HYBRID WAR TWIST: KAVANAUGH — ALT-RIGHT — KREMLIN
CONNECTING THE DOTS
The investigation into the publication history of Brett Kavanaugh’s friend and alleged accomplice in an attempted rape reveals an Internet influence campaign conducted by the Kremlin.
- In February 2018, special counsel Mueller indicted three Russian companies and 13 Russian individuals, accusing them of illegally interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
- In May 2018, attorneys for one of these Russian companies filed a motion with the court on which Kavanaugh currently sits, citing Kavanaugh nine times, proposing to dismiss the indictment.
- In July 2018, Trump nominated Kavanaugh.
- In September 2018, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of an attempted rape in high school.
- According to Dr. Ford, Kavanaugh’s accomplice was his long-term friend, author Mark Gauverau Judge.
- Over 1,000 classmates of Dr. Ford signed the letter in support of Dr. Ford’s claim and character. Kavanaugh and Judge declined the incident.
- A closer look at Judge’s publication history revealed his profuse interest in rape culture and graphic details of torture.
- In December 2014, Judge contributed a rape-related article to the blog managed by the alt-right leader Charles “Chuck” Johnson, who was allegedly involved in meddling in the US elections in 2016, had ties with Wikileaks, worked on Trump’s transition team, and was close with the open neo-Nazi leaders in the US and worldwide.
- In December 2016, Judge contributed an article to a Russian Orthodox website sponsored by the Russian government and managed by a professional propagandist working for the administration of the Russian president.
- The following investigation sheds light on the operation of the complex network of the US conservatives, alt-right personalities, Trump administration officials and Putin’s government and oligarchs.
1. MARK JUDGE — RUSSIA
MARK GAUVERAU JUDGE — RUSSIAN ORTHODOX WEBSITE
On December 16, 2016, a Russian Orthodox website Pravmir.ru published Mark Judge’s article, linking the translation to the original to the Catholic News Service website.
By September 19, 2018, most of the photos and videos of and by Mark Judge were erased from the Internet.
RUSSIAN ORTHODOX WEBSITES — RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT
Pravmir is one of many non-commercial, supposedly independent media agencies, active and popular in Russia, publishing in Russian and English. As a 2015 Medusa expose demonstrates, these agencies are supported and sponsored by the Russian government or/and by the oligarchs close to Putin and the Kremlin.
The Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill is a known former KGB officer with alleged ties to the organized crime and a close ally of Putin.
PRAVMIR — KATEHON — DUGIN — CARTER PAGE
Taking in consideration the centralized structure of the Russian Orthodox media, it is worth noting that four days before Judge’s publication in Pravmir, on December 12, 2016, Katehon, another Russian Orthodox website, covered Carter Page’s visit to Moscow. During this visit, Page announced Rex Tillerson’s nomination for the Secretary of State position — even though Trump made the announcement only on December 13, 2016.
Katehon is the project of Alexander Dugin, a Russian neo-fascist philosopher, ultranationalist and former adviser to Sergei Naryshkin, a key member of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. Dugin has received a nickname “Putin’s brain” and is the man behind the geopolitical theory of Russia as a “civilization model.” He has ties to virtually every American white supremacist leader.”
Alexander Dugin is a central figure in the Kremlin hybrid war campaign and understanding his role in this complex network of connections is crucial. Below is my article with the basics on Dugin and his ties to the US alt-right.
PRAVMIR — RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT — INFORMATION WAR
Pravmir.ru, the website that published Judge’s article, is registered as a non-commercial structure. Among the federal government partners listed on the website are the Ministry of Culture, Federal Administration of Music and Festival Programs and the Russian Fund of Culture.
Since 2012, Vladimir Medinsky, Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation is the head of the Board of Trustees. According to Pravmir’s chief editor Anna Danilova, the Board of Trustees covers about 50% (60%, according to her Medusa interview ) of the website operational costs.
Medinsky supported Pravmir before becoming a minister of culture. According to Medusa, a third of the members of the Board of Trustees are “Medinsky’s friends” but Danilova refused to disclose their names.
MEDINSKY — “BOT MASTER” KLYUSHIN
Medinsky is known to recruit “an army of bloggers” with the help of Artyom Klushin, nicknamed “bot master” and known for his trolling, currently an executive secretary of the public council Rosmolodezh of the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs and a close friend of Konstantin Rykov (aka Akitilop,) a man who claimed to have worked with Russian hackers, WikiLeaks and Cambridge Analytica and attended Trump’s speech at the Coalition for the Faith and Freedom conference of Iowa in September 2015.
Klyushin and his ex-wife Yulia Alferova met Trump several times since 2013, in Russia and the US. In June 2013, when Trump held a private dinner with the Agalarovs in Las Vegas to finalize the details for the Miss Universe in Moscow, Julia Alferov and Artem Klyushin were present.
Klyushin’s social media public accounts boast photographs with many government officials and oligarchs, including Trump, Putin and Emin Agalarov, one of the organizers of Miss Universe 2013.
PRAVMIR — ANNA DANILOVA — “MANIPULATION THROUGH WORDS”
Alexandra Danilova, the chief editor of Pravmir and a senior lecturer of the philological faculty of Moscow State University (MGU), is also a professor of the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation.
She has an advanced degree and twenty years of experience in linguistic manipulation and influence during military campaigns, English language, mass media and psycholinguistics. According to Wikipedia, as an MGU student, Danilova received a Presidential stipend. Her thesis was titled Methods of Linguistic Influence on the Public Consciousness.
In 2009, Danilova published Manipulation through the Word, a book on weaponizing language during military campaigns in the Western mass media, offering a detailed analysis of the methods of media influence on the mass consciousness and event perception engineering. The book included the description of over twenty techniques of the public consciousness manipulation, including verbal and visual techniques. “In recent decades, the covert forms of influence on public consciousness have become increasingly important,” wrote Danilova.
In 2016, the government of the Russian Federation awarded the chief editor Anna Danilova for achievements in the mass media industry.
40/60, IMITATION GAMES AND OTHER TOOLS OF PROPAGANDIST
Pravmir.ru features a wide variety of writers and subjects. Understanding Danilova’s training is important. Her website is applying the so-called 40/60 method, invented by Goebbels at his time. “The idea is to create a media source broadcasting 60 percent information in the interest of the enemy. Having earned the opponent’s trust, the media source uses the remaining 40 percent for broadcasting misinformation that becomes extremely efficient due to this very trust. During World War II, the anti-fascist worldwide community listened to a certain radio station. It was considered British. Only after the war, it turned out that in fact it was a radio station operating on Goebbels’ 40/60 principle and run by him,” writes Vladimir Yakovlev in his seminal article on “spetz” propaganda translated by me here. Yakovlev, like me, was forced to study the subject as a part of the journalistic curriculum. Unlike Danilova, we chose not to pursue this career.
Staging a debate is yet another trick from the “spetz” propaganda arsenal.
ANNA DANILOVA — MIKHAIL TURENKOV — ALEXANDER DUGIN
In addition to her mainpulation skills, Danilova has at least ten years of work connection and reportedly personal friendship with other Russian Orthodox functionaries, officials and ideologists, including Dugin and Mikhail Turenkov, formerly one of the leaders of Evrasia, founded and chaired by Dugin.
In 2009, Danilova, Turenkov and Dugin worked together at the Center for Conservative Studies of the Faculty of Sociology at Moscow State University chaired by Dugin, promoting the idea of the unification of church and state. As shown above, in ten years the Kremlin ideologists have achieved much progress in this respect.
MIND MANIPULATION THROUGH INTERNET TROLLS
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google provided evidence of Russian agents running a political campaign during the elections of 2016. According to Danilova, “the most common and effective type of the influence on the public consciousness is the manipulation of public consciousness through the use of language.”
With the midterms in less than two months, it is critical to listen carefully to this message and recognize the orchestrated effort aimed at undermining the liberal democracy in the US.
This hybrid war campaign targets our society at every level, from social media users and mass media consumers to the executive and judicial power. The Russian government funds experts in mass psychology and psy-op operations as well as hi-tech professionals equipped with breakthrough technologies and IT tools to strike at what they call the “Western world order” — and what we call our home.
Their effort is not limited to Russia. The second part of this article provides the examples of the Kremlin operations involving recruiting the agents of influence in the US. Below is the detailed, year-old investigation into several alt-right groups active in the US and their relationship to the Kremlin.
2. MARK JUDGE — THE UNITED STATES
MARK JUDGE — CHARLES “CHUCK” JOHNSON
On December 6, 2014, Charles “Chuck” Johnson, a known alt-right figure, published a different Mark Judge’s article describing and questioning a frat party gang rape in graphic detail. According to Politico, Johnson was among the most prominent skeptics of Rolling Stone’s since-debunked article about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. In the process of attacking the story, he revealed the supposed identity of the woman who had been the anonymous source for the story.
As reported by Jay McKenzie, Johnson paid Judge for the article and they had communicated as early as 2014.
JOHNSON — TRUMP
“If there’s a real alt-right conspiracy in American politics, Charles C. Johnson is an integral part of it. Johnson, a self-described journalist, came up through a series of conservative fellowships and internships as a student at Claremont McKenna College, where he graduated in 2011. From there, he has made a name for himself through a series of controversies as both a debunker and purveyor of false stories,” wrote Ben Schreckinger in his Politico’s portrayal of the alt-right.
As reported by Forbes, Charles “Chuck” Johnson pushed “for various political appointees to serve under Donald Trump, according to multiple sources close to the President-elect’s transition team.” Johnson did not have a formal position but according to Forbes, he was working behind the scenes with members of the transition team’s executive committee, including billionaire Trump donor Peter Thiel, to recommend, vet and give something of a seal of approval to potential nominees from the so-called “alt-right.”
JOHNSON — DANA ROHRABACHER — JULIAN ASSANGE — WIKILEAKS
According to the LA Times, Johnson gave Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, the 14-term California congressman, a $5,400 campaign contribution in the form of bitcoin, the maximum amount allowed by law, weeks after he said he helped arrange a meeting between the Orange County congressman and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
Johnson said plans for Rohrabacher’s meeting with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange were “hatched over cocktails at the Republican congressman’s Costa Mesa home. “A Moscow mule,” Johnson specified” in a phone conversation with the Orange County Register.
Rohrabacher, the chairman of the House subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia, is a well-known Putin ally and a big Trump supporter.
On his official congressional trip to Moscow in April 2015, Rohrabacher met privately with Vladimir Yakunin, a Putin confidant whom the Treasury Department blacklisted to punish Russia for invading Ukraine, and accepted documents from Russian prosecutors claiming Magnitsky wasn’t a whistleblower, but a thief. In summer 2016, Rohrabacher used the information he received directly from the Russian government to promote one of Putin’s top priorities: removing the name of the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky from a global anti-corruption law.
Rohrabacher is known to associate with the alt-right figures. On August 5, 2017, he participated in the event ‘Celebration of Western Culture,’ along with Kyle Chapman, Brittany Pettibone (see below), and Benitez.
JOHNSON — RICHARD SPENCER — ALT-RIGHT
Johnson is close or knows most alt-right and conservative personalities, including Richard Spenser, the Mercers, McInnes, Cernovich, Yiannopoulos, “Baked Alaska,” and more, as reported by Politico. These connections were widely reported in the press. According to the SPL Center, Johnson worked with Steve Bannon at Breitbart.com and together they invited Bill Clinton’s accusers to the press conference in 2016. A full list of Johnson’s connections by Patrick can be found here.
SPENCER — DUGIN
Spencer has multiple ties to Dugin. His blog, AltRight.com, accepted contributor pieces from Dugin and Spencer contributed articles to Dugin’s website.
Spencer’s ex-wife, the Russian-born Nina Kouprianova (aka Byzantina), is a self-proclaimed “Kremlin troll leader” and a translator of Alexander Dugin.
JOHNSON — HILLARY CLINTON’S EMAILS — PETER SMITH — GUCCIFER
Johnson and his former business partner Pax Dickinson, agreed to helpa Republican operative Peter Smith to obtain 33,000 emails deleted by Hillary Clinton. According to Politico, Smith also reached out to “Guccifer 2.0” — an alias the U.S. intelligence community has linked to Russian state hackers — and was advised to seek the help of a white nationalist hacker Andrew Auernheimer , the chief technology officer of Daily Stormer (at the time),— a blackhat hacker known as “weev” — who currently lives in Ukraine.
Auernheimer is a former convict with fraud and hacking offenses charges, released from federal prison in 2014. Smith has committed suicide in May 2017.
THE DAILY STORMER WEBSITE
The Daily Stormer (a reference to “Der Stürmer,” the Nazi tabloid), a webzine formerly known as Total Fascism, was launched in 2013 by Andrew Anglin, who boldly embraced a Nazi ideology on the Daily Stormer and spread his message through short, news-related posts riddled with racial epithets.
According to Business Insider, “Anglin has long espoused views sympathetic to the Kremlin, including support for pro-Russia Ukrainian separatists.”
Dailystormer.com was getting more than 10 million page views until it was shut down by GoDaddy and Google after remarks about the activist murdered in Charlottesville. It then briefly reappeared on a Russian domain and now is reported to be hosted in Iceland. Anglin has been in hiding for about five months.
Anglin wrote about Trump: “our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor. Make no mistake about it: we did this.” “Bannon is our man in the White House,” commented one of the Daily Stormer’s contributor.
JOHNSON — INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE ON RUSSIA
In August 2017, Johnson refused to turn over documents and emails requested by the Senate Intelligence Committee about any contacts he has had with Russian agents.
CONCLUSION
The EU and US governments have not come up with a strategy to confront the Kremlin’s asymmetric assault on the West. Manipulation of consciousness, as Anna Danilova points in her manual, is performed by applying verbal, visual and acoustic methods on three levels: individual, group and mass levels — and nothing is being done to stop it.
It would be contra-intuitive to expect the Trump administration propelled to power by the Kremlin campaign to recognize or confront this effort. The people need to accept the fact that this government will not undermine itself but, on the contrary, will take every measure to protect its position in power.
Kavanaugh’s confirmation is one such measure and will present a grave danger to democracy. In my recent article, I have explained the mechanism of “espirit de corps” or “mutual responsibility,” one of the defining features of a mafia state, installing loyal people in key positions and creating a network of support.Trump is following this pattern by nominating Kavanaugh, Benczkowski, and other key positions in DOJ and national security agencies. Read more here:
ACTION
CALL, EMAIL, SIGN AND SHARE:
- Sign Kamala Harris’s petition:
2. Three Republican Senators are the best hope for “no” votes on the Kavanaugh confirmation because of his views on Roe vs Wade, programs and protections for indigenous people, affirmative action and racial profiling.
2.1. Susan Collins @SenatorCollins, http://Collins.senate.gov
Augusta 207–622–8414 Bangor 207–945–0417 Biddeford 207–283–1101 Caribou 207–493–7873 Lewiston 207–784–6969 Portland 207–780–3575 DC 202–224–2523
2.2. Lisa Murkowski @lisamurkowski, http://murkowski.senate.gov
877–857–0322 Anchorage 907–271–3735 Fairbanks 907–456–0233 Juneau 907–586–7277 Wasilla 907–376–7665 Soldotna 907–262–4220 Ketchikan 907–225–6880 DC 202–224–6665
2.3. Tim Scott @SenatorTimScott, http://scott.senate.gov
855–425–6324 Midlands 803–771–6112 Low Country 843–727–4525 Upstate 864–233–5366 DC 202–224–6121
2.4. More Senators:
Heidi Heitkamp, 202–224–2043
Joe Manchin, 202–224–3954
Joe Donnelly, 202–224–4814
Jake Flake, 202–224–4521
Bob Corker, 202–224–3344
John Cornyn, 202–224–2934
4. BEWARE OF DISTRACTIONS
Do not get distracted by Trump’s tweets, gestures, Op-Eds, and scandals.
Deflection is a hybrid war tactic. A scandalous statement, incident or word is “dumped” into the collective information space via the social media and fringe media. Shocking and offensive, these “dumps” start trending. The mainstream media jumps on it. The subject is discussed for days and eclipses all other events. The government carries on with its agenda in the shade.
*All facts and photos are in public domain and available through Google. Links to the original sources are included.
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