The Amazing Rita Katz and S.I.T.E.

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Re: The Amazing Rita Katz and S.I.T.E.

Postby nashvillebrook » Thu Sep 02, 2021 12:07 pm

Going by time stamp, at just about the same damn time that creepy SITE story appears on CNN (and everyone’s Apple News App NOTIFIED them of it), celebrities are disingenuously saying “the left” (whatever that means at this point) is basically “The Taliban.”

See under this image, a piece I wrote recently about the spooky Daily Kos anti-Russia glamping trip i attended in March 2017 when i was told in no uncertain terms (by a supposedly alt media site) that alt media was no longer necessary b/c THEY have celebrities who will simply parrot their talking points on social media…and so much more. Never forget that Markos = CIA.

Note to all: can’t recall if it’s in the text, but back in 2017 i was still on speaking terms with the progressive caucus here in FL and was sent to this event in the stead of the president, who, at approx 80 years old, wasn’t keen on camping in Death Valley. When asked if i had any interest in going to a conf on how “Russia is taking over America” put on by DK, I was like “oh yeah! I’ll find a way to get there!” LOL

So, it’s not for me to say that this is all ‘of a piece,’ buuuut it damn sure looks to me like it’s all of a piece. Also, the essay I wrote prior to this was about the bogus “red-brown alliance” claptrap which is the mechanism by which the institutional left is trying to jettison the actual grassroots left.

To recap, within 24 hours we had SITE on CNN with a big story about how the far right is likely forming an alliance with The Taliban, and celebrities equating grassroots left with…The Taliban.

Just data points. That’s all.

Image096E3A35-2D34-4DAC-B51A-B55EC2C04FBC by brookhines,

Link to my substack —> https://brookhines.substack.com/p/neoliberals-glamping-in-death-valley

Neoliberals Glamping in Death Valley
A plan to spread paranoia using celebrities, influencers and sockpuppets

Brook Hines

“TO BE A TOURIST is to escape accountability...Tourism is the march of stupidity...You are an army of fools...There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.” ― Don DeLillo, The Names

It’s not your imagination that since 2016 or so social media suddenly became flooded with various demi-celebrities swanning about to share their surprisingly uniform thoughts: ‘Trump is bad;’ ‘Democrats will save us;’ ‘Medicare For All is racist.’ Those who offered counter-examples were enthusiastically piled-on by armies of low-follower accounts before the screen actor flounced off to their next commercial or Hallmark movie. We’ve all endured the exhausting pontifications, provocations (and should you disagree, hard blocks) of the likes of Alyssa Milano, Rob Reiner, Patty Arquette, Debra Messing, and Sarah Silverman.

Where did all this come from?

Some of course is just natural. Celebrities are (for the most part) people, and like the rest of us, their unscripted thoughts and reactions can be ill-considered or obnoxious. And many were simply aghast that America chose Donald Trump (and rejected Hillary Clinton) in 2016. Still, whole flocks of them seem to be saying the same things, the same way, over and over. And curiously, most seem as mad at progressives and leftists as they were at the Bad Orange Man.

Manufacturing Consent in Death Valley

Celebrities are perfect propaganda machines. The amorphous sense of glamour and privilege they bring with them takes the focus off policy and puts it on style. Our suffering bores them because it’s foreign. Their interests and values align with the .01% with whom they share zip codes. Celebrities aren’t just value-neutral rubberneckers. They actually rob us of our own narratives. Once celebrities are deployed on the political playing field, the world sees things through their cloistered, fashionable eyes, not our own.

Democratic Party operatives have worked for years to recruit and train celebrity propagandists. Nomiki Konst ran an organization (which may or may not have been a non-profit) called “Alliance Hollywood” which nominally trained celebrities in the art of political advocacy public speaking. An “Alliance Hollywood” Flickr page features Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos running an event affiliated with the organization.

Coincidentally, in 2017 I attended a Daily Kos conference in Death Valley where a plan was presented for how Democrats would use celebrities with large social media accounts as a substitute for a media strategy. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.


GLAMPING FOR DEMOCRACY

You might ask, ‘why host a conference in arid, remote Death Valley?’ The answer, as with every question for Democrats in 2017, was “Russia, Russia, Russia!”

The eccentric location, the organizers told us, was to get as far away as possible from the prying electronic eyes and ears of the devious Russian Bear and its evil plans. Seriously. But that was just the first hint of the feckless lunacy to come.

Having caught a cheap non-stop flight from Orlando to Vegas and rented a car for the drive into the desert, I hastily gathered a few provisions at the local Target, passed the bright lights of the Vegas strip, and drove into the gloaming desert beyond, reaching the remote lodge and campground just after dark.

Making the final turn, I caught a glimpse of a coyote, yellow eyes glittering, crouching furtively behind a rock. Coyotes loom large in the mythology of the desert, reminding us to pay attention to “the moral of the story.”

I wondered what the moral to this story would become.

The desert location may have been remote, but it wasn’t empty. Dozens of well-heeled party operatives rolled into the campgrounds in expensive rented campers. Others car-camped or slept in tents. I chose to rent a room at the motor lodge as did many others who, like me, would rather not sleep on the cold ground if I can avoid it.

A large, extremely well-equipped panel truck would serve as “home base” for the weekend’s activities. It proved to be full of an impressive array of shiny new equipment and a never-ending supply of food and drink. Someone had clearly paid a mighty shitload of money for this event.

Attendees were mostly Daily Kos insiders and Democratic Party operatives from around the country. The event leader, whom I’d actually met earlier on my Target run, was an affable guy who easily slipped into conversation with everyone. He didn’t have that abrasive glibness I associate with political operatives. He was there with his mother and younger brother who works in aerospace in California. That night gathered around the fire, I’d meet a lot of aerospace (read: defense industry) professionals, including a candidate for a California congressional seat. People were drinking and having a good time.


Russia Russia Russia

Early the next morning we met for our first “session.” The leader opened with a recital of the philosophical foundation of the event: Russia stole the election for Donald Trump through the manipulations of social media. I couldn’t tell yet if people were buying this bullshit. The party needed this fiction to make their machine go, and even though I personally thought the Russiagate Conspiracy was complete bullshit I had no desire to change anyone’s mind on the subject. There’s no reasoning with dogma.

Someone commented soberly that “The more you know the less you can sleep’ [bingo, they’re buying the bullshit]. After intoning the dogma of the Russiagate conspiracy, they spent a moment sharing boilerplate contempt for the nutty conspiratorial thinking of the opposition which had not fully blossomed into what would be known Q.

As if to punctuate the cognitive dissonance, it rained all morning in Death Valley.

The paranoia was ramped up when the event leader declared all the electronics we carry—from iPhones to Fitbits—are actually surveillance devices that Russians use to spy on us. There was no way to be safe, but we might consider keeping our devices in a shielded “Faraday bag,” lined with electron-proof materials.

We were told repeatedly to leave all electronics in our rooms, campers or tents while meeting together. Because they’d be sharing highly sensitive information, especially the planning sessions.

Having established that hordes of Russian operatives were lurking in our smartwatches and cell phones, the next point in the curated conversation was to establish the idea that we are immersed in disinformation or “fake news.” Except of course for Rachel Maddow, whose “superior Russia coverage,” was obviously on-target. Attendees likewise gushed over the “Steele Dossier,” the sensationalized oppo piece commissioned by anti-Trump Republicans and then adopted by Democrats. Used to mislead the FISA Court into authorizing spying on Carter Page, the document has since been debunked as little more than a drunken game of “what if” between a couple of aging British spies.

We also heard about how to identify human “Russian-intelligence Controlled Assets.” Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and former foreign policy advisor Carter Page all fit the profile. All were likely under the control Russian banks and the all-powerful Vladimir Putin.


Celebrities and sockpuppets

After the morning’s lesson in paranoia, it was time for breakout sessions. One group was working on a letter to the DNC. I went to the “media” session, which oddly only attracted four people including myself. You’d think that people involved with an online publication like DailyKos would be more enthusiastic about media.

The participant who took the lead had leveraged her blogging success into an invitation to the White House to meet Obama, and before she knew it she had a political consultancy.

Given that Daily Kos and Netroots Nation were famous for launching a thousand blogs into the mainstream, I assumed the strategy would involve boosting their indie media partners.

Instead, the blogger in charge let us know that the “media plan” had already been decided and implemented. She said that instead of bothering with small media ventures they were seeking funders to train hot young celebrities and social media influencers. It was all beginning to feel more like a business pitch than a workshop.

“The funders,” we were informed, had no interest investing in independent media, because corporate media was already serving their aims. Instead, the focus was to be on recruiting celebrities and influencers and “re-training” them in the new information ecosystem before sending them out to the various social media platform. This approach, we were told, was already in full swing.

This new media landscape transcended the usual concerns of media and “Facebook is all the infrastructure we need now.”

Our blogger-turned-consultant described a “virtuous triangle,” whereby a celebrity launders messaging from “influencers” to their following, who then amplify the message in a viral manner. To extend their reach, their funders were investing in “software that mimics personas” which would create the illusion of vast herds of Democrats all singing the same tune.

To be honest, at the time I felt she was full of shit, and dismissed the software comment as part of her entrepreneurial schtick. I’ve heard all kinds of bizarre evidence-free claims from operatives. Everyone wants you to sell you their brand of Special Sauce. But we’ve known since at least 2011 that the military uses “sockpuppet armies,” or groups of invented online personas, to create “a false consensus in online conversations, crowding out unwelcome opinions and smothering commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.” In the context of the military, it’s called psychological warfare. In the context of Democratic machine politics it’s come to be known as #Khive.

We have disclosure laws for political speech for a reason. While the atrocious Citizens United decision can make it hard to tell who is funding what, political groups still must disclose that they are engaged in political messaging. Check those glossy, hysterical postcards that flood your mailbox in an election year, and each will say “paid for by” and include the correct name of the entity which can be referenced at the FEC.

Yet the very people hopping up and down in front of me about the nefarious influence of Russian Facebook ads were clearly very excited to explain that the future of Democratic messaging is to disguise paid political messaging as the organic thoughts of ordinary people via “software that mimics personas.”

This is all happening right now. When you log on to Twitter, you’re bumping up against funder-supported armies of sockpuppets, pushing whatever it is the mysterious “funders” believe we need to believe. It’s still psychological warfare. And there is money to be made doing it.

If you’re in a chat group with a political influencer pressuring you to post this or that, you should wonder who’s paying them. If you’re a political influencer participating in this, you should ask who put the money in the PAC that cuts your checks. Defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies, insurance providers, polluters, human rights abusers? The all-important “funders” were never mentioned by name. Chances are that a lot of political operatives have no idea where their money originates from. A check is written on the account of a trusted campaign/union/PAC is transferring money that came from somewhere—generally a special interest that expects their policy demands to be met.

We deserve to know whose interests are being represented by those thousands of seemingly organic comments and “likes” on social media. We had hoped social media would be an avenue for a more democratic worldwide discourse. Instead has become just one big, paid psyop.

“Informational hygiene”

After each breakout session, participants returned to the main group to “report back” on their discussions. Our media group’s blogger-in-chief regurgitated the chilling strategy she had laid out to us: Feed celebrities political messaging on social media; use “influencers” and software to “mimic personas” to amplify the message. The “Virtuous Triangle.”

When she was finished, I asked if I could have a moment to follow-on. I was curious if anyone else saw inherent risks or contradictions in the social media strategy. Why not include media in this vision? That would play to the strength of the Daily Kos brand. and employ a more meat-and-potatoes media strategy in addition to this sketchy, psy-op-inspired social media-by-deception plan?

Someone said that “We can’t trust media anymore because of ‘fake news.’” I said okay, but as Daily Kos you’re “the news.” Do you not trust yourself? Why limit a media strategy to social media?

Silence.

After a few moments of pregnant silence, someone offered that the real problem was that we needed to “cleanse the news” of disinformation through a process of “informational hygiene.” While the speaker was clearly suggesting a program of censorship, what the term “informational hygiene” actually means is “having regular engagement with news, and differing points of view; verifying information and not amplifying misinformation.” This stands in stark contrast to a strategy of creating sockpuppet armies using software-generated bots to fabricate a false consensus, while hiding a pay-for-play scheme to gain political influence.

It was becoming clear the disturbing underlying philosophy was that real people are unreliable in that they tend to have opinions and critiques, whereas “software that mimics personas” doesn’t come with any such problematic strings attached. The utter ruthlessness and hypocrisy stunned me.

The irony that the very same people who only that morning were up in arms about Russia manufacturing consent via social media were enthusiastically proselytizing for the very same strategy was apparently lost on the group.

These people were high on their own supply. It was time for lunch and I was ready for a break.

“Keep your electronics in your room”

We had about 20 minutes until the next session. The food truck had some kind of warmed-up Costco offering that looked and smelled sketchy. I had some greens from my Target run stashed in the motel room, so I threw together a salad to eat during the next session.

Walking up to the motor lodge I noticed what seemed to be a couple of conference attendees entering a room with housekeeping. Someone probably lost their keycard. But a few minutes later, on my way out, I noticed the same group again following housekeeping into the next room closer to mine. I stood for a moment thinking about all the hair-on-fire security instructions to leave our electronics behind in our rooms. Do I want housekeeping and the two tag-alongs to have access to my electronics?

Without drawing any firm conclusions, I moved my laptop and electronics to the car and locked the doors. I planned to take off as soon as the next session lets out to do some photography, so why not just have everything ready to go?

Super double-secret operations sesh

At the lunchtime planning session, we were informed that the information we were about to exchange was so sensitive we needed to move even farther out into the desert to discuss it. Apparently another 300 feet out into the scrub would shield us from the prying eyes and ears of the Kremlin.

It felt like a game of “Let’s Pretend We’re Super Important People Doing Super Important Stuff.” Trying not to roll my eyes, I grabbed my chair and followed the herd into the brush and dunes.

It’s impossible to overstate the build-up to this moment. People had traveled across the country to participate in the project of re-taking democracy. No phones, cameras, laptops, or even Fitbits were allowed, because Russia was definitely surveilling us, and the information we’d share in mere moments was so incredibly sensitive that extra steps were taken to mitigate the risk of being overheard.

We arranged our chairs into a large circle. Some people seemed tense. Others just looked tired, disinterested, and hungover. I was admiring the sunlight cutting jagged shadows into the Grapevine mountain range and wondering how soon this would be over so I could run and take photographs. Also, I wanted to eat my salad.

I was just getting situated to eat when the aerospace-connected brother of the event’s leader approached with a sour facial expression. He pointed to my bag, and accused me of “hiding my phone” in there.

His weird hostility put me off. If my phone was in my bag it wouldn’t be hidden, it would be where it normally belongs, but I’d locked it in the car when I saw the curious group following housekeeping from room to room at the motel. Opting to be nice, I just said “No.”

I had just moved my electronics from the room to the car less than 10 minutes before, and if those people were indeed going from room to room, they would be at mine right about now. If someone were, say, covertly trying to verify the location of my electronics, they would have found none. And here was Mr. Defense Contractor, face contorted in self-important rage, oddly convinced my phone was “hidden” somewhere.

Looking back, the “secure location” we were ordered to was just far enough from the camp where most people were staying to put it out of view. The motel was further still. It seems not beyond the realm of possibility that our hyper-security-conscious organizers pulled their own ham-handed “op” on us.

Finally, out in the scrub, these Daily Kos insiders were going to reveal the Top Secret Plan. To take back our democracy. This is what everyone had been waiting for. Information so precious we all needed to travel to DEATH VALLEY to evade electronic surveillance.

TAKING BACK DEMOCRACY: action item #1

First up was a Black activist from Georgia, who described how her sorority was part of an effort to get the cable channel VH1 to cancel a show they said “cast a bad light” on the Greek system in universities. This important issue was apparently tackled with a fresh, insightful strategy involving … websites and Facebook groups. Also, celebrities.

One might wonder if “software that mimics personas” wasn’t also part of the Sorority Sisters saga. Had their messages been artificially boosted by software that mimics personas? Who knows? Who fucking cares?

Someone—not me—actually said “We’re in the desert talking about television boycotts?” It was clear that the only reason to worry about surreptitious recording of the session was because the whole thing was mortifying; horribly embarrassing.

TAKING BACK DEMOCRACY: action item #2

The first case study was a dud. How about the second one? This one has to be better. It can’t be worse.

Here’s the pitch: get dirt on Republicans,specifically sexual misconduct information.

While this approach is a significant improvement over “Let’s boycott TV shows,” it hardly merits a “top secret” designation. Everyone does opposition research. You don’t need a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or an empty desert to do so. Hell, most people put their oppo on Google Docs.

The session broke up and everyone hiked back to the camping area. The build-up had been as intense as Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone’s vault, and the plan was fittingly as empty as the cellar featured on that 2-hour television special.

With a few hours before the sundown, I was ready to explore and take some pictures. The dunes were full of tourists, and the wildflowers hadn’t bloomed yet. I decided drive as far away from people as possible. Found my spot and watched the light to do its thing while laughing to myself at the inanity of everything I’d just witnessed.

When I got back it was just getting dark and people had obviously started drinking directly after the planning session. I grabbed a hot dog and sat at a picnic table. As with so many second nights at a conference, people got wasted. Things just got stupider from there.

Someone brought out an American Flag and loudly and badly belted out the first couple of lines of The Star Spangled Banner. Others joined, each for some strange reason trying to touch the flag. It was icky and pretentious. I couldn’t wait to leave.

I think my friend the coyote would agree that if there were a lesson to be learned here, it would be in this moment—at this twilight’s last gleaming Democrats were moving far, FAR to the right of their base. They’d swing from the rafters singing how they’re more patriotic than anyone. They’d hop up and down, wave their flags, as their persona-mimicking social media accounts reinforced each day’s talking points. This was the grand plan for Democratic messaging for the foreseeable future.


Coyote’s moral to the story

For Democratic operatives only interested in political tourism, real engagement wasn’t just frowned upon, it’s shut down. They’d deploy their version “informational hygiene” to cleanse the discourse of any evidence of dissent. They had their new software that would “mimic personas” on social media, and they had already trained celebrity brand ambassadors through organizations such as Konst’s “Alliance Hollywood.”

Fed up with the paranoia theater I hopped in the rental car and drove out to do some night photography. There was no moon, and the Milky Way lit up the sky. It felt good to pivot from the pitiful narrowness of the day’s programming, to gazing at infinity.

It was easy to see that electronic security was not the reason we were out in Death Valley. We were in the desert to LARP a paranoid fantasy of Russian skullduggery. Borrowing from improvisational theater, if everyone acts as if they believe a premise, the premise becomes more believable and people then have the experience of the premise being real, which makes acting on that premise seem natural. In this game the point was the paranoia. They wanted everyone to go home and spread the Russian Jitters.

People attending this event were not there as political organizers or even human actors with agency. We were all to be tourists, provided a dose of frantic paranoia and then soothed with a simulacrum of having done political work.

Be afraid and boycott a TV show for Democracy—the “software that mimics personas” has already taken over.
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Re: The Amazing Rita Katz and S.I.T.E.

Postby Harvey » Thu Sep 02, 2021 12:24 pm

I think you see it all clearly.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: The Amazing Rita Katz and S.I.T.E.

Postby nashvillebrook » Fri Sep 03, 2021 10:08 am

Of course WaPo has the exact same SITE info today:


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/03/far-right-america-taliban/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social

The U.S. far right has a curious affinity for the Taliban
Ishaan Tharoor
For some onlookers, the debacle of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan constitutes an almost cultural defeat. In the words of NBC News’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel, the fall of the Afghan government and the desperate American evacuation represented “the worst capitulation of Western values in our lifetimes” — a statement that earned no shortage of derision from critics of the United States’ costly, bloody interventions. Yet others shared his sentiment. Speaking to Sky News, a former senior British intelligence official echoed this idea of a civilizational blow: “This marks the end of an era of Western liberalism and democracy that started with the fall of the Berlin Wall,” the former official said. “It is a defeat of Western ideology.”

But among some circles on the far right, the very idea of the Taliban engineering a Western defeat elicited a kind of glee. After all, an avowedly illiberal, somewhat nationalist militia had outfoxed the modern American war machine and eventually overwhelmed the enfeebled U.S.-backed Afghan government. The supposed ideals wrapped up in two decades of U.S.-led nation-building — from inculcating republican democracy to expanding women’s rights — collapsed in the face of a tribal resistance movement more rooted in the country.

“What went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan was, first and foremost, the ideas in the heads of the people running the show,” tweeted Yoram Hazony, an Israeli writer who is one of the leading intellectuals of “national conservatism,” a brand of right-wing nationalism that’s reshaping the Republican Party. “Say its name: Liberalism.”

Analysts point to a somewhat long-standing tradition of white supremacists voicing admiration for Islamist extremists, no matter their anti-Muslim bigotry. In its weekly bulletin on far-right extremists, the SITE Intelligence Group noted that some people saw the Taliban’s victory as “a lesson in love for the homeland, for freedom, and for religion,” while it was also tracking “increasingly violent rhetoric about ‘invasions’ by displaced Afghans.”

On various social media platforms, including the 4chan message board that is popular with the far right, users crowed over the perceived lessons learned. “These farmers and minimally trained men fought to take their nation back from [Western neoliberals],” wrote a poster on a popular Telegram channel associated with the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence whose members participated in the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol. “They took back their government, installed their national religion as law, and executed dissenters. Hard to not respect that.”

“The Taliban is a conservative, religious force, the U.S. is godless and liberal,” wrote influential far-right operative Nick Fuentes, who leads a white-supremacist group and counts at least one Republican congressman as an ally, on his Telegram channel. “The defeat of the U.S. government in Afghanistan is unequivocally a positive development.”

Somewhat more mainstream voices have also chimed in. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) described the Taliban as “more legitimate than the last government in Afghanistan or the current government here.” His comments reflected right-wing disgruntlement over social media companies wielding their power to censor public figures — most notably former president Donald Trump, but now also accounts linked to the Islamist militants in power in Kabul.

The Taliban’s “legitimacy,” in this view, is mostly about the sort of humiliation its success poses to the Biden administration and its supporters. “The far right, the alt-right, are all sort of galvanized by the Taliban essentially running roughshod through Afghanistan, and us leaving underneath a Democratic president,” Moustafa Ayad of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which tracks extremist groups, told New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg.

There are also deeper narratives at play. In the first week of the Taliban’s takeover, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, arguably the most influential right-wing voice in the United States, cast the militants’ victory as a repudiation of liberal norms around gender equality. “It turns out that the people of Afghanistan don’t actually want gender studies symposium,” he said.

“They don’t hate their own masculinity,” Carlson went on. “They don’t think it’s toxic. They like the patriarchy. Some of their women like it too. So now they’re getting it all back. So maybe it’s possible that we failed in Afghanistan because the entire neoliberal program is grotesque.” (Carlson seems to have misused the word “neoliberal,” which more accurately applies to a set of laissez-faire economic principles, not social or cultural ones.)

Carlson, to be sure, does not want Afghans coming to America. For many on the far right, the celebration of American liberalism foundering in a foreign land is accompanied by a belief in the inadmissibility of Afghans into the United States. “So first we invade, and then we’re invaded,” Carlson said, scaremongering over the current influx of thousands of Afghan refugees.

Carlson’s animus is part of what administration officials have described as a growing chorus of anti-refugee sentiment on the right that has followed the Taliban’s capture of Kabul. CNN obtained the details of a recent call between John Cohen, the head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, and local and state law enforcement. In the call, Cohen said his agency, in its monitoring of far-right groups, had seen both an uptick in invocations of the “great replacement” — a white-supremacist conspiracy theory that liberals are “importing” foreigners to undermine the country’s white majority — and praise for the Taliban’s success from those who call for a new civil war within the United States.

“There are concerns that those narratives may incite violent activities directed at immigrant communities, certain faith communities, or even those who are relocated to the United States,” Cohen said on the call.



When the next act of violence happens it’ll 100% be cooked-up by intel services.
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Re: The Amazing Rita Katz and S.I.T.E.

Postby Elvis » Wed Sep 08, 2021 6:40 am

nashvillebrook wrote:Neoliberals Glamping in Death Valley
A plan to spread paranoia using celebrities, influencers and sockpuppets

Brook Hines


That's a terrific account of a bizarre event, thanks. After all that security, now Putin knows everything! :wink:
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: The Amazing Rita Katz and S.I.T.E.

Postby norton ash » Wed Sep 08, 2021 12:44 pm

Great piece, Brook!
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Re: The Amazing Rita Katz and S.I.T.E.

Postby nashvillebrook » Sat Oct 09, 2021 3:26 pm

Thanks you guys for reading the Glamping piece. I sat on that story for way too long. Or maybe it just took years to digest.

This seems to be in the same vein and I don’t see it posted here already; it’s a a 45-page report for NATO (from an internal NATO “think tank”) that lays out rationale for “cognitive warfare.” This is Cass Sunstein on mega-steroids.

https://www.innovationhub-act.org/sites/default/files/2021-01/20210122_CW%20Final.pdf

There’s also a piece by Ben Norton that skims it which I’ll paste below. This is all stuff we’ve known for years, so you know THEY’ve known it for longer. I think it’s being promoted NOW b/c it serves a purpose (prolly related to c19). I can’t think of anything that has been more of a clusterfuck in my entire time on this planet.

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/10/08/nato-cognitive-warfare-brain/


Behind NATO’s ‘cognitive warfare’: ‘Battle for your brain’ waged by Western militaries
Ben NortonOctober 8, 2021

Western governments in the NATO military alliance are developing tactics of “cognitive warfare,” using the supposed threats of China and Russia to justify waging a “battle for your brain” in the “human domain,” to “make everyone a weapon.”

NATO is developing new forms of warfare to wage a “battle for the brain,” as the military alliance put it.

The US-led NATO military cartel has tested novel modes of hybrid warfare against its self-declared adversaries, including economic warfare, cyber warfare, information warfare, and psychological warfare.

Now, NATO is spinning out an entirely new kind of combat it has branded cognitive warfare. Described as the “weaponization of brain sciences,” the new method involves “hacking the individual” by exploiting “the vulnerabilities of the human brain” in order to implement more sophisticated “social engineering.”

Until recently, NATO had divided war into five different operational domains: air, land, sea, space, and cyber. But with its development of cognitive warfare strategies, the military alliance is discussing a new, sixth level: the “human domain.”

A 2020 NATO-sponsored study of this new form of warfare clearly explained, “While actions taken in the five domains are executed in order to have an effect on the human domain, cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”

“The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” the report stressed. “Humans are the contested domain,” and “future conflicts will likely occur amongst the people digitally first and physically thereafter in proximity to hubs of political and economic power.”

NATO cognitive warfare report
The 2020 NATO-sponsored study on cognitive warfare
While the NATO-backed study insisted that much of its research on cognitive warfare is designed for defensive purposes, it also conceded that the military alliance is developing offensive tactics, stating, “The human is very often the main vulnerability and it should be acknowledged in order to protect NATO’s human capital but also to be able to benefit from our adversaries’s vulnerabilities.”

In a chilling disclosure, the report said explicitly that “the objective of Cognitive Warfare is to harm societies and not only the military.”

With entire civilian populations in NATO’s crosshairs, the report emphasized that Western militaries must work more closely with academia to weaponize social sciences and human sciences and help the alliance develop its cognitive warfare capacities.

The study described this phenomenon as “the militarization of brain science.” But it appears clear that NATO’s development of cognitive warfare will lead to a militarization of all aspects of human society and psychology, from the most intimate of social relationships to the mind itself.

Such all-encompassing militarization of society is reflected in the paranoid tone of the NATO-sponsored report, which warned of “an embedded fifth column, where everyone, unbeknownst to him or her, is behaving according to the plans of one of our competitors.” The study makes it clear that those “competitors” purportedly exploiting the consciousness of Western dissidents are China and Russia.

In other words, this document shows that figures in the NATO military cartel increasingly see their own domestic population as a threat, fearing civilians to be potential Chinese or Russian sleeper cells, dastardly “fifth columns” that challenge the stability of “Western liberal democracies.”

NATO’s development of novel forms of hybrid warfare come at a time when member states’ military campaigns are targeting domestic populations on an unprecedented level.

The Ottawa Times reported this September that the Canadian military’s Joint Operations Command took advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to wage an information war against its own domestic population, testing out propaganda tactics on Canadian civilians.

Internal NATO-sponsored reports suggest that this disclosure is just scratching the surface of a wave of new unconventional warfare techniques that Western militaries are employing around the world.

Canada hosts ‘NATO Innovation Challenge’ on cognitive warfare

Twice each year, NATO holds a “pitch-style event” that it brand as an “Innovation Challenge.” These campaigns – one hosted in the Spring and the other in the Fall, by alternating member states – call on private companies, organizations, and researchers to help develop new tactics and technologies for the military alliance.

The shark tank-like challenges reflect the predominant influence of neoliberal ideology within NATO, as participants mobilize the free market, public-private partnerships, and the promise of cash prizes to advance the agenda of the military-industrial complex.

NATO’s Fall 2021 Innovation Challenge is hosted by Canada, and is titled “The invisible threat: Tools for countering cognitive warfare.”

Canada NATO innovation challenge cognitive warfare

“Cognitive warfare seeks to change not only what people think, but also how they act,” the Canadian government wrote in its official statement on the challenge. “Attacks against the cognitive domain involve the integration of cyber, disinformation/misinformation, psychological, and social-engineering capabilities.”

Ottawa’s press release continued: “Cognitive warfare positions the mind as a battle space and contested domain. Its objective is to sow dissonance, instigate conflicting narratives, polarize opinion, and radicalize groups. Cognitive warfare can motivate people to act in ways that can disrupt or fragment an otherwise cohesive society.”

NATO-backed Canadian military officials discuss cognitive warfare in panel event

An advocacy group called the NATO Association of Canada has mobilized to support this Innovation Challenge, working closely with military contractors to attract the private sector to invest in further research on behalf of NATO – and its own bottom line.

While the NATO Association of Canada (NAOC) is technically an independent NGO, its mission is to promote NATO, and the organization boasts on its website, “The NAOC has strong ties with the Government of Canada including Global Affairs Canada and the Department of National Defence.”

As part of its efforts to promote Canada’s NATO Innovation Challenge, the NAOC held a panel discussion on cognitive warfare on October 5.

The researcher who wrote the definitive 2020 NATO-sponsored study on cognitive warfare, François du Cluzel, participated in the event, alongside NATO-backed Canadian military officers.

NATO cognitive warfare Canada panel
The October 5 panel on cognitive warfare, hosted by the NATO Association of Canada
The panel was overseen by Robert Baines, president of the NATO Association of Canada. It was moderated by Garrick Ngai, a marketing executive in the weapons industry who serves as an adviser to the Canadian Department of National Defense and vice president and director of the NAOC.

Baines opened the event noting that participants would discuss “cognitive warfare and new domain of competition, where state and non-state actors aim to influence what people think and how they act.”

The NAOC president also happily noted the lucrative “opportunities for Canadian companies” that this NATO Innovation Challenge promised.

NATO researcher describes cognitive warfare as ‘ways of harming the brain’

The October 5 panel kicked off with François du Cluzel, a former French military officer who in 2013 helped to create the NATO Innovation Hub (iHub), which he has since then managed from its base in Norfolk, Virginia.

Although the iHub insists on its website, for legal reasons, that the “opinions expressed on this platform don’t constitute NATO or any other organization points of view,” the organization is sponsored by the Allied Command Transformation (ACT), described as “one of two Strategic Commands at the head of NATO’s military command structure.”

The Innovation Hub, therefore, acts as a kind of in-house NATO research center or think tank. Its research is not necessarily official NATO policy, but it is directly supported and overseen by NATO.

In 2020, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation (SACT) tasked du Cluzel, as manager of the iHub, to conduct a six-month study on cognitive warfare.

Du Cluzel summarized his research in the panel this October. He initiated his remarks noting that cognitive warfare “right now is one of the hottest topics for NATO,” and “has become a recurring term in military terminology in recent years.”

Although French, Du Cluzel emphasized that cognitive warfare strategy “is being currently developed by my command here in Norfolk, USA.”

The NATO Innovation Hub manager spoke with a PowerPoint presentation, and opened with a provocative slide that described cognitive warfare as “A Battle for the Brain.”

NATO Cognitive Warfare

“Cognitive warfare is a new concept that starts in the information sphere, that is a kind of hybrid warfare,” du Cluzel said.

“It starts with hyper-connectivity. Everyone has a cell phone,” he continued. “It starts with information because information is, if I may say, the fuel of cognitive warfare. But it goes way beyond solely information, which is a standalone operation – information warfare is a standalone operation.”

Cognitive warfare overlaps with Big Tech corporations and mass surveillance, because “it’s all about leveraging the big data,” du Cluzel explained. “We produce data everywhere we go. Every minute, every second we go, we go online. And this is extremely easy to leverage those data in order to better know you and use that knowledge to change the way you think.”

Naturally, the NATO researcher claimed foreign “adversaries” are the supposed aggressors employing cognitive warfare. But at the same time, he made it clear that the Western military alliance is developing its own tactics.

Du Cluzel defined cognitive warfare as the “art of using technologies to alter the cognition of human targets.”

Those technologies, he noted, incorporate the fields of NBIC – nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. All together, “it makes a kind of very dangerous cocktail that can further manipulate the brain,” he said.

NATO cognitive warfare human targets

Du Cluzel went on to explain that the exotic new method of attack “goes well beyond” information warfare or psychological operations (psyops).

“Cognitive warfare is not only a fight against what we think, but it’s rather a fight against the way we think, if we can change the way people think,” he said. “It’s much more powerful and it goes way beyond the information [warfare] and psyops.”

De Cluzel continued: “It’s crucial to understand that it’s a game on our cognition, on the way our brain processes information and turns it into knowledge, rather than solely a game on information or on psychological aspects of our brains. It’s not only an action against what we think, but also an action against the way we think, the way we process information and turn it into knowledge.”

“In other words, cognitive warfare is not just another word, another name for information warfare. It is a war on our individual processor, our brain.”

The NATO researcher stressed that “this is extremely important for us in the military,” because “it has the potential, by developing new weapons and ways of harming the brain, it has the potential to engage neuroscience and technology in many, many different approaches to influence human ecology… because you all know that it’s very easy to turn a civilian technology into a military one.”

NATO cognitive warfare psyops

As for who the targets of cognitive warfare could be, du Cluzel revealed that anyone and everyone is on the table.

“Cognitive warfare has universal reach, from starting with the individual to states and multinational organizations,” he said. “Its field of action is global and aim to seize control of the human being, civilian as well as military.”

And the private sector has a financial interest in advancing cognitive warfare research, he noted: “The massive worldwide investments made in neurosciences suggests that the cognitive domain will probably one of the battlefields of the future.”

The development of cognitive warfare totally transforms military conflict as we know it, du Cluzel said, adding “a third major combat dimension to the modern battlefield: to the physical and informational dimension is now added a cognitive dimension.”

This “creates a new space of competition beyond what is called the five domains of operations – or land, sea, air, cyber, and space domains. Warfare in the cognitive arena mobilizes a wider range of battle spaces than solely the physical and information dimensions can do.”

In short, humans themselves are the new contested domain in this novel mode of hybrid warfare, alongside land, sea, air, cyber, and outer space.

NATO cognitive warfare humans domain

NATO’s cognitive warfare study warns of “embedded fifth column”

The study that NATO Innovation Hub manager François du Cluzel conducted, from June to November 2020, was sponsored by the military cartel’s Allied Command Transformation, and published as a 45-page report in January 2021 (PDF).

The chilling document shows how contemporary warfare has reached a kind of dystopian stage, once imaginable only in science fiction.

“The nature of warfare has changed,” the report emphasized. “The majority of current conflicts remain below the threshold of the traditionally accepted definition of warfare, but new forms of warfare have emerged such as Cognitive Warfare (CW), while the human mind is now being considered as a new domain of war.”

For NATO, research on cognitive warfare is not just defensive; it is very much offensive as well.

“Developing capabilities to harm the cognitive abilities of opponents will be a necessity,” du Cluzel’s report stated clearly. “In other words, NATO will need to get the ability to safeguard her decision making process and disrupt the adversary’s one.”

And anyone could be a target of these cognitive warfare operations: “Any user of modern information technologies is a potential target. It targets the whole of a nation’s human capital,” the report ominously added.

“As well as the potential execution of a cognitive war to complement to a military conflict, it can also be conducted alone, without any link to an engagement of the armed forces,” the study went on. “Moreover, cognitive warfare is potentially endless since there can be no peace treaty or surrender for this type of conflict.”

Just as this new mode of battle has no geographic borders, it also has no time limit: “This battlefield is global via the internet. With no beginning and no end, this conquest knows no respite, punctuated by notifications from our smartphones, anywhere, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

The NATO-sponsored study noted that “some NATO Nations have already acknowledged that neuroscientific techniques and technologies have high potential for operational use in a variety of security, defense and intelligence enterprises.”

It spoke of breakthroughs in “neuroscientific methods and technologies” (neuroS/T), and said “uses of research findings and products to directly facilitate the performance of combatants, the integration of human machine interfaces to optimise combat capabilities of semi autonomous vehicles (e.g., drones), and development of biological and chemical weapons (i.e., neuroweapons).”

The Pentagon is among the primary institutions advancing this novel research, as the report highlighted: “Although a number of nations have pursued, and are currently pursuing neuroscientific research and development for military purposes, perhaps the most proactive efforts in this regard have been conducted by the United States Department of Defense; with most notable and rapidly maturing research and development conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).”

Military uses of neuroS/T research, the study indicated, include intelligence gathering, training, “optimising performance and resilience in combat and military support personnel,” and of course “direct weaponisation of neuroscience and neurotechnology.”

This weaponization of neuroS/T can and will be fatal, the NATO-sponsored study was clear to point out. The research can “be utilised to mitigate aggression and foster cognitions and emotions of affiliation or passivity; induce morbidity, disability or suffering; and ‘neutralise’ potential opponents or incur mortality” – in other words, to maim and kill people.

NATO cognitive warfare report
The 2020 NATO-sponsored study on cognitive warfare
The report quoted US Major General Robert H. Scales, who summarized NATO’s new combat philosophy: “Victory will be defined more in terms of capturing the psycho-cultural rather than the geographical high ground.”

And as NATO develops tactics of cognitive warfare to “capture the psycho-cultural,” it is also increasingly weaponizing various scientific fields.

The study spoke of “the crucible of data sciences and human sciences,” and stressed that “the combination of Social Sciences and System Engineering will be key in helping military analysts to improve the production of intelligence.”

“If kinetic power cannot defeat the enemy,” it said, “psychology and related behavioural and social sciences stand to fill the void.”

“Leveraging social sciences will be central to the development of the Human Domain Plan of Operations,” the report went on. “It will support the combat operations by providing potential courses of action for the whole surrounding Human Environment including enemy forces, but also determining key human elements such as the Cognitive center of gravity, the desired behaviour as the end state.”

All academic disciplines will be implicated in cognitive warfare, not just the hard sciences. “Within the military, expertise on anthropology, ethnography, history, psychology among other areas will be more than ever required to cooperate with the military,” the NATO-sponsored study stated.

The report nears its conclusion with an eerie quote: “Today’s progresses in nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science (NBIC), boosted by the seemingly unstoppable march of a triumphant troika made of Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and civilisational ‘digital addiction’ have created a much more ominous prospect: an embedded fifth column, where everyone, unbeknownst to him or her, is behaving according to the plans of one of our competitors.”

“The modern concept of war is not about weapons but about influence,” it posited. “Victory in the long run will remain solely dependent on the ability to influence, affect, change or impact the cognitive domain.”

The NATO-sponsored study then closed with a final paragraph that makes it clear beyond doubt that the Western military alliance’s ultimate goal is not only physical control of the planet, but also control over people’s minds:

“Cognitive warfare may well be the missing element that allows the transition from military victory on the battlefield to lasting political success. The human domain might well be the decisive domain, wherein multi-domain operations achieve the commander’s effect. The five first domains can give tactical and operational victories; only the human domain can achieve the final and full victory.”

Canadian Special Operations officer emphasizes importance of cognitive warfare

When François du Cluzel, the NATO researcher who conducted the study on cognitive warfare, concluded his remarks in the October 5 NATO Association of Canada panel, he was followed by Andy Bonvie, a commanding officer at the Canadian Special Operations Training Centre.

With more than 30 years of experience with the Canadian Armed Forces, Bonvie spoke of how Western militaries are making use of research by du Cluzel and others, and incorporating novel cognitive warfare techniques into their combat activities.

“Cognitive warfare is a new type of hybrid warfare for us,” Bonvie said. “And it means that we need to look at the traditional thresholds of conflict and how the things that are being done are really below those thresholds of conflict, cognitive attacks, and non-kinetic forms and non-combative threats to us. We need to understand these attacks better and adjust their actions and our training accordingly to be able to operate in these different environments.”

NATO cognitive warfare Andy Bonvie

Although he portrayed NATO’s actions as “defensive,” claiming “adversaries” were using cognitive warfare against them, Bonvie was unambiguous about the fact that Western militaries are developing these tecniques themselves, to maintain a “tactical advantage.”

“We cannot lose the tactical advantage for our troops that we’re placing forward as it spans not only tactically, but strategically,” he said. “Some of those different capabilities that we have that we enjoy all of a sudden could be pivoted to be used against us. So we have to better understand how quickly our adversaries adapt to things, and then be able to predict where they’re going in the future, to help us be and maintain the tactical advantage for our troops moving forward.”

‘Cognitive warfare is the most advanced form of manipulation seen to date’

Marie-Pierre Raymond, a retired Canadian lieutenant colonel who currently serves as a “defence scientist and innovation portfolio manager” for the Canadian Armed Forces’ Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security Program, also joined the October 5 panel.

“Long gone are the days when war was fought to acquire more land,” Raymond said. “Now the new objective is to change the adversaries’ ideologies, which makes the brain the center of gravity of the human. And it makes the human the contested domain, and the mind becomes the battlefield.”

“When we speak about hybrid threats, cognitive warfare is the most advanced form of manipulation seen to date,” she added, noting that it aims to influence individuals’ decision-making and “to influence a group of a group of individuals on their behavior, with the aim of gaining a tactical or strategic advantage.”

Raymond noted that cognitive warfare also heavily overlaps with artificial intelligence, big data, and social media, and reflects “the rapid evolution of neurosciences as a tool of war.”

Raymond is helping to oversee the NATO Fall 2021 Innovation Challenge on behalf of Canada’s Department of National Defence, which delegated management responsibilities to the military’s Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS) Program, where she works.

In highly technical jargon, Raymond indicated that the cognitive warfare program is not solely defensive, but also offensive: “This challenge is calling for a solution that will support NATO’s nascent human domain and jump-start the development of a cognition ecosystem within the alliance, and that will support the development of new applications, new systems, new tools and concepts leading to concrete action in the cognitive domain.”

She emphasized that this “will require sustained cooperation between allies, innovators, and researchers to enable our troops to fight and win in the cognitive domain. This is what we are hoping to emerge from this call to innovators and researchers.”

To inspire corporate interest in the NATO Innovation Challenge, Raymond enticed, “Applicants will receive national and international exposure and cash prizes for the best solution.” She then added tantalizingly, “This could also benefit the applicants by potentially providing them access to a market of 30 nations.”

NATO cognitive warfare Shekhar Gothi

Canadian military officer calls on corporations to invest in NATO’s cognitive warfare research

The other institution that is managing the Fall 2021 NATO Innovation Challenge on behalf of Canada’s Department of National Defense is the Special Operations Forces Command (CANSOFCOM).

A Canadian military officer who works with CANSOFCOM, Shekhar Gothi, was the final panelist in the October 5 NATO Association of Canada event. Gothi serves as CANSOFCOM’s “innovation officer” for Southern Ontario.

He concluded the event appealing for corporate investment in NATO’s cognitive warfare research.

The bi-annual Innovation Challenge is “part of the NATO battle rhythm,” Gothi declared enthusiastically.

He noted that, in the spring of 2021, Portugal held a NATO Innovation Challenge focused on warfare in outer space.

In spring 2020, the Netherlands hosted a NATO Innovation Challenge focused on Covid-19.

Gothi reassured corporate investors that NATO will bend over backward to defend their bottom lines: “I can assure everyone that the NATO innovation challenge indicates that all innovators will maintain complete control of their intellectual property. So NATO won’t take control of that. Neither will Canada. Innovators will maintain their control over their IP.”

The comment was a fitting conclusion to the panel, affirming that NATO and its allies in the military-industrial complex not only seek to dominate the world and the humans that inhabit it with unsettling cognitive warfare techniques, but to also ensure that corporations and their shareholders continue to profit from these imperial endeavors.
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Re: The Amazing Rita Katz and S.I.T.E.

Postby nashvillebrook » Sat Oct 09, 2021 3:35 pm

Funny that the NATO piece mentions Clint Watts right out of the gate, so I’m also posting a piece from 2017 on that guy for background. You can see the mechanisms of “cognitive warfare” right in the text of this (n US-Russia relations). This is New Cold War stuff.

There’s a podcast called “Death Is Just Around The Corner” that i think many here would like. It’s by a guy named Michael Judge. He has a really solid take on the Cold War which is that it was WW3 and no one bothered to notice.

Here’s an archive of his older stuff. The JFK material is really good. https://shoutengine.com/DeathIsJustAroundtheCorner/


https://thegrayzone.com/2017/11/08/clint-watts-russia-meddling-expert-censorship/


Meet Clint Watts, dubious Russia meddling ‘expert’ lobbying US gov to ‘quell information rebellions’
Max BlumenthalNovember 8, 2017
Clint Watts Russia shirt
With a sketchy past in the counterterror swamp, supposed “Russia expert” Clint Watts has suggested media censorship as a remedy to Kremlin interference.

By Max Blumenthal / AlterNet

Read part two of this investigation here.

Nearly a year after the presidential election, the scandal over accusations of Russian political interference in the 2016 election has gone beyond Donald Trump and reached into the nebulous world of online media. On November 1, Congress held hearings on “Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online.” The proceedings saw executives from Facebook, Twitter and Youtube subjected to tongue-lashings from lawmakers like Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who howled about Russian online trolls “spread[ing] stories about abuse of black Americans by law enforcement.”

In perhaps the most chilling moment of the hearings, and the most overlooked, Clint Watts, a former U.S. Army officer who had branded himself an expert on Russian meddling, appeared before a nearly empty Senate chamber. Watts conjured up a stark landscape of American carnage, with shadowy Russian operatives stage managing the chaos.

“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” he proclaimed. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

Next, Watts suggested a government-imposed campaign of media censorship: “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced: silence the guns and the barrage will end.”

The censorious overtone of Watts’ testimony was unmistakable. He demanded that government news inquisitors drive dissident media off the internet and warned that Americans would spear one another with bayonets if they failed to act. And not one member of Congress rose to object. In fact, many echoed his call for media suppression in the House and Senate hearings, with Democrats like Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Jackie Speier agreeing the most vehemently. The spectacle perfectly illustrated the madness of Russiagate, with liberal lawmakers springboarding off the fear of Russian meddling to demand that Americans be forbidden from consuming the wrong kinds of media—including content that amplified the message of progressive causes like Black Lives Matter.

Details of exactly what transpired vis a vis Russia and the U.S. in social media in 2016 are still emerging. This year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a declassified version of the intelligence community’s report on “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,” written by CIA, FBI and NSA, with its central conclusion that Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order.”

To be sure, there is ample evidence that Russian-linked trolls have attempted to exploit wedge issues on social media platforms. But the impact of these schemes on real-world events appears to have been exaggerated. According to Facebook’s data, 56 percent of Russian-linked ads appeared after the 2016 presidential election, and another 25 percent “were never shown to anyone.” The ads were said to have “reached” over 100 million people, but that assumes that Facebook users did not scroll through or otherwise ignore them, as they do with most ads. Content emanating from “Russia-linked” sources on YouTube, meanwhile, managed to rack up hit totals in the hundreds, not exactly a viral smash.

Facebook posts traced to the infamous Internet Research Agency troll factory in Russia amounted to only 0.0004 percent of total content that appeared on the social network. (Some of these posts targeted “animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies,” while another hawked an LGBT-themed “Buff Bernie coloring book for Berniacs.”) According to its “deliberately broad” review, Twitter found that only 0.74 percent of its election-related tweets were “Russian-linked.” Google, for its part, documented a grand total of $4,700 of “Russian-linked ad spending” during the 2016 election cycle. While some have argued that the Russian-linked ads were micro-targeted, and could have shifted key electoral voting blocs, these ads appeared in a media climate awash in a multi-billion dollar deluge of political ad spending from both established parties and dark money super PACs.

However, a blitz of feverish corporate media coverage and tension-filled congressional hearings has convinced a whopping 82 percent of Democrats that “Russian-backed” social media content played a central role in swinging the 2016 election. Russian meddling has even earned comparisons by lawmakers to Pearl Harbor, to “acts of war,” and by Hillary Clinton to the attacks of 9/11. And in an inadvertent way, these overblown comparisons were apt.

As during the aftermath of 9/11, the fallout from Russiagate has spawned a multimillion-dollar industry of pundits and self-styled experts eager to exploit the frenetic atmosphere for publicity and profits. Many of these figures have emerged out of the swamp that flowed from the war on terror and are gravitating toward the growing Russia fearmongering industrial complex in search of new opportunities. Few of these characters have become as prominent as Clint Watts.

So who is Watts, and how did he emerge seemingly from nowhere to become the star congressional witness on Russian meddling?

Dubious expertise, impressive salesmanship

A former U.S. Army officer who spent years in obscurity at a defense industry funded think tank called the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), Watts has become a go-to source for cable news producers and print journalists on the subject of Russian bots, always available with a comment that reinforces the sense that America is under sustained cyborg attack. This September, his employers at FPRI hailed him as “the leading expert on developments related to Russian-backed efforts to not only influence the 2016 presidential election, but also to inflame racial and cultural divisions within the U.S. and across Europe.”

Watts boasts an impressive-looking bio that is replete with fancy sounding fellowships at national security-oriented outfits, including George Washington University’s Center Cyber and Homeland Security. His bio also indicates that he served on an FBI Joint Terror Task Force.

Though Watts is best known for his punditry on Russian interference, it’s fair to say he is as much an expert on Russian affairs as Harvey Weinstein is a trusted voice on feminism. Indeed, Watts appears to speak no Russian, has no record of reporting or scholarship from inside Russia, and has produced little to no work of any discernible academic value on Russian affairs.

Whether or not he has the substance to support his claims of expertise, Watts has proven a talented salesman, catering to popular fears about Russian interference while he plies credulous lawmakers with ease.

Before Congress, a string of deceptions

Back on March 30, as the narrative of Russian meddling gathered momentum, Watts made his first appearance before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

Seated at the front of a hearing room packed with reporters, Watts introduced Congress to concepts of Russian meddling that were novel at the time, but which have become part of Beltway newspeak. His testimony turned out to be a signal moment in Russiagate, helping transition the narrative of the scandal from Russia-Trump collusion to the wider issue of online influence.

In the widely publicized testimony, Watts explained to the panel of senators that he first noticed the pernicious presence of Russian social media bots after he co-authored an article in 2014 in Foreign Affairs titled, “The Good and The Bad of Ahrar al Sham.” The article urged the US to arm a group of Syrian Salafi insurgents known for its human rights abuses, sectarianism and off-and-on alliances with Al Qaeda. Watts and his co-authors insisted that Ahrar al-Sham was the best proxy force for wreaking havoc on the Syrian government weakening its allies in Iran and Russia. Right below the headline, Watts and his co-authors celebrated Ahrar al-Sham as “an Al Qaeda linked group worth befriending.”

Watts rehashed the same argument at FPRI a year later, urging the U.S. government to harness jihadist terror as a weapon against Russia. “The U.S. at a minimum, through covert or semi-covert platforms, should take advantage and amplify these free alternative [jihadist] narratives to provide Russia some payback for recent years’ aggression,” he wrote. In another paper, Watts asked, “Why shouldn’t the U.S. redirect some of the jihadi hatred towards those with the dirtiest hands in the Syrian conflict: Russia and Iran?” Watts did not specify whether the theater of covert warfare should be limited to the Syrian battlefield, or if he sought to encourage jihadists to carry out terrorist acts inside Russia and Iran.

The premise of these op-eds should have raised serious concerns about Watts and his colleagues, and even questions about their sanity. They had marketed themselves as national security experts, yet they were lobbying the US to “befriend” the allies of Al Qaeda, the group that brought down the Twin Towers. (Ahrar al-Sham was founded by Abu Khalid al-Suri, a Madrid bombing suspect who was named by Spanish investigators as Osama bin-Laden’s courier.) Anyone cynical enough to put such ideas into public circulation should have expected a backlash. But when the inevitable wave of criticism came, Watts dismissed it all as a Russian bot attack.

Addressing the Senate panel, Watts said that those who took to social media to mock and criticize his Foreign Affairs article were, in fact, Russian bots. He provided no evidence to support the claim, and a look at his single tweet promoting the article shows that he was criticized only once (by @Navsteva, a Twitter user known for defending the Syrian government against regime change proponents, not an automated bot). Nevertheless, Watts painted the incident as proof that Russia had revived a Cold War information warfare strategy of “Active Measures,” which was supposedly aimed at “crumbl[ing] democracies from the inside out [by] creating political divisions.”

Next, Watts introduced his signature theme, claiming that Russia manipulated civil rights protests to exploit divisions in American society. Declaring that “pro-Russian” outlets were spreading “chaos in Black Lives Matter protests” by deploying active measures, Watts did not bother to say what those measures were. In fact, the only piece of proof he offered (in a Daily Beast transcript of his testimony) was a single link to an RT article that factually documented a squabble between Black Lives Matter protesters and white supremacists—an incident that had been widely covered by other outlets, from the Houston Chronicle to the Washington Post. Watts did not explain how this one report by RT sowed any chaos, or whether it had any effect at all on actual events.

Watts then moved to the main course of his testimony, focusing on how Trump employed Russian “active measures” to attack his opponents. Watts told the Senate panel that the Russian-backed news outlets RT and Sputnik had produced a false report on the U.S. airbase in Incirlik, Turkey being “overrun by terrorists.” He presented the Russian stories as the anchor for a massive influence operation that featured swarms of Russian bots across social media. And he claimed that then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort invoked the incident to deflect from negative media coverage, suggesting that Trump was coordinating strategy with the Kremlin. In reality, it was Watts who was spreading the fake news.

In the articles cited by Watts during his testimony, neither RT nor Sputnik made any reference to “terrorists” taking over Incirlik Airbase. Rather, these outlets compiled tweets by Turkish activists and sourced their coverage to a report by Hurriyet, one of Turkey’s largest mainstream papers. In fact, the incident was reported by virtually every major Turkish news organization (here, here, here and here). What’s more, the events appeared to have taken place approximately as RT and Sputnik reported it, with protesters readying to protect the airbase from a coup while Turkish police sealed the base’s entrances and exits. A look at RT’s coverage shows the network even downplayed the severity of the event, citing a tweet by a U.S.-based national security analysis group stating, “We are not finding any evidence of a coup or takeover.” This stands entirely at odds with Watts’ claim that RT exaggerated the incident to spark chaos.

Watts has pushed his bogus narrative of RT and Sputnik’s Incirlik coverage in numerous outlets, including Politico. Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen echoed Watts’ false account on the Senate floor while arguing for legislation to force RT out of the U.S. market on political grounds. And Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times’ media correspondent, reproduced Watts’ distorted account in a major feature on RT and Sputnik’s “new theory of war.” Almost no one, not one major media organization or public figure, has bothered to fact check these false claims, and few have questioned the agenda behind them.

Questions emailed to Watts via his employers at FPRI received no reply.

Another Watts deception, this time discredited in court

During his Senate testimony, Watts introduced a second, and even more distorted claim of Trump employing Russian “active measures” to attack his political foes. The details of the story are complex and difficult for a passive audience to absorb, which is probably why Watts has been able to get away with pushing it for so long.

Watts’ testimony was the culmination of a mainstream media deception that forced an aspiring reporter out of his job, drove him to contemplate suicide, and ultimately prompted him to take matters into his own hands by suing his antagonists.

The episode began during a Trump rally at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, when Trump read out an email purportedly from longtime Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal (the father of this writer), hoping to embarrass Clinton over Benghazi. The text of the email turned out to be part of a column written by the pro-Clinton Newsweek columnist Kurt Eichenwald, not an email by Blumenthal.

The source of Trump’s falsehood appeared to have been a report by Bill Moran, then a reporter for Sputnik, the news service funded by the Russian government. Having confused Eichenwald’s writing for a Blumenthal email, Moran scrubbed his erroneous article within 20 minutes. Somehow, Moran’s retracted article had found its way onto the Trump campaign’s radar, a not atypical event for a campaign that had relied on material from far-out sites like Infowars to undercut its opponents.

In his column at Newsweek, Eichenwald framed Moran’s honest mistake as the leading edge of a secret Russian influence operation. With help from pro-Clinton elements, Eichenwald’s column went viral, earning him slots on CNN and MSNBC, where he howled about the nefarious Russian-Trump-Wikileaks plot he believed he had just exposed. (Glenn Greenwald was perhaps the only reporter with a national platform to highlight Eichenwald’s falsifications.) Moran was fired as a result of the fallout, and would have to spend the next several months fighting to correct the record.

When Moran appealed to Eichenwald for a public clarification, Eichenwald staunchly refused. Instead, he offered Moran a job at the New Republic in exchange for his silence and warned him, “If you go public, you’ll regret it.” (Eichenwald had no role at the New Republic or any clear ability to influence the magazine’s hiring decisions.) Moran refused to cooperate, prompting Eichenwald to publish a follow-up piece painting himself as the victim of a Russian “active measures” campaign, and to cast Moran once again as a foreign agent.

When Watts revived Eichenwald’s bogus version of events in his Senate testimony, Moran began to spiral into the depths of depression. He even entertained thoughts of suicide. But he ultimately decided to fight, filing a lawsuit against Newsweek’s parent company for defamation and libel.

Representing himself in court, Moran elicited a settlement from Newsweek that forced the magazine to scrub all of Eichenwald’s articles about him—a tacit admission that they were false from top to bottom. This meant that the most consequential claim Watts made before the Senate was also a whopping lie.

The day after Watts’ deception-laden appearance, he was nevertheless transformed from an obscure national security into a cable news star, with invites from Morning Joe, Rachel Maddow, Meet the Press, and the liberal comedian Samantha Bee, among many others. His testimony received coverage from the gamut of major news outlets, and even earned him a fawning profile from CNN. From out of the blue, Watts had become the star witness of Russiagate, and one of corporate media’s favorite pundits.

FPRI, a pro-war think tank founded by white supremacist eugenicists

Before he emerged in the spotlight of Russiagate, Watts languished at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, earning little name recognition outside the insular world of national security pundits. Based in Philadelphia, the FPRI has been described by journalist Mark Ames as “one of the looniest (and spookiest) extreme-right think tanks since the early Cold War days, promoting ‘winnable’ nuclear war, maximum confrontation with Russia, and attacking anti-colonialism as dangerously unworkable.”

Daniel Pipes, the arch-Islamophobe pundit and former FPRI fellow, offered a similar characterization of the think tank, albeit from an alternately opposed angle. “Put most baldly, we have always advocated an activist U.S. foreign policy,” Pipes said in a 1991 address to FPRI. He added that the think tank’s staff “is not shy about the use of force; were we members of Congress in January 1991, all of us would not only have voted with President Bush and Operation Desert Storm, we would have led the charge.”

FPRI was co-founded by Robert Strausz-Hupé, a far-right Austrian emigre, with help from conservative corporations and covert funding from the CIA. From the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, Strausz-Hupé gathered a “Philadelphia School” of Cold War hardliners to develop a strategy for protracted war against the Soviet Union. His brain trust included FPRI co-founder Stefan Possony, an Austrian fascist who was a board member of the World Anti-Communist League, the international fascist organization described by journalists Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson as a network of “those responsible for death squads, apartheid, torture, and the extermination of European Jewry.” True to his fascist roots, Possony co-authored a racialist tract, “The Geography of Intellect,” that argued that blacks were biologically inferior and that the people of the global South were “genetically unpromising.” Strausz-Hupé seized on Possony’s racialist theories to inveigh against anti-colonial movements led by “populations incapable of rational thought.”

While clamoring for a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union—and acknowledging that their preferred strategy would cause mass casualties in American cities—Strausz-Hupé and his band of hawks developed a monomaniacal obsession with Russian propaganda. By the time of the Cuban missile crisis, they were stricken with paranoia, arguing on the pages of the New York Times that filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was a Soviet useful idiot whose film Dr. Strangelove advanced “the principal Communist objectives to drive a wedge between the American people and their military leaders.”

Ultimately, Strausz-Hupé’s fanaticism cost him an ambassadorship, as Sen. William Fulbright scuttled his appointment to serve in Morocco on the grounds that his “hard line, no compromise” approach to communism could shatter the delicate balance of diplomacy. Today, he is remembered fondly on FPRI’s website as “an intellectual and intellectual impresario, administrator, statesman, and visionary.” His militaristic legacy continues thanks to the prolific presence—and bellicose politics—of Watts.

The paranoid style

This year, FPRI dedicated its annual gala to honoring Watts’ success in mainstreaming the narrative of Russian online meddling. Since I first transcribed a Soundcloud recording of Watts’ keynote address, the file has been mysteriously scrubbed from the internet. It is unclear what prompted the removal, however, it is easy to understand why Watts would not want his comments examined by a critical listener. His speech offered a window into a paranoid mindset with a tendency for overblown, unverifiable claims about Russian influence.

While much of the speech was a rehash of Watts’ Senate testimony, he spent an unusual amount of time describing the threat he believed Russian intelligence agents posed to his own security. “If you speak up too much, you’ll get knocked down,” Watts said, claiming that think tank fellows who had been too vocal about Russian meddling had seen their laptops “burned up by malware.”

“If someone rises up in prominence, they will suddenly be—whoof!—swiped down out of nowhere by some crazy disclosure from their email,” Watts added, referring to unspecified Russian retaliatory measures. As usual, he didn’t produce concrete evidence or offer any examples.

“Anybody remember the reporters that were outed after the election? Or maybe they tossed up a question to the Clinton campaign and they were gone the next day?” he asked his audience. “That’s how it goes.”

It was unclear which reporters Watts was referring to, or what incident he could have possibly been alluding to. He offered no details, only innuendo about the state of siege Kremlin actors had supposedly imposed on him and his freedom-fighting colleagues. He even predicted he’d be “hacked and cyber attacked when this recording comes out.”

According to Watts, Russian “active measures” had singlehandedly augmented Republican opinion in support of the Kremlin. “It is the greatest success in influence operations in the history of the world,” Watts confidently proclaimed. He contrasted Russia’s success with his own failures as an American agent of influence working for the U.S. military, a saga in his career that remains largely unexamined.

Domestic agent of influence

“I worked in influence operations in counter-terrorism for 15 years,” Watts boasted to his audience at FPRI. “We didn’t break one or two percent [increase in the approval rating of US foreign policy] in fifteen years and we spent billions a year in tax dollars doing it. I was paid off of those programs. We had almost no success throughout the Middle East.”

By Watts’ own admission, he had been part of a secret propaganda campaign aimed at manipulating the opinions of Middle Easterners in favor of the hostile American military operating in their midst. And he failed massively, wasting “billions a year in tax dollars.”

Given his penchant for deception, this may have been yet another tall tale aimed at burnishing his image as an internet era James Bond. But if the story was even partially true, Watts had inadvertently exposed a severe scandal that, in a fairer world, might have triggered congressional hearings.

Whatever took place, it appears that Watts and his Cold Warrior colleagues are now waging another expensive influence operation, this time directed against the American public. By deploying deceptions, half-truths and hyperbole with the full consent of Congress and in collaboration with the mainstream press, they have managed to convince a majority of Americans that Russia is “trying to knock us down and take us over,” as Watts remarked at the FPRI’s gala.

In just a matter of months, public consent for an unprecedented array of hostile measures against Russia, from sanctions and consular raids to arbitrary crackdowns on Russian-backed news organizations, has been assiduously manufactured.

It was not until this summer, however, that the influence operation Watts helped establish reached critical capacity. He had approached one of Washington’s most respected think tanks, the German Marshall Fund, and secured support for an initiative called the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The new initiative became responsible for a daily blacklist of subversive, “pro-Russian” media outlets, targeting them with the backing of a who’s who of national security honchos, from Bill Kristol to former CIA director and ex-Hillary Clinton surrogate Michael Morrell, along with favorable promotion from some of the country’s most respected news organizations.

In the next installment of this investigation, we will see how a collection of cranks, counter-terror retreads and online vigilantes overseen by the German Marshall Fund have waged a search-and-destroy mission against dissident media under the guise of combatting Russian “active measures,” and how the mainstream press has enabled their censorious agenda.
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