Deeper and Deeper He Goes

The last few days have made it clear Trump has no minimum standards of ethics or decency, and it extends well beyond shitholes.

Trump condo sales that match [the US] Treasury [department]’s characteristics of possible money laundering totaled $1.5 billion, BuzzFeed News calculated. They accounted for 21% of the 6,400 Trump condos sold in the US. Those figures include condos that Trump developed as well as condos that others developed in his name under licensing deals that pay Trump a fee or a percentage of sales.

Some of the secretive sales date back more than three decades, long before recent worries that Russians tried to influence Trump by pouring millions of dollars into his businesses.

But a months-long BuzzFeed News examination of every Trump condominium sale in the US shows that such sales surged in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when some Trump businesses were in financial trouble and when Donald Trump Jr. made his now-famous remark about the Trump Organization seeing “a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

No wonder Trump marked his business as a red line that cannot be crossed, he’s likely been helping Russian oligarchs launder their money. And while Wolff has a less-than-stellar journalistic record, this sounds like something he taped (bolding mine).

It was clear where Mueller and his team were going, said Bannon: they would trace a money trail through Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and Jared Kushner and roll one or all of them on the president.

It’s Shakespearean, he said, enumerating the bad advice from his family circle: “It’s the geniuses, the same people who talked him into firing Comey, the same people on Air Force One who cut out his outside legal time, knowing the email was out there, knowing that email existed, put the statement out about Don Junior, that the meeting was all about adoptions … the same geniuses trying to get Sessions fired.

“Look, Kasowitz has known him for twenty-five years. Kasowitz has gotten him out of all kinds of jams. Kasowitz on the campaign- what did we have, a hundred women? Kasowitz took care of them all. And now he lasts, what, four weeks? He’s in the mumble tank. This is New York’s toughest lawyer, broken. Mark Corallo, toughest motherfucker I ever met, just can’t do it.”

“Took care” of “a hundred women?” It sounds an awful lot like Kasowitz paid off hundreds of sexual harassment complaints against Trump. Given news just broke another of Trump’s lawyers may have paid $130,000 to a porn star to bury a sexual encounter, and that over a dozen women accused Trump of sexual harassment or worse is, it’s not that far-fetched.

No wonder Republican representatives are fleeing their party in record numbers. Who wants to share a party with Trump?

[2018/01/13 HJH] PZ Myers brings up an excellent point:

Which means that when a porn actress, Stormy Daniels, says she did not have sex with Donald Trump, you should believe her, barring any solid evidence to the contrary. It is a non-story. At its worst it might be a tale of consensual sexual interactions between two people, one of whom is sleazy and repellent (it’s not Daniels I’m talking about)…but as long as it’s consensual, it’s only their business.

This is nothing but an attempt to harm Donald Trump, an activity I might approve of, by associating him with the unfair disrepute of sex workers. All it can do is further damage the standing of sex workers in general and Stormy Daniels in particular, to no good end.

Still, I think I can mount a worthy counter-argument. The following is an edited version of a comment I posted, with a few more links added.

For one thing, the evidence that nothing happened consists of a letter being produced by Donald Trump’s lawyer. For decades, Trump has lied and openly defied the law; forging a letter wouldn’t be a big deal for him or his “pit bull” lawyer.

Secondly, sex workers almost never talk about their clients. We live in a culture which heavily shames them for their work, so clients usually demand discretion to protect their reputations from splash damage. Coming forward about Publicly naming a client would pretty much kill a sex worker’s career. Nonetheless, Daniels was in negotiations with two separate news organisations to discuss one of her clients before mysteriously cutting off contact. She must have had a good reason to go that far.

Thirdly, we have plausible reason to think something non-consensual happened. Trump has nineteen women claiming sexual harassment or worse against him. His time as owner of Miss Universe demonstrates his sub-human view of women, and those beliefs are correlated with likelihood of sexual assault. It’s quite plausible Daniels was forced into non-consensual acts, and even a sex-positive view of sex work would condemn that. It would also explain Daniels’ move to talk with news organisations, which came at a time when allegations of sexual assault against Trump were a news topic.

There’s a chance Daniels was just in it for the money, of course. But I think there’s reason enough to report on this story, above and beyond our society’s taboo about sex.

Kremlin Watch: Papadopoulos, Fusion GPS, and Fake Americans

The Last Jedi was excellent. My scribbled notes may turn into a blog post at some point, but until then I need another pick-me-up. And what better cheer is there than foreign governments messing with US politics, amirite?

Return Of The FBI

It looks like we’ve got our answer to why the FBI was looking into Trump, and it involves booze and Australians.

During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton. About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign. […]

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.

Bravo on this one, New York Times. It also swats down the “coffee boy” line about Papadopoulos.

He was hardly central to the daily running of the Trump campaign, yet Mr. Papadopoulos continuously found ways to make himself useful to senior Trump advisers. In September 2016, with the United Nations General Assembly approaching and stories circulating that Mrs. Clinton was going to meet with Mr. Sisi, the Egyptian president, Mr. Papadopoulos sent a message to Stephen K. Bannon, the campaign’s chief executive, offering to broker a similar meeting for Mr. Trump.

After days of scheduling discussions, the meeting was set and Mr. Papadopoulos sent a list of talking points to Mr. Bannon, according to people familiar with those interactions. Asked about his contacts with Mr. Papadopoulos, Mr. Bannon declined to comment.

There’s also proposals to write “neutral” opinion pieces in favour of Trump, taking advantage of his access. Well worth the read.

Fusion GPS Strikes Back

The news about Papadopoulos also undercuts a Republican talking point: Fusion GPS’s “pee tape” dossier kicked off the FBI investigation, and since that was paid for by Democrats the FBI is now tainted with Democrat cooties. Or something like that, the argument’s never made much sense to me. Whatever the case, two of the people behind Fusion GPS are pushing back.

We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case.

Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.

We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.

The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.

As if that wasn’t eyebrow raising enough, Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritsch tease some of that testimony.

We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals don’t seem to interest Congress.

There’s more, but you’ll have to click through for that.

Attack Of The Cloned Americans

On top of all that, Russia shows up in an unexpected place. The FCC, like a number of departments in the US government, request public input on big policy changes. The number of comments coming in about Net Neutrality broke records, and for poor reason.

A study has found more than 7.75 million comments were submitted from email domains attributed to FakeMailGenerator.com, and they had nearly identical wording. The FCC says some of the nearly 23 million comments on Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal to gut Obama-era rules were filed under the same name more than 90 times each.

And then there were the 444,938 from Russian email addresses, which also raised eyebrows, even though it’s unclear if they were from actual Russian citizens or computer bots originating in the U.S. or elsewhere.

The oddities in the FCC’s inbox have attracted scrutiny from New York’s attorney general and from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which has opened a probe. […. New York Attorney General Eric] Schneiderman said the FCC had not cooperated with his investigation.

Rachael Maddow, my source for this story and inspiration for this blog post, goes into detail about those shenanigans and similar ones afoot. It’s worth pointing out that this one may have nothing to do with the Kremlin; automated bots are common enough that their mere existence says little about their origins, and while the Russian emails are weird there were also a tonne from Germany. Still, it does fit in with Kremlin tactics.

The point of this new propaganda is not to persuade anyone, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted—to disrupt Western narratives rather than provide a counternarrative. It is the perfect genre for conspiracy theories, which are all over Russian TV. When the Kremlin and its affiliated media outlets spat out outlandish stories about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in July—reports that characterized the crash as everything from an assault by Ukrainian fighter jets following U.S. instructions, to an attempted NATO attack on Putin’s private jet—they were trying not so much to convince viewers of any one version of events, but rather to leave them confused, paranoid, and passive—living in a Kremlin-controlled virtual reality that can no longer be mediated or debated by any appeal to ‘truth.’

Their goal is to get “the West” to stop believing in democracy, and the day we stop believing democracy can work is the day we lose it.

Uh Oh

Apologies for setting off the fire alarm, but:

Francis Rooney (R-FL): I’m very concerned that the DOJ and the FBI, whether you want to call it deep state or what, are kind of off the rails. People need a good, clean government.

Hallie Jackson: Do you think people don’t have a good clean government? … There are those that look at comments, like the ones that you’re making, and say that Republicans are working to, essentially, try to discredit the Department of Justice and thus discredit the Russia investigations. Is that not what you’re doing?

Rooney: No, I don’t want to discredit’m. I, just, I would like to see the directors of the agencies purge it, and say, look, we’ve got a lot of great agents, a lot of great lawyers here. Those are the people I want the American people to see, and know the good works being done. Not these people, who are kind of the deep state.

Jackson: Language like that, congressman, “purge?” Purge the Department of Justice?

Rooney: Well, I think that Mr. Strzok could be purged, sure.

To put that in context, Peter Strzok exchanged a series of private texts with Lisa Page, while Strzok was part of Mueller’s Special Council investigation. Upon learning of the texts, Mueller removed him from the case. Just over three months later, a selection of those texts were released to Fox News and Republican lawmakers, who immediately seized on Strzok’s anti-Trump comments as proof of bias. Problem is, only a subset of those texts were ever released, from an active investigation into the situation, and the Department of Justice is refusing to answer important questions about them. Also, Strzok had a lot of opinions.

Regarding Clinton, Strzok once texted, “I’m worried about what happens if HRC is elected.” He also referred to Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea Clinton, as “self-entitled,” and dismissed Sen. Bernie Sanders, I – Vt., as an “idiot.” Page also called Sanders supporters “idiots.” They also both had low opinions of President Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, with Strzok writing it was “wildly offensive” for Holder’s portrait to be next to that of iconic Attorney General Elliott Richardson and insisting that a television be turned off when Holder spoke at the Democratic National Convention.

Page perhaps best summed up their worldview when she texted Strzok during lunch with an unidentified person: “We both hate everyone and everything.”

Finally, there’s no evidence Strzok’s private opinions had any influence on Mueller’s investigation of Trump! Remember the “active investigation” bit? When the texts were released to Republicans and Fox News, the DoJ had still not concluded an internal probe into the matter. Now that those texts have been hopelessly politicised, how can that investigation remain free of charges of bias?

And yet, based on that context, a Republican Congressperson is ready to “purge” the FBI of people like Strzok. People who, so far, are only guilty of privately saying mean things about the US President.

via GIPHY

We’re not even a year into Trump’s presidency, yet the United States is becoming an authoritarian state far faster than I thought possible. Others are catching on to this, too.

Note that the calls for a “purge” of the FBI and DOJ are becoming more explicit, actually using the word “purge” and moving from the right-wing publications to sitting members of Congress. A small part of this is simple partisanship, what threatens the leader of your political party is bad and needs to be attacked. But what we’re seeing goes far, far beyond that and can only be explained by the Republican right’s broader embrace of authoritarianism, which both predates Trump, accounts for his rise and has in turn been accelerated by his presidency.

This point is critical to remember. Trump’s flouting of democratic norms during the campaign was a core element, perhaps the core element, of his appeal. Support for Trump certainly wasn’t in spite of this. Nor was it incidental. We focus on Trump’s antics. They remain erratic and unbridled. But equally important, probably more important, is the absence of any overriding respect for the rule of law or democratic norms among his supporters. Functionally that means the entire Republican party, even if individual Republican officeholders may express a muted displeasure.

Others were way ahead of me.

Given that some of [Rep. Lindsey] Graham’s worst fears about Trump’s Kremlin ties and mental state have been legitimized, what accounts for the senator’s changed attitude toward the president? There are a variety of possible rationales available for conjecture, many of which apply to the GOP at large. Opportunism may play a role, as Graham complies with Trump in order to pursue right-wing extremist economic policies and war. Blackmail may also be an issue, given that Graham has admitted his email was hacked, as was the RNC’s, by Russia. Trump has derided and threatened members of Congress and private citizens, and it’s not a stretch to imagine him unleashing his fire– publicly or privately–on Graham.

Graham’s radical change in rhetoric is reminiscent of the behavior one sees in autocratic regimes when potential political opponents are mollified or threatened into compliance. But the truly troubling question is not what is driving his changed behavior, but what it means for the rest of the GOP, especially as speculation mounts that the Trump administration could end Mueller’s investigation and propagandists recast Republicans like James Comey and Mueller as enemies of the state. In 2016, Graham initiated the call for an investigation into Trump’s Kremlin ties. In 2018, judging by his recent actions, Graham may lead the way in ensuring there are no consequences for what investigators have discovered.

Either way, it’s time to panic. Americans, your democracy is rapidly degrading! There is no better time to become politically active, to petition your representatives, and push back against those that would rob you of political power. The rest of the world is counting on you, because the consequences will effect the rest of us.

Words Still Have Meanings

It’s a bit amusing to sit down to write something, only to realize you’ve said it better before.

But, rolling back to the start….

Sen. Susan Collins on Tuesday blasted coverage of her support for the GOP tax bill as “extremely discouraging” and “unbelievably sexist.” […]

“I believe that the coverage has been unbelievably sexist, and I cannot believe that the press would have treated another senator with 20 years of experience as they have treated me,” she told reporters in the Capitol. “They’ve ignored everything that I’ve gotten and written story after story about how I’m duped. How am I duped when all your amendments get accepted?”

Having dug into the details, there might be a faint glimmer of truth in there.

Collins also singled out a report that she said included a line about how she “didn’t cry” during a recent meeting with protesters, many of whom suffer from grave medical conditions. That line was later removed after Collins complained, but not before the story posted online.

And sure enough, if you read an archived copy of that New York Times article:

As a group of progressive activists and constituents prepared for a 15-minute meeting on Wednesday with Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, they sat in the lobby of her office and developed a last-ditch strategy to persuade her to vote against the $1.5 trillion tax bill barreling through Congress: tears.

“If Senator Collins actually saw you as a human, saw me as a human, then she wouldn’t pass any of this,” said Ady Barkan, a member of the Center for Popular Democracy, who recently learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., and uses a wheelchair. […]

After her meeting at her office, it did not appear that Ms. Collins was ready to change her vote, or that she had been brought to tears.

This fits into a common sexist stereotype.

One of the most persistent ideas about the differences between men and women is that women are more emotional than men. Research on stereotypes has shown emotionality to be one of the general dimensions of sex stereotypes: women are said to be more expressive, excitable, and easily hurt than men. They are also supposed to be more sensitive to the emotions of others […]. Not surprisingly then, when we think of an emotional person, a woman most quickly comes to our minds […].

The large and uncontested consensus about women’s greater emotionality not only characterizes common sense. The assumption that men and women fundamentally differ in their emotional lives can be found through the history of Western academic thought: whereas maleness stands for reason, femaleness is characterized by another mood of understanding, in which taste, sensibility, practical sense and feeling are more important […]. From the 19th century onwards, rationality and emotionality have largely become associated with the supposedly different natures of men and women, the former fitted for productive labor and the latter for household and emotional labor.

Fischer, Agneta H. “Sex differences in emotionality: Fact or stereotype?.” Feminism & Psychology 3.3 (1993): 303-318.

By using tears as a theme in that article, it was indirectly reinforcing the stereotype that women are driven more by emotion than logic and reason. That is sexist.

Except that’s not all the article said.

Ms. Collins remained respectful and strained to convince the room of about a dozen skeptics that the promises that had been made to her were ironclad. She defended her decision in the face of the group’s challenges that previous Republican promises for the tax bill had been broken, including a commitment to not add to the deficit and to not benefit the rich, and that written agreements are not law.

“I do not believe that I’ve given up leverage,” Ms. Collins said. “I’ve used my leverage to negotiate agreements that are promises to me.” She added, “I’m sorry that you don’t believe in the agreements.”

The deals that Ms. Collins struck that extend beyond the tax bill have been the subject of much speculation and doubt in Washington, because they would require the backing of House Republicans and some Democrats.

Alan Rappeport’s article primarily presents Collins as a rational, autonomous agent. The Senator claims she has negotiated for bipartisan health legislation and against automatic Medicare cuts. It puts that front and centre, focusing on the debate over how secure those pledges to Collins have been, and leaves the call to emotion as a background theme. At the other end, emotion is a strong tool in the activists’ toolkit. Appeals to emotion are not automatically sexist, they only become that way when generalized across a sex. Rappeport’s article was not directly sexist, as it did not explicitly state women are more driven by emotion; at best, it indirectly contributed to existing sexist stereotypes. That’s not a good thing, but that has to be weighed against the large portions where it indirectly challenges those stereotypes as well.

Note as well that the Senator claimed her coverage was “unbelievably sexist.” Yet when pressed, the best example she could give is the indirect, conflicting example above. It’s a pretty safe bet that Collins is conflating “criticizing women” with “sexism,” possibly in an attempt to defend herself from people critiquing the strength of her concessions. She might also legitimately misunderstand what “sexism” means, a terribly common problem.

I was going to transition to talking about how Status Quo Warriors rely on ignorance of terms to support their views, but I realized past-me already did an excellent job on that subject. So please accept this brief meditation on sexism instead, and follow the link for more interesting reading.

Pardon the Interruption,

but there’s someone I’d like you to meet. His name is George Papadopoulos, and he has quite the story to tell.

In early March 2016, defendant PAPADOPOULOS learned he would be a foreign policy advisor for the Campaign. Defendant PAPADOPOULOS was living in London, England, at the time. Based on a conversation that took place on or about March 6, 2016, with [Sam Clovis] (the “Campaign Supervisor”), defendant PAPADOPOULOS understood that a principal foreign policy focus of the Campaign was an improved U.S. relationship with Russia. […]

On or about March 31, 2016, defendant PAPADOPOULOS attended a “national security meeting” in Washington, D.C., with then-candidate Trump and other foreign policy advisors for the Campaign. When defendant PAPADOPOULOS introduced himself to the group, he stated, in sum and substance, that he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin. […]

On or about ApriI 18, 2016, the Professor introduced defendant PAPADOPOULOS over email to an individual in Moscow (the “Russian MFA Connection”) who told defendant PAPADOPOULOS he had connections to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (“MFA .. ). The MFA is the executive entity in Russia responsible for Russian foreign relations. Over the next several weeks, defendant PAPADOPOULOS and the Russian MFA Connection had multiple conversations over Skype and email about setting “the groundwork” for a “potential” meeting between the Campaign and Russian government officials. […]

The government notes that [Paul Manafort] forwarded defendant PAPADOPOULOS’s email to [Rick Gates] (without including defendant PAPADOPOULOS) and stated: “Let[‘]s discuss. We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should
be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”

What’s especially fascinating is when all this happened. Not the bits detailed in the “Statement of the Offense,” mind, but the fact that Papadopoulos was arrested in July of 2017 and pled guilty on October 5th. Robert Muller not only has a critical witness to Trump-Kremlin collusion in his back pocket (see section 6 on page 4, plus this tweet), he’s managed to keep that from leaking out for months. Even worse, Papadopoulos has close connections to Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump.

RYAN: Thank you… We’ve heard you’re going to be announcing your foreign policy team shortly… Any you can share with us?

TRUMP: Well, I hadn’t thought of doing it, but if you want I can give you some of the names… Walid Phares, who you probably know, PhD, adviser to the House of Representatives caucus, and counter-terrorism expert; Carter Page, PhD; George Papadopoulos, he’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy; the Honorable Joe Schmitz, [former] inspector general at the Department of Defense; [retired] Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg; and I have quite a few more. But that’s a group of some of the people that we are dealing with. We have many other people in different aspects of what we do, but that’s a representative group.

See what I mean? I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more from Papadopoulos in future.

Goddammit, could they at least pace this stuff out?

The Court being in receipt of the government’s letter of October 30th, 2017, and having considered the government’s representation that sealing of the plea proceedings in the above-captioned case is no longer necessary … it is hereby

ORDERED that the Clerk of the Court shall unseal and make available on the public docket any and all documents filed with the Court pertaining to the above-captioned case, including: the information; defendant’s plea agreement (including the Statement of Facts); the transcript of the October 5, 2017 plea hearing, the government’s October 5, 2017 motion to seal; and the Court’s order granting the motion of seal; and it is further

ORDERED that the dockets in the above-captioned criminal case [Papadopoulos’ false statement case] and the associated miscellaneous case (No. 17-mc-2482) shall be unsealed in their entirety.

A few hours later, documents are starting to rain down on us. You’ll need a paid PACER account to read that one, but it’ll only be a matter of time until someone makes the document public. As that happens, I’ll try to update this post with links.

Also, what is “17-mc-2482?” That’s not the Manafort/Gates indictment, and Google searches come up empty. I guess we’ll find out shortly…

Sorry for all the shouting, courts just like to do that. In order of appearance, right from the top:

Sigh, I haven’t spotted any filings in Papadopoulos’ legal case in a few days. I guess they are pacing this out.

In the meantime, the White House’s denials that Papadopoulos had a non-trivial role in Trump’s campaign are beginning to unwind.

“Papadopolous was only one among the many contacts [the American Jewish Committee] established and maintained among advisers to both parties’ 2016 presidential candidates and in the two parties’ national committees,” AJC spokesperson Ken Bandler said in a statement. […]

The AJC forum, occurred on the third day of the RNC in downtown Cleveland. Papadopolous sat on a panel with Reps. Tom Marina, R-Pa., and Ted Yoho, R-Fla., both members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee while Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, gave opening remarks.[…]

Papadopoulos’ public role for the Trump campaign continued. In late September, just six weeks before Election Day, he gave an interview as a Trump campaign official to the Russian Interfax News Agency, where he said that Trump will “restore the trust” between the U.S. and Russia.

And he met with Israeli leaders during the inauguration in January as a foreign policy adviser for the newly-sworn in president. “We are looking forward to ushering in a new relationship with all of Israel, including the historic Judea and Samaria,” Papadopoulos told the Jerusalem Post the following day.

Naturally, Carter Page isn’t helping the situation.

Activist Self-Protection

The hosts of Feminist Killjoys outdid themselves with their latest episode, when they interviewed a member of “Redneck Revolt,” an AntiFa group. The conversation was pretty one-sided and animated, but you get a great summary of what they do.

00:08:13,760 –> 00:08:50,120
… we were asked by anarchist people of color to go and defend Justice Park. Our mission in Charlottesville was purely defensive. We never moved – and I want to make this really clear, and I hope this message gets out – we never moved beyond a very fixed perimeter. We were highly disciplined, we had a clear mission: keep people safe, keep the state and the Nazis out of the park. [We were] successful, partially because 1) we were asked to be there, so we knew who had our back and who wanted us there and 2) we knew what was to our front, the state and the Nazis.

00:08:50,120 –> 00:09:31,040
We never mixed into the larger protest, and there’s been some discussion, I think, out in the internet world that “yeah, we’re just wandering around with guns.” I mean, we’re not operators – this isn’t SEAL team 6 cosplay. We kept our muzzles down, and we wanted to project the force and power that not only our group possesses, but what we knew was streaming behind us and through us: as AntiFa columns, groups of Quakers marched- BLM folks moved- queer liberation activists… all these people move through our line to go and face down white supremacy.

00:09:31,040 –> 00:09:41,780
White supremacists came to face us, but we were in complete concert with the people that were deploying other tactics, and that again is an enormous power that really can’t be underestimated.

I can’t find flaw in the tactics; when white supremacists are willing to murder and terrorize to get their way, and the police aren’t keeping the peace, this is precisely what you need. The interviewee also dropped an interesting citation.

00:20:05,330 –> 00:20:38,250
People should go read “This Non-Violence Stuff Will Get You Killed.” Great, amazing book about how weapons provided a militant armed self-defense backbone to the civil rights movement. It sweeps away the whitewashed narrative of Martin Luther King, and describes an entire interior world of African American and allied folks willingness – and sometimes actual use – of firearms to preserve the sanctity and lives of the people dedicated to that struggle.

I’m not that surprised to find guns mixed with social justice movements. The police and FBI have not been kind to activists, and in some cases have been infiltrated by white supremacists. Some sort of self-defense against state violence is sensible in those circumstances.

But what did surprise me was how common guns were.

Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. “Just for self-defense,” King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend’s Montgomery, Alabama, home as “an arsenal.”

MLK Jr? Armed to the teeth? I’ve gotta pick up that book.

[HJH 2017-09-29] Speaking of which, Politically Reactive also interviewed Mark Bray about AntiFa. The more I hear about it, the more I believe that Anonymous isn’t that original.

Tracing Trolls

We hear a lot about the Kremlin’s hacking exploits (speaking of which, get acquainted with Rinat Akhmetshin), but less about their social media game. Sensitive documents cannot damage public perception if they don’t wind up getting publicity; the DNCC emails didn’t make much of a splash when they were first posted on “DCLeaks,” but made a tremendous splash when they landed on WikiLeaks.

The Kremlin has “troll factories” to do that dirty work, but how do you spot their handiwork? Salty Current points to a great Twitter thread on just that topic.

A pattern you may have noticed: many bot and troll accounts have usernames that end in 8 random digits.

I searched through two recent datasets (propagators of #FireMcMaster and #UniteTheRight hashtags) and found 824 such accounts.

Searching their followers for similarly named accounts, and subsequently their followers’ followers yielded 63099 accounts.

Here’s the follower network formed by those 63099 accounts. Larger circle = more accounts with the 8-digit numbers among its followers.

All very troll-like, but not evidence of a Kremlin op, right?

Let’s look at the largest node in the network, DavidJo52951945. This account’s been around for a while – since early 2013, 136K tweets.

Here’s an interesting observation – David is posting 8 AM – 8 PM every day, Moscow time. Almost like it’s his job or something.

What’s he tweeting about? This figure illustrates the volume of DavidJo52951945’s tweets mentioning various topics over the years.

A history of what "DavidJo52951945" has been Twetting about over the last four years. UKIP, Brexit, and migrants dominate.The messaging is very interesting. Let’s go back to 2013, check out DavidJo52951945’s tweets about Ukraine: #TrumpRussia

Several Tweets from "DavidJo52951945" about Ukraine. They have a heavy pro-Kremlin bias.So four years ago, this Twitter account tweeted on Moscow time and was heavily biased towards the Kremlin; four years later, it’s pumping out pro-Trump propaganda that also benefits the Kremlin. If this is a false-flag op, it began two years before Trump announced he was running for US president. Highly unlikely.

Also, if you think this is just a problem for US Republicans, I’ve got another Twitter thread for you.

Everyone knows about Putin’s alt-right pro-Trump trolls. He’s using left-wing anti-Trump trolls too. Exhibit A: meet @MarcusC22973194 /2

Marcus grabbed a great handle, NotMyPresident. Looking like the perfect #Resistance liberal, he’s amassed 16,500 followers in 9 months /4

Marcus is getting to be a big deal. With a Klout score of 70, he’s more influential than @SallyQYates (58) @renato_mariotti (63)… /7

Marcus is as influential as @AngrierWHStaff (70) & @DavidPriess (70) & close to & gaining on @CarlBernstein (71) & @TheRickWilson (72). /9

So how can we tell Marcus is a Russian troll? We can tell by his profile, how much he tweets, where he tweets from, when he tweets,… /12

his problems with English, how he can’t keep his cover story straight, how he plagiarizes others, the threats he makes, the bizarre… /13

things he says, how he’s too good to be true & how he pushes Kremlin propaganda. /14

The timing of Marcus’ tweets is consistent with someone working paid shifts at a Russian troll factory. archive.fo/s40DH /20

Marcus claims to be American but constantly uses British spellings revealing he didn’t learn to speak in the US writing things like… /35

behaviour colour glamour honour humour labour neighbour rumour saviour archive.is/vVk6s, and also things like… /36

Instead of calling the USSR premier “Khrushchev” like Americans would, Marcus uses “Chrustjev” like a Russian. archive.is/m3xJD /48

Russian trolls have strict quotas – they need to post 100+ times/day. This hard when you’re English not great. /69

So trolls steal other ppl’s work & pass it off as their own. Marcus does this faster than a cop hands out tickets on the 31st. /70

And so on. It’s excellent detective work, and shows the Kremlin is trying to infiltrate US left-wing politics as well. Compare and contrast this with a typical 4chan op, and you see the handiwork is quite different: the command of English is better; the Twitter handles don’t have eight numeric digits appended; the heavy use of picture memes; and of course, planning the entire thing on a public message board that many people monitor.

It isn’t that hard, once you know what to do. So why not take a boo at what the Kremlin is currently peddling, and roll up your sleeves too?

Mystery Cults and the Alt-Right

The chain of referrers on this is longer than the paragraph I wanted to share: via Salty Current and Josh Marshall, I was alerted to this tidbit of wisdom by John Herrman.

It is worth noting that the platforms most flamboyantly dedicated to a borrowed idea of free speech and assembly are the same ones that have struggled most intensely with groups of users who seek to organize and disrupt their platforms. A community of trolls on an internet platform is, in political terms, not totally unlike a fascist movement in a weak liberal democracy: It engages with and uses the rules and protections of the system it inhabits with the intent of subverting it and eventually remaking it in their image or, if that fails, merely destroying it.

I’m more in the camp of Josh Marshall than Herrman, though.

And yet, I think the Times article by John Herrman basically misses the mark in thinking that racist groups’ reaction to this banning was planned or showed some deeper understanding or even sympathy with the authoritarian nature of these platforms. […]

The mix of provocation, harassment and trolling is a major part and in some ways the totality of what the digital far-right is about. That’s why racist activists are so eager to give speeches at Berkeley. They get a reaction. Fights start. They create polarization. If some racist freak holds that speech is his backyard or basement with ten friends, who cares? No one does. No one even knows … That is truly the unique hell of online racist provocateurs: no one even knowing they’re ranting. A new version of Twitter for racists only will be the digital equivalent of the same thing.

You can’t change culture without engaging in it on some level, and you’re in the culture-changing business if you want to move from being a fringe to an accepted part of culture. Hence the focus on dog whistles and the worship of memes, as a way of wedging fringe ideas into popular culture.

Kek, in the Alt-Right’s telling, is the “deity” of the semi-ironic “religion” the white nationalist movement has created for itself online — partly for amusement, as a way to troll liberals and self-righteous conservatives — and to make a political point. He is a god of chaos and darkness, with the head of a frog, the source of their memetic “magic,” to whom the Alt-Right and Donald Trump owe their success, according to their own explanations.

In many ways, Kek is the apotheosis of the bizarre alternative reality of the Alt-Right: at once absurdly juvenile, transgressive and racist, as well as reflecting a deeper, pseudo-intellectual purpose that lends it an appeal to young ideologues who fancy themselves deep thinkers. It dwells in that murky area they often occupy, between satire, irony, mockery, and serious ideology; Kek can be both a big joke to pull on liberals and a reflection of the Alt-Right’s own self-image as serious agents of chaos in modern society.

Most of all, Kek has become a kind of tribal marker of the Alt-Right: Its meaning obscure and unavailable to ordinary people — “normies,” in their lingo — referencing Kek is most often just a way of signaling to fellow conversants online that the writer embraces the principles of chaos and destruction that are central to Alt-Right thinking.

This combination of religious “mystery cults” and secular bigotry is potent and tough to scrub away. Fortunately, it can be diluted.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.…

The problem with going more abstract, as Lee Atwater famously suggested, is that the emotional punch of the original is watered down, and in the natural drift of language you can lose control of where it goes. “States’ Rights” was a code-word for defending bigotry, but since then other interest groups have started using it for their own ends. At the same time, social justice advocates work hard to educate the public on what the dog whistle really means, changing it from covert to overt. Pepe the Frog is a great example of this. The memes that don’t escape into popular culture, such as the rebranding of the OK symbol, aren’t of much concern because “no one even knows” they exist and they fail to “disrupt [public] platforms.”

But if this bigotry has strong religious connotations, I have to ask: where’s the atheist community in all this? Shouldn’t we be leading the charge against this attempt to remake society in a racist image, due to our familiarity with the underlying tactics?

This Should Get Interesting

Trump’s Feed is the brainchild of Philip Bump over at the Washington Post. It follows everyone that Trump is following, and retweets their latest tweets; the idea is to simulate what Trump sees when he opens Twitter. Currently, it’s full of tweets like this:

(That one’s true, stocks rose on news of his departure.)

It’s an interesting range of opinions, with some happy to have Bannon out and others thinking this is a dramatic turn leftward. Bannon and Breitbart are signalling they’re ready to fight the White House, though I’m not sure how seriously to take that. Corey Lewandowski (maybe) came back, Trump was still interested in talking to Michael Flynn months after firing him, and Bannon’s friends aren’t entirely reliable. There’s also the slight problem of trying to invoke the alt-Right when you’ve said this:

I asked Bannon about the connection between his program of economic nationalism and the ugly white nationalism epitomized by the racist violence in Charlottesville and Trump’s reluctance to condemn it. Bannon, after all, was the architect of the strategy of using Breitbart to heat up white nationalism and then rely on the radical right as Trump’s base.

He dismissed the far right as irrelevant and sidestepped his own role in cultivating it: “Ethno-nationalism—it’s losers. It’s a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more.”

“These guys are a collection of clowns,” he added.

And yet he was also aggressively courting those clowns not too long ago. Do they still side with him? Would an exodus mean Brietbart will fade out? Are part of his base going to peel away if they think Trump is turning leftwards, or will this bring some calm to the White House water cooler? Firing Bannon was a table-flip; all the pieces are flying around, and no-one is sure how they’ll land. About the only thing we can say is that the results will be interesting.