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28 Jan, 25 tweets, 7 min read
1/ Hey guys, remember that time Steve Bannon ran an army of game virtual currency miners in Asia, for sale to westerners at discount prices, arbitraging attention for profit?

That was awesome...
wired.com/2016/09/trumps…
2/ “The company was founded by former child star Brock Pierce, and Bannon was an investor. Bannon managed to convince Goldman Sachs to plow $60 million into a company that sold imaginary goods in an imaginary world.”

In 2020, Brock Pierce ran for President. Guess who...
3/ was Pierce’s campaign manager?

Brittany Kaiser, the fake whistleblower who left Cambridge Analytica in late March 2018 — right *after* it blew up.

prnewswire.com/news-releases/…
4/ Guess who was all excited about today’s $GME activity? Steve Bannon and Russia shill, Jack Posobiec. They called it a “populist uprising against Wall Street.” That’s cool... just leftists, Steve Bannon, and Russia shills cheerleading for the same stuff. It happens...
5/ Zerohedge, another outlet known to be aligned with Russia said yesterday, “Everything is breaking.” Martin Geddes, a QAnon influencer who has sadly become very disconnected from reality, was also very excited about the GME activity.
6/ Brock Pierce was also part of the 2014 film “An Open Secret,” helped to lay the foundation for the child sexual abuse and trafficking narrative that undergirded Pizzagate and QAnon.

indiewire.com/2017/10/hollyw…
7/ For the fanbois, the activity in WSB is real and undeniable. We also don’t really know who is involved in it or how much market making capacity there is there, ultimately. We also don’t know the distribution of whales and peons. A narrative has taken hold...
8/ that it’s all small timers banding to take on evil Wall Street hedge fund managers. Certainly that’s partly true. But it can also include basically anyone else who wants to play. Scrutiny of transaction volume by individual buyers/sellers is needed.
9/ Who cares, some might say? Let the RH kids have some fun, they’ve earned it! The shoe is on the other foot this time. And that’s true. But this now has the attention (even if it didn’t, which is increasingly implausible, before) of Bannon and Russia.
10/ Blowing up short positions is fair game, but if that becomes weaponized by state actors that may lead to a good deal more chaos than anyone realizes now. This activity should be watched for signs of large scale manipulation, and merging with existing...
11/ influence campaigns such as QAnon or similar efforts. This will evolve in real time, and Steve Bannon isn’t done trying to make his stupid “Fourth Turning” happen. This is all on his radar now. Expect chaos. Disinfo beat folks, take note. We were warned.
12/ Here’s the 2008 @WIRED piece about Bannon, Pierce, and their imaginary goods arbitrage business — funded by Goldman Sachs.

wired.com/2008/11/ff-ige/
13/ Also worth noting that Gabe Hoffman, who produced the film “An Open Secret” and is suing people linked to QAnon, is a huge short seller and a mortal enemy of Elon Musk. Musk has been trying to bankrupt Hoffman for a long time.

cnbc.com/2017/11/10/tes…
14/ And Musk has been a key figure in the WSB activity, and in driving animus towards specific holders of short positions. Many analysts have wondered if BTC and TSLA are not also being manipulated by similar kinds of campaigns, and some unspecified whales.
15/ There is also increasing pressure for influence campaigns to be self-supporting, and several analysts pointed out today that the GME activity is a blueprint for how to do this. It’s not pump-and-dump if it’s against short-holders, seems to be the current consensus.
16/ If you’re not familiar with Bannon’s obsession with “The Fourth Turning,” he (still) believes that we are overdue for global collapse and that the right events can trigger it. He failed to do so in government and is likely to try economic angles next.

nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/…
17/ Posobiec pumped the GME situation constantly the last 24 hours in his foreign influence campaign, taking every opportunity to make fun of the Biden admin, and suggest the market would crash. But this is just bros makin’ dough, yeah?
18/ QAnon and the Jan 6 crew seem to have two poles, organizationally: the Steve Bannon wing and the Roger Stone wing. It certainly looks like the swarm of Jan 6 is something that Bannon is interested in repeating, manipulating finance/business/media and gov’t in the process.
19/ And look, I get it, this is a fun story with little guys and real villains, and it’s fun to throw in $100 and see what happens. It’s also important to know how this tactic may be incorporated into influence campaigns, now and in the future, with unexpected consequences.
20/ Financial Times notes that many of the “Reddit Bros” are supporters of the “alt-right.” That’s a generalization; but there is overlap between alt-right, gamergate, and other online swarms also leveraged by Bannon previously.
ft.com/content/ac7389…
21/ And as @1D_Nasty points out it looks like some very established Wall Street players (i.e. BlackRock) are going to make out very nicely here. Wonder who will get out first? The whale or the minnows? 🐳 🐟
22/ Everyone’s favorite scion weighed in with this endorsement of the campaign, too. Just an old fashioned David vs. Goliath tale... DJT Jr. standing up for the little guy once again!

23/ And now AOC and Don Jr. are on the same side. This is bizarro world, perfectly balanced Active Measures fodder. Everybody’s mad! Now what!?! Only populism can save us.
24/ And now, squee, we even have Ted Cruz on board!?! Golly, can we all go to go to Cheesecake Factory after this? They are sure to have something for everyone! Good thing this isn’t behaving like some kind of info op, or this would be an extraordinary set of developments!
25/ And... probably worth noting that two of Robinhood’s major investors are Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, and Jared Kushner’s brother Josh. From 2017...

reuters.com/article/us-rob…

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More from @davetroy

Dave Troy Profile picture
26 Jan
Four years ago this month, there was an uproar among analysts (and the public) about whether Cambridge Analytica was a PSYOP. The word is triggering; it tends to get people animated, makes people think of conspiracy theories, implies a grand master plan, shadowy operators, etc.
I have a good memory of that. What's happening now re: QAnon and whether it was a PSYOP and by whom is comparable. And it's a pointless debate. Any operation that 1) does target audience analysis, 2) deploys messaging against audiences, 3) tries to alter behavior, is a PSYOP.
The origin of this particular operation is complicated, networked, and muddied by people who wish to both claim and disclaim it. But it is functionally a PSYOP, has borrowed from that heritage, and can be analyzed in those terms. Miss me with claims to the contrary.
Read 12 tweets
Dave Troy Profile picture
24 Jan
Opinion: Chris Miller, Kash Patel, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Anthony Tata, Michael Ellis, Michael Flynn + family, and Devin Nunes tried to overthrow the USG, less than three weeks ago...
Now they are deploying a host of resources from their network — lawyers, ex-spooks, writers — to scramble the narratives and create FUD about their involvement, and to inject plausible deniability. This is a disinfo campaign.
Various analysts and journalists have picked up on the deception and know what this is. Had things gone differently... <waves hands> these folks would be at the center of power; they thought.
Read 7 tweets
Dave Troy Profile picture
24 Jan
Unfortunately @SubstackInc has an emerging propaganda problem it is going to have to confront. It is serving as an open sewer, hosting those who aren’t given quarter elsewhere. Caitlin Jonestown, Glenn Greenwald? Really? Know where this leads for your brand.

/cc @hamishmckenzie
Oh, and Taibbi. Here’s Greenwald on Substack; a sign of trouble brewing:

Substack says, "We're not approving or disapproving the content that goes out on our platform. We're just providing a service that allows people to come and monetize their journalism or their writing."
Anytime a platform is disclaiming responsibility for setting norms, and “just” doing X, there is an emerging ethical dilemma. IBM “just” provided tabulators to the Reich — a true service.

@cjgbest this is not a good direction to head in.
Read 4 tweets
Dave Troy Profile picture
22 Jan
THREAD: It’s time to clarify an ethical stance regarding QAnon, and those who research and report on it. It is a disease — a mind virus — with real victims, people who have been lied to and alienated from their families and communities.
2/ First, we must help the victims, and focus on helping them restore their bonds to family and community. Second, we must hold the perpetrators accountable. Third, we must shun all those who profit from its continuance.
3/ We need to make fringe ideas fringe again. They will always be with us, but fringe groups should remain small and in dark corners. If we think of QAnon as a virus, we need to shrink the number of infected people.
Read 20 tweets
Dave Troy Profile picture
18 Jan
@athoc your system was used this morning to send out alerts suggesting the US is at COGCON level 2. Was your system hacked? Care to comment?
People received phone calls from 703-857-7155, which is tied to your system. Here is a text version some people received. Did @athoc suffer a hack?
For those reading this is what COGCON Level 2 means. NOTE: we cannot confirm whether this message has any validity at all, or if @BlackBerry @AtHoc was hacked. We need a statement from them to verify. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COGCON
Read 11 tweets
Dave Troy Profile picture
12 Jan
Move to Epik underway. Let’s see how long Bekah Mercer wants to be associated with Nazi sites. She has bailed on Bannon, Cambridge Analytica and Milo in the past as a result of bad press. History likely to repeat.

mashable.com/article/parler…
Parler usage, if they can get it back online at all, and if they can find replacement email, SMS, and other third party vendors, will plummet without AppStore/Google Play distribution channels, which are unlikely to return.
So the question is how many dollars Mercers want to set on fire in the name of having a low-rent no-engagement platform with a tiny number of users, on the same servers as Nazi sites. I don’t think they have the appetite. But we will see.
Read 6 tweets

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