{"id":180020,"date":"2017-08-06T18:08:00","date_gmt":"2017-08-06T23:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/08\/06\/one-of-the-rules-of-whacked-out-conspiracy-theorists\/"},"modified":"2017-08-06T18:08:00","modified_gmt":"2017-08-06T23:08:00","slug":"one-of-the-rules-of-whacked-out-conspiracy-theorists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/08\/06\/one-of-the-rules-of-whacked-out-conspiracy-theorists\/","title":{"rendered":"One of the Rules of Whacked Out Conspiracy Theorists"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>No matter where they start, all end up blaming the Jews, case in point, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/scroll\/242583\/louise-menschs-new-conspiracy-it-wasnt-the-russians-it-was-the-jews\">Russia conspiracy nutjob Louise Mensch<\/a>:<\/div>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">You can say a lot of things about Louise Mensch, everyone\u2019s favorite conspiracy theorist and unhinged internet troll, but you can\u2019t accuse her of not knowing how to spin a good yarn. The author of novels like Venus Envy and A Kept Woman\u2014the titles give you a pretty good idea of what\u2019s inside\u2014is a natural storyteller, a gift she\u2019s been using lately on Twitter to convince her hundreds of thousands of followers that she is, as my friend Jamie Kirchick <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/the-brit-grifters-and-the-designated-american-suckers\">wrote<\/a>, \u201cperpetually on the cusp of exposing a massive conspiracy on the part of Russia, dating back decades, to make Donald Trump president of the United States.\u201d Yesterday, Mensch introduced an unexpected plot twist to her Twitter potboiler: America wasn\u2019t hacked by the Russians alone; the Jews helped. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">One Jew in particular: Bibi Netanyahu, dark lord and, apparently, apprentice to puppet-master Putin. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Because the pleasure of indulging in lunacy lies in the minute details, here goes. The saga began last night, when Mike Cernovich, himself a fan of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, tweeted to protest the firing of Derek Harvey, a National Security Council official sacked by National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, suggesting that Harvey was let go because of his allegiance to Israel. Another Twitter user responded and accused Cernovich of being an agent of a Russian-sponsored coup d\u2019etat. It was precisely the kind of language that summoned Mensch into the fray. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cLove you sir\u201d she tweeted back, with all the subtlety of an oversexed British boarding school adolescent. And then, having warmed up to her subject, she continued: Obama, she tweeted, was right to despise Netanyahu. Oh, and Netanyahu was colluding with Russia to help Trump take an ax to the beating heart of American democracy.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">What is Netanyahu, then? And where\u2019s the proof of his subterfuge? What\u2019s up with the RISSAD, which used to be called the Mossad but which Mensch has renamed Russian Israeli Trolls Loyal to Moscow Over Jerusalem, suggesting Israeli intelligence, too, is in Putin\u2019s pocket? And why rehash, as Mensch did this morning, the <b><span style=\"font-size: 100%; font-variant: small-caps;\">ridiculous canard that Chabad is secretly a vessel for connecting the Kremlin and the Knesset<\/span><\/b>?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Anyone who had two brain cells to rub together knew that Mensch was an addled conspiracy theorist, but because it fit a narrative, she got an OP\/ED in the <i>New York Times<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>Even if Russia did everything that they have been accused of in exactly the manner accused, and the evidence is at best sparse, it is neither unusual nor unprecedented behavior.<\/p>\n<p>US interventions in foreign elections, including Yeltsin&#8217;s 1996 reelection in Russia was far more extensive, including tacit support of vote fraud, as was Winston Churchill&#8217;s intervention by his intelligence agencies in the 1940 US Presidential election.<\/p>\n<p>As I&#8217;ve said before, Donald Trump&#8217;s election was a perfect storm of many factors, but the entire, &#8220;A noun, a verb, and Vladimir Putin,&#8221; crap serves only to gloss over the very real institutional failures of the Democratic Party, and as such continues to set it up for electoral debacles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No matter where they start, all end up blaming the Jews, case in point, Russia conspiracy nutjob Louise Mensch: You can say a lot of things about Louise Mensch, everyone\u2019s favorite conspiracy theorist and unhinged internet troll, but you can\u2019t accuse her of not knowing how to spin a good yarn. The author of novels &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[581,364,405,414,455,406,403],"class_list":["post-180020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-conspiracy","tag-evil","tag-presidential-campaign","tag-psychology","tag-russia","tag-stupid","tag-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180020"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180020\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}