The FBI is investigating whether Alexander Torshin, a top Russian banker (known as the "Russian godfather"), illegally funneled money to the NRA to help Trump win.
(The NRA spent $30 million to support Trump — 3X what they gave to Romney's 2012 campaign)
<quick thread>
A bit of background info on Alexander Torshin, the Russian bank exec and suspected mobster/organized crime boss who is now being investigated for potentially funneling $ through the NRA to help Trump's campaign. (That's him at the 2016 NRA convention👇).
/1/
According to intel assessments, Torshin is part of a years-long "aggressive Kremlin effort to forge alliances" w/top GOP figures, including those close to the WH. The NRA is a major conduit of influence here... and possibly also a cash conduit.
Trump was set to meet with Alexander Torshin in February before the National Prayer Breakfast. The meeting was canceled the night before when an NSC staffer blew the whistle and flagged Torshin as a potential Russian mobster...
In Nov., @NBCNews reported that Jared Kushner failed to disclose what lawmakers called a "Russian backdoor overture & dinner invite" from Alexander Torshin.
Torshin wanted Trump to attend an event at the NRA's May 2016 convention in Louisville, KY.
The undisclosed email chain suggested that Torshin "was seeking to meet with a high-level Trump campaign official during the NRA convention, and that he may have had a message for Trump from Putin."
Also in Nov., Don Jr admitted that he met with Torshin at a private dinner at the NRA's 2016 convention — just as Torshin requested in the (undisclosed) emails to Kushner (in which he said he wanted to meet with a high-level Trump campaign official).
Torshin and Trump have reportedly known each other since at least 2012. According to Bloomberg, the two "had a jovial exchange at the NRA convention in Tennessee in 2015."
...interesting how this keeps circling back to the NRA, isn't it?
Another key figure in the Torshin-NRA-Trump nexus: Torshin's "special assistant" Maria Butina, who attended one of Trump's first campaign events in April 2015 — during which Trump signaled his willingness to lift sanctions on Russia.
Something that you have to understand about Russian interference is that it’s highly unlikely that they would actually try to manipulate votes or vote tallies. Why? Because they know they can achieve the same or even better outcomes by manipulating voters instead. 🧵
I wrote about this 5 years ago.
As I said then, changing the vote count in one election would yield limited returns. But convincing voters to doubt the legitimacy of election outcomes for the foreseeable future? That’s a return on investment.
There is a strange tendency to talk about Russian interference as if the impact must either be direct — i.e. changing vote totals — or nonexistent. But that’s not the reality of how influence and information operations work, which is through subtle & indirect effects.
If you’re genuinely surprised that Trump won, may I gently suggest that you reevaluate where you are getting your information from, and be honest with yourself about whether you are willing to listen to people who tell you things you don’t necessarily want to hear.
The information environment on the left is broken, too, just in different ways than on the right. Too many people choose who to follow and who to listen to based on who makes them feel good, not who tells them the truth. In fact, those who told the truth were often ostracized.
I know this because it happened to me. Over & over & over again. I could’ve just chosen to tell you comfortable lies, like many influencers do. It’s scandalously easy to go viral doing that. But unlike them, I wasn’t willing to light our country on fire for clicks & ad revenue.
A viral claim emerged from pro-Trump Twitter on Friday, alleging that locals in NC had assaulted a FEMA director. By Saturday, it was a top Google trend. But it never actually happened.
There were a lot of striking aspects of this story, but more than anything, this was among the clearest examples I’ve seen of how online storytelling can be used to motivate and guide offline violence through the reframing of political violence as a necessary act of survival.
The rumor first emerged on Friday, but really picked up steam later on Friday and into the early hours of Saturday AM, when it ranked among the top 10 Google searches. The initial tweet was retweeted 20,000+ times & got 100,000+ “likes” & 6.4 million views in the first 19 hours.
He did. Trump & his allies spent years weaponizing the narrative around antifa in order to preemptively justify using violence and force to crack down on anyone who opposed Trump — thus paving the way for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act on 1/6.
👉🏼
This went on for YEARS; I was one of very few people talking about it for a long, long time. It was in the works since at least 2017 (likely earlier) and it involved politicians, media, think tanks, govt officials, & more.
Trump and his allies were so determined to get antifascists to come out and fight on 1/6 (to cause enough chaos to justify a militarized crackdown) that there was even a plan to have right-wing extremists impersonate antifascists, infiltrate 1/6 protests, and incite violence.
I wrote about cognitive warfare and how the contrived panic over Haitian immigrants hijacked our algorithms, our brains, and our national discourse. weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/how-the-cont…
During the 2-hr-long presidential debate this week, abortion was the top political topic searched in 49 states. The only exception was Ohio, where immigration was the top-searched issue — a trend driven by searches for topics related to the false claims about Haitian immigrants.
But despite being the top search topic in 49 states, abortion wasn’t the top search topic overall. Immigration — specifically, a false story about Haitian immigrants in Ohio — displaced abortion as the top search topic overall for nearly the entire 2-hour time window.
This was always the inevitable endpoint of the wildly false claims about Haitian immigrants eating dogs & cats. As this person literally admits, it doesn’t matter to them if it’s factually true or not — it only matters that (to them) it *feels* like it *could* be true.
It’s REALLY easy to get people to spread absurd lies about immigrants (or anyone else) if those people already believe terrible things about immigrants *and* are politically/ideologically motivated to persuade others to believe terrible things about immigrants.
We see this all the time; it’s one of the main reasons that fact-checking, at least on its own, so often fails — because people don’t believe lies & rumors simply based on the facts presented, but rather based on their own prior beliefs, motives, identity, emotions, and more. P