked like they may unearth some kind of smoking gun linking Trump and the Kremlin — or could at least help fill in certain missing pieces of the puzzle — they are now as derided, and derisive, as their earliest critics pegged them. They have become, as Deadspin noted, “the InfoWars of the left.”.....
....Take Mensch, for example. As the New Republic’s Sarah Jones noted, Mensch — called a “conspiracy queen” by the Daily Beast, and a prolific romance lit writer — has no background in Russian studies, nor a “degree in any subject that would grant her anything close to expertise on Russian politics.” (Unfortunately, that didn’t prevent Vanity Fair from the embarrassing choice of naming Mensch as the top Twitter feed to follow for Trump-Russia developments.)
It didn’t take long after Trump’s inauguration for Mensch’s conspiratorial colors to shine through. Not only did she claim Anthony Weiner was sexting with a Russian hacker instead of an underage girl, but around the time she was published in the New York Times — a move that, according to at least one report, sparked a “civil war” between the Times’ news and opinion sections — Mensch, citing zero evidence, said she believed Russian President Vladimir Putin had “murdered” Andrew Breitbart.
But these bizarre, outlandish claims weren’t Mensch’s most well-known brush with ignominy. A few months later, Mensch and Claude Taylor (214,000 followers on Twitter currently) — a volunteer director during the Clinton administration, and someone dubbed by New York Magazine as Mensch’s “sidekick” — were publicly duped by a hoaxer, who convinced the pair that Trump’s former fashion model agency was facing impending indictment as a hub for sex trafficking. As the hoaxer told The Guardian, she’d grown frustrated with their “dissemination of fake news,” and purposely provided falsehoods that Mensch and Taylor happily shared.....
https://thinkprogress.org/blue-detectives-collapse-trump-russia-a42a94537bdf/
year ago, as Donald Trump prepared to take office, a new crop of self-proclaimed investigators burst forth to unspool the Russian conspiracy they claim launched Trump into the White House. Leaning on Twitter as their preferred platform, these voices worked to unwind the Kremlin ties that, in their mind, cost Hillary Clinton the election.
Led by British gadfly Louise Mensch (269,000 followers on Twitter currently) and going by a handful of names and hashtags — including #TeamPatriot — this coterie largely avoided any kind of original reportage, instead opting to try to piece together open-source information that they believed journalists elsewhere had overlooked. In the early days of the Trump administration, they were, as BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel wrote, a “mooring force” for the anti-Trump “Resistance.” With Mensch’s 2017 op-ed in the New York Times on Russian hacking, this group — which Warzel termed the “Blue Detectives” — appeared ascendant.
A year on, though, the group is in tatters, roundly mocked by experts on Russian-American relations, ignored by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his staff, and barreling quickly toward irrelevance. Where these “Blue Detectives” once looked like they may unearth some kind of smoking gun linking Trump and the Kremlin — or could at least help fill in certain missing pieces of the puzzle — they are now as derided, and derisive, as their earliest critics pegged them. They have become, as Deadspin noted, “the InfoWars of the left.”.....
....Take Mensch, for example. As the New Republic’s Sarah Jones noted, Mensch — called a “conspiracy queen” by the Daily Beast, and a prolific romance lit writer — has no background in Russian studies, nor a “degree in any subject that would grant her anything close to expertise on Russian politics.” (Unfortunately, that didn’t prevent Vanity Fair from the embarrassing choice of naming Mensch as the top Twitter feed to follow for Trump-Russia developments.)
It didn’t take long after Trump’s inauguration for Mensch’s conspiratorial colors to shine through. Not only did she claim Anthony Weiner was sexting with a Russian hacker instead of an underage girl, but around the time she was published in the New York Times — a move that, according to at least one report, sparked a “civil war” between the Times’ news and opinion sections — Mensch, citing zero evidence, said she believed Russian President Vladimir Putin had “murdered” Andrew Breitbart.
But these bizarre, outlandish claims weren’t Mensch’s most well-known brush with ignominy. A few months later, Mensch and Claude Taylor (214,000 followers on Twitter currently) — a volunteer director during the Clinton administration, and someone dubbed by New York Magazine as Mensch’s “sidekick” — were publicly duped by a hoaxer, who convinced the pair that Trump’s former fashion model agency was facing impending indictment as a hub for sex trafficking. As the hoaxer told The Guardian, she’d grown frustrated with their “dissemination of fake news,” and purposely provided falsehoods that Mensch and Taylor happily shared.....
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Louise Mensch is a hack conspiracy theorist.not a journalist - Spanky KU - 11/14 10:28:52