At that time, my own understanding of the media war against Russia was quite naïve and innocent, just to be honest. While I understood how politically incorrect my views seemed to media I had previously worked for, the scope of literal control of western media still evaded me. The people and agencies pulling strings, their ultimate organizational structure, and their goals, these were obscured mostly by the unimaginable scope of the thing.
Before 2015 not many people could conceive of such media control. Orwell’s book 1984 was still considered fiction by most people. The Edward Snowden revelations about the NSA had not yet been fully absorbed by the public either, so imagining a “deep state” propaganda machine extending across the world was simply not something even seasoned journalists or analysts focused on.
Then the independent media caught wind of NGOs and characters like billionaire George Soros, and learned that a broad network of subversive agencies had deeply embedded their claws into western society. In North America, across Europe, and especially in the former Soviet states, Soros and others had created a real subculture of anti-traditionalist, post-modernist liberalism. The “movement,” if I may call it that, is also virulently anti-Russian.
While this aspect of my involvement is better suited to another book, the organizational aspect of this “network” is indicative of the long-range strategies leveled primarily at Russia. The Euromaidan and this whole anti-Russia circus we are witnessing were planned far in advance.
To put this “network” in better focus, it’s important to understand the role of George Soros in Eastern Europe, and especially in Ukraine. The DCLeaks revelations that came out after Soros’ NGO Open Society Foundations was hacked revealed what can only be described as a diabolical strategy for media and regime control. I recall an article on Zero Hedge[8] citing DCLeaks in 2016:
“George Soros is a Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, political activist, and author who is of Hungarian-Jewish ancestry and holds dual citizenship. He drives more than 50 global and regional programs and foundations. Soros is named an architect and a sponsor of almost every revolution and coup around the world for the last 25 years.”
Euromaidan Press, which very early on labeled anyone with an opposing view either Kremlin apologists or Putin trolls, is supported by George Soros’ Renaissance Foundation. These media “arms” of the Soros machine take great pride in having been sourced by BBC, Reuters, The New York Times, and most Western mainstream media. Their constant harping about “troll armies” and Putin’s so-called propaganda machine started the instant the Ukraine civil war began. The hysteria continues even as I write this chapter, and even more vociferously. One article entitled “Kremlin trolls exposed: Russia’s information war against Ukraine” uses the same kind of “quasi-proof” CNN and other media are currently being bashed over. The cited article claims there are thousands of paid Kremlin trolls that have been identified by Ukrainian journalist Roman Kulchinskiy (recently mentioned by the Ukrainian version of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty). Furthermore, social activist Liudmyla Savchuk supposedly infiltrated this troll army to discover their social media dominance. The article quotes Savchuk:
“They’re everywhere — Facebook, Vkontakte, LiveJournal, Odnoklassniki. They make their own fake news sites. They create their own news agencies. They pretend to be Ukrainian journalists. They write as if they’re Ukrainian journalists. As if they’re from Kyiv or Kharkiv, but they’re really in Russia. They simply take a news piece, rewrite it how they need it, distort the information and send it out into the world.”
A more recent case of Kremlin Troll hysteria can be found in an article by a girl named Morgan Chalfont, a recent Boston College grad who writes a cybersecurity column at Jimmy Finkelstein’s political newspaper The Hill.[9] As an observation note here, Finkelstein is an immensely influential individual who some say is a “real nasty piece of work”.[10] Returning for the moment to the young reporter’s August 2017 story, Chalfont cites quasi-experts about a supposed Kremlin smear campaign against US President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. The straight out of college girl uses the dubious Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab and FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence. The reason I use the term “dubious” is because the Atlantic Council think tank makes no bones about its globalist stance, and because of the twenty-five or more foreign countries that fund it. Russia is not one of those countries, just so my point is well made. As for FireEye, the Milpitas, California startup founded by new Pakistani billionaire Ashar Aziz was funded by Sequoia Capital, the investors largely responsible for Apple, Google, PayPal, YouTube, and Yahoo! Venture capital. The company is now run by former US Air Force officer Kevin Mandia, who has Silicon Valley venture ties to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which is headed by the technocrats that boosted Google and Amazon to the forefront of the digital world. The reason I make these connections is to show the vested “interests” aspect from the technocrats’ side of the whole Russia story. The Atlantic Council concocting narrative to suit geo-strategy is no new methodology, and companies selling stocks on Wall Street are certainly not above misleading the public. FireEye has been called out on more than one occasion as well.[11] As a “for instance”, the independent media led by Zero Hedge utterly destroyed a Bloomberg story where FireEye accused Russia of “weaponizing” social media. The long and short of the anti-Russia narrative from Washington think tanks and intelligence community technocrats is, most of the evidence and all the dogma is invented. Let’s look at the notion of “weaponized social media” from a first adopters point of view.
I hope the reader will forgive me a brief digression into sarcasm here, but as the alleged top Kremlin troll on Earth, it seems to me I should know more about these “thousands” by now. In all seriousness, why don’t each of my “Putin tweets” receive at least 100 retweets? Instead of using my own money for boosting Facebook posts featuring my articles, how is it my master’s paid minions are not sharing on their own? The answer will become blazingly, alarmingly, and gloriously evident by the end of this book. According to Soros’ paid minions, Vladimir Putin is spending upwards of $400,000 dollars a month at the legendary St. Petersburg troll factory alone! For those up us wired into the social media circuit board in this media war, the suggestion is preposterous for a multiplicity of reasons.
The reality of the St. Petersburg IT operation is a far more mundane like-share operation undertaken for good old capitalistic reasons. I have it on good advice that some innovative ‘entrepreneur’ in Russia does, in fact, get paid for social media “juice,” but these are likes and shares for businesses, technology startups, and social media marketers, etc.
Once again, this is fodder for yet another book, but my point is made here. I was an early adopter when social media was very young. The marketing strategies of Facebook and Twitter and 100 others were in a small way, influenced by me and my contemporaries. Trust me, if there were 2,000 Kremlin trolls out there on Putin’s payroll, I’d be one of the first beneficiaries of their influence. This Roman Kulchinskiy who was sourced by the CIA backed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty mimicked another well-known internet agent for the West, a man named Andrew Weisburd, who I shall discuss later. For Kulchinskiy’s part, he and his colleagues supposedly used a social indexing tool[12] to “correlate” Kremlin toll associations. What is amazing for me is the fact none of the most prominent Kremlin Troll confessors in this book seems to be in this correlative matrix. As for this St. Petersburg troll army, I shall delve into the contrivance of this as a strategy later in the book. At this point it’s just important to understand that there are strategies being played out before us.
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