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The bizarre rise and dramatic fall of Louise Mensch and her Blue Detectives
https://thinkprogress.org/blue-detectives-collapse-trump-russia-a42a94537bdf/A 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.”
At the outset of the Trump presidency, this crew looked like it might have something to add to the conversation: on national security, on America’s degraded democracy. But one year later, they look little better than their target in the White House — especially when it come to peddling the conspiracy theories that provide comfort to both ends of the political spectrum.
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.”
At the outset of the Trump presidency, this crew looked like it might have something to add to the conversation: on national security, on America’s degraded democracy. But one year later, they look little better than their target in the White House — especially when it come to peddling the conspiracy theories that provide comfort to both ends of the political spectrum.
Malcolm Nance had her pegged from the very beginning.
Sid
43 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
to Malcolm Nance!
It is really discouraging to see these people and their tweets seriously discussed on DU. Mensch, Counterchekist, Schindler, Claude Taylor, Rick Wilson, Dena Grayson, Palmer, etc. I also question Joy (still love her show) giving Dworkin face time.
More info about him here: https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=10098501
Response to SidDithers (Original post)
