Jacob Wohl

There’s a few fundamental problems with the idea of ‘believe all women,’ or more broadly, ‘believe all victims.’ The first is that our entire justice system is built upon the opposite idea, that people are in fact innocent until proven otherwise. The second is that as our definition of sexual assault keeps changing by the minute, it’s possible for two people to experience the same encounter in radically different ways, with one person believing they just had entirely consensual sex, and the other believing they were assaulted. The third, and most important: there are bad people in this world. And bad people lie.

The Trump era has surfaced an ensemble cast of bizarre characters: hustling for eyeballs through a killer combination of outrage, bombast and grift. The majority of these are in the Trump corner: think Candace Owens, Laura Loomer and Jacob Wohl. But let’s now turn the spotlight towards the strangest creatures of the anti-Trump brigade. Cockburn is of course talking about the Krassenstein twins. For the uninitiated, the twins are Brian and Ed Krassenstein, 37-year-old brothers from Fort Myers, Fla. They rose to prominence through a practice Cockburn refers to as ‘wohling’: that’s to say, whenever @realdonaldtrump tweets something, you reply with a bland but extremely partisan statement, in the hope of accruing likes and retweets, and building your personal brand.

Cockburn doesn’t mind a cocktail or two, but he wasn’t sure if he could stomach the ‘Raheem is Daddy’ special on offer at the Nigel Farage party last night at CPAC. Kassam is a particularly proud boy at the moment, and perhaps understandably so. He’s just bought Human Events, the media company, with his ally Will Chamberlain and his party had a celebratory and very boozy atmosphere. Raheem himself called it ‘The Transatlantic Right Wing Spring Fling.’ ‘Feel free to say how hot my date was,’ he said. His party was an ‘off-the-record’ (but not for you, dear reader) knees-up at Pose Nightclub, upstairs at CPAC, and a veritable ‘who’s that’ of conservative personae, including several folk who were too damn dangerous for access to the convention proper.