If we want to save our country and be a beacon for global democracies, we’ve got to neutralize Putin.
We have to stop Russia’s infiltration or we’ve stopped nothing at all. If we don’t beat ‘em back now, they may not topple us this time but they’ll get us the next time.
Thread
1/ We’ve been so focused on the Circus of Trump, like moths drawn to a horror flame, but there’s a bigger picture. For context, let’s go back a decade to Estonia, when it tried to relocate a statue.
@ForeignPolicyforeignpolicy.com/2017/04/27/10-…
2/ ”Since 2014, Russia has also focused cyber attacks on Poland, Germany, France, Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Romania, Switzerland, Austria and Spain. In addition to information warfare, Russia is using economic and foreign direct investment.”-@dvgsecurity thehill.com/opinion/cybers…
3/ Con. “..plus funding and support for conservative and alt-right European political parties, to minimize the influence of Western-style democracy and convert the European powers to an authoritarian implementation of democratic principles.”-@dvgsecurity thehill.com/opinion/cybers…
4/ “We know they can use information warfare easily without having to put in too many resources because Russia is starting from a position of great economic weakness. Its economy is a tenth of the size of the economy of the United States”-@MishaGlenny
@NPRnpr.org/2018/07/15/629…
5/ “Putin has been likened to a mafia don running his homeland like a protection racket..allies are rewarded for loyalty. Enemies & rivals are ruthlessly extirpated..corruption, much of it officially facilitated and approved, sucks up 48% of GDP”
@guardianamp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
6/ “Russia takes advantage of the divisions within the West—and within the U.S.—by driving wedges between its opponents, using psychological warfare, propaganda, and cyberwar..Hacking the Democratic Party’s emails in 2016 hit that sweet spot.”
“Cyber warfare is no longer just about the technical details of computer ports and protocols. Rather, disinformation and social media are rapidly becoming the best hacking tools.”-@HowHackersThink
@FastCompanyfastcompany.com/90209667/what-…
11/ Con. “With social media, anyone–even Russian intelligence officers and professional trolls–can widely publish misleading content. As legendary hacker @kevinmitnick put it, ‘it’s easier to manipulate people rather than technology.’”-@HowHackersThink fastcompany.com/90209667/what-…
12/ “Russian interference undermined democracy in the West by destabilizing institutions and polarizing societies. Western democratic governments must strengthen their domestic institutions to protect against adversaries eager to exploit weaknesses.”
@FPRIfpri.org/article/2019/0…
13/ Contained in the Mueller Report is hard evidence of an illegitimate president* who benefited from dezinformatsiya, encouraged Russia’s criminal attacks and is doing nothing to prevent future attacks. Makes sense.
15/ Watch @ActMeasuresDoc to get the full backstory on Russia’s long game. If you don’t have access, here’s my review of the film. Even Trump’s catchphrases were recycled dezinformatsiya.
18/ Our illegitimate president* is doing a fantastic job for a marionette, a vulgarian against the world doing the bidding of his handler (see #14). Ergo, a global pariah’s emboldened.
“The troubling reality is that we lack a full picture of what is really happening in the social media (disinformation) sphere because the main platforms are not fully transparent."-@FabricePothier
22/ When the scope of the Russian cyber aggression was revealed in February 2018, it became very clear our democratic systems are fragile.
@TheJusticeDeptjustice.gov/file/1035477/d…
23/ Like a proper marionette, Trump has spent much as his presidency* obstructing justice.
25/ With Mueller’s stark warning on Russian cyber aggression still fresh in our minds, a Helsinki refresher is in order:
@BBCNewsbbc.com/news/world-eur…
29/ To understand recent Ukraine history, is to understand what we are dealing with in real time.
@politicopolitico.eu/article/ukrain…
30/ We need to create new words for a new war: “trolls” “hacks” and “meddling” must be thrown in the dustbin of history. These are benign words. They sound mischievous, rather than toxic, criminal. Nothing benign about losing your democracy to cyberwar.
31/ It will end badly for Trump, as it does for puppets. Maybe he’ll be impeached, indicted, and convicted. Or maybe he’ll grab the silver and run off to Russia. However it goes, we must stop Putin. We must thwart cyberwar. Or it’ll happen again. And again news.yahoo.com/nato-seeks-way…
ADDENDUM: A chilling reminder that all is not well, and all is not what it seems. h/t @Verba_et_Vertus
The moment I learned of Charlie Kirk’s death, I thought of Jeff Sharlet. Sharlet has documented extremist right-wing movements in America for two decades, and he was the one who taught me how Ashli Babbitt became a MAGA martyr.
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In an interview with RadPod on his book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, Sharlet told us:
So Ashli Babbitt, 35-year-old white woman from Southern California, Air Force veteran storms the Capitol with violent intentions - she wrote about them. That's her knife on the cover of the book. That's the evidence photo, you can see it dated 1.6.2021.
She climbs up into a window leading a mob through a broken window, they smash the window, she comes up into it.
And we see on the video that very day, the two hands of the Capitol Hill police officer who shoots her, and it is the hands of a black man, and she's a white woman, and as a student of American mythology and American history, I know right away what's going to happen with that story.
And it happened within hours. First, they started saying Ashli - she was 135 pounds, she was in her 20s. Or maybe she was 16, she was just a little white girl. And they start shrinking her - she's 125 pounds, that's not going to work. She's 115 pounds. No, she's 110. They are making her into this model of white innocence.
Now, those not familiar with the history of lynching don't realize that at the heart of lynching throughout American history has been this kind of sexualized panic. This idea that black men are coming for our - possessive, you see - white women - a kind of property.
And that's the story that they began telling.
That's when the book really started to take shape. I said I'm going to follow the formation of this martyr myth.—Jeff Sharlet, on RadPod
As Vladimir Putin glad-hands Narendra Modi and Xi Jin Ping, I report in @BylineTimes that, like the recent Alaska summit with Trump, the point of these events is to reputation wash Putin
“I really do feel a crisis of language,” Dr Marci Shore told Byline Supplement. “Watching Trump roll out that red carpet for Putin — there's already been so much rhetorical inflation, and yet everything feels inadequate to capture the sickening nature of it all.”
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Under the guise of ‘peace talks’ regarding Russia’s full-scale invasion of the independent country of Ukraine, the two criminals met with all the pomp of third world warlords.
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Julius Caesar stood on the banks of the Rubicon River contemplating the fate of his country and the world. The legions were expressly forbidden to return to the city of Rome for the Roman Senate knew very well that if they did, the Republic would lost.
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Caesar is reputed to have uttered the words “the die is cast”, as he ordered his troops to make the crossing.
Ever since Caesar’s pivotal decision, mankind has understood that the deployment of a nation’s armies against its own people marks the end of that nation.
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HOT TYPE: The Real Leaders of the Free World Are Women
My latest column in @BylineTimes focuses on the remarkable women leaders of Eastern Europe, who are a crucial counterweight to the media's obsession with the ‘strongmen’ Trump and Putin
I was an investigative reporter in broadcast journalism when Donald Trump landed on my radar in 2006 while I was interviewing the victims of a pyramid scheme. Lured in by get-rich-quick videos featuring Trump, some told me they’d spent their entire life savings on a video phone company that turned out to be bad business.
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So when I realized Trump had become a serious contender for US President in 2016, I had already investigated him and unearthed a long history of bad business dealings.
Canada and EU universities are offering US scientists and academics safe harbour from an increasingly authoritarian US in an echo of a dark past. From my latest column in @BylineTimes
“Project 2025 is a revenge fantasy and the victim is democracy… It reads like a Soviet-era how-to manual on the total annihilation of the US government and any critics of the regime.”—Heidi Siegmund Cuda, December 16, 2023
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In 2023, I reported that Donald Trump and the religious extremists he had aligned with created a blueprint for the total annihilation of democracy. The report was titled ‘A MAGA Hat and a Gun’ — Trump’s Violent Vision for 2025: