GIGLI Cofounder Ennenbach Bizarrely Accuses Me of "Hacking"

Remember GIGLI, the completely ineffective astroturf group formed after there was a split in the St. Louis Tea Party?  They have now completely given up on pretending to be a real "grassroots" group and haven't posted anything new on Twitter for over a month.  And recall that unlike the St. Louis Tea Party which actually did organize rallies with hundreds of people in their prime, GIGLI hasn't done anything to show they could organize themselves out of a paper bag.  But they don't need to because the St. Louis media will dutifully pretend they're an actual group without requiring them to establish any credentials.

Anyway, that's all just a long aside to introduce the latest bizarre conspiracy theory about me.  GIGLI co-founder Jen Ennenbach is bizarrely suggesting that I'm "hacking" her Twitter account.  Why? I have no idea, but we can be sure that they'll never provide any evidence to back up the claim, just like they don't with their nutty "SEIU blogger" conspiracy theories.  Anyway, here's the absurd tweet:

Dana Loesch Punks CNN

Since her disgraceful comments cheering marines who urinated on corpses, CNN has wisely kept Dana Loesch out of most of their political coverage including:

• The South Carolina CNN debate.
• South Carolina primary night.
• Post debate analysis of the NBC debate in Florida.
• The Florida CNN debate.
• Florida primary coverage.

So it seems pretty clear that they've been trying to keep her away from their most important coverage, in contrast to previous primaries. However, they did have her on one time since the scandal and, unsurprisingly, she used the opportunity to further damage CNN's credibility. From the transcript:

CNN contributor, Dana Loesch joining me now. So, Dana, Billy Tucker, the leader of Florida's largest Tea Party group has chosen not to endorse a candidate. Why and could an endorsement by Tucker impact all of those undecideds?

DANA LOESCH, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: It could, absolutely, Kyra. It could very much impact those undecided voters. This is sort of the bittersweet thing, the double-edged sword about the Tea Party movement.

Because it's such a large, all encompassing movement, there's a ton of different movements that are sovereign. Each group can decide what it wants to do. I know there have been a couple of Tea Party groups in Florida that have endorsed Newt Gingrich.

There were a couple of Tea Party groups in South Carolina that endorsed him, as well, and different parts of the country. But really from my perspective and the group I'm with in St. Louis, the Gateway Grass Roots Initiative.

One of the really founding things of the movement is that you don't endorse candidates, at least I've always thought that, especially in a primary, you don't get involved and endorse candidates because it seems a little bit too close to being used by candidates.

There are a couple of things going on here. First, despite breaking up with the St. Louis Tea Party, Loesch is appealing to the group she created, the "Gateway Grassroots Initiative," to establish her "expertise" on conservative activism. Second, she's shamelessly using CNN to promote her "group".

So what's the problem? The problem is that there's no evidence whatsoever that suggests the "Gateway Grassroots Initiative" is a real group at all, as opposed to a disorganized webpage with lazy brainstorming ideas. Unlike the St. Louis Tea Party, GGI hasn't organized large rallies, hasn't worked on elections, hasn't hosted any public events, and in fact hasn't really done anything at all! They have an "Individual Initiative" project that basically consists of people saying "wouldn't it be nice if we did X" with essentially zero follow-up. After existing for more than a month, they only have 340 followers on Twitter and 280 "likes" on facebook.


In comparison, after one month, Occupy St. Louis had over 6,000 "likes" on facebook and over 1,000 followers on Twitter.

In fact, there is no other evidence to suggest that they are having any impact in St. Louis or anywhere else, despite being initially promoted on Glenn Beck's and Stephen K. Bannon's radio shows and Breitbart's web sites.

Here's what one conservative Missouri activist had to say about the group:

It's been such a #fail. I'm not sure how she holds her head up on her 20th "project" that fails. It's embarrassing. You're exactly right, they have done nothing. Literally nothing.

(as always, though this quote is anonymous, I'm happy to provide more info to any journalists who inquire, though of course I'd have to clear it first with my source)

So basically Loesch is punking CNN in two ways. First, she's pretending to be an "expert" based on a group created after she left the tea party that has done absolutely nothing and appears to exist only online. Second, she's using CNN to promote her own personal endeavors, before those endeavors have done anything to show that they're viable. This is what happens when the mainstream media panders Breitbart editors, who represent a fundamentally dishonest approach to information far more than the represent any kind of true conservatism.

GIGLI Still Attacking Ed Martin Even After He Switched Contests

As we know, the St. Louis Tea Party split up because some of the members supported Ed Martin and others supported ultimate GOP insider Ann Wagner. But even after yesterday's hilarious news that Martin decided, yet again, to switch campaigns, looks like the Ann Wagner splinter group known as GIGLI is still ragging on poor Ed. Here's what they tweeted yesterday:



And here's what the post says:

But Missouri should be asking a couple of questions of Mr. Martin:

First, why has he never attempted to mount a campaign in his home district? Missouri District 1 has been struggling, strangling under Democrat control since 1949. The people in his own neighborhood are drowning under the weight of increased unemployment, and he chooses to step out on them to represent others.

Second, can we expect him to stay in the Attorney General's race if another, shinier candidate steps into the ring?

Gateway Astroturf Initiative Badmouthing Tea Party To Other Conservative Groups, Claiming They Have "Alchohol Problems"

Jen Ennenbach, one of the co-founders of the new Gateway Astroturf Initiative (aka GIGLI), previously wrote the following about the St. Louis Tea Party:

For a movement that screams ”transparency, transparency, transparency!!!!” I certainly see none here. I see: Executive Director who was recently seated to the Board which stroked her ego; an unemployed lawyer, Benjamin Smith Williams (aka Ben Evans), who holds his Bar in New York, not Missouri, but still likes to act as legal counsel here; a loose cannon, John Burns who has been out of the Tea Party movement for over a year; another huge-headed blogger who likes to distort truth and is too chickenshit to put his name to half of what he publishes (Darin Morely); Co-founder Bill Hennessy, standing by silently, but driving this all behind the scenes.

But it looks like what she's saying about them behind their backs is even worse. Here's a message from Ennenbach to C. Steven Tucker, a leader of the Chicago Tea Party:


So very classy of Loesch's group to publicly pretend to be staying above the fray while privately smearing their former friends.

More Missouri Conservatives Blocked and Insulted By Loesch For Asking Questions

As we all know, Dana Loesch is completely incapable of coherently responding to thoughtful criticism, whether that criticism comes from liberals or conservatives. In fact, she's often at her most obnoxious when blasting conservatives who make comments that aren't praising her. We saw one example of that with Nina's question a couple weeks ago. And now I've been provided with another example of her shutting down a conservative for simply asking why a tea partier would support Ann Wagner.

Here's the post from the man, Greg Z, who announced that Loesch had deleted his comments and blocked him from her facebook page:

And here are the harmless comments that got him blocked:


It's funny that Loesch is so afraid of honest debate. Interestingly, as I've mentioned before, other actual Missouri conservative activists seem to know that Loesch is a blowhard who's not to be taken seriously as a self-proclaimed "grassroots activist."



Other Missouri conservatives who were trashed by Loesch for having the audacity to disagree with her about something:

• The St. Louis Tea Party
• Dr. Gina Loudon
• John Wayne Tucker
• The Hillbilly LogicRadio Crew
• Carl Bearden
  

This is one of many reasons that Loesch's "Gateway Astroturf Initiative" is unlikely to be successful.

Suprise! Gateway Astroturf Initiative's Scott Boston Is Big Ann Wagner Supporter!

As was mentioned previously, the mission statement for Dana Loesch's new group, the Gateway Astroturf Initiative (codename GIGLI) was copy and pasted by a former employee of the national astroturf organization, the Tea Party Patriots. And, wouldn't you know it, that employee Scott Boston just happens to be a big Ann Wagner fan!

You can see on his Twitter feed that he regularly RTs Ann Wagner's campaign announcements:



You get the idea. He also promoted Gateway Pundit's defense of Ann Wagner and attack on Ed Martin:

So the former employee of a national astroturf organization supports the GOP establishment candidate? Who woulda thunk it!

Whoops! Loesch's New "Grassroots" Group Lies About Cutting and Pasting Astroturf Mission Statement

So if you were going to announce that you'd just launched a new "grassroots" organization, wouldn't you at least bother to write your own mission statement? Not if you're Dana Loesch, who lost track of all meaning of "grassroots" and "astroturf" long ago.

Loesch's new group, which calls itself the Gateway Grassroots Initiative, has a "mission statement" entirely composed of nationally-coordinated snippets from Tea Party Patriots language used by outlets around the country.

You can see a copy of their mission statement here:



It reads, in part:

Mission Statement

Our mission is to attract, educate, organize, and mobilize fellow Gateway area citizens to secure a culture consistent with our three core values of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets.

Core Values

• Fiscal Responsibility
• Constitutionally Limited Government
• Free Markets

Fiscal Responsibility: A fiscally responsible government honors and respects the freedom of the individual to spend the money that is the fruit of his or her own labor. A constitutionally limited government, designed to protect the blessings of liberty, must be fiscally responsible or it must subject its citizenry to high levels of taxation that unjustly restrict the liberty our Constitution was designed to protect. The runaway deficit spending as we now see in Washington...

...and so on. A quick google search reveals that this exact same language (except for the "gateway" part) is used by numerous tea party groups across the country. If you pick pretty much any phrase in the group's mission statement, you'll see that it was used by many groups across the country. Interestingly, they don't all use the exact same language: they pick and choose what they want to cut and paste.

It's pretty clear that there's national coordination on the messaging of these mission statements. Because so many groups use it, it's not easy to see who's in charge, but several of the groups specifically refer to the Tea Party Patriots, a national astoturf group that has a mission statement basically identical to that of Loesch's new group:


Tea Party Patriots has been explicitly linked to former GOP congressman Dick Army's astroturf group FreedomWorks and was caught distributing a memo telling tea partiers how to disrupt town halls. So this mission statement appears to be straight from national astroturf organizations.

Maybe it wouldn't be a big deal if the group just admitted that they didn't write their own mission statement. However, ridiculously, they are claiming that they wrote it themselves. My interaction with Jen Ennenbach, one of the founders of the new group:




It's pretty embarrassing for them to claim that they just spontaneously came up with the exact same language as hundreds of other tea party groups around the country including a national astroturf organization. But I expect there will be many more embarrassing moments to come for this group.

Update: The group is even more astroturf than I realized.

The GGI group argued on Twitter that the statement wasn't astroturf because the guy who wrote the mission statements for the national group is actually the same guy who copied and pasted GGI's statement. In fact, Scott Boston on Twitter claims he wrote the original Tea Party Patriots statement, and I believe him. But this makes it even more astroturf, not less, because it turns out that Boston used to be an employee of the astroturf organization Tea Party Patriots! From his Linked In profile:

National Education Coordinator
Tea Party Patriots

• Identified and evaluated training materials for local organizers and coordinated distribution of materials from such organizations as Leadership Institute, American Majority, Heritage Foundation, National Center for Constitutional Studies and Encounter Books.
• Lead Coordinator 9/12 St. Louis, one of three large regional rallies that drew 15,000 - 20,000 people to the Gateway Arch, July-September 2010. Identified and secured speakers and entertainers. Wrote press releases, did radio and TV interviews, created content for the event website.
• Volunteer Liaison to Glenn Beck’s Staff, Restoring Honor Rally, July-August 2010.
• Traveled to Tennessee and Arizona to meet with regional coordinators, May 2010.

So yeah, so one of the "grassroots" group's founders was an employee of a Dick Army affiliated national astroturf group. Another, of course, is a CNN pundit and radio host. I look forward to their future lectures about the true meaning of grassroots.

Conservatives of America 2.0, Or Failed Conservative Online Project Number 3,452,297

In December of 2009, Dana Loesch announced a new project:

Jamie and I unveiled our new project, along with Bill Murphy, this morning. Introducing the conservative version of MoveOn.org: Conservatives of America.com.

I’ve spoken with so many people who have expressed a desire for better, tighter organization, an umbrella under which all our conservative groups could network and fellowship. Until now, no one had stepped up to take on this massive task.

Times are a’changin.

Conservatives of America asked gullible conservatives to pay $25 of their hard earned cash in order to become "members" of the site. The only thing that's known about where the money went is that it decidedly did not go anywhere that would help the conservative movement. Not only did the site not become the "conservative MoveOn," it didn't even become the conservative Chess Club of Greater Niagra Valley. It was a complete, unmitigated failure.

Now Loesch is back with a totally hip site that's the newfangled thing in happening conservationism. Will it be able to organize a rally with more than 50 people? Will it be like the St. Louis Blogger's Guild and the Tea Party: initially used as a platform to promote Loesch then sabotaged as soon as it no longer serves that purpose? And of course the biggest question: how long before they start asking gullible conservatives to throw away their money?