By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, July 20, 2017
A few years back, my father and I voluntarily submitted
ourselves to an episode of Question Time,
a long-running program on the BBC on which sundry British politicians try to
sound as indignant as possible while expressing nothing whatsoever beyond the
day’s conventional wisdom. On the panel that evening was one Louise Bagshawe, a
Tory MP from London who had a gig on the side as a writer of teen-girl books.
“That woman,” my dad said to me about half-way through the show, “is one of the
dullest people I’ve ever seen. Even for Question
Time.”
So much for plus ça
change.
Today, Louise Bagshawe is Louise Mensch, a show-woman and
a fantasist of world-class ability. No longer a member of Parliament, Mensch
now lives in the United States, where she spends at least 18 hours a day
filtering current affairs through the mind of Edward Lear. Over the last six
months, Mensch has unleashed her unfiltered stream-of-consciousness on the
denizens of her new country — both in short-form on Twitter, which she uses in
much the same way as a woodpecker uses a wall, and in longer episodes on her Patribotics blog, which describes itself
as “Pro-America, pro-democracy, pro-NATO, pro-Russia, anti-Putin,” but which
seems most consistently to be pro-clicks. In both arenas, she has made sure to
set herself at the thriving center of a hive of unfastened theorizing and
molten-hot dudgeon. If a hot topic can be linked to Donald Trump or to Russia,
Louise Mensch will manage it. And if it can’t, she’ll manage it too.
In theory, Mensch represents the fact-checker’s
deepest-held fantasy — the moment for which all that training was contrived and
intended. In practice, she is uncheckable and unaccountable in precisely the
same manner as is a primal scream. Mensch reads like a woman who speaks civics
as a third or fourth language that she lost touch with long ago. She has a
pidgin grasp on the American settlement, and an ersatz, bastardized
relationship with reality. One part novella-fantasy, one part hallway-hearsay,
Mensch’s world is one in which an ethereal “they” are omnipresent and
omnipotent. “They,” she tells us, are considering executing Steve Bannon,
though he hasn’t been charged with so much as speeding in a school zone. “They”
have already “sentenced” Rudy Giuliani — to what fate we will presumably find
out when someone next mentions his name on television. “They” will soon
overturn the election results, and are on the verge of making Orrin Hatch
president. Donald Trump, in turn, is perennially but a few steps from the
gallows. On the 13th of April, Mensch promised that the “first arrests may be
as soon as next week.” Yesterday, she related that the president faced imminent
“federal execution.” Presumably, “they” just needed some more time.
Usurpation abounds, at home and abroad, and seems never
to be walled in by anything as prosaic as the law. Mensch’s Supreme Court has
proactive police powers and a Bruce Willis–esque “marshal” who chases down
helicopters and colludes heroically with the rogue justices. Her Congress acts
primarily in camera, and may already
have informed Trump that he is no longer permitted to use his legal powers. Her
FISA courts issue indictments they have no authority to present. And the rules?
They’re suggestions, really. The America of Mensch’s imagination is a place in
which the entire Republican party is imminently going to jail — on RICO
charges, no less — because Paul Ryan is a partisan. What the Da Vinci Code was to Christian theology,
Louise Mensch is to James Madison’s handiwork. See how the symbols line up in
the moonlight?
It is on the subject of Russia, however, that Mensch has
really hit her stride. In the derailed opium den that is the extended Patribotics universe, Vladimir Putin is
not a brute and a bully, so much as an ubiquitous, Svengali-like puppeteer of
the sort whose use as a domestic cudgel would have made even the John Birch
Society blanch. Per Mensch, the Kremlin is universal: It was behind the riots
in Ferguson; it was behind the candidacy of Bernie Sanders; it helped to
sabotage the congressional campaign of John Ossoff; it “catfished” Anthony
Weiner, causing Hillary Clinton to lose the general election; it planned and
orchestrated the recent terror attack on London Bridge, along with the bombing
of the Boston Marathon in 2013; and, most perniciously of all, it has set up
vast, bipartisan network of spies and secret agents that include Sean Hannity,
Matt Taibbi, Evan Siegfried, Glenn Greenwald, and, well, anybody who has the
temerity to tweet at her in a tone of which she disapproves. As a solution for
this infinite interference, Mensch has a modest proposal: Bomb Moscow.
In a more sensible world, a woman such as Mensch would be
running around a train station warning commuters about the spaceships in the
lavatory car. In America, 2017, alas, she was first elevated to the head of a
News Corp property and is now is at the heart of what has become a popular and
widely read conspiracy movement, which not only indulges her endless flights of
hallucinatory fancy but repeats and retweets them under the heady imprimatur of
“reporting.” Along with Eric Garland, Claude Taylor, Andrew Laufer, and a few
other sorry victims of early onset absurdity, Mensch provides hope and
titillation to the illiterate and the credulous, more than 250,000 of whom have
elected to follow her on Twitter. In the course of her breakdown she has ensnared
some of those you’d imagine she’d ensnare — Joy Reid is a fan, naturally, as
are Ted Lieu and Keith Olbermann – but she has also managed to attract some of
those you would not. To his intense discredit, Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe has
shared her material on more than one occasion, which should serve as a welcome
reminder that brilliance in one’s field in no way guarantees the possession of
common sense.
“Rumor,” wrote Shakespeare, “is a pipe, blown by
surmises, jealousies, conjectures, and of so easy and so plain a stop, that the
blunt monster with uncounted heads, the still-discordant wav’ring multitude,
can play upon it.” Indeed so, and one can only reflect with a sigh upon the
number of blunt monsters to whom the web has handed a lectern. Nevertheless,
those many uncounted heads invariably need conductors to play the role of the
metronome, and Mensch has gladly become the beat that leads this sordid fray.
Back in the days of Question Time, we
were all dead wrong. She’s no drib-drab from Corby, nor workaday purveyor of
bargain-bin beach-reads; she’s precisely the Pied Piper that our moment needs
the least.
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