Thread by @brooklynmarie

Well, Roger Stone did make Donald Trump's political career for him by ferrying smears and disinformation to and from Trump's camp on his behalf for decades, up to and including enabling and smoothing the way for the weaponized propaganda firehosing that began in earnest in 2016

https://twitter.com/Yamiche/status/1227688441787428870

So Trump directly benefited from Stone's influence for years, and obviously plans to continue to do so

Trump Org used his lobbying firm for influence for years, after all. You know the one I'm talking about, right? The one Roger Stone ran with Paul Manafort?

wsj.com/articles/roger…

The one that used weaponized disinformation to upend Ukrainian politics. You know. That Paul Manafort.

Remember kids! What people in power do to "them" ("them" being whomever is part of the designated out-group), they will ALWAYS do to us.

theguardian.com/us-news/2018/a…

Here's more about Paul Manafort, Roger Stone's business partner (profiled in 2016.) He has worked on behalf of all sorts of dictators.

theguardian.com/us-news/2016/a…

Everyone just forgot this, it feels like. Firtash, hmmm?

Where have we heard that name recently? Ah yes. So Trump has benefited directly from smears pushed against a perceived political rival about goings-on in Ukraine, huh? You don't say?

thedailybeast.com/ukrainian-olig…

Can't imagine why a freshly emboldened Trump, just acquitted a week ago of the exact sort of fuckery that Stone and Manafort's firms were famous for with the involvement of someone Manafort worked for directly, might intervene in Roger Stone's sentencing this week!

And this is why I'm not a conspiracy theorist, folks. This was all done in plain sight all along, with only an ocean of bullshit distracting the increasingly exhausted and dispirited American journalism corps and public needed. This is why journalism matters.

So stop carrying water for power and take a good hard look at who is doing what. People don't automatically become un-corrupted when they attain positions of power, and to pretend otherwise is catastrophically, moronically wrong.

Final notes to this thread, which I really should turn into an article to send somewhere: I truly, strongly, fervently believe that we will come to look back at the disinformation of this time in the United States (from 2016 on) as a weapon of war. Because it is.

The "firehose of falsehood" model is a known Kremlin propaganda technique that's been used since at least 2008 and was used to great effect in 2014 during Russia's annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.

rand.org/content/dam/ra…

"...Mr. Manafort envisioned an approach that exploited regional and ethnic peculiarities in voting, tapping the disenfranchisement of those who felt abandoned by the Orange Revolution in eastern Ukraine...."

nytimes.com/2016/08/01/us/…

And in this war, journalists are the soldiers and disinformation and smears are the weapons. And look what a cottage industry of smearing, threatening, and physically assaulting working American journalists (what's left of us, anyway) has sprung up since 2015 or so.