#ScoobyGang Chronicles #1: Introduction

"Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants"
- Justice Louise Brandeis


I think that the old dead white guy got that one right and so I am going to use my little platform here to explain what is going on with the group I have named the #ScoobyGang (Louise Mensch, John Schindler, Claude Taylor, and all the various creeps, nuts, and losers (the Box of Broken Toys) that Louise has collected around her.)

Most of you probably know me from Twitter, but a quick intro for those who might have stumbled in here without having followed me there. I am not a fictional sea captain or even Bill Murray. I'm an ordinary American citizen who used to enjoy posting my lame attempts at humor on Twitter in lieu of annoying my family. During the summer of 2016, I became much more active on Twitter. Sadly, my epic trolling of Kellyanne Conway is now lost to posterity, thanks to attacks from Mensch's minions (and there will be more about that in another post *wink*) but trust me, some of them were comedy gold. I'm a lifelong liberal Democrat who would love to see our country move more towards European social democracy (but I'm not a Bernie Bro.) I proudly voted for Hillary Clinton last November and I respect her even more in defeat.



I chose to hide my tweeting behind behind this persona for safety reasons because of the Alt-Right / Pepe crowd. Little did I ever imagine that I would end up attacked by a bunch of deluded liberals who have been conned by a wingnut from the UK, but here we are. I am going to tell the story of how this came to pass, because I have realized recently that the giant cloud of smoke and confusion that Louise has thrown up has obscured what is going on here. This is part of her method, and it works, because most people can't pay attention to enough of it to figure out what is really happening. I believe the Russians even have a word for this...

My goal with this series of blog posts is to lay all the facts out there to the best of my knowledge. Because a lot of this stuff is happening behind the scenes, there are certain things I know for a fact and can supply proof and there are other things that I believe to be true, but can't fully prove. To avoid being excessively wordy, I will adopt a convention to show which pieces of information are speculative. So, black text reflects stuff I am 99% confident of and red text is more speculative, but all of it reflects my (incomplete and flawed) understanding of the situation. You are smart people and you've read this far, so you can make you own judgments. I truly believe that or I wouldn't even be bothering with this.

The last personal thing I want to deal with here is the accusation I hear sometimes from people on Twitter - "Why are you so obsessed with Louise? Why do you spend so much time on her? Are you some kind of weird stalker?" Short answer: no, I am not a weird stalker. If you have only recently followed me, you might think I am obsessed with her, but I assure you that's a situation I have found myself in quite by accident. Now that she has chosen to publicly accuse me of being a Russian spy and dishonoring a fallen soldier, I am pretty obsessed, but it didn't start out this way. Ask some of my long time followers about that.

I began following Louise last summer when I first became of the whole Russian troll bot weirdness going on on Twitter. She seemed to be a little ahead of the curve on that stuff and I thought it was possible she had some inside information that might be useful. I was aware of her history, so I went into the whole thing with eyes open. (Pro Tip for the kids: always check out who is providing your information, it's a good way to assess credibility.) Over the next 6 months or so, I followed and unfollowed Louise repeatedly as she swerved back and forth over the line of sanity. After the election, I totally forgot all about her and paid her almost no attention (I think I tweeted at her once in December questioning her understanding of how the declassification process works.) In January, I noticed that I was seeing her stuff retweeted fairly often and I was surprised to learn that people seemed to be taking her fantasies seriously. (Proudest moment - there is a tweet from me to Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior warning them that she was not a reliable source.)

From that time forward, I started to pay attention to her more. It absolutely floored me that ANYONE was taking this nutter seriously, especially after she started posting on her Patribotics blog. When I saw the "Carolina Conspiracy" post and the "Let's Play Chess, Mr Putin" nonsense, I thought that would be the end of it because they were self-refuting stupid. Instead, I began to see more and more retweets. As we rolled through February and March, it began to actually ruin my timeline. I subtweeted her plenty - I had lots of jokes about her workshopping her next spy novel on Twitter, I called her Nancy Drew Teen Tory Detective and other stuff like that. Eventually, I announced that I was un-following anyone who retweeted her crap into my timeline and began doing that. At this point, I think I didn't even have 800 followers, so I wasn't making much of an impact but at least my timeline looked better. I also started running into other people who thought the whole thing was nuts.

Emboldened by the knowledge that I wasn't completely alone, I began to step up my campaign and hit upon the hashtag for which I am now slightly Twitter-famous - #ScoobyGang. It's now on the hashtag selection hints and it's been used by people like Malcom Nance and Joy Reid (who have become our biggest allies.) Yeah, me! We (for now there was a dedicated little group) pretty much naturally settled on a mixed strategy of humorous mocking, some factual debunking, and some one-on-one persuasion of people who seemed open minded enough to listen. From this very small platform, we have had some real successes - Louise's follower count peaked in mid-May at 288k followers and currently sit somewhere around 265k. Given how quickly her followers had been rising over the preceding months, I consider that a real victory for a bunch of nobodies. We began to expand our campaign to other members of her little inner circle (the hapless Claude the Fraude Taylor, disgraced former NSA analyst and professional fuckup John "Dick Pics" Schindler, and the others.)

It's all working well enough, but now we are on the Queen Bee's radar and so she has unleashed hell upon us (as well as attacking more prominent people, like Joy Reid, Malcom Nance, Naveed Jamali, as well as prominent Resistance accounts like Robin, Laura, and Olga. At this point, it should be obvious to everyone that this is a toxic group of people who are here only to cause trouble. They are not your allies against Trump. They are trying to sow confusion and chaos. Malcolm Nance coined them the "Agents of Chaos" and that sums it up perfectly.

I am going to stop here and enjoy my Fourth of July. I will be back to tell more of the story and I hope you will continue to read what I have to say. You don't have to take my word for any of it - go do your own research. I am confident that if you do, you aren't going to believe what has been going on.

 I close with a short message to Louise Mensch and her minions:

I am not going away and I am not intimidated by your bullshit. I am not threatening you, I am just telling you - I will tell the truth and the truth is going to burn your little pretend kingdom to the ground. You picked the wrong guy to fuck with.

Thanks for reading and remember to be careful with the fireworks tonight!

MUCH MORE to come later....