Never, ever, trust a cuckservative, as the President has now learned:
Victoria Coates, an art history Ph.D. who served as an adviser to Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, has been identified as “Anonymous,” administration sources tell RCP reporter Paul Sperry:
A protégé of Bush administration Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Coates embedded with the U.S. military to cover the Iraq War for RedState.com, a blog run by Erick Erickson, an early critic of Trump but who has since modulated his opposition. She filed positive reports from Baghdad, while knocking down criticism that the war was a debacle.
NSC investigators put stock in the fact that Coates has a history of concealing her identity in her writings. For years she blogged anonymously for RedState.com. The site eventually revealed that Coates was the blogger writing under the pseudonym “Academic Elephant.”
They found her by one of my favorite means of distinguishing truth from falsehood, textual analysis:
The sources said that to crack the identity of the rogue Trump official, investigators ran previously published works authored by Coates through forensic author identification programs, and they matched the prose style of Anonymous.
Investigators were able to profile the author of the op-ed and book by sentence structure, grammar, punctuation and syntax. They then compared that writing profile to Coates’. The stylistic traits synced up, sources said.
Researchers have found that authorship recognition tools can identify an author with a high level of accuracy when there are several thousand words of available content to analyze, as was the case with the sample size the White House analyzed. Coates’ own body of written work spans two decades and includes several books and dozens of columns, as well as policy papers, speeches and a doctoral thesis.
In short, the authors share the same punchy but at times breezy writing style, with pithy sentences punctuating a fluid narrative.
What’s more, the same manners of expression and phrases, such as “like-minded” and “clear-eyed,” kept turning up in the writings of both Coates and the secret Trump betrayer. The two also shared distinct vocabulary — such as the uncommon “sextant” — another linguistic fingerprint that pointed to the same authorship.
As we’ve observed here over the years, it is ridiculously easy to identify someone once you are sufficiently familiar with their literary style and habits. For example, I can quite often spot a banned troll on his first anonymous post-ban comment; no two people think or write exactly the same way. And it’s very easy to tell when news reports are concocting fake quotes from nonexistent people; if it sounds like it’s from a movie, it’s reliably fake.
Anyhow, it’s good that the treacherous infiltrator was exposed and removed.