On Clare Locke and L'affaire McHugh
How the Israelis manage this stuff
I’m not going to mince words here, an attack on Virginia’s fraternities is an attack on the United States. This is where the children of the deep state go, and it’s where the deep state recruits. It is not something to be messed with.
The way to think about the “Rape on Campus” matter is that it’s a typical Israeli extortion operation, in which the blackmail and extortion sides are kept separate, just like with Gaetz. They’re very good at this. Sabrina Rubin Erdely publishes the fake story in Rolling Stone, then Clare Locke, a highly Israeli law firm, comes in afterward to get a big judgment out of the university on behalf of Dean Eramo.
They also repped NSO Group and Adam Neumann. In August, after they got a big win against Fox in the Dominion case, four partners left, including the one this letter came from. I’m not sure what that’s really about.
My run-in with them in 2018 is interesting given some of these things that have come to light in the past year. At the time, I was in graduate school out in Kansas, writing for the London Spectator and the Catholic Herald. When I heard Katie McHugh had decided not to be a Nazi anymore, I helped her.
When I got wind of it, she had been in talks with The Atlantic, and Rosie Gray was the reporter. She was dumping all her emails, which ended up implicating a bunch of the far-right guys who had made their way into the Trump administration, which were of course dripped out for maximum impact, building a narrative that the administration had a big problem there.
McHugh was keen to tell her own story, rather than have Gray do it for her. So I tried to come up with a means for her to do that. She wrote up a draft, which I still have, and which the Spectator declined to publish. Their reasons for that are their own, I still don’t fully understand why the Brits get skittish about certain things and we don’t, and vice versa.
I don’t question the decision to assign a reporter to her story either, rather than the way I thought it might be done. That’s fine. It’s certainly true that McHugh was a troubled young woman. But I do note that The Atlantic is edited by a dual citizen, and Buzzfeed, where the story on McHugh eventually appeared, was at the time edited by Israeli asset Ben Smith. So my strong suspicions all along were that this was the Israelis trying to manage the story.
I need to be careful here, but I am one of a handful of people able to compare the discrepancies between the Buzzfeed story and the draft McHugh wrote herself, which is rather torrid so I’m not going to quote from it. There are some that seem significant. There are two boyfriends of hers in the story: one is Kevin DeAnna, and the other is Ben Zapp. In the draft she wrote herself, Zapp is named but DeAnna is not. In the Buzzfeed story they are reversed.
McHugh’s reasons for that, I inferred, were that she felt that Zapp had wronged her, but DeAnna, though she claimed to find his views repugnant by that point, at least had not mistreated her. I told her I respected that, but if you’re going to come clean, you probably need to really come clean and name both of them, a standard Buzzfeed was not up to.
This section of Rosie’s story is a lie, and she knows it’s a lie because she has the same emails I do, and plenty of publicly available information shows what a lie it is:
I would simply note that there’s a double standard here, with Buzzfeed eagerly jumping on the #MeToo and #BelieveAllWomen trains, and this looks to me like the Israelis choosing a guy to protect. Maybe because he’s actually a source, maybe because to be in the real estate business in New York you have to be on good terms with the Hebrews, I have no idea.
But this stuff happens all the time. One way to look at the Steele Dossier is that it’s the Israelis doing that oppo dump in a way that protects their other assets in Russia and Ukraine, many of which are now, finally, getting the scrutiny they deserve.
There are a number of other funny intersections between this alt-right world and the mainstream conservative media, the most important being Peter Brimelow, who wrote the biography of Rupert Murdoch that never came out, and has occasionally alluded, in reference to it, that his children have great health insurance.
It’s sort of taboo to publish a cease-and-desist letter, but in this case there are matters of national security and public interest here, so I’m doing it. I don’t know if Buzzfeed’s reason for their omission was that they had gotten similar threats, but there you go:
A few things to say about this letter. I suspect the story leaked, or was hacked, out of the Spectator newsroom somehow. Their client was DHS policy analyst Ian Smith, about whom a story was eventually run in The Atlantic.
Two days after this letter was sent, I got an email from Smith, in which he says someone had told him it was me behind this “attack” on him. I had published a few of his op-eds, and had lunch with him once. He’s a talented policy analyst, and I agree with a fair number of the views he expresses in his op-eds, but he had fallen in with the wrong crowd, and it wrecked his career. I didn't reply, because for one thing he had just threatened to sue me, and for another there was absolutely nothing I could have done for him at that point. Two weeks later the story in The Atlantic appeared.
If I were the one behind this, why would I be giving it to publications edited by neocons? I am one of their most inveterate critics. Does that make any sense?
So it’s Israeli-aligned law firms and publications that are all running these pieces and sending out threats, and it’s BAP’s Israeli network that’s smearing me and managing the fallout.
The question is why. There is, I would simply say, a major advantage to Israel in keeping the far-right stuff going, it’s a very important way in which their interests diverge from those of American Jews. It’s what allows the ADL to extort tech companies, and it creates demand for the security software produced by 8200 alums, which is then sold to DHS and the FBI.