After the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog lied about lawyer Aman Thakar, managed to get him suspended from his job, and then lied to cover their tracks, another example of their craft came to light, showing that the Fawkes smear machine behaves very much the same way, whoever is on Staines’ staff.
Frankie Leach
Campaigner and activist Frankie Leach has told that she “Will never forget how it felt when Guido implied I’d given out sexual favours in return for positions in a local momentum group a few days after my *nineteenth* birthday … Solidarity to Aman & every other poor person that’s had their integrity & lives ruined over these ‘scoops’”.
Alex Wickham - rewarded for smears and dishonesty
That’s a particularly nasty smear she’s describing. And although The Great Guido, being of less than perfect courage, took the offending post down, that was only done after it had been left there for the mud to stick for around two years. So what did they say? Deletion was not as effective as they might have thought. The Internet never forgets.
Feared. But only by rickety furniture
First, as Ms Leach has told, “They trawled through my social media and used photos of me from my freshers week at uni. It was quite obvious I was being used to target someone else but they published the name of my university, my course and my full name. All because I went out with someone for a drink”. And how was it spun?
Across those photos was plastered the headline “Lansman’s Secret Election” (Geddit?!?). It went on “Momentum is supposedly a grassroots organisation run by the people, for the people. So how do they elect their national representatives? Meet Frankie Leach, a 19 year-old International Politics student at Manchester Met. Frankie is also a Momentum activist who spent Saturday night boozing with the group’s boss Jon Lansman”.
After telling that Ms Leach Tweeted that she was having a drink with Lansman (and, indeed, others), and that soon afterwards she had been elected as Momentum’s youth and students delegate for North West England, the Fawkes rabble sneers “Guido has no idea what happened in those three minutes, but lefty sources claim Lansman went from a tequila slammer to a sham of an election”. There were no lefty sources. It was made up.
Yes, it was another pack of lies, the author of which, Alex “Billy Liar” Wickham, has now moved on to BuzzFeed News, his move accompanied by congratulations from many in the media establishment who should hang their heads in shame. But won’t be doing so.
Here's another beneficiary of Fawkes smears ...
As Ms Leach has said, “To date I am yet to receive an apology or even a correction that what they printed was borderline libel. Most people on the left have had a run in with Guido, some of it is minor and some of it is life changing. Journalism is journalism and a real scoop is not the same as a lie”. Yet the press establishment welcomed Staines and his nasty little Wild West Show with open arms. That tells you a lot about them.
... and here they are with another pal. No comment
And as for the comments sewer that accompanied the Fawkes nudge-nudgery, the less said about that the better. What happened to Aman Thakar is not an isolated incident. It confirms that when Staines told Esquire magazine “the lying in politics is on an industrial scale”, he managed to forget that he and his pals contribute rather a lot of it.
Don’t call the Fawkes blog “journalism”. It isn’t. It’s a sewer of smears and hatred.
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2 comments:
The most obvious thing about Wickham - as it is of propaganda clerks like Neil, Kuenssberg and Benn - is just how SEEDY are he and his ilk.
All it needs now is for an eternal loser like McTernan to show up to "rescue" the "reputation" of the far right Fawkes gang.
Small beer, though, in comparison to what lies (quite literally) ahead if Johnson gets his fat arse into Downing Street. And where's Toby Jug Young when he's needed to perform his usual function of "explaining" the latest urfascist fuck up?
Presumably you've seen Ally Fogg's thread here: https://twitter.com/AllyFogg/status/1142052513774018567
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