If Brittany Pettibone’s letter is fake, she’s doubling down:

To the people claiming my deportation document is fake, it’s not. Not sure why there are spelling mistakes—perhaps they didn’t care enough to proof read. This is the exact document I was given upon being denied entry to the U.K. pic.twitter.com/j1hpJuGYTo — Brittany Pettibone (@BrittPettibone) March 12, 2018

Following discussions on Twitter last night, I’m leaning towards this being real. That someone writing letters on behalf of the Home Office can’t spell shouldn’t come as a surprise: they were probably state-educated. Expecting literacy from someone working in Britain’s public sector is like me going into a French prefecture and expecting the staff to be properly trained and helpful. What set the alarm bells ringing was that it seems to be a little too convenient, containing phrases guaranteed to trigger the American alt-right. But I think Adam in the comments might be correct:

I suspect that the reason that the written English in the letter is so bad is due to the fact that the person who wrote it uses English as a second language. I would also lay a firm bet that the individual in question originally hails from a country where a certain religion of peace is widely practiced.

The Home Office is refusing to confirm the letter’s authenticity, which makes me think they are desperately running around trying to find out who wrote it and come up with a suitable narrative. My guess is the public sector is so stuffed full of SJWs and sympathetic Muslims that middle management and bureaucrats believe they can make arbitrary political decisions with impunity. After all, this is precisely how much of the US government operates so why should it not be the same in the UK? What the person who wrote this letter may not have realised is that it would gather so much publicity, they probably thought they were seeing off an obscure right wing provocateur. I suspect there are a few in the Home Office, Amber Rudd included, rather happy that everyone is kept busy by this crisis with Russia and the media are distracted.

On a similar subject, a couple of people have asked why I said Lauren Southern makes stuff up. Firstly, there was the time she took a boat into the Mediterranean to supposedly intercept NGO boats ferrying Africans to Italy. She was on the scene for a matter of minutes before the Italian coastguard picked her up, but she made out she was personally battling to stop these boats. In fairness, I kind of overlooked that because at least she was putting herself out there. But a short time later she came to Paris and posted this:

I’m playing spot the European in Paris right now. 👌🏻 pic.twitter.com/2RQTvsX5jt — Lauren Southern (@Lauren_Southern) May 1, 2017

And a whole load of other short videos and tweets like this:

What she’d done was attend a Mayday protest taking place in République for an hour or two in the morning, and made out that the whole of Paris was a permanent war zone and there were not white people to be seen. Had she walked two blocks in either direction, or come back the next day, she’d have found the streets rather ordinary. What annoyed me about these tweets was that I’d spent the entire afternoon walking around a large chunk of Paris, and at some point posted this:

It was the first day of decent weather in a while and all the Parisians were out with their kids enjoying the city and the sunshine. I then got home and saw Southern’s postings and wondered where the hell she’d spent the day, because it didn’t look anything like the city I’d just walked around. I quickly worked out her schtick is to fire out a few right wing soundbites and put herself in front of a camera somewhere looking cute. I suspect if she wasn’t good looking she’d have about 30 followers on Twitter instead of 30,000. She certainly hasn’t got much to say that’s worth listening to and her reporting is, as I’ve discovered, unreliable. But she is cute. Did I mention that?