New reporting in Business Insider reveals strong links between Putin and neo-Nazis in U.S. I can show that those neo-Nazis that are so close to Putin’s Russia are also strongly linked to Trump. The facts are there, and not hard to find. We just have to connect them to make a picture. A very frightening picture.
While writing this, I did a thought experiment, imagining what I would see as one of Putin’s intelligence men. It wouldn’t be all the different pieces of the story that American media covers one by one, missing the forest for the trees. I would see the different parts of a single operation, calculated toward a goal, the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President.
An objective so bold and implausible that few would believe it, not even if the CIA said it happened.
And the candidate himself, Donald Trump? Who is he? My thought experiment breaks down here. Is Trump just a showman, the Kremlin’s “useful idiot” who actually believes Russia should have Crimea, Syria and whatever Baltic States it wants? Someone who questions the need for NATO? Who thinks it’s no big deal that Russians broke into the computers of his political opponent and dumped the contents on Wikileaks? Who says reports of a Russian fake news propaganda machine are nothing? Who thinks there is nothing to see when told that Russians tried to breach the voter registration databases of more than twenty States?
Or did Trump do a deal with Putin?
I have no idea. But I have pieced together additional parts of this story, thanks to that new reporting in Business Insider detailing connections between prominent American neo-Nazis (“alt-right”) and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I’ve taken their work and googled those names and found some direct connections to Trump’s campaign. It took a little time, but it wasn’t hard to find the facts.
The most important thing in understanding this story is context; let me first walk you through the different things that Putin’s men did to help Donald Trump win the election.
The Democratic hack/Wikileaks email dump
The first part of this story is the hack of John Podesta and Democratic National Committee emails. These were then passed to Wikileaks to make the dump look like news — and the American news media took the bait, doing much of the Russians work for them. Key parts of the hack/dump story were known prior to the election, but it wasn’t until last week that the Washington Post reported this:
“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”
The New York Times followed up with reporting of astounding depth and detail that leaves no doubt about the Russian hacking. The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S. is a must read for anyone who still has doubts the Russian operation.
While there’s no way to be certain of the ultimate impact of the hack, this much is clear: A low-cost, high-impact weapon that Russia had test-fired in elections from Ukraine to Europe was trained on the United States, with devastating effectiveness. For Russia, with an enfeebled economy and a nuclear arsenal it cannot use short of all-out war, cyberpower proved the perfect weapon: cheap, hard to see coming, hard to trace.
“There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind,” Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command said at a postelection conference. “This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily,” he said. “This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”
The Times reminded their readers of this tweet by Trump confidant Roger Stone — which shows he knew about the Podesta email dump in advance. (Stone was off by two days in his tweet, the dump came on Friday October 7).
October 1, 2016 Screen capture from Roger Stone Twitter feed.
As I was writing this, I suddenly remembered an even earlier Stone Tweet and went looking for it. I found it. On August 21st, Stone bragged that it will soon be “Podesta’s time in the barrel”. This was four days after Steve Bannon came on-board as Trump campaign’s CEO.
August 21, 2016 Screen capture from Roger Stone Twitter feed.
Whether Trump’s people knew the content of the Podesta emails in advance or not, the lead time meant they could design a new campaign message to maximize the impact when Wikileaks finally did the dump.
And once it came, Trump did his best to hammer the story home.
Screen capture of Donald Trump Tweet urging the media to cover the Podesta emails.
Despite Trump’s constant whining, the press covered the Podesta emails like it was part of their religion. The Times’ story blames the media — including its own reporting — for the way they covered the D.N.C. and Podesta emails.
Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.
Mr. Putin, a student of martial arts, had turned two institutions at the core of American democracy — political campaigns and independent media — to his own ends.
The Times asked and then answered the question about Putin’s motives:
Did he seek to mar the brand of American democracy, to forestall anti-Russian activism for both Russians and their neighbors? Or to weaken the next American president, since presumably Mr. Putin had no reason to doubt American forecasts that Mrs. Clinton would win easily? Or was it, as the C.I.A. concluded last month, a deliberate attempt to elect Mr. Trump?
In fact, the Russian hack-and-dox scheme accomplished all three goals.
Fake News
The fake news propaganda machine is the next important piece of what the Russians did.
Their operation spit out masses of fake stories that were then shunted into social media channels to both support Trump and maximize the damage to Clinton from the hack/dump.
The Russians began practicing fake news techniques in the U.S. back in 2014 when they spread false scare stories about Ebola and chemical spills. Adrian Chen reported about the Russian connections to the fake news stories back in June of 2015 in The New York Times.
Who was behind all of this? When I stumbled on it last fall, I had an idea. I was already investigating a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the Internet Research Agency. The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a “troll farm.” The more I investigated this group, the more links I discovered between it and the hoaxes. In April, I went to St. Petersburg to learn more about the agency and its brand of information warfare, which it has aggressively deployed against political opponents at home, Russia’s perceived enemies abroad and, more recently, me.
Last week The Washington Post revealed the evidence of Russian meddling in the U.S. Presidential campaign by using fake news. Four separate sets of researchers found evidence that Moscow mounted an intense online propaganda effort using a network of websites and social media accounts to push fake news into the center of the campaign.
The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.
Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers.
There was some push-back against the Washington Post story by some on the left because one of the research teams, PropOrNot identified several left-wing websites that either used a lot of Russian Times or Sputnik news sources (both are essentially Russian propaganda) or had anti-Clinton stories that were intentionally amplified by the Russians. Max Blumenthal of AlterNet had this push-back:
The dead-enders of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president have also seized on PropOrNot’s claims as proof that the election was rigged, with Clinton confidant and Center For American Progress president Neera Tanden declaring, “Wake up people,” as she blasted out the Washington Post article on Russian black ops.
Blumenthal finished with a hysterical rant ridiculing anyone worried about Russian fake news.
Fake news and Russian propaganda have become the great post-election moral panic, a creeping Sharia-style conspiracy theory for shell-shocked liberals. Hoping to punish the dark foreign forces they blame for rigging the election, many of these insiders have latched onto a McCarthyite campaign that calls for government investigations of a wide array of alternative media outlets.
Truthfeed was one of the sites listed by PropOrNot as Russian propaganda. They had this response to the listing.
I’m taking the time to note Blumenthal’s criticisms because they were widely distributed and Blumenthal wanted to cast doubt on this crucial piece of reporting in The Post. The story was well sourced and PropOrNot was only one of four sources. The Post didn’t vouch for their list, but cited their data on Russia’s fake news operation. PropOrNot has responded to the criticism by removing a number of websites from their list, and say they are willing to engage with any others who want off.
One of the sites that PropOrNot has identified as Russian propaganda is Truthfeed.org, who had this push-back.
Washington Post Writes FAKE NEWS Hit Piece Claiming Conservative Sites Like Truthfeed.com Are “Russian Propaganda”
I want to make sure you understand exactly what these fake news stories look like.
Two fake news stories. Top: Pizzagate. Bottom: truthfeed.com story saying Hillary is a murderer.
I spent a couple of hours last night researching disgusting twitter feeds to come up with the images I used in this story. Afterwards I felt I needed a shower, the same as I do after visiting Stormfront to see what the Nazis are doing.
The ones above are just two samples, one which came from the imgur.com image site (used heavily by Nazis to push out their messages) and the second from Truthfeed. Both were on the “PEDO HILLARY Retweeted” Twitter feed, which published scare stories about Hillary’s health prior to the election and then shifted into other memes, including Pizzagate after Trump won.
When PropOrNot says truthfeed is part of the Russian propaganda machine, I believe it. They have the data to back up their claims. But for me, the proof is in the images themselves.
It’s important to point out that that the Russians aren’t responsible for all the fake news, maybe not even most. The neo-Nazis (“alt-right”) and Brietbart News and other right-wing sites also create a lot. According to the Financial Times (and others), even teenagers in Macedonia have gotten in on the fake news scam.
One website owner said he had created more than 10,000 fake Facebook profiles to post links across the social network and used an automated tool to schedule millions of posts. One of the Facebook groups he manages — “American Politics Today” — has more than 85,000 followers. Users click on the links, bringing them to the Veles sites, which cash in by selling advertising.
Focusing on the creators of fake news, however, misses the point. The damage is done when these stories are pushed out to readers in a big way, and that was — and still is — the focus of the Russian propaganda machine. To leverage stories that helped Trump and hurt Clinton and the Democratic Party. Or as the PropOrNot Executive Director put it:
“It was like Russia was running a super PAC for Trump’s campaign. . . . It worked.”
How Trump used the fake news and Russian hack/dumps
I took this picture as Trump announced the re-opening of FBI-Clinton email investigation in Manchester, New Hampshire. October 28, 2016.
I saw first hand how fake news worked to boost the enthusiasm of Trump supporters. I was at the Trump rally in Manchester, New Hampshire when Trump announced that FBI Director James Comey was re-opening the Clinton email investigation.
Trump was a one and a half hours late getting to the stage, and the crowd had grown restless and depressed. It was the high-point of the Clinton campaign and she was riding a substantial lead in the polls. Trump’s people looked down as speaker after speaker took the stage to talk about the Trump program and kill time.
Before Trump arrived to break the FBI news, there were only three things that consistently got a rise out of the crowd. One was talk about building the wall. Another was an attack on Hillary Clinton — to which the crowd would chant, “Lock her up — lock her up”. Finally there was the attack line against the press. On cue, the crowd turned to the beleaguered press corp and booed.
Trump crowd turning to boo the press — when I took this picture, the cage for the Trump press corp was just past my right shoulder. Manchester, New Hampshire on October 28, 2016.
Beleaguered Trump press corp. Oct 28 in Manchester, NH.
I have never seen a press corp so mistreated and discouraged as the one covering Donald Trump. They were not allowed into the auditorium until the crowd had assembled, and then they were led in by armed security guards like they were prisoners of war. They looked like POWs being led back to their cells — and why not? Trump made bashing the press a regular feature of his rallies. Demoralizing the press to keep them from challenging him was one of his tricks. Another was attacking real news so his followers would be more susceptible to the fake stuff. Fake news built to capitalize on the other side of the Russian operation — the DNC and Podesta hacks and the dumping of all those emails on Wikileaks. None of which was actually very damaging as a single thing — but with fake news ginning up controversy after controversy, the Trump supporters and undecided voters came to believe that you couldn’t have all that smoke without a fire.
Link to fake news story capitalizing on Wikileaks Podesta email dump.
After looking through all those ugly twitter feeds last night, I saw that the Trump crowd’s “Lock her Up!” screams made sense. They actually believed what they read on Twitter.
And what they read was that Hillary Clinton was a dishonest murderer, running a pedophile ring that murdered children. That she was also — paradoxically — weak and dangerously ill with an un-determined disease that Obama was helping to cover-up. That she was the most corrupt politician to ever grace the American political scene. Crooked Hillary. Lock her up.
Enough people believed this nonsense to swing the vote in a few key states. The fake news assault, by the way, has not stopped. Check out Twitter, its’ still going strong. Look at this truthfeed.com post attacking George Soros as one of the “Anti-American Commies” staging “riots” against Trump.
truthfeed.com attacking George Soros as an “Anti-American Commie” staging riots against Trump.
How can AlterNet and others on the left imply that Russian manipulation of our democracy is a myth? This represents a fascist assault on our national values and we better start fighting it.
How Russia aided the rise of the neo-Nazis (“alt-right”)
During the campaign I read right wing websites periodically, especially Breitbart News and the neo-Nazi website Stormfront, because I found it was the best way to see how Trump voters were responding to campaign news. Breitbart News, in particular, was the best predictor of which candidate Trump was likely to target and dispatch next — using that information together with polling I could accurately predict how Trump was going to do in a given primary.
But it wasn't until the Spring of 2016 that Breitbart revealed itself as the home of the “alt-right”. And with a shock I soon realized that the neo-Nazis I had been following were same thing as Steve Bannon’s “alt-right”. This is a big movement, much bigger than I had realized. Even though I have followed it closely for four decades.
I’ve come to see that there are many reasons why it is growing; it is no longer dependent on its own financial support and limited to those it can proselytize face to face. The internet has been one of the game changers and the movement has been helped by things as diverse as the 2014 Gamergate hashtag campaign, the birther campaign against President Obama (of which Trump was a big part), and the fake news movement.
But neo-Nazis have also been aided by Putin. And in exchange they are almost worshipful toward him in return. They idolize Russia, seeing it as Putin’s white nationalist state.
I was unaware of this Russian angle until I saw this recent tweet by independent Presidential candidate, Evan McMullin, which tipped me to the Business Insider reporting.
The white supremacist and nationalist movement is a key tool in Putin's subversion of western democracy.
Screen capture of Evan McMullin tweet on December 11, 2016.
I met Evan McMullin the day before the election. It was at a diner just outside of Salt Lake City, where he was holding a campaign event. As he introduced himself, he explained that he was a constitutional conservative who believed in a multi-racial America.
I don’t share McMullin’s libertarian economic views but we agree on four things: the importance of Constitutional protections, that the politics of Donald Trump are dangerous and fascistic and that the neo-Nazi movement is a cancer on our body politic. And the value of fighting for an America that is accepting of everyone, i.e. multi-racial and multi-ethnic and tolerant.
McMullin knows something first hand about neo-Nazis. During the campaign. a neo-Nazi named William Daniel Johnson recorded a robo-call supporting Trump and attacking McMullin.
Johnson self-identifies as a “white nationalist” but he is part of the American Freedom Party — one of the neo-Nazi groups whose members have been aided by Vladimir Putin.
William Daniel Johnson is a Los Angeles-based attorney and leader of the neo-Nazi American Freedom Party. They support Donald Trump, despite having their own candidate for President.
This was what Johnson said his in robo-call against McMullin:
Evan McMullin is an open borders, amnesty supporter. Evan has two mommies. His mother is a lesbian, married to another woman. Evan is okay with that. Indeed, Evan supports the Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage. Evan is over 40 years old and is not married and doesn’t even have a girlfriend. I believe Evan is a closet homosexual. Don’t vote for Evan McMullin. Vote for Donald Trump. He will respect all women and be a president we can all be proud of.
The title of the Business Insider report is 'A model for civilization': Putin's Russia has emerged as 'a beacon for nationalists' and the American alt-right. When I read it, I finally understood why so many Trump voters are pro-Russian; It reflects the role the neo-Nazis have in his campaign. And they feel much more at home in Russia than in America.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has emerged as a hero of several prominent alt-right figures, raising new questions about the Kremlin's influence on the far-right, white nationalist movement that has asserted itself as a new force in American politics.
Whether Russia has played a direct role in awakening the American alt-right, whose resurgence as a crusade against establishment politics coincided with the rise of President-elect Donald Trump, is debatable.
But the extent to which the alt-right has found a natural ally in Russia's current zeitgeist — which perceives the US as a globalist, imperialist power working on behalf of liberal elites — is hard to overstate.
Self-described white nationalist Matthew Heimbach, who said he identifies as a member of the alt-right, has praised Putin's Russia as "the axis for nationalists."
“I really believe that Russia is the leader of the free world right now," Heimbach told Business Insider in a recent interview. "Putin is supporting nationalists around the world and building an anti-globalist alliance, while promoting traditional values and self-determination."
Studying neo-Nazis is like a forced march through a field of mud. You feel very, very dirty and its easy to get lost in the maze of names, groups, organizational acronyms, obscure conferences and speeches and the mindlessly boring ideology of hate.
But just because it is banal doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous and so I make the effort to understand the connections. The Business Insider report is mainly a list of white supremacist names that have strong links to Russia and by itself it doesn’t say that much, even though the import of the article is frightening.
But I decided to google these names for those connections to Trump and his campaign. And that’s when it got very, very interesting. I’m going to report my findings by going through the names, including a brief quote from Business Insider along with a brief explanation about their role in the U.S.
DAVID DUKE
Business Insider:
David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, has traveled to Russia several times to promote his book "The Ultimate Supremacism: My Awakening on the Jewish Question." The book has been sold openly in the main lobby of the State Duma (Congress) for the equivalent of about $2, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
An old picture of Duke in his globe-trotting KKK days.
David Duke is probably the best known of these names. He has been a member of both the Klan and the Nazis before rebranding himself as a white nationalist, and now “alt-right”.
He’s emerged time and again in relation to the Trump Campaign. And I've blogged about him on Daily Kos, in relation to the amnesia that surround Trump and his people when Duke’s name comes up. Since Duke is the best known of these men, I won't say much here. But if don't know who he is, let the Southern Poverty Law Center catch you up.
I don’t want you to think that David Duke’s involvement with Russia is limited to just a few trips. It’s extensive, so much that he also owns an apartment in Moscow. And he sublets that apartment to another of the neo-Nazis named in Business Insider, Preston Wiginton.
PRESTON WIGINTON
Here is Preston Wiginton in Moscow, where he spend part of the year in David Duke’s apartment.
Preston Wiginton in the center waving the cowboy hat at a neo-Nazi demonstration in Moscow, November 4, 2013. The picture is one I found on Stormfront, the neo-Nazi website.
Business Insider:
Preston Wiginton, a white supremacist from Texas who sublets Duke's Moscow apartment when he travels to Russia, has written that his "best friends" in Russia — "the only nation that understands RAHOWA [Racial Holy War]" — are "leading skinheads."
When he isn’t enjoying the Hitler salutes of his fellow neo-Nazis in Moscow, Preston Wiginton hangs around Texas making a nuisance of himself. In November he popped up in the local news for two separate stories. The first was his proposal for new organization for white people:
"If we want to have a white state, or a white community or a white homeland we should be able to have that," Wiginton told The Battalion [Texas A&M University student newspaper]. "We respect that for all people. If we look at the NAACP, black people have the right to have that. Why can't white people have a WAACP?"
His second splash came this month when he invited noted white supremacist Richard Spencer to speak at Texas A&M. Spencer popularized the “alt-right" rebranding of neo-Nazis. He is also a big Trump supporter — keep reading, he is the next name I feature.
Wiginton is a former A&M student, but has no connection to the school — except that he seems to know his way around. Apparently Texas A&M has on-campus facilities they rent to all comers, with no policies to keep the neo-Nazis out, claiming it’s a free speech issue. Over the years Wiginton has invited a number of neo-Nazis to speak at Texas A&M, including Jared Taylor on two separate occasions (he gets his review him after Spencer’s) and British National Party leader (BNP) Nick Griffin, with whom he is alleged to be close.
I perked up when I saw that Preston Wiginton spoke in Sweden in 2007 at a big neo-Nazi event, which is a little too close to home since I live in Stockholm. This thing truly is international and we need to recognize the threat.
RICHARD SPENCER
Business Insider:
Spencer's ties to Russia, which he has called the “ sole white power in the world," go deeper. He was married until October to Russian writer and self-proclaimed "Kremlin troll leader" Nina Kouprianova, whose writing under the pen name Nina Byzantina regularly aligns with Kremlin talking points.
Tila Tequila and fellow Nazis at “alt-right” National Policy Institute gathering in Washington to celebrate Trump’s victory. : Tila Tequila / Twitter / Via Twitter: @AngelTilaLove
Richard Spencer is the public face of the “alt-right”. While he didn't coin the term (that was Dr. Paul Gottfried) he is the “alt-right” neo-Nazi man of the hour after hosting a November event in Washington, D.C. where Trump was praised with “Heil Trump” Hitler salutes and Spencer encouraged his guests to “party like it was 1933”. His stated goal is the creation of a white ethno-state in North America and he uses his innocuous sounding nonprofit, the National Policy Institute, as his main vehicle to get there. Spencer is dangerous because he knows how to advance his ideology of white racial superiority, by tying it to economic issues and a sense of white male grievance. If you want to know more, the Southern Poverty Law Center has it here.
The Washington Post had this profile after his National Policy Institute event praising Trump’s election.
For years, Spencer and his followers worked in obscure corners of the Internet to promote pride in white identity and the creation of an “ethno-state” that would banish minorities. Then came the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, whose attacks on undocumented immigrants, Muslims and political correctness deeply resonated with them.
Though Trump denounced the alt-right Tuesday, its adherents had crusaded for him on Twitter before the election and celebrated his victory as a seminal moment for their cause.
They exulted again when Trump announced that his chief White House strategist would be former Breitbart chairman Stephen K. Bannon, who once called his website “the platform for the alt-right.”
JARED TAYLOR
Business Insider:
A right-wing conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, organized last year by Russia's nationalist Rodina, or Motherland, party offered a safe space for fringe thinkers — including white supremacists and anti-Semites — to gather and rail against the US-led status quo.
There, American "race realist" Jared Taylor called the US " the greatest enemy of tradition everywhere."
Jared Taylor speaking at the International Russian Conservative Forum in 2015. Photo from the American Renaissance website.
Jared Taylor is another of the big names in the “alt-right” neo-Nazi world. He heads the New Century Foundation and the American Renaissance website. During the election he worked with William Daniel Johnson of the American Freedom Party to promote Donald Trump. He has a video on his website praising Trump: “Americans, real Americans have been dreaming of a candidate who says the obvious, that illegal immigrants from Mexico are a low-rent bunch that includes rapists and murders.”
Joining Taylor at the International Russian Conservative Forum in St. Petersburg was a who’s-who of European neo-Nazis and fascists. Udo Voigt of the ultra-right Germany National Democratic Party spoke, along with Roberto Fiore of the Italian ultra-right party Forza Nuova. The Nazis of the Greek Golden Dawn Party attended, as did Nick Griffin of the British National Party. According to the Wall Street Journal, guest list was so extreme that even Jared Taylor was appalled. (He tries very hard to avoid a Nazi label). But he spoke anyway, saying “When you’re on the fringe, there’s no soapbox too low.” Here’s the ending of that speech.
. . . we are a small minority on this planet. Our numbers are shrinking while those of every other group are growing. That is why we must have territories that are exclusively ours, which are for us alone and for our children for ever. Without this, everything we love will be washed away.
We Europeans are one people. We have the same heritage and the same destiny.
That is why your struggle is my struggle. So long as the light of the West still shines in Russia, or in Sweden, or in Italy or in Spain, it shines for all Europeans, even for us, far away in North America.
KEVIN MACDONALD
Business Insider:
Kevin MacDonald — who gave a speech at Spencer's NPI in late November about how "Jews remade America in their interests ... to make white America comfortable with massive non-white immigration and its own dispossession" — has written that the "demonization of Russia in Western media and political circles" is a Jewish campaign to undermine Putin.
Kevin MacDonald was briefly a story during the campaign when Donald Trump Jr. re-tweeted an accusation he made against Hillary Clinton alleging improper dealings with the Swiss bank, UBS .
Kevin MacDonald is a director of the American Freedom Party (I’ve already noted the connections William Daniel Johnson and Jared Taylor have with them). MacDonald distinguishes himself by being extremely anti-semitic according to the Anti-Defamation League.
It seems strange that Donald Trump Jr., who has a Jewish brother-in-law, would be following McDonald on Twitter, but the “alt-right” neo-Nazi/white supremacist world is not big on consistency. Many of them are extremely anti-semitic and spent the campaign harassing Jewish journalists. Others see Jews as a potential ally against Muslims, and some in the crowd are actually Jewish, such as Dr. Paul Gottfried (although he protests the neo-Nazi label).
MATHEW HEIMBACH
Business Insider:
Self-described white nationalist Matthew Heimbach, who said he identifies as a member of the alt-right, has praised Putin's Russia as "the axis for nationalists."
“I really believe that Russia is the leader of the free world right now," Heimbach told Business Insider in a recent interview. "Putin is supporting nationalists around the world and building an anti-globalist alliance, while promoting traditional values and self-determination."
Mathew Heimbach is another Putin-supporting American white nationalist. He has started his own
political party, the Traditional Worker Party. This from their website:
“The ethnic community is the definition of a true nation. Shared blood, history, and traditions are what make a people and bind us together as an extended family.”
Heimbach made news during the campaign when he shoved a black woman who was protesting at a Trump rally — while wearing one of Trump’s trademark red “Make America Great Again” caps. In a Washington Post profile of Heimbach, Ryan Lenz of the Southern Poverty Law Center calls him a “media-savy millennial who has forged relationships with Stormfront, the League of the South, the Aryan Terror Brigade, the National Socialist Movement and other white-supremacist organizations”. Heimbach has traveled in Europe to meet with the neo-Nazis of the Golden Dawn in Greece, and the National Democratic Party in Germany. He tried to go to Britain, but they wouldn’t let him in. The Post article includes video of Heimbach at the Trump rally. Despite wearing that “Make America Great Again” hat, he qualifies his support for Trump. This from the Washington Post.
. . . whites are being ignored in favor of minorities. And no one has pointed that out more clearly to the rest of the nation, he says, than Trump . . . “Hopefully this [election] will really damage the Republican Party as a whole and awaken white working-class and middle-class people that the Republicans don’t represent them,” Heimbach said. “So I really like Trump for that. But he’s not one of us. He’s not a white nationalist.”
This isn't all the names I found. But its enough to make my point.
PUTIN’S FASCISM
According to the Russian Analytical Digest of the Center for Security Studies in Zurich, the Russkiy Mir Foundation was started by Putin in 2007 to project Russian soft-power. It now has a presence of 50 centers in 29 countries that are designed to spread Russian language, culture and values — values that many Baltic and East European find to be conflict with their democracies.
Christopher Stroop is an academic who explains that "Putinism is heavily influenced by the ideas of Dugin and that old Slavophlie/Pan-Slav Russian nationalist tradition.” He notes the close relationship between the Russkiy Mir Foundation and the Russian Orthodox Church, a church that Andrew Higgins of the New York Times characterized this way:
A fervent foe of homosexuality and any attempt to put individual rights above those of family, community or nation, the Russian Orthodox Church helps project Russia as the natural ally of all those who pine for a more secure, illiberal world free from the tradition-crushing rush of globalization, multiculturalism and women’s and gay rights.
But the fascism of Putin’s Russia goes much deeper than this kind of traditionalist religion. A Yale history professor named Timothy Snyder has described how Vladimir Putin rehabilitated a former enemy of the Soviet state, Ivan Ilyin, a man Synder describes as a “prophet of Russian fascism”. This is from his September New York Times Op-ed, How a Russian Fascist Is Meddling in America’s Election.
Ilyin believed that individuality was evil. For him, the “variety of human beings” demonstrated the failure of God to complete the labor of creation and was therefore essentially satanic. By extension, the middle classes, political parties and civil society were also evil, because they encouraged the development of personalities beyond the single identity of the national community.
According to Ilyin, the purpose of politics is to overcome individuality, and establish a “living totality” of the nation . . . Ilyin looked on Mussolini and Hitler as exemplary leaders who were saving Europe by dissolving democracy. His 1927 article “On Russian Fascism” was addressed to “My White brothers, the fascists.” Later, in the 1940s and ’50s, he provided the outlines for a constitution of a fascist Holy Russia governed by a “national dictator” who would be “inspired by the spirit of totality.”
This leader would be responsible for all functions of government in a completely centralized state. Elections would be held, with open voting and signed ballots, purely as a ritual of support of the leader. The reckoning of votes was irrelevant: “We must reject blind faith in the number of votes and its political significance.”
According to Snyder, Putin and other top Russian figures now regard Ilyin as an authority, someone whose ideas should guide them in developing a new Russian ideology that replaces communism. Snyder was writing to warn Americans to safeguard our democracy against Putin’s attempt to disrupt it.
The technique of undermining democracy abroad is to generate doubt where there had been certainty. If democratic procedures start to seem shambolic, then democratic ideas will seem questionable as well. And so America would become more like Russia, which is the general idea. If Mr. Trump wins, Russia wins. But if Mr. Trump loses and people doubt the outcome, Russia also wins.
Not enough Americans listened. They were too busy reading the fake news about Hillary’s many murders, bad health and evil corruption.
Putin’s Republican enablers
Is the Trump-Putin relationship a kind of tit for tat? Putin helps Trump win the election and then Trump pays him back in some way?
Not provable beyond a shadow of a doubt is the defense used by Reince Priebus and others at the Republican National Committee.
"Number one, you don't know it, I don't know it, and there's been no conclusive or specific report that say otherwise. So that's the first thing. The second thing I would tell you is that you don't have any proof that the outcome of the election was changed. Forget about who did the hacking," Priebus said.
Since when did we start using the “he is not guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt” criminal defense when choosing our President?
Trump himself is unbothered by reports that he might be in Putin’s pocket. Rather than reassuring Americans, he (and his team) attacked the intelligence community:
"I don't believe they interfered," he told Time magazine about Russia in an interview published this week. "That became a laughing point, not a talking point, a laughing point. Any time I do something, they say, 'Oh, Russia interfered.'"
John Bolten, who could be Trump’s pick for Deputy Secretary of State, went even further, hinting to Fox News’ Eric Shawn that the Obama Administration might have done the hacking itself as a “false flag” operation (after stating that any attempt to influence an election would be a direct attack on the Constitution). You can see a video of the Bolten interview here.
I did my own transcription of the original interview since Bolton is now claiming he was mis-quoted in the press. Here are the actual words that came out of Bolton's mouth. Decide for yourself what he meant:
JOHN BOLTON: It’s not at all clear to me just viewing this from the outside that this hacking into the DNC and the RNC computers was not a false flag operation. Let's remember what FBI Director James Comey said dealing with Hillary's home-brew server. He said we found no direct evidence of foreign intelligence service penetration. But given the nature of it, we didn't expect to. Meaning a really sophisticated foreign intelligence service would not leave any cyber fingerprints. And yet people say they did leave cyber fingerprints in the hacks regarding our election. So the question that has to be asked, is why did the Russians run their smart intelligence service against Hillary's server, but their dumb intelligence services against the election?
ERIC SHAWN: When you say false flag, that's a very serious charge. False flag by whom? Here's the Washinton Post report that the CIA had concluded that individuals with close ties to the Russian government hacked the emails. Intelligence officials have determined that Russia's goal was to help Trump win, rather than simply undermining confidence in the election. Are you actually accusing someone here in this administration, in the intelligence community of trying to throw something?
JOHN BOLTON: We just don't know. But I believe intelligence has been politicized in the Obama Administration.
Bolton’s subsequent “clarification” came on Monday’s Fox & Friends where Bolton claimed he meant to blame a foreign intelligence service for the “false flag”, not the Obama Administration.
JOHN BOLTON: I think its at least question to be asked whether its a false flag operation with some foreign government other than Russia.
FOX HOST: What's a false flag operation?
Bolton: Where a foreign intelligence service conducts an operation and leaves evidence pointing the finger at somebody else.
FOX HOST: So in other words China might have left fingerprints that look like Russia in the computer?
BOLTON: Exactly. Or Iran or North Korea.
FOX GUY ON THE COUCH: Or a 400 pound guy on his bed in his basement.
Bolton didn’t bother to contradict the Fox Guy On The Couch.
Before the election, Congressional leaders heard the intelligence about Russian hacking but did nothing, since the Republicans refused to believe the CIA. Evan McMullin was the chief policy director for Republicans in the House of Representatives before he became the face of the #NeverTrump Republicans when he jumped into the Presidential race last August. He called out his former bosses for choosing to do nothing because they didn’t want to damage Trump’s chances.
“Look, the truth is it’s been very obvious for leaders in Washington on the Republican side that the Russians have been undermining our democracy, or did undermine our democracy,” McMullin said at an event hosted by POLITICO Wednesday morning. “I know because I know for a fact that they know this. It was a topic of discussion during the election and they chose not to stand up.”
John Weaver, a Republican strategist who worked for Ohio Gov. John Kasich's presidential campaign, pulled no punches either in pointing out the connection between Steve Bannon and American’s neo-Nazis:
"The racist, fascist extreme right is represented footsteps from the Oval Office," Weaver tweeted. "Be very vigilant, America."
When Trump chose Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, Evan McMullin reacted with two tweets that are a forceful warning about Trump's Presidency.
“[Trump] is purposely dismantling barriers that protect our nation from dangerous Russian subversion, which he has also welcomed,”
“It must be clear that Donald Trump is not a loyal American and we should prepare for the next four years accordingly,”
The silence of the rest of the Republican Party is deafening.
Fascism’s Plutocrats
This lead sentence in Julian Borger’s Guardian report on the Exxon Mobile CEO becoming Trump’s Secretary of State says it all.
Rex Tillerson’s nomination as the next secretary of state confirms Vladimir Putin as one of the strategic victors of the US presidential election.
The Wall Street Journal noted this about Tillerson:
Friends and associates said few US citizens are closer to Mr Putin than Mr Tillerson.
Rex Tillerson and Vladimar Putin together in 2011 after signing the Rosneft-Exxon Mobil strategic partnership agreement. Photo from Sputnik, the Russian news service.
© SPUTNIK/ ALEXEI DRUZHININ
Sputnik International, the news service controlled by Russia:
Russian Senator Alexei Pushkov told RIA Novosti that while it was too early to suggest that he is a shoo-in, "the fact that Tillerson is the main candidate confirms the seriousness of [President-elect] Trump's intentions to opt for the normalization of relations with Russia."
Choosing Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State pleases Vladimir Putin. But it isn't just about the foreign policy changes. Tillerson will also be a boon to Putin and American billionaires alike who are worried that climate agreements will damage the future of fossil fuels.
Tillerson is just one of many appointments that is pay-back to the billionaire class that supported him. Trump’s government-in-waiting is full of appointees who will reward the industries they are supposed to regulate. Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post put it all together with a recent op-ed title: Trump is assembling an anti-government. Did Russia help get him here?
The president-elect appears to be assembling not a government but an anti-government. He said Sunday that “nobody really knows” whether climate change is real, though 97 percent of climate scientists say it is, and he intends to appoint a fervid skeptic as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. He seeks to install a labor secretary who does not believe there should be a minimum-wage increase, an education secretary who shows little or no commitment to public education, and a housing secretary whose only relevant experience is having lived in houses.
The New Yorker noted the dissonance between Trump’s campaign and his appointments.
Trump mocked billionaire Republican political donors, including the Koch brothers. Steve Bannon, his campaign manager and now his chief strategist, derided the “donor class,” which he said had sold out ordinary voters, while Trump promised to take on corrupt special interests in Washington, and, as he put it, “drain the swamp.” With the choice of Pruitt, though, Trump appears to have once again chosen the plutocrats over the populists.
Young boy listening to one of Trump’s preliminary speakers. Trump rally, Manchester, NH on October 28, 2016.
My thoughts drift back to that Trump rally in New Hamphire, the one where James Comey served Trump the FBI weapon he needed to get back in the race. There was a face in that crowd, a little boy in his father’s arms as he listened to Trump’s warm-up acts, men spewing vitriol at Clinton, at immigrants, at Muslims, at women, at the press, at democracy itself. What will happen to that little boy? Who will he grow up to be?
No one should be surprised by the after-math of this election. This is what fascism does. Putin presents himself as the savior of the Russian people and then gives all the wealth to the plutocrats. The fascists of Russia applaud. The same thing is happening here. No one in Bannon’s “alt-right” neo-Nazi world is upset at Trump. They are applauding.
Stop being distracted by Trump’s latest outrage, whatever it is. The outrages are on purpose, the whole point is to distract. Do my thought experiment and try to see it the way Putin’s FSB men do — Wikileaks, the intelligence hacking, the fake news and Bannon’s neo-Nazi “alt-right” as all part of the same thing. Trump, Putin and Bannon with his neo-Nazi alt-right really are a threesome from hell.
We can't change that Trump will sit in the White House. But we have to recognize the danger of Bannon and his neo-Nazis. Putin didn’t create them, Bannon didn’t create them, we’ve always had them. But Bannon and Putin’s support has made them much stronger, more dangerous and taken the thing international.
What now? What do we do? I made some suggestions in a Kos story last week: Ten tactics for fighting the ultra-right("alt-right")
You can also check out our new Kos group: FIGHTING AND DEFEATING THE NEO NAZIS
Our country’s democracy is at stake and a lot of vulnerable people are at risk. Whatever you choose, do something.
