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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide
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The “fact of life” quip is drawing headlines. I am almost more disturbed that Vance describes a 14 year old as a “psycho” and implies that he understands the concept of a “soft target.” This is the same party that pretends that better mental health care is the answer.
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What you have to understand is that Russia may be doing something bad but that’s nothing compared to what Ukraine is doing in my imagination.
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Downplaying this is such a horrendous take. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have died and the battlefield has changed because a subset of a U.S. political party stonewalled any military support for SIX MONTHS, reading the exact script these dipshits have been paid to produce. If you thing there is anything resembling significant organic sympathy to Russia and opposition to helping Ukraine, then you might also be duped into accepting 100s of thousands of dollars from a mysterious benefactor with a LinkedIn and shitty PDF. Russians spend billions on this project because it actually does work, it is not a wasted investment. They successfully got a U.S. political party to help them win a war against a friendly European nation.
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Senator Mike Lee was convinced to start his “Based Mike Lee” account by a person who in the kindest possible interpretation, was too stupid to to realize something was off about the mysterious benefactor paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars to talk about how Ukraine is bad and Russia is awesome.
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Coordinated Response to Russian Covert Manipulations
956 Worldwide replied to 956 Worldwide's topic in Daily Texan
Now this group is a far more serious entity, although it is widely speculated that a key part of the GRU’s tactics is to be “exposed” to project the image of a fearsome Russian intelligence entity capable of operating everywhere. -
Coordinated Response to Russian Covert Manipulations
956 Worldwide replied to 956 Worldwide's topic in Daily Texan
Convicted pedophile Scott Ritter is VERY LOUDLY ANNOUNCING HE IS NO LONGER A RUSSIAN ASSET. -
Coordinated Response to Russian Covert Manipulations
956 Worldwide replied to 956 Worldwide's topic in Daily Texan
The Russians did not try particularly hard to cover this up or hide the ball, and its eventual exposure was baked into the operation. They hold traitors and useful idiots in contempt, these are not valuable assets that they have been cultivating. They are capable of doing things right when they want to. -
Coordinated Response to Russian Covert Manipulations
956 Worldwide replied to 956 Worldwide's topic in Daily Texan
There has been some clear and unambiguous veiled foreign propaganda and disinformation posted and amplified on the Israel CR thread that is not remotely pro-Israel. -
Coordinated Response to Russian Covert Manipulations
956 Worldwide replied to 956 Worldwide's topic in Daily Texan
Diving deeper into the sanctioned entities offers a good look into both how the ecosystems work and how the Russian state apes, manipulates, and uses seemingly familiar structures to pretend that covert intelligence and influence operations are in fact analogous to Western media. Running down the list, what should stick out is how likely it is that all of us have consumed Kremlin products whether we want to or not. First the basics— after the 1990s Russia did in fact have a semi-normal media environment with recognizable and professional news organizations. Putin began by rolling up any actual independent media fairly early in his tenure. Beginning in 2008 through the mid-2010s, the attention turned to consolidating what were plausibly “public” outlets into state-controlled organizations and creating new channels designed to ape familiar ones like the BBC. This mostly consolidated under the control of Margarita Simonyan as the “Rossiya Segondya” conglomerate which isn’t really a conglomerate. It produces org charts and similar documents but the reality is that nothing is truly a subsidiary, the entire apparatus exists as a tool of Kremlin messaging, and over time all of the “brands” came under the control of security personnel. So moving down the list of Rossyia Segondya quasi-entities: RT (Russia Today): Well known, mostly discredited in the West, reduced to paying Tim Pool behind a cutout to operate in the U.S. and mostly closed in Europe. However— it is the most consumed non-local Spanish news outlet across most of Latin America and is immensely popular across Africa and Asia and the Middle East. The Prime Minister of Malaysia gave them an interview yesterday and tutted at U.S. sanctions. Ruptly: Little known but you’ve likely consumed their stuff without knowing what it is. This is a Berlin-registered digital video production under the control of Simonyan and the hilariously named Konstantin Kalashnikov. Did you watch Assange getting dragged out of the Ecuador embassy? That was an exclusive Ruptly piece of content. What about footage of Beirut after the port explosion? Also Ruptly. This org, like RT, also produces non-branded content and uses its channels and viral videos to drive traffic. They have a unit, Redfish, which targets the left and African Americans to fairly miserable success but they are trying! RIA Novosti: Formerly a semi-reputable public news wire a la AFP, RIA Novosti is the Kremlin’s official foreign wire service. Reputable outlets have no choice but to cite them when quoting Zakharova or Peskov, because that is who the Kremlin talks to. You will read their press releases at one time or another. ANO-TV Novosti: The alleged parent organization of RT, this brand also falls under Simonyan and is allegedly funded by a Russian government grant to operate RT. The grant structure enables the Kremlin to claim that the structure is analogous to the BBC or RFE/RL with editorial independence and not a state-controlled media outlet. It’s important to note that places like the Post and NYT bought this argument until 2022. Sputnik: Allegedly the “Russian Voice of America,” Sputnik has barely any radio presence and is almost all online. It is a branded outlet for Russia, and has a broader reach into Europe and to less-spoken languages that aren’t worth using RT resources for broadcast. Anton Anisimov reports to Simonyan. And finally, Qatar owned media reporting on how big mad the Kremlin is: https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/9/5/russia-warns-response-to-us-sanctions-on-rt-will-make-everyone-shudder -
He left Crunchy Con behind, the thesis there was that conservatives should care about the environment and invest in building communities instead of fighting culture wars. His new thesis is that the right should unite behind an autocratic strongman like Orban to crush the shitlibs, gays, and immigrants. He writes all about it from Budapest and also about how UFOs are probably demons.
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I also would place money that the American owners of Tenet are already singing, it’s all fun and games till the FBI shows your “what time in Moscow” google search while waiting for a paycheck. Conservative media is all so completely astroturfed and fake that this should not at all be surprising, and conservative influencers are accustomed to just taking huge sums of money to say shit and not ask questions. Example: Rod Dreher, a weird little mini-influencer who is a niche celebrity BUT— wields real influence. His viral book review launched JD Vance into the national convo and he introduced Tucker to Viktor Orban. Last year when he had to leave his blog at The American Conservative behind, it came out that the entire time he was bankrolled by one weird man: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/rod-dreher-blog-weird-american-conservative Rod has now decamped permanently to Budapest and more or less openly serves as Orban’s chief English propagandist from his sinecure at a state think tank, where he has agreed to “write about his experiences” in Hungary. The point is this pipeline and jump is baked into right wing media operations. You take money from people to spout whatever authoritarian talking points they want. That’s how the system works and you don’t ask questions or think too much about who is funding you and why. It’s the exact inverse of real journalism and that’s why it’s ALMOST plausible that the Tenet talent lineup might have just shrugged and said that the scheme must be some weird Thiel or Koch shit.
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Coordinated Response to Russian Covert Manipulations
956 Worldwide replied to 956 Worldwide's topic in Daily Texan
One of the commentators (Rubin or Johnson) got a little suspicious about their benefactor so the Russians made this pdf and sent it around. Immaculate tradecraft. -
“We spew Russian talking points totally organically, the Russian money doesn’t change our ideas” isn’t the defense Watters thinks it is.
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Coordinated Response to Russian Covert Manipulations
956 Worldwide replied to 956 Worldwide's topic in Daily Texan
“Idiot”’ is the senior partner in the “useful idiot” word pair but it’s important not to compartmentalize or downplay this stuff. The Tenet stable is for sure a lineup of morons, but they are still morons with sizable audiences and the things they say resonate, repeat, and are responded to. Russia understands it cannot dominate the information battlefield but it can conduct shaping operations. And that’s what this is. These activities mean that we spend time as Americans having debates that Moscow wants us to have, not our own.- 154 replies
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Tucker was just a bit too on the nose for the RT financiers.
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Coordinated Response to Russian Covert Manipulations
956 Worldwide replied to 956 Worldwide's topic in Daily Texan
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Coordinated Response to Russian Covert Manipulations
956 Worldwide replied to 956 Worldwide's topic in Daily Texan
They are not named in the indictment because they were “deceived” allegedly. But it’s all pretty fucking clear. -
Peeling this away from the CR thread on propaganda and the Ukraine thread. There were pretty significant coordinated actions against Russian covert influence operations today. Justice indicted two Russians and seized several domains, Treasury sanctioned Margarita Simonyan (she’s famous on the Ukraine thread) and others, and State slapped a foreign mission designation on Simonyan’s company Rossiya Segodnaya (translation: Russia Today) and pushed out visa restrictions on unnamed Russkies. The big bombshell news is that Simonyan’s RT brand funneled tens of millions of dollars to a U.S. company that employs people like Tim Pool and Dave Rubin to create Russia-approved content and videos that got pretty outstanding reach. But beyond that, this network of actions allows people to piece together how the machine works. RT, for instance, doesn’t really exist. It’s merely a convenient brand used within Rossiya Segodnaya internationally while Rossiya Segodnaya operates more of a media empire. At the Kremlin’s direction, the RT content and messaging then gets amplified and spread via a network of Kremlin security service controlled networks run by shadowy entities like the Social Design Agency and Structura, using various LLM tools and botnets. The big piece here is two-fold and different from past shady Russia shit in that it differs from just propaganda and disinformation. The Russians are actually (covertly) financing pretty significant U.S. media figures and not just kooky bots. The indictments are careful to say the Americans are “unwitting,” which you can decide the credibility of. The second is the clear attempt to move beyond just chaos and discord and instead move to actually advancing Kremlin aims and policies including on Ukraine and upcoming elections. A slate of today’s actions at the links: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2559 https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-rt-employees-indicted-covertly-funding-and-directing-us-company-published-thousands https://www.state.gov/state-department-actions-to-counter-russias-election-interference-and-foreign-malign-influence-operations/
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Broke: Liking Churchill because he kicked Nazi ass. Woke: Disliking Churchill because of colonialism. Bespoke: Disliking Churchill because he kicked Nazi ass.
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