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Mar 15 • 19 tweets • 8 min read
OK, interesting

I expect that no one in my #NAFO set is gonna know who Miles Guo is, so let me introduce him real quick: Miles Guo is basically an expat Chinese billionaire huckster.

You and I care who he is because this mf finances insurrectionism.
nytimes.com/2023/03/15/nyr…
🧵
The Times in '17 characterizes him as a "gadfly" to Beijing with a tendency to leak wild-looking claims that are "outlandish and easily debunked", along with some actually legit intel.

This made him a natural fit with the Trump admin.

nytimes.com/2017/05/30/wor…
The real picture on Guo is something closer to a trashnews provocateur involved in running hedge fund beefs.

There's been an Interpol Red Notice for him since '17.
scmp.com/news/china/pol…
Multiple US and Chinese-language sources confirm that through his daughter, Guo is alleged to have laundered ~$32 billion, for instance South China Morning Post:
scmp.com/news/hong-kong…

and whatever this is:
news.mingpao.com/pns/%e6%b8%af%…
It is also worth noting that there appear to be credible rape allegations file against Guo in New York filed by a personal assistant.
reuters.com/article/us-chi…

NYPost, somewhat unhelpfully, characterizes it as a "sex slave suit".

Thanks, NYPost.

Thanks.
nypost.com/2017/09/11/chi…
In May of '20, GOAT-status researchers @Bellingcat found a rather wild-looking operation that looked like it was run by pro-Chinese cats and aimed at, amongst other things, attacking Miles Guo.
bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/0…
Guo's attacks by, and on behalf of, the Chinese government are a recurrent pattern; it's one of the reasons why it's hard to figure out what the hell he is exactly.

So here's another attack by China, happening in 2019, according to Australian researchers:
aspi.org.au/report/tweetin…
But we have to reconcile Guo's stridently anti-China rhetoric with, for instance, reportedly receiving tax benefits from the Chinese government for a Henan skyscraper:
motherjones.com/politics/2022/…

or attacking dissidents in the U.S., potentially for the MSS
newyorker.com/magazine/2022/…
In August 2020, Steve Bannon was arrested on Federal fraud charges for his "Build The Wall" scam with Kolfage.

He was taken into custody on Guo's yacht. This is where things get interesting.
cbsnews.com/news/guo-wengu…
In '20, Guo's sites were the origin of multiple, fairly bad coronavirus and political disinfo narratives.

So you see his sites pushing the "COVID Lab Release!!!" narrative early in '20, natch:
buzzfeednews.com/article/janely…
DailyDot, which is, let's be clear, not exactly Bellingcat, somewhat uniquely traces "Hunter's Laptop Is Teh Worst!!!" disinfo to an origin point on Miles Guo sites.

To be fair, there's a lot of Hunter's Laptop narratives, so they're probably right.

dailydot.com/debug/hunter-b…
What you're seeing here is Parler & Facebook profiles with common characteristics that started appearing in Nov. '20:

- simplified Chinese names
- strident anti-China viewpoints
- spam posting of Miles Guo outlets
- hashtagging #milesGuo and #milesKwok

I call them "GuoBots".
In '21, I was asked to look at donation lists for unusually high-volume and regular donations by Chinese-Americans to the Proud Boys.

It was somewhat of a mystery: I couldn't find a verifiable similarity between them, so I called it "organic" activity.

usatoday.com/story/news/nat…
Later that year in '21, a Graphika study explained it.

Guo gets people to donate to conservative political causes by promising it'll advantage their visa applications. It's just another grift.

I think that's where the Proud Boys donations came from.

graphika.com/reports/ants-i…
You're looking at, I want to emphasize, a fairly sophisticated operator here with Guo, if not a clearly aligned one.

This dude ran multi-platform bot campaigns and propagated up-to-the-minute marching orders for #stopTheSteal tools.

facebook.com/choejoohn/post…
What you're seeing today with Guo's bust on fraud charges is reminiscent of the downfall of other Trump-era figures to me.

Like, these guys don't go down on treason, bribery or corruption charges.

It ends up being whatever people can find that brings them down.
So, Bannon got hit for running a spectacularly dumb (or dumbly spectacular) grift, not for racism or general shittiness.

Trump himself isn't getting indicted on, say, colluding with Russia pretty damn openly for six years. He's getting sent up on taxes and fraud.
This is, I think, simply the nature of lawfare.

It's like, I'm not super-sure myself what the hell law Guo broke precisely in doing what he did.

It's pretty clearly wrong, he's pretty clearly a bad dude, but feeling like something is wrong and $5 is worth a cup of coffee.
But once it's clear that Guo is a bad guy, then no matter what you can find on him - it could be weird sex stuff like with Assange, I don't care - you run with it, hard, to remove a threat to the American conversation and the integrity of American institutions.

And so it goes.

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More from @JoohnChoe

JChoe Profile picture
Mar 14
"So this low-quality journalist I was arguing with on Twitter saw that video, and said that I was a trans person living with my mom," I told my mom over Chinese takeout the other night.

She raised an eyebrow. "Why are you arguing with such a person?"
"It's part of the activism I'm doing", I explained. "We talk back to people who lie about the war in Ukraine. It's kind of an extension of the work I was doing during the Trump years, studying liars."
"It's basically the same reason why I was in the Washington Post last year or that Ukrainian newspaper this year," I said.

"So what did you say?" Mom asked.
Read 7 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Mar 14
Every time you feel dismayed by the sheer volume of disinfo out there, remember that disinfo producers only do that because their position is so unfavorable.

Like RAND Corp. said, it's a firehose. Superfluity is a basic function of disinformation.

rand.org/pubs/perspecti…
(1/2) Image
But it's not just that people on the side of truth lack the resources to spam. There's simply no need.

We don't need to make up stories and invent adversaries to motivate people.

I don't need to insist I'm right when I'm wrong or silence dissent.
There was this idea in the early Trump years that you could just, like, get people to pledge to truth and it would spread like a movement and automagically stop the disinfo.

This was stupid, I think, because truth doesn't work like that; it doesn't fight for itself.
Read 4 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Mar 14
The problem with racial monocultures, like Silicon Valley Bank's board, isn't that you need a magical ethnic person around to have a good idea.

It's that people with relatively homogenous, unanimous opinions start making really dumb decisions.

It's called groupthink.

(🧵)
"Groupthink" sounds somewhat unfortunately like a Sesame Street song or something, but it's actually A Thing.

Like, these screencaps are from a fricking NASA page.

Because NASA knows to worry about groupthink.
sma.nasa.gov/news/sma-news-….
Groupthink is particularly interesting from the perspective of #NAFO.

The leaderless, chaotic aspects of something like NAFO sound almost like the opposite of this.

It's one reason why I think it's been around this long: no one's screwed it up with a bad executive decision yet.
Read 9 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Mar 13
In '13, I met a startup [name withheld] at a VC pitch event; three undergrads with popped collars and significant evidence of hair gel, as I recall.

So, what do you guys do? I ask. Pizza delivery, they say.

I ask them, so, what's your USP - your unique selling proposition?
(🧵)
I'm guessing they picked leaders based on most hair gel, because the one with a full-on pompadour responds, proudly: what makes us different is, we slice it differently.

I remember pausing for a solid three-count, just in case they were trying to, like, play a joke on me.
Wait, I asked, somewhat stupidly, that's what makes you unique? You slice it differently?

Yeah, they said, that's the reason for our name.

I remember looking at my cofounder, and thinking, almost aloud, the same thing at that moment.
Read 6 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Mar 13
In 2020, I played a key role in getting Belarusian secret police commander Mike Bedunkevich and his second in command at GUBOPiK Department 3-3 sanctioned.

By, like, accident.

I made this meme to commemorate it.

Here, I'll show you how I did it.

(🧵) Image
Belarus is a "preemptive authoritarian state" because its government maintains power by preempting democracy.

It does so today by using Facebook evidence of "extremism" in arbitrary arrests, as my confidential human sources showed.

Thanks to #BYPOL, an organization of dissident Belarusian police, it is possible to identify the specific government agency responsible for coordinating extremism arrests with local police with extreme particularity.

It's GUBOPiK Department 3-3.

Read 10 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Mar 13
Just a glimpse at what NAFO tackles makes the MAGAts trying to pick a fight with NAFO look stupid and quaint.

Patty L blamed Ukrainians, not Russians, for attacking Mariupol last year and carving swastikas into bodies.

Versus, what, some dipshit made a t-shirt?

(🧵)
You could argue that this is all part of the same complex of liars, that's valid. Where we'd disagree is the idea that it's meaningful or the most salient aspect of it all to highlight.

It's a question of relative threat levels and current threat environment.
The MAGA "movement" is decreasingly relevant and increasingly insane. Historically, unrelated things bring its core elements down.

Trump's businesses? SDNY, not the FBI.

Trump's kids? Charity lawsuits, not nepotism scandals.

Bannon? The goddamn Postal Service, of all things.
Read 5 tweets

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