Don’t Menshn Antifa Hoax

Times are increasingly difficult for (thankfully) former Tory MP Louise Mensch, whose piss-poor website Heat Street website had the plug pulled on it by the Murdoch mafiosi, made an ever bigger idiot of herself than could have been imagined on the BBC’s Sunday Politics, and more recently was rumbled by the Guardian basing her claims on details supplied by someone who turned out to be a hoaxer. Now she has gone one better.

Being hoaxed? Pah. This pales into insignificance when put alongside the achievement of hoaxing oneself, if only in the degree of stupidity required to accomplish the task. And Ms Mensch has indeed hoaxed herself, as her increasingly paranoid world has seen one Russian plot too many. All it needed was an inactive web domain.

The anti-fascist movement across the USA has attracted a lot of attention recently, most of it from the far-right trying desperately to paint it as disruptive and violent. Ms Mensch is in a quandary on this one: she dislikes the far-right, but is a good conservative. So she found just what she was looking for: “Well, well, well. If you thought #Antifa was a pathetically obvious Russian plot you were right. Antifa Dot Com registered in Russia”.

A fellow Tweeter tried to warn her: “Louise... it's not even an active website. Take some vitamins and go for a walk”. This is correct: antifa.com is inactive and is at present parked, displaying nothing more than a few adverts. Why might that be?

Tom McKay tried his best to put her straight. “Louise Mensch has really cracked the code on this one” he mused, showing a screen shot of antifa.com alongside her Tweet declaring victory over the dastardly Russians, who, er, weren’t.

McKay had another think about antifa.com and was back with another thought soon afterwards: “I'm not sure how to read elements of that whois but looks awful lot like anyone could have registered it + cloud hosting could be in Russia”. Correctamundo.

He followed that with another correct deduction: “Why wouldn't you host your domain parking sites in a cheap foreign country? Speed is not important”. Heck, if all you’re doing is to park a domain until someone ponies up the money for the name and takes it away to do what they will with it, then yes, if it’s cheap to park with a Russian provider, why not?

Parker Molloy had yet more bad news for Ms Mensch: “Also, this is just... that's not the actual address of the person who registered it. It's the privacy service”. If Louise Mensch wants to be taken seriously, rather than becoming even more of a figure of fun, she could do a lot worse than ask someone to check out this kind of thing first.

Then she would avoid making a clown of herself. But then, as she knows everything about everything, that won’t be necessary. And remember, they allowed her to become an MP.