Thread by @davetroy

1/Blunt truth: there are many people in the West who do not understand that Putin has an active, sprawling, well-developed Fifth Column operation running in EVERY NATO country, especially in US and Canada.

Analysts not familiar with its participants, messaging, and...

2/goals may, for fear of being shunned, suggest excess caution in attributing activity to this Fifth Column and instead suggest it is “organic” or “coincidence.”

This is childish naïveté and flat out wrong. Dispense such analysis as misinformed pablum. One reason analysts…

3/fail to properly see the Fifth Column is because they have broken mental models about how it works.

• It doesn’t have a “top down” org chart.
• It doesn’t mean “Putin is paying” every participant.
• There may not be specific “orders” given on a regular basis.

4/
• Participants are often autonomous.
• Includes a mix of witting collaborators and “true believers.”
• Actors are aligned around common goals.

This is networked insurgency. It’s a model ppl like Mike Flynn helped develop and enhance.

5/One reason media has been stymied in their efforts to cover this networked warfare is they are looking for the “org chart.” Or they try to “follow the money,” which is valid but yields little insight.

Ergo, this network is stealth and cannot be covered by media…

6/and still adhere to its own ideas about “respectability.”

Therefore the only way to infer anything about these networks is via intelligence gathering and analysis, which is often nuanced, messy, and error-prone. Yet, this is what we must do.

7/Longitudinal analysis and mapping of these networks reveals predictive insights about what people may do and what they support. That is ground truth.

Journalists need to reorient their perspective towards ongoing hybrid warfare and look at the history of every driver…

8/of every low-intensity conflict that emerges. Assume it *is* hybrid warfare Fifth Column activity until you can *rule it out.*

Then expose what you find *at threat speed.* Exposing a Fifth Column operation two years after it’s over is insufficient to defend our democracies.

9/If this war does one good thing I hope it destroys cognitive biases and encourages people to cudgel their “feelings” about what they think they are seeing, and replace with a cold longitudinal assessment of network activity over time. This is the only way forward.

10/Pay attention to what people *do*, who they *endorse*, what *interests* are served, and how the apparatus *functions*.

Explicitly discard “party” affiliation, and what people “claim” to be vs what they actually are.

Tulsi Gabbard and Glenn Greenwald are good cases in point.

11/“Oh but they’re progressive,” people said. BS, they’re blatant Putin shills and everyone knows it now. Who’s next on that hit parade, eh? Think you know? Maybe you do.

Does the IC know? I think so. Is Putin “paying” them all? No. Is Thiel? Maybe. Are Mercers? Maybe some.

12/Certainly Bannon and Prince are big nodes in this network. Who pays them? Who knows. Crypto, Ziklag Christo fascists? Likely. But it’s all one big Fifth Column fatberg trying to crawl from the sewer to destroy democracies globally. And it’s working.

13/We need to lose our illusions about what we “think” and “feel” is happening — which have been fully weaponized against us — to develop accurate real-time longitudinal assessments of what *is* happening.

It’s the only way we survive this, everything else is noise.

14/If you are not yet familiar with the term Fifth Column, now is the time to get up to speed.

It means a network of subversive actors in the population designed to soften an adversary and make it more pliable for an attacker.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_col…

15/Also, DO NOT DO THIS: "In the US, it's the Republicans; in the UK, it's the Tories," etc.

NO.

It doesn't stop there, kids. KILL THAT WITH FIRE. It is on the right, the left, the middle, in academia, on television, in print, etc...

LABELS are irrelevant. Only actions matter.

It feels satisfying to try to reduce the problem to one's own out-group. BUT, that is how you lose.

1. The problem isn't confined to your out-group.
2. Not every member of your out group is part of the problem.
3. There are people in your in-group who are a problem.

Also, people with the most understanding of the Fifth Column operations were the ones who (correctly) predicted the maximal scope of Putin's ambitions.

Why spend decades building out this network if you weren't going to use it later?

"We told you so" isn't helpful. But still.