Meet Daniel Mauch.
Why do you care about Daniel Mauch? Well, he also goes by “francisnblake,” and he posts a lot of video on YouTube. Mr. Mouch is apparently one of the members of the Iron Rail Book Collective, though he has posted a comment below attempting to dilute his connection to the group which reads:
This is francisnblake. I met Mick Wright outside the Hilton on the evening of the 9th while we were both observing the protest. As we were both involved in indepedent journalism and had more than a passing interest in politics, we spoke for almost an hour concerning various subjects related to the obvious subject at hand. At the end of the conversation, I gave him the address of my youtube channel (because he hadn’t got the chance to see the protests earlier that day) and information on a local workers’ collective (because he had never observed one in operation before). I wrote these things on a protest flyer because it was what I happened to have in my pocket at the time.
Yeah, well – our readers will recall that Mick Wright runs a pretty darn good blog at Tennessee Conservative, and Mick has a slightly different take on the encounter with Mr. Mauch:
I took a break from the conference Friday night to see what I could find out about the protest, which another SRLC attendee had casually informed me about earlier that evening. As I approached Mr. “Francis N. Blake” and a group of four or five other young, white males, one of them shouted, “Racist! Sexist! Homophobe!” etc., etc.
Over the course of an hour, I spoke to these guys, asking questions, trying to get to the bottom of who they were and what they were really after. Most of them sulked away after finding me to be a mellow, reasonable, inquisitive member of the “media,” as my badge indicated, signaling that I might be friendly to their cause. As they left, one said something like, “wow, you really managed to calm us down.”
One fellow stayed behind, however, Mr. Francis N. Blake, who had earlier introduced himself as “Daniel.” He informed me of the march and the rally that had taken place outside Brennan’s, and he proved it by handing me the rally fliers, and by writing down the address of his YouTube channel. When I saw the name Francis N. Blake, I said, “hey, that’s not your name.” He responded with something like, “no, I use lots of pseudonyms to keep them confused.” I didn’t ask who *they* were.
After recounting much of the above circumstances surrounding Mauch’s identity, Wright discloses some of the research he’s done into the journalistic exploits of “francisnblake.” That includes a Facebook post on his wall which says, in pertinent part:
My offer to film any mischief making today still stands. Give me a call if you’re doing any street theatre in the FQ.
Wright asks some terrific questions:
What does “mischief” mean to an anarchist?
What does “street theatre in the FQ” mean to an anarchist?
Is it outside the realm of possibility that it meant violent attacks on the Republican fundraisers who went to the French Quarter that night, who ended up with a broken leg, a concussion, and a fractured nose and jaw?
What role did these anarchists play in stirring up the hate that may have led to these attacks?
Someone should ask Daniel Mauch, Joanna Dubinsky, and the other radicals and anarchists who organized the rally that led protesters to the scene of the crime.
So true. We hear conservatives and Tea Party types berated time and time again about “overheated rhetoric” with almost zero evidence that Tea Party demonstrations and speeches on the floor of the House of Representatives serve to spawn Timothy McVeighs across the fruited plain. By that standard, we’d like to know when, given that we now have a concrete example of hateful, threatening, in-your-face rhetoric from left-wingers on the scene not long before two people of an opposite political persuasion were put in the hospital, the perpetrators of that rhetoric will be called to account by the major media for their “overheated rhetoric.”
We can wait all week. But let’s not drag this out, OK?
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