If I were to enumerate the reasons for Trumps winning the election, I'd say
that the electoral college has been a terrible problem for a long time and
neither Republicans nor Democrats seem willing to change it. I'd say that the
Democrats chose their presidential candidate unwisely. I'd say that the huge
amount of Republican money and voter suppression are much to blame. And I'd say
that the Democratic Party's abandonment of their base is one of the most
important factors. The Obama administration did not take advantage of the
tremendous public support and the Democratic majority in congress when it came
into power to do the kinds of financial repair work that needed to be done.
Instead, Obama chose people from the Clinton administration who'd made some of
those negative legal changes to our financial situation and who favored big
business over labor, for his own administration. The people wanted this hope
and change that Obama was talking about. Instead, they got more of the same.
And Obama was willing to compromise with the Republicans at every turn. I
remember listening to him with horror in a debate in 2012 when he agreed that
changes should be made to social security in order to limit it. Whoever was
responsible for publicizing Clinton's emails, what is more important than who
made them public, is their content.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2018 9:49 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: At a Berlin security conference, hardline neocon
Jamie Fly appeared to claim some credit for the recent coordinated purge of
alternative media, report Max Blumenthal and Jeb Sprague.
Well, on the one hand, Trump won the election by 80 thousand votes in three
large states, which gave him all the Electoral College votes from those states.
That wouldn't have taken a lot of Russian influence to pull off. On the other
hand, it wouldn't have taken a lot of money from those billionaires or voter
interference from the Republican Party to pull off either.
Now I suppose you could call an indictment an unproven accusation. But it's
highly unlikely that Meuller would have brought those indictments without some
evidence to support them.
It is known, however, that Russia has engaged in cyber warfare in other
countries, as has the United States among many other countries. So the idea of
Russian interference in our election is certainly plausible, even if the extent
of that interference may be one of those things we might never know for sure.
And whether it was enough to tip the election is something that will probably
always be open to debate.
Evan
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2018 9:32 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: At a Berlin security conference, hardline neocon
Jamie Fly appeared to claim some credit for the recent coordinated purge of
alternative media, report Max Blumenthal and Jeb Sprague.
A huge amount has been written about the Russian interference, a great deal of
which presents arguments to the effect that whatever interference may have
taken place, was minimal in comparison to the influence of the money that the
far right billionaires advertising and the Republican interference with voting
had. Also, several people pointed out that indictments are unproven
accusations. These are indictments of Russians who are in Russia and who will
never be tried in a court here because Russia will never allow them to be
extradited here. So basically, it's all good propaganda for the Democratic
Party, but it isn't particularly helpful. I don't know if you read that book
that he mentions, Shattered, but I did, on Bookshare when it first came out. I
think it's now also on BARD. Many journalists also read it because it was
written by two journalists and so I read about it which is why I downloaded the
book. There really is a description in the book of a meeting after the election
in which John Podesta suggests that Russian interference in the election be
presented to the public as the main reason for Hillary Clinton's defeat. Well,
the Russians probably interfered. After all, the US has interfered in their
elections as well as those of other countries. I assume all the big powers do
this. But Russian interference was clearly not the reason for Hillary's defeat.
There's a lot of material counteracting Russiagate stories on Consortium News
if you want to read some material regarding it from the last 2 years. . What's
most distressing about all of this is that many forces in our country are now
using alleged Russian interference in our elections to attempt to curtail free
speech.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2018 8:40 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: At a Berlin security conference, hardline neocon
Jamie Fly appeared to claim some credit for the recent coordinated purge of
alternative media, report Max Blumenthal and Jeb Sprague.
Well, that makes things a whole lot clearer. <smile>. Actually not.
I wish they had addressed the indictments of 12 Russian agents by the Meuller
investigation back in July. Was that just a big mistake? Is Blumenthal saying
that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, or not? It seems he is being a bit
cagey here, or else I'm just not fololowing him as well as I should be.
Evan
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2018 6:18 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] At a Berlin security conference, hardline neocon
Jamie Fly appeared to claim some credit for the recent coordinated purge of
alternative media, report Max Blumenthal and Jeb Sprague.
Facebook Censorship of Alternative Media ‘Just the Beginning,’ Warns Top Neocon
Insider
October 24, 2018
At a Berlin security conference, hardline neocon Jamie Fly appeared to claim
some credit for the recent coordinated purge of alternative media, report Max
Blumenthal and Jeb Sprague.
By Max Blumenthal and Jeb Sprague
Gray Zone Project
This October, Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of users,
including many alternative media outlets maintained by American users. Among
those wiped out in the coordinated purge were popular sites that scrutinized
police brutality and U.S. interventionism, like The Free Thought Project,
Anti-Media, and Cop Block, along with the pages of journalists like Rachel
Blevins.
Facebook claimed that these pages had “broken our rules against spam and
coordinated inauthentic behavior.” However, sites like The Free Thought Project
were verified by Facebook and widely recognized as legitimate sources of news
and opinion. John Vibes, an independent reporter who contributed to Free
Thought, accused Facebook of “favoring mainstream sources and silencing
alternative voices.”
In comments published here for the first time, a neoconservative Washington
insider has apparently claimed a degree of credit for the recent purge — and
promised more takedowns in the near future.
“Russia, China, and other foreign states take advantage of our open political
system,” remarked Jamie Fly, a senior fellow and director of the Asia program
at the influential think tank the German Marshall Fund, which is funded by the
U.S. government and NATO. “They can invent stories that get repeated and spread
through different sites. So we are just starting to push back. Just this last
week Facebook began starting to take down sites. So this is just the beginning.”
Fly went on to complain that “all you need is an email” to set up a Facebook or
Twitter account, lamenting the sites’ accessibility to members of the general
public. He predicted a long struggle on a global scale to fix the situation,
and pointed out that to do so would require constant vigilance.
Fly made these stunning comments to Jeb Sprague, who is a visiting faculty in
sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara and co-author of this
article. The two spoke during a lunch break at a conference on Asian security
organized by the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin, Germany on Oct.
15 and 16.
The remarks by Fly — “we are just starting to push back” — seemed to confirm
the worst fears of the alternative online media community. If he was to be
believed, the latest purge was motivated by politics, not spam prevention, and
was driven by powerful interests hostile to dissident views, particularly where
American state violence is concerned.
Fly: A Rising Neocon
Fly: Neocon rising.
Fly is an influential foreign policy hardliner who has spent the last year
lobbying for the censorship of “fringe views” on social media. Over the years,
he has advocated for a military assault on Iran, a regime change war on Syria,
and hiking military spending to unprecedented levels. He is the embodiment of a
neoconservative cadre.
Like so many second-generation neocons, Fly entered government by burrowing
into mid-level positions in George W. Bush’s National Security Council and
Department of Defense.
In 2009, he was appointed director of the Foreign Policy Initiative(FPI), a
rebranded version of Bill Kristol’s Project for a New American Century, or
PNAC. The latter outfit was an umbrella group of neoconservative activists that
first made the case for an invasion of Iraq as part of a wider project of
regime change in countries that resisted Washington’s sphere of influence.
By 2011, Fly was advancing the next phase in PNAC’s blueprint by clamoring for
military strikes on Iran. “More diplomacy is not an adequate response,”
he argued. A year later, Fly urged the US to “expand its list of targets beyond
the [Iranian] nuclear program to key command and control elements of the
Republican Guard and the intelligence ministry, and facilities associated with
other key government officials.”
Fly soon found his way into the senate office of Marco Rubio, a neoconservative
pet project, assuming a role as his top foreign policy advisor. Amongst other
interventionist initiatives, Rubio has taken the lead in promoting harsh
economic sanctions targeting Venezuela, even advocating for a U.S. military
assault on the country. When Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign floundered amid
a mass revolt of the Republican Party’s middle American base against the party
establishment, Fly was forced to cast about for new opportunities.
He found them in the paranoid atmosphere of Russiagate that formed soon after
Donald Trump’s shock election victory.
PropOrNot Provides the Spark
A journalistic insider’s account of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign,
Shattered, revealed that “in the days after the election, Hillary declined to
take responsibility for her own loss.” Her top advisers were summoned the
following day, according to the book, “to engineer the case that the election
wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up … Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece
of the argument.”
Post: Ran with unverified story. (Photo credit: Daniel X. O’Neil)
Less than three weeks after Clinton’s defeat, The Washington Post’s Craig
Timberg published a dubiously sourced report headlined, “Russian propaganda
effort helped spread ‘fake news.’” The article hyped up a McCarthyite effort by
a shadowy, anonymously run organization called PropOrNot to blacklist some 200
American media outlets as Russian “online propaganda.”
The alternative media outfits on the PropOrNot blacklist included some of those
recently purged by Facebook and Twitter, such as The Free Thought Project and
Anti-Media. Among the criteria PropOrNot identified as signs of Russian
propaganda were: “Support for policies like Brexit, and the breakup of the EU
and Eurozone” and “Opposition to Ukrainian resistance to Russia and Syrian
resistance to Assad.” PropOrNot called for “formal investigations by the U.S.
government” into the outlets it had blacklisted.
According to Timberg, who uncritically promoted the media suppression
initiative, Propornot was established by “a nonpartisan collection of
researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.”
Timberg quoted a figure associated with the George Washington University Center
for Cyber and Homeland Security, Andrew Weisburd, and cited a report he wrote
with his colleague, Clint Watts, on Russian meddling.
Timberg’s piece on PropOrNot was promoted widely by former top Clinton staffers
and celebrated by ex-Obama White House aide Dan Pfeiffer as “the biggest story
in the world.” But after a wave of stinging criticism, including in the pages
of The New Yorker, the article was amended with an editor’s note stating, “The
[Washington] Post… does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s
findings regarding any individual media outlet.”
PropOrNot had been seemingly exposed as a McCarthyite sham, but the concept
behind it — exposing online American media outlets as vehicles for Kremlin
“active measures” — continued to flourish.
Taxpayers Pay for Russian Bot Tracker
By August, a new, and seemingly related initiative appeared out of the blue,
this time with backing from a bipartisan coalition of Democratic foreign policy
hands and neocon Never Trumpers in Washington. Called the Alliance for Securing
Democracy (ASD), the outfit aimed to expose how supposed Russian Twitter bots
were infecting American political discourse with divisive narratives.
It featured a daily “Hamilton 68” online dashboard that highlighted the
supposed bot activity with easily digestible charts. Conveniently, the site
avoided naming any of the digital Kremlin influence accounts it claimed to be
tracking. The initiative was immediately endorsed by John Podesta, the founder
of the Democratic Party think tank the Center for American Progress, and former
chief of staff of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Julia Ioffe, the Atlantic’s chief Russia-gate correspondent, promoted the bot
tracker as “a very cool tool.”Unlike PropOrNot, the ASD was sponsored by one of
the most respected think tanks in Washington, the German Marshall Fund, which
had been founded in 1972 to nurture the special relationship between the U.S.
and what was then West Germany.
Weisburd: Brains behind Dashboard.
The German Marshall Fund is substantially funded by Western governments, and
largely reflects their foreign-policy interests. Its top two financial
sponsors, at more than $1 million per year each, are the U.S. government’s
soft-power arm the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the
German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt). The U.S. State Department also
provides more than half a million dollars per year, as do the German Ministry
of Economic Cooperation and Development and the foreign affairs ministries of
Sweden and Norway. It likewise receives at least a quarter of a million dollars
per year from NATO.
Though the German Marshall Fund did not name the donors that specifically
sponsored its Alliance for Securing Democracy initiative, it hosts a who’s who
of bipartisan national-security hardliners on the ASD’s advisory council,
providing the endeavor with the patina of credibility. They range from neocon
movement icon Bill Kristol to former Clinton foreign policy advisor Jake
Sullivan and ex-CIA director Michael Morell.
Jamie Fly, a German Marshall Fund fellow and Asia specialist, emerged as one of
the most prolific promoters of the new Russian bot tracker in the media.
Together with Laura Rosenberger, a former foreign policy aide to Hillary
Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Fly appeared in a series of interviews and co-authored
several op-eds emphasizing the need for a massive social media crackdown.
During a March 2018 interview on C-Span, Fly complained that “Russian accounts”
were “trying to promote certain messages, amplify certain content, raise fringe
views, pit Americans against each other, and we need to deal with this ongoing
problem and find ways through the government, through tech companies, through
broader society to tackle this issue.”
Yet few of the sites on PropOrNot’s blacklist, and none of the alternative
sites that were erased in the recent Facebook purge that Fly and his colleagues
take apparent credit for, were Russian accounts. Perhaps the only infraction
they could have been accused of was publishing views that Fly and his cohorts
saw as “fringe.”
What’s more, the ASD has been forced to admit that the mass of Twitter accounts
it initially identified as “Russian bots” were not necessarily bots — and may
not have been Russian either.
‘Not Convinced on This Bot thing’
A November 2017 investigation by Max Blumenthal found that the ASD’s Hamilton
68 dashboard was the creation of “a collection of cranks, counter-terror
retreads, online harassers and paranoiacs operating with support from some of
the most prominent figures operating within the American national security
apparatus.”
These figures included the same George Washington University Center for Cyber
and Homeland Security fellows — Andrew Weisburd and Clint Watts — that were
cited as experts in the Washington Post’s article promoting PropOrNot.
Weisburd, who has been described as one of the brains behind the Hamilton 68
dashboard, once maintained a one-man, anti-Palestinian web monitoring
initiative that specialized in doxxing left-wing activists, Muslims and anyone
he considered “anti-American.” More recently, he has taken to Twitter to spout
off murderous and homophobic fantasies about Glenn Greenwald, the editor of The
Intercept — a publication the ASD flagged without explanation as a vehicle for
Russian influence operations.
Watts, for his part, has testified before Congress on several occasions to call
on the government to “quell information rebellions” with censorious measures
including “nutritional labels” for online media. He has received fawning
publicity from corporate media and been rewarded with a contributor role for
NBC on the basis of his supposed expertise in ferreting out Russian
disinformation.
However, under questioning during a public event by Grayzone contributor Ilias
Stathatos, Watts admitted that substantial parts of his testimony were false,
and refused to provide evidence to support some of his most colorful claims
about malicious Russian bot activity.
In a separate interview with Buzzfeed, Watts appeared to completely disown the
Hamilton 68 bot tracker as a legitimate tool. “I’m not convinced on this bot
thing,” Watts confessed. He even called the narrative that he helped
manufacture “overdone,” and admitted that the accounts Hamilton 68 tracked were
not necessarily directed by Russian intelligence actors.
“We don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of
them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting
Russia,” Watts conceded.
But these stunning admissions did little to slow the momentum of the coming
purge.
Enter the Atlantic Council
In his conversation with Sprague, the German Marshall Fund’s Fly stated that he
was working with the Atlantic Council in the campaign to purge alternative
media from social media platforms like Facebook.
The Atlantic Council is another Washington-based think tank that serves as a
gathering point for neoconservatives and liberal interventionists pushing
military aggression around the globe. It is funded by NATO and repressive,
US-allied governments including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Turkey, as well as by
Ukrainian oligarchs like Victor Pynchuk.
This May, Facebook announced a partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital
Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) to “identify, expose, and explain disinformation
during elections around the world.”
The Atlantic Council’s DFRLab is notorious for its zealous conflation of
legitimate online dissent with illicit Russian activity, embracing the same
tactics as PropOrNot and the ASD.
Ben Nimmo, a DFRLab fellow who has built his reputation on flushing out online
Kremlin influence networks, embarked on an embarrassing witch hunt this year
that saw him misidentify several living, breathing individuals as Russian bots
or Kremlin “influence accounts.” Nimmo’s victims included Mariam Susli, a
well-known Syrian-Australian social media personality, the famed Ukrainian
concert pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a British pensioner named Ian Shilling.
Shilling: ‘I am not a bot.”
In an interview with Sky News, Shilling delivered a memorable tirade against
his accusers. “I have no Kremlin contacts whatsoever; I do not know any
Russians, I have no contact with the Russian government or anything to do with
them,” he exclaimed. “I am an ordinary British citizen who happens to do
research on the current neocon wars which are going on in Syria at this very
moment.”
With the latest Facebook and Twitter purges, ordinary citizens like Shilling
are being targeted in the open, and without apology. The mass deletions of
alternative media accounts illustrate how national security hardliners from the
German Marshall Fund and Atlantic Council (and whoever was behind
PropOrNot) have instrumentalized the manufactured panic around Russian
interference to generate public support for a wider campaign of media
censorship.
In his conversation in Berlin with Sprague, Fly noted with apparent approval
that, “Trump is now pointing to Chinese interference in the 2018 election.”
As the mantra of foreign interference expands to a new adversarial power, the
clampdown on voices of dissent in online media is almost certain to intensify.
As Fly promised, “This is just the beginning.”
This article originally appeared on the Grayzoneproject.com
Jeb Sprague is a visiting faculty at the University of California, Santa
Barbara. He is the author of “Globalizing the Caribbean: Political economy,
social change, and the transnational capitalist class” (Temple University
Press, 2019), “Paramilitarism and the assault on democracy in Haiti”
(Monthly Review Press, 2012), and is the editor of “Globalization and
transnational capitalism in Asia and Oceania” (Routledge, 2016). He is a
co-founder of the Network for the Critical Studies of Global Capitalism.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books including
best-selling Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party,
Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, The Fifty One Day War: Ruin and
Resistance in Gaza, and The Management of Savagery, which will be published
later this year by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an
array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including
Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie and the forthcoming Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded the
Grayzone Project in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of
perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
