Well, who has lost touch with the light? I don't think it's me. But Louise is extremely self-sure of her "truths," to say the least.
She asked me to write for her during her short-lived editorship at Heat Street (a publication whose days are numbered, it turns out), but nowadays she never responds when I say hello on Twitter. She's ensconced herself in a cocoon.
In any case, the very sharp Charles C.W. Cooke has a new essay on Louise's "investigations," at National Review, "Louise Mensch’s Destructive Fantasies":
Mensch, a former British MP, is now the purveyor of fantastical conspiracy theories about Donald Trump and Russia.Keep reading.
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...
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