“Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution…”
– James Madison
*****
While it’s all the rage in many news outlets these days to criticize President Trump – this article will provide ample evidence for his praise.
It will do this by using exclusive research to provide a series of contrapoints that illustrate how he has displayed a high degree of personal and Presidential civility in his handling of three current events:
The Transgender Military Ban
Chelsea Manning’s incarceration for refusing to speak with Grand Jury investigators
Nicolas Maduro’s impending departure from power
In addition to demonstrating how Donald Trump has embodied professionalism and the type of nationalistic paternalism appropriate to the Office of the President, it will also illustrate how these three examples are connected toongoing intelligence operations by the government of Nicolas Maduro to spread misinformation and disinformation, to encourage espionage and civil unrest, and even to facilitate it.
In short, this will show the claim of Laura Durso, Vice President of the LGBT Research and Communications Project at the Center for American Progress, that this ban “undermines military readiness and perpetuates the fear across the transgender and allied communities that this government will not protect them, not even those who would sacrifice everything to protect our nation” – along with similar claims made by others are motivated not by a desire to speak the truth but to spread an uninformed, hateful view of President Trump.
Trans-Soldier Ban & Trump’s Presidential Civility
Other commentators hint that the real reason for the ban is not because of financial costs but due to discrimination, prejudice or hate.
They are right the official government line is not true, but not because of those reasons.
Instead, the real reason for the Trans military ban stems from President Donald Trump’s genuine sense of love for the Americans that serve in the United States military.
Why is that?
By not sharing with the public that the real reason for the ban was due to a long-term espionage operation targetting Trans military personnel by Venezuelan Intelligence, President Trump absolves himself of divisive accusations that he questions troop loyalty or that he is any way giving cause for yet another mentally unbalanced person to baselessly attribute violent crimes to him.
Venezuela’s Counterintelligence Campaigns: Control Public Perception
This TeleSUR employee has written nearly an encyclopedia’s worth of content about politicians aligned with Rafael Correa, Hugo Chavez, and Nicolas Maduro.
During the Cold War the Soviet Union sound to disrupt U.S. international relations and undermine U.S. power in the world and undermine the appeal of U.S. democracy to other countries. Since 2002, Venezuela has sought to do the same through a variety of methods. Having state media employees at TeleSUR work full time to monitor certain Wikipedia entries is just one minor example. They have their own state media company as well, and it has numerous partners -such as Russia’s RT, Ruptly, Redfish and Sputnik, as well as Nicaragua, Cuba and Iran’s iterations of the same. And they are also connected to numerous “private” outlets in the U.S. as well – such as The Real News Network, WSWS, Teen Vogue, MintPress News, Democracy Now, etc. And there are also numerous independent journalists that have also gotten in on the act. I write about some of these journalists here, but in this article, will focus on Facebook as it’s quicker to illustrate my points as it relates to President Donald Trump’s civility.
Venezuela’s Honey Traps
Anarcha-Transfeminism is one of at least 300 Pages on Facebook that is moderated and operated by accounts promoting Venezuela’s anti-American worldview. While the above shares of official Venezuelan government websites and accounts make this easy to see, other content includes generalized incitement to violence, anti-voting messaging, disinformation and misinformation, and other forms of content designed to increase polarization.
The Great Sh!tpost Army
In addition to “Occupied” Facebook pages and numerous social media action centers in Venezuela that monitor and operate on Twitter and Facebook groups there is also an auxiliary force of voluntary shi!tposters, sock puppets operators, link-spammers, and others. Their goal is similar, to agitate online – Terms of Service be damned.
In the new world of digital media activism, one’s courage is determined by how many Facebook bans that you’ve come back from.
Appeals to Abstract Notion of Solidarity
How do they do this? For one by structuring images that help create a sense of belonging where there was once none and a sense of security where there was once none. This combined through the promotion of “solidarity” in a manner that simplifies the history and politics of Venezuela allows for deep-personal identifications to be made.
Considering how my other reports based on observation of official and non-official public groups and pages related to Venezuela’s intelligence operations show that sexism, transphobia, racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism are still quite alive despite their implications that it’s not – this is ironic, but that is really besides the point.
By collapsing the myriad complexities involved in any discussion of Venezuelan-U.S. relationships in this manner is a form of distortion, but one with potentially powerful emotional resonance.
Recruiting Trans People Online & In Real Life
Venezuelan accounts and Socialists sympathetic to them aren’t just engaged in trivial online behavior.
The International Socialist Organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and The Workers World Party – which has long been considered connected to foreign political interests – also have their members working in outreach and service organizations, or front groups to recruit.
The connection between this and military operations is yet unceratin, but the above images certainly indicate that espionage and the leaking of classified information to the benefit of military opponents is the goal.
Presumably, part of the investigation now being done in private by the U.S. Military related to the trans ban is not just about medical costs, but is about having American intelligence operatives pose as trans military personnel to determin the extent of active count-intelligence recruitment schemes going on.
Mainstreaming Revolution
Increasingly, this sort of radicalism isn’t just on the fringes either. Lucy Diavolo, the editor for Teen Vogue, frequently curates the writings of Venezuela associated writers like Keeanga Yamahtta and George Ciccariello-Maher.
Divalo, whose first written article for Teen Vogue was in praise of Chelsea Manning and who recently wrote an op-ed against her imprisonment for not cooperating with a grand jury investigation, hints at the extent to which the media has been influenced by Venezuela.
If this seems alarmist, consider the below evidence which indicates it might already have happened.
Celebrating Discharge and Promoting Espionage
After photos of Spenser Rapone stating that “Communism will win” were circulated through Venezuela’s coordinated inauthentic behavior network, they eventually made its way onto the desk of Florida Senator Marco Rubio. This and other veteran’s outcries of lead to Spenser’s other-than-honorable discharge.
Shortly after this, he presented at the Socialism conference in Chicago. The slogan for this event is “Another World is Necessary,” a variation of the World Social Form slogan – an organization founded in part to develop Socialism in America. One of their founders, Chico Whiataker, is currently on the WikiLeaks advisory board.
He also appeared on a new podcast called “unauthorized disclosure,” an obvious allusion to leaking information to the public. Mike Prysner, a former soldier himself, is also the finance of Venezuela spokesperson Abby Martin and a long time co-Producer for Empire Files, a program funded by the Venezuelan government.
While this could all be coincidence and affinities at work, it’s intereting to note that as of Thursday March 21st, Spenser Rapone is friends on Twitter with Ernesto Villegas, who previously had shared his photo on Instagram and Twitter and who is also the Minister of Venezuela’s Department of Popular Power and Culture – the Venezuelan equivalent of the CIA and the government body which also advises the president on how to operate TeleSUR.
Antifa and Nicolas Maduro
Military influence operations are just the tip of a much larger iceberg of Venezuelan intelligence projects in American. Since before 2007, Venezuela has been actively seeking to influence the American political scene.
Since 2010 Nicolas Maduro has been indoctrinating adolescents in Venezuelan collectivos to adopt “antifascism,” funded the development of eco-socialist and antifascism clubs throughout Latin America and in Spain. Though the motivating cause for collective action are different, as do the organizations backing them, there is nevertheless an underlying logic behind it all.
That’s why so many of the people that now make up Antifa are the same people that were previously involved in Occupy Wall Street and before that were in the Global Justice Movement.
The Smash Racism DC organizer, revolutionary communist and Antifa leader Jose Martin – who protested in front of Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s house, berated Sen. Ted Cruz at a restaurant until he and his wife were forced to leave, and was later involved in a fight wherein he yelled racist comments at U.S. troops – is just one of many examples of people radicalized in part by the Venezuelan intelligence operations whose goal is to help develop multiple dual-power, 21st Century Socialist movements in America.
President Trump’s Civic Responsibility in the Face of Fake News
Considering that so many non-governmental organizations, like Laura Durso’s LGBT Research and Communications Project, as well as numerous news and opinion, like the New York Times, CNN, VOX, and Teen Vogue, hire columnists and editorialists that don’t consider research as part of their professional process and that because of this President Trump is vilified, it’s understandable why he would have such disdain for the press.
He is, in this instance, like Batman – absorbing the hate of many people out of his love for the people. Were they informed of the Truth, Donald Trump would be praised for how he has handled Wikileaks/the World Social Forums/Venezuela’s attempts at getting U.S. military personnel – trans or otherwise – to commit acts of espionage.
It’s for these reasons that American’s should give the President due credit for his professional behavior in the face of calumny, and give him support in however he chooses to deal with Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro.
The Senate holding a Committee Hearing the FARA Act.
The response that I got from my case handler was, I’m paraphrasing paragraphs was “less poetry, more forwardness”.
Here was my response:
Greetings FARA Registration Unit,
Thank you for the prompt response and appreciation of my interest in the matter.
I made the decision to contact you after reading the appropriate legal definitions and the Atlantic Council’s “Agent of Influence: Should Russia’s RT Register as a Foreign Agent?”
Considering:
TeleSUR’s Incorporation documents – state that the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is the president of the company
TeleSUR’s budget is paid by the functionaries of the Nicolas Maduro government
The PSUV’s Redbook (Nicolas Maduro’s party) – states that “TeleSUR… was created to fight and defeat imperialism.”
The former President of TeleSUR, Hugo Chavez Frias, writing in his official Venezuela’s Program for the Homeland 203-2019 – that their goal is to “Strengthen the multi-State Telesur television and radio networks and Radio del Sur, together with their respective electronic platforms… in order to disseminate the truth of our peoples and break the information blockade and censorship to which the peoples of imperialist powers are subject to by the transnational communication corporations.”
The director of the Ministry of Popular Power for Communication and Information – who advises the Director of TeleSUR Patricia Villegas – stated in 2015 to the National Assembly that: “TeleSUR is oriented to promote a strategy that deepens the new socialist values and ethics”
TeleSUR’s official partnership with Russia’s RT – is required to register under FARA.
The official one-sided coverage and unofficial distribution and support networks are functionally operational to a political party press.
meet these qualifications according to the legal definitions?
Additionally, does not their promotion of violent content and anti-voting messaging, amongst all of the above reasons, indicate that the “news” exception does not apply in this instance?
Thank you again for your time.
Ariel Voyager Sheen
These are just future possibilities for FARA legislation. The above article is based on the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, as amended, 22 U.S.C. § 611 et seq.
Andre Damon, the Technology reporter for World Socialist WebSite that doesn’t understand how Technology or the Internet works, spreading misinformation about censorship via RT America.
Andre Damon’s reporting is good at placing pieces of information together to show a picture.
But since his reporting reflects fundamental misunderstandings of how the technology which underlies a variety of internet services functions, however, this puzzle is not held together because the pieces fit into a coherent narrative. It looks as it does because Andre Damon, who two decades ago would have been considered unqualified and unfit by any newsroom with rigorous professional standards to get published about the topics on which he speaks, has taken a hammer to the edges of curated facts in order to make an image that fits his prejudices.
While he claims to be informing his audience, readers of his articles and viewers of his live and video appearances wherein he speaks about issues related to social media, democracy, and censorship end up misinformed rather than informed.
An example of the many sock puppet accounts that like WSWS’ Facebook page.
Curiosity, not virtue-seeking, is the true root of journalism.
When TeleSUR went down the second time, I decided to investigate why and the answer is found in my article. Kultural Marxism: Digital Evidence of Venezuela’s Attempt to Influence American Elections. As I write about in more detail there, WSWS is one of several “alternative news” sites – such as TeleSUR, Venezeula Analysis, RT, Mint Press News, CounterPunch, GeoPolitics Alert, GlobalResearch.ca – that are part of a large network designed to artificially inflate their engagement to boost ranking on the Facebook algorithm.
I sent an email to Andre Damon sharing my findings with them and asking to speak with the person in charge of their digital marketing, but – they never responded and as you can see from the image above – the coordinated inauthentic behavior continued.
Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior: Fake Backlinks
Examples of backlinks devalued by Google following their last algorithmic change: Links from foreign blogs (especially Russian) and anti-semitic websites like Jew Watch. Source- Ahrefs, March 12th 2019
The extent of black hat backlinking by WSWS is so extensive – you can use any limited use SEO tool to get a view of just how much junk links are posted on a variety of websites.
Unethical Journalism
Andre Damon claims in the article the Socialism and the struggle against Internet Censorship that an increase in visits to the website translates to a “growing influence.” This, however, is not a sign of influence and reflects that same kind of poor managerial thinking that lead Pablo Vivanco of TeleSUR English to think that “1000% increase in outreach” is a positive indicator! Sorry to put ya’lls ignorance on blast, guys, but in this digital, social media age so if you get rank for reasons that stank the stench has a tendency to get aired, no?
So what do I mean by increase in visists doesn’t translate to growing influence?
I could individually go to my own webpage and click refresh many times over.
I could hire a click farm to engage with my content.
I could contract a digital media specialist to build a number of aggregate blogs and fake facebook groups and accounts to increase my search term ranking for keywords – as I documented that WSWS and others did – to raise the number of hits to my website but depending on other factors this nor none of the above signifies a growing influence!
What would is the number of visitors that continued along their ideological “buyer’s journey”. In this case it is questions like the following which really matter: How many new people signed up to be new members? How many purchased literature from the website? How were bounce stats affected? What’s the average amount of time people stayed on the website?
Zero Hedge, which was recently banned from Facebook, promotes a number of WSWS articles.
The lack of reportage on this indicates that for all the crowing about censorship, the numbers of people that go from the consumer of WSWS reports to party members or even just a customer of the party is very low.
While knowing this is technically “specialized knowledge” it in no way was kept secret from Andre Damon either – it just required curiousity.
One could read the documentation provided by Google.
One could review the white papers and blogs of digital marketing companies.
One could learn about the issues one is talking about beforehand and thus prevent oneself from writing a series of articles that ought to be viewed now as genuinely embarrassing by the WSWS and cause for new editorial guidelines.
But Andre Damon hasn’t done any of this, and thus his reporting illustrates his lack of technical comprehension of basic concepts related to the digital world. The people that he interviews, additionally, all feed into this as well.
Let’s get specific.
In an article on the WSWS website titled “Facebook security officer- not all speech is created equal,” another allusion to George Orwell, we see another example of Andre Damon’s ignorance of basic tenants of journalism as well as the digital media infrastructure underpinning the internet webpages.
Why? Because with the slightest modicum of scrutiny the Orwellian analogy shows itself to be absurd.
There is a substantive difference between an article that includes an author name, that is published under the banner of a journalistic enterprise, that has been properly vetted by professional editors, that has references to sources included or made available to those that request it and an anonymous blog article posted on a recently purchased domain connected to an automated RSS feed that just posts links to networked news outlets.
Damon, in essence, is arguing against the kind of professional standards in journalism that would normally keep him from speaking about this issue in the first place.
This isn’t even the full extent of the disinformation Andre Damon shares, he also misinterprets other people’s statements to fit his worldview.
In Our Crime was Telling the Truth, when Damon states that “According to Stamos and Kristof, the major newspapers should have simply censored themselves and refused to cover WikiLeaks’ revelations.” he is again taking the quote out of context. Stamos is putting the responsibility for the issues being addressed onto the news outlets that published information in the first place. Stamos is saying that Facebook would have had to play content censor with a large number of major news outlets – which they didn’t want to do – were certain items of information to have been kept from the public. Thus we see hear that Andre Damon is crying censorship in a case wherein a spokesperson for Facebook is explicitly stating that the company did not see it as their responsibility to censor something.
Fundraising Fraud
What the above means in the context of WSWS’s fundraising efforts is that they are committing fraud.
Considering they are partners with TeleSUR – and that I’ve already shown how TeleSUR has committed Fundraising Fraud – this shouldn’t be that shocking. What is shocking is that not a single person decided to do any fact checking related to what was being said in advance.
The only reason that Chris Hedges, following the line of Andre Damon, is able to describe these websites as being targeted “because they find these critiques to be dangerous” is because he fundamentally doesn’t understand what’s going on in the back end.
When David North describes the problem of the Left: “The basic problem is not absence of courage, it’s not an absence of a desire to fight, it is an absence of understanding.” and states that, “Our challenge is to provide an increasingly insurgent world movement of the working class with the ideas and the program which it needs to understand the political situation which it confronts.” We see here an example of Orwellian irony because he clearly isn’t familiar with how technology operates!
Why Lie? To Scare Up Donations and to Increase the Paranoid Style in American Politics
Chris Hedges on RT “outing” Wikipedia as a tool of imperialism rather than that of lazy students. Given that TeleSUR has people working full time to incorporate their content as sources and to write articles in Spanish highlighting the accomplishments of politicians who have collaborated with the PSUV – this is another example of Orwellian Irony.
One issue with this type of false news reporting is that it perpetuates a narrative based on ignorance that fits into the geopolitical goals of foreign nationals – specifically Venezuela and Russia.
If people are afraid over things they shouldn’t be and they believe that unconstitutional things are happening when they aren’t it exacerbates perceptions of political polarization and loss of confidence in the government. Which is not to say that news which leads to that *should* be censored, but that fake conspiracies like the one which WSWS, Andre Damon, Chris Hedges, David North and all of the other members of this network should not be able to be classified as news on social media.
If they can’t make the effort to inform themselves before they seek to inform others; if they can’t make the effort to fact check themselves after someone like myself has contacted them; if they raise money for a fraudulent basis that’s connected to these networks – these people aren’t journalists, but foreign propagandists.
For social media to operate as designed, users engagement must be authentic.
A lot of conversations are going on online about the nature of censorship, social media, democracy and technology and yet not one of the commentaries made by people who’ve claimed victimization or decried others that I’ve read thus far has demonstrated adequate subject area knowledge about what’s been going on.
This article will review three concepts important to discussions about social media in relationship to algorithms, authenticity, and coordinated, inauthentic behavior; using Caitlin Johnstone’s Medium and Facebook account as a brief case study.
Many factors feed into the algorithm so that users get an enjoyable experience and so that bad actors are inhibited from falsifying their engagement number
As of March 5th 2019, there are 394 million responses to the Google Query of “Facebook Algorithm”. And yet Abby Martin, Jimmy Dore, Lee Camp, Aaron Mate, Branko Marcetic, Chris Hedges – anyone that’s been contracted to work for Venezuelan and Russian state media outlets really – have a real hard time understanding what it is.
In the simplest terms as it applies to this case, algorithms a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations; they quantify lots of data according to specific terms for use of some sort. PCTR, or Interest, Post, Creator, Type, and Recency are just five of the myriad factors which fit into such problem-solving processes for social media platform. One of the most important of these qualities is Authenticity. Authenticity means that what data is being recorded and used in the algorithm stems from normal use. Coordinated inauthentic behavior is when groups of people seek to boost algorithmic ranking through planned actions – such as liking, sharing, commenting, watching, creating regional group pages, etc.
Given her claim that she is just a “rogue journalist” without any kind of institutional affiliation or disclosure of support from states such as Russia and Venezuela, it’s surprising that Caitlin Johnstone also has trouble understanding this.
Caitlin Johnstone and her Collection of Venezuelan/Russian Sock Puppet Followers. Notice that Ajamu Baraka and Jimmy Dore are categorized as related pages.
Caitlin Johnstone’s journalism has lead to controversies in Arc Digital, Counterpoint, Mint Press News, Daily Kos, and other outlets. Sometimes described as a Cassandra Fairbanks-like content creator, a former TeleSUR contractor, I honestly haven’t read much Caitlin Johnstone. Like a TeleSUR contractor and Jacobin author Branko Marcetic, she is an Australian without demonstrable specialized subject area knowledge in the subjects she writes about – I’ll give her that the wacky-tacky Doomsday Prepper poetess schtick does provide some decent turns of phrase in what I did read, but as numerous others have stated the editorial standards are very low. .
While I haven’t read anything since last she popped up on my radar in connection to Orwellian Irony, an alert I have for a certain set of search terms came to my inbox and so I again found myself on her Medium page. One there I saw echoed the commentary framed in almost exactly the same way that I encountered in my research on TeleSUR, slightly different opinions but similarly based on significant omissions and distortions.
Darrel Koerner’s may be a real person, but on Medium he only exists to boost the engagement numbers for Caitlin Johnstone.
Shortly before my Medium account was taken down due to the coordinated activity of a group of Trans activists known as ACTUP, I posted a comment on this article that Caitlin Johnstone had published about Venezuela just a few minutes before. As she’d responded to the person who wrote two minutes before, I asked her a question.
Not only did I not get a response from the author, but I then watched in real time as a stream of comments that started to fill the response board and that lots of claps were being given to low-quality comments. My thoughtful request comment was literally drowned out by comments that looked suspicious. I decided to take a peak, and sure enough – they were! After looking at several of the accounts that had posted comments – it was clear that there were a number of sock puppet accounts heaping praise in the form of claps and engagement in the form of low-quality comments on the blog.
joe blow too only seems to exist to comment on Caitlin Johnstone’s page, but he also seems to have another connection.
Like Darrel, the entirety of Joe Blow’s comments exist solely on the comments section of Caitlin Johnstone’s Medium page.
Like Darrel, these comments are small quotes, trite praises for “telling the truth” or comments only tangentially connected to the topic. It’s filler.
Unlike Darrel, Jow Blow has a profile image – however, it’s likely that this is not of him.
Unlike Darrel, Joe Blow may have a verifiable connection to a known disinformation account.
joeblowman: Alien master-race controlling the world; anti-semitic; unscientific biohacking; 9/11 Conspiracy Theories; anti-semitic & Nazi propaganda all orbiting one another.
Why I decided to include two accounts that only commented on Caitlin Johnstone was to hint at it’s prevalence – there are a number of other such Medium accounts that seem to exist only to fluff Caitlin or one or two other authors, and as in doing research for another article I found another Joe Blow. In that other article, I show the behavioral connections between joeblowman and a larger network of right-wing fringe content sharers connected to Venezuela’s Kultural Marxism network. It’s hard to make the hard connections, but birds of a feather do flock together.
To be clear, I’m not saying that these Jow Blows are the same people – I’m just saying that given the lack of creativity of Venezuelan and Russian coordinated inauthentic networks it’s very, very likely that they are.
When Social Media platforms and Google respond to such coordinated inauthentic behaviors by penalizing those that have brazenly broken their terms and conditions, as it would seem that Caitlin Johnstone has done in this instance, it is not to silence speech – but to make the marketplace of ideas more democratic by having one’s numbers being honest and authentic.
This article will introduce the American Public to some of the finer points of Left-Wing Social theory and will introduce the American Public to a political party that’s worked inside America without any fanfare for over a decade, the United Socialist Party of America, or PSUA for short.
The Movements of Movements thesis attests to its likely existence; while Invisibility Mapping helps proves it. Using Antifa, a group that the United States Congress has sought to unmask, as a case study in invisibility mapping I will illustrate the connection between them, the PSUA and Venezuela.
Building the Base, with a Regional Focus
The Multitude, the Movement of Movements, the Grassroots; the People; Mi Gente – archival research and data science proves these are not just random solidarity alliances converging. There are many traces over many places & troves of data showing a guiding order to American Socialism – Venezuela.
In future publications, which you can learn about by following me here, I will show how the PSUA developed in large part due to the material and symbolic assistance of Venezuela via Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro; the media company of which they are the President on Record – TeleSUR; TeleSURs state partners in Nicaragua, Cuba, Iran, and Russia; TeleSURs political party partners across the world; Venezuela’s official political and cultural attaches in the United States and elsewhere; media colectivos and encuentros organized via Bolivarian Circulo members abroad and Bolivarian Collectivos in Venezuela; Academic colectivos organized through the Cuba-based Red de Intellectuals; identity-based activism groups targeted by Bolivarian-supported Communist Entryists; the development of novel software and digital services; and more.
Five Fingers, One Fist: The Movement of Movement Thesis
To develop political action networks in the United States that would spread political unrest to use for its benefit, a variety of actors working on behalf Venezuelan Intelligence Services infiltrated a variety of U.S. and international organizations and institutions. Their goal? Set the conditions for Revolution.
Hugo Chavez never hid his intentions to help export revolution across the American continent. Proof of this is evident in the new name adopted by Venezuela, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela; his interest in founding a new Socialist International; the behavior of TeleSUR – the face of Venezuela’s Intelligence Apparatus; as well as myriad Bolivarian Government documents.
Using Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci’s writing as a guide and the oil-income from the PSVSA (the state oil company of Venezuela) – which has now moved their offices to Russia – Hugo and later his successor Nicolas Maduro Moros flattered political and cultural actors while also paying for participation in their world-altering quest to gain control of Latin America. While unable to ever economically develop their own country in the manner promised by PSUV (the United Socialist Party of Venezuela – Nicolas Maduro’s party); the net effect of this concerted political influence effort in North America was the creation of a counter-hegemonic political force that operated within North America, but at the behest of Venezuela. The name for this movement of movements is called the PSUA, or United Socialist Party of America.
Invisibility Mapping: An Algorithmic-based Rationale for Evidence
Does Red Scare 3.0 mean Venezuela 6.0? Only time will tell…
Having learned from the Soviet Union’s attempt to influence American politics, the directors of Project PSUA – the name that I’ve given to Venezuela Intelligence’s influence campaign in America – decided not to limit their support to one or two parties, but instead gave material or symbolic support to many parties, movements and individuals. Akin to Chairman Mao’s Hundred Flowers Campaign, they drew together a motley-crew of grassroots activists to help form and direct the new movement for socialism in America.
Proving this is difficult, especially so as many of the people involved refuse to talk about it, but it’s not impossible. There are a variety of ways of doing this, which the University of Washington has done and that I have demonstrated elsewhere. One method, however, the is likely to be novel to many people is called Invisibility Mapping.
Invisibility Mapping is the term of an algorithmic concept that I picked up from one of my favorite TV series, Star Trek: Discovery. When facing an invisible enemy, the crew decides to activate the ships spore drive hundreds of times around its enemy in order to gather small bits of information so that it may calculate a means of circumventing these “security culture” defenses. By getting small bits of information from a large sample size – new data emerges. Let’s see how this works in action.
Invisibility Mapping, Antifa and Venezuela
Refuse Fascism is one of many front groups for the Revolutionary Communist Party. They are aligned with Venezuela through ideological affinities as well as via institutional connections such as the Alliance for Global Justice Alliance – the new iteration of the Nicaragua Network, as well as Hands Off Venezuela. While they are open about their desire to help bring about violent socialist revolution in the United States, they are quiet about the nature of their relationship to other groups such as Redneck Revolt; John Brown Gun Club and the Hampton Insitute and The Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Communist Party and the Workers World Party. All defend and justify the acts of Antifa, and yet none of the claim open membership.
Venezuela’s Imperialist Designs for Latin America; Nicolas Maduro speaking at the first International Antifascist Meetings Ever, held in Caracas in 2013; the Software which PSUC activists aligned with the PCV use to ensure political compliance by the Venezuelan populace.
How to test this hypothesis? Well I decided to write Rose City Antifa in order to try to verify it.
I sent them an email stating who I am and what my interest was, but they were did not respond. Understandable. Answering my surveys it would quickly validate the movement of movements thesis – something that those involved don’t want.
Nevertheless, the communique and projected survey outlined below shows how it is that one is able to map the invisible.
I share it here now so that the concept is better understood by my readers.
The Below is a copy of an email that I sent the leader of Rose City Antifa.
RCA,
You’re welcome to state that this line of questioning is silly and dismissing this investigation as a conspiracy-minded, though to be honest I can’t locate the humor.
Also, I feel compelled to point out that not only is it counter-intuitive that people/groups with similar political affinities would AVOID working together, history is ripe with historical examples of international leftist organizations working together (a portion of my master’s thesis from NYU on American political economic development charted the fates of American leftist parties based on their international alliances/domestic orientation) and the data related to the matter at hand I’ve organized thus far from publicly available sources is crystal clear in it’s implications.
That said, I hope you won’t mind providing me with clarification on a point as it relates to your decision-making process to decline my request.
I understand that Antifa tries to operate according to a consensus model:
Did you convey my request to other members of the organization for discussion and a collective decision, or are you claiming to speak on their behalf without having consulted them? And if not, why?
I understand security is a concern of yours but I’m interested in pursuing the truth, not political points.
I would not be including questions about specific demos or activities as this is not some ruse to entrap anyone – hence my personal introduction from the beginning – and participants would be free to skip whatever questions they didn’t want to answer. I’m just interested in being able to visualize the relationships between movements and parties so if, as you say, there is no relation then data would show that.
If anything, I think that were your and your comrades to agree to my request the results would show that the people involved in Antifa have a variety of humanitarian concerns beyond just de-platforming Nazis.
I hope this gives you room to reconsider my request.
Hi, No that is not feasible. This is a very silly line of questioning. I am not going to waste of both of our time to go through and counter these weird points and flimsy “evidence”. The right-wing loves a conspiracy theory and this tendency is largely impervious to reason. /// RCA
On 2019-02-15 18:25, Ariel Sheen wrote:
RCA,
Thanks for your prompt and informative response!
Based on it, I think that I did a poor job of communicating what I was looking to learn by contacting you. My bad.
First, let me clarify that I haven’t encountered any evidence that would lead me to believe that you or your particular Antifa group is receiving money or instructions from Venezuela and that I believe you when you describe your fundraising and volunteer efforts.
The same can’t be said, however, for Latin American Antifacists; nor for PODEMOS in Spain; nor anarchist groups in Pais Vasco; nor for Philly Antifa; nor for a number of other American groups.
I’m glad I could make you laugh about being part of an “international communist conspiracy” but considering the above; the previous information I shared; that Maduro now claims that the Trump administration is the KKK and the Lima group are Nazis; and how in Mark Bray’s book Antifa he claims:
“The only long-term solution to the fascist menace is to undermine its pillars of strength in society grounded not only in white supremacy but also in ableism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, nationalism, transphobia, class rule, and many others. This long-term goal points to the tensions that exist in defining anti-fascism, because at a certain point destroying fascism is really about promoting a revolutionary socialist alternative (in my opinion one that is antiauthoritarian and nonhierarchical) to a world of crisis, poverty, famine, and war that breeds fascist reaction.”
I think it’s rational to make the connection between the Bolivarian Revolution’s goals for a new world order and an American group that wants a revolutionary socialist alternative which aligns with those goals. Right?
To repeat – I have no basis to make any claim that you or your group is anything other than an organic expression of activism emerging from your interpretation of the present – which is why I’m reaching out to you and not Philly Antifa.
That said, let me clarify what I’d really like to know:
I’d be interested to know, as a percent of total, which of your “members” are also members of? The Revolutionary Communist Party The Party for Socialism and Liberation Workers World Party Democratic Socialists of America Freedom Road Socialist Organization And other Leftist Factions, like Revolutionary Abolutionism Movement
I’d be interested to know, as a percent of total, which of your “members” have gone to: United States Social Forums Regional Social Forums World Social Forums People’s Movement Assemblies Left Forum Academic Marxist Conferences Etc.
I’d be interested to know, as a percent of total, which of your “members” are or were involved with: Bolivarian Circles Hands Off Venezuela Refuse Fascism The Poor People’s Campaign Occupy Wall Street (or regional iteration) Project South
South to South The Praxis Project Alliance for Global Justice Union Del Barrio Grassroots Global Justice Jobs with Justice Derechos para Todos The People’s Freedom Caravan Crimethinc Critical Resistance (There is a Portland Chapter) All of Us or None Rural Organizing Jobs with Justice Nicaragua Network Code Pink Black Lives Matters Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee And a few more along those lines I could throw it into a Google Survery, which allows for anonymous responses, provided you agreed to share such a line of questioning.
Is this something that seems more feasible?
The PSUA & Antifa: Venezuela’s Rear-Guard
As you can tell by the survey, which is based on research into Venezuela’s interaction with American political movements, parties, political actors and sympathizers – they’ve been able to help create and direct a vast network of American activists.
The evidence that they do this is in their literature – however those that participate refuse to share about their behavior as to do so would be to admit this networks’ existance as well as the existance of a political party – the PSUA – that they would rather keep secret.
This article reviews operational documents published by the Venezuelan government and the PSUV; news published by TeleSUR that has been shown to be fake; published investigations regarding the state of access to journalism in Venezuela and TeleSUR’s relation to current and former media partners; anonymous and public comments published by journalists that have previously worked for the organization; as well as originally obtained data and research.
I then present a case study which illustrates how TeleSUR and its journalistic associates violated the best practices for a standard of care in Journalism.
Based upon the above evidence, I then examine legal issues related to journalistic malpractice to determine whether TeleSUR aligns with the characteristics of a news organization or, as it’s many detractors say, it is better classified as a propaganda outlet for the Venezuelan government.
Operational Documents Indicate Motives for Unethical Practices
In December 2003, at a meeting of media professionals for brainstorming how a new propaganda machine — TeleSUR — would operate at the Cuartel de la Montana, Hugo Chaves spoke of his desire to “create a breach in the media wall” and via “social networks”. TeleSUR was started by people who wanted to have a means by which they could shape their audience’s perception to the same views as that held by those who funded it — the PSUV. Thus while TeleSUR may claim to be no different from other news organizations — the behavior of their correspondents, of their executives, and the people who provide it’s funding and oversight all show that this is not the case. Looking in Venezuela’s own public records allows one to see this clearly.
Former Telesur president Andres Izarra bluntly characterized the goal of the Venezuelan government’s media strategy as a form of “communication hegemony” (Pradas, 2007).
After stating that capitalism is reaching a potentially terminal crisis, Hugo Chavez states in his Program for the Homeland 2013–2019 that: “In the words of Antonio Gramsci, the old must finally end so that the birth of the new can be manifested to the full… it is difficult to know exactly when this great horizon will become visible, but we should deploy significant and well-aimed efforts in the interest of its advent”
The PSUV’s Redbook, the Bolivarian iteration of Mao’s Little Red Book, is another place where information on the nature of TeleSUR can be determined. After stating their resolve to create alliances with similar political and social movements worldwide with the aim of achieving a new international pluripolar order — they gives examples of such initiatives: “ALBA, Petrosur, Petro-Caribe, TeleSUR, Bank of the South, UNASUR and the creation project of the Organization of Latin American and Caribbean Nations, are to fight and defeat imperialism (PSUV 35; underline and italics added). In other words,TeleSUR is viewed by the party who controls the company as an instrument of war.
What the terrain for this conflict looks like for the PSUV/TeleSUR can be found on page 89 of Hugo Chavez’s 2013–2019 Program for the Country. After stating that the main goal is to create a “new communication order” to be built, it states the need to:
“Strengthen the multi-State Telesur television and radio networks and Radio del Sur, together with their respective electronic platforms… in order to disseminate the truth of our peoples and break the information blockade and censorship to which the peoples of imperialist powers are subject to by the transnational communication corporations.”
Again, in Hugo Chavez’s own words TeleSUR is not a news station, but conceived of as an instrument of information warfare.
In a 2015 presentation given to the National Assembly by the Ministry of Popular Power for Communication and Information, the following information appears: “TeleSUR is oriented to promote a strategy that deepens the new socialist values and ethics”.
Their goal, another words, is to proselytize — not inform about the truth.
Low Quality, Poorly Sourced News Reporting With Undisclosed Bias
In June 2003, the New York times saw their brand forever tarnished after “executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd resigned their posts amid a much-publicized scandal that not only rocked journalistic circles but also left the newspaper’s readers wondering just how severely they had been duped” (Calvert).
The reason? One of their journalists had been found guilty of significant fabrications, plagiarism and errors. Jayson Blair, now a case study of what not to do, “lacked journalistic integrity and violated cardinal tenets of journalistic practice.The Times found in its investigation at least a half-dozen instances in which Blair lifted sentences and quotations from other published sources such as Associated Press and Washington Post” (Calvert).
While such reporting at the New York Times causes a journalist to be fired and forever shamed; the managing and executive editors to resign in disgrace while also forcing the company to set up new processes to ensure it didn’t happen again — this is the normal form of news reporting for TeleSUR.
This is evident in the photo above and the article it comes from. You can see in the photo that there is no “real author” connect to it, no parent names their child “ms-RSF-rg” and the way the article is sourced is solely by stating the places where information was pulled from — not what was pulled from where — as is the traditional professional standard.
According to an interview with a former TeleSUR English employee their “news writers” — which operate on shifts from 7am to 3pm, 3pm to 11pm, and 11pm to 7am — are tasked each day with reviewing the current events of the days from news websites and then publishing 5 different stories. In the process of stitching the articles together they also go through an “ideological polishing”.
Another former TeleSUR employee I interviewed sent me the below meme that circulated around the Quito office to mock Cyril Mychalejko, the former assistant-director of TeleSUR English, for the frequency with which he requested changes to news coverage to better meet the current editorial line developed in at the head office in Caracas in coordination with Venezuela’s Ministry of Popular Power for Communication and Information.
Thus while the content is by definition news, given the poor citations for information sources; the lack of author attribution; and the political influence from Caracas on the story it is better classified as opinion rather than truth. Which makes sense, after all, as he who pays the piper calls the tune.
TeleSUR’s Anti-Science Fake News
The first sentence for this TeleSUR article that was re-posted by a number of major media outlets, is as follows.
“A mysterious, cigar-shaped, 400-meter-long object is speeding through our solar system at almost 200,000 miles per hour, and astronomers — including Professor Stephen Hawking — believe it might (or might not) be an alien spaceship.”
What’s interesting about TeleSUR’s take is that they explicitly give the belief that this object is an alien spaceship to Stephen Hawking- despite the fact that he never made such a comment.
Despite what TeleSUR says, America doesn’t have a base in Costa Rica and the International Criminal Court has not declared Brazilian ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a political prisoner
As part of Telesur’s coverage of Costa Rica’s presidential elections, they once said that there was a U.S. Southern Command military based in Costa Rica.
The base, according to the report, “Presencia de milicia de EE.UU. en Costa Rica es evidente”, was located in the Guanacaste province. There is, however, no military base there. In a formal letter Patricia Villegas, TeleSUR’s second in command to Nicolas Maduro, the television station acknowledged it had made a “regrettable mistake”.
TeleSUR also falsely published patently false information about the
Interesting to note is that despite over a year having gone by since this fake news has been debunked, that Cuba’s news outlet — and TeleSUR partner — re RadioRebelde, still not taken down the fake news.
The American Council on Science and Health has an interesting take on this article in particular and those within this category in general as being a part of a general Russian campaign to influence Americans to have an anti-science. This isn’t just conjecture, but a part of research they’ve done to determine the sources of these articles.
As you can see from the above, after doing a Google search for other outlets that had published the “fake news” story, TeleSUR was first, with Russian media outlets coming in second. I blockquote the ACSH article below, which is
Truthfully, no respectable news outlet should have covered this. The head researcher is Konstantin Korotkov, a well-known crank who once claimed to have photographed a soul leaving a human body. He is a hoaxer, so this is a non-story, just like “Crazy Person on Street Keeps Yelling Crazy Things” is also a non-story. Korotkov should have been ignored. But he wasn’t. Why?
Fake Aliens and Fake News: It’s Always the Russians
The timeline seems to go like this:
The story began in Russia’s state-controlled media. On March 5th, Mir 24picked up the story, which was then followed by Sputnikon March 10th. Then, the mother of all Russian propaganda outlets, RT, ran the story early on March 13th. From there, the story went “mainstream” in the Western press.
Stop and think about that for a second. A complete hoax was circulated among Russian state-controlled media as legitimate news, and the Western media fell for it. Sure, some of them provided “caveats,” but the point is that Russian propaganda has so infiltrated the public discourse that it appears regularly in mainstream Western media outlets. That’s shocking.
Why is Russia doing this? It appears that the Kremlin is waging a war on truth. (There is a book that discusses this by Peter Pomerantsev called Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.) By purposefully muddying the distinction between fact and fiction, the Kremlin can further its own agenda.
Before Western journalists, who seem only to care about boosting traffic, copy-and-paste these clickbait stories from their Russian counterparts, they might want to first ask, “Is it true?” and, “Whom does the story benefit?” You know… the sorts of questions journalists are supposed to ask.
Disclaimer: the initial headline of this story has been changed from “Ancient Mummies in Peru ‘Not Human, Possibly Alien’: Scientists” to the current headline identifying Russian researcher Konstantin Korotkov as the scientist who claimed such findings. We have also included refutals of the claims by these Russian researchers in bold.
and the fact that the rebuttals of the claims that they added clearly show that the entire story is bogus — and yet it remains published.
Unethical Journalistic Practices Claimed By Anonymous Current and Former Employees
TeleSUR employees express fear of sharing their experience out of fear of the organization’s reach.
Convincing several former and current TeleSUR employees to share their story under the condition of anonymity isn’t the only way to learn about the unethical journalistic practices at TeleSUR.
On the GlassDoor reviewsfor TeleSUR English, there are a number of comments left which further indicate that the organization is the very definition of “fake news”
The news room at TeleSUR is described by one former journalist as follows:
“No ethics
– Cheap propaganda.
– No team work
This TV station is a joke. It’s all based in propaganda and lacks totally of ethics or professionalism. A government elite from Cuba and Venezuela manages all the “news” that are broadcasted. Couldn’t make less sense. Opinion diversity is banned and most of people in the offices have no experience in journalism/media at all. Pay… depends on who you know, and how aligned are you with their ideology (kiss butt).”
Another anonymous former employee highlights the connection between the Venezuelan Government and the organization in a different posting:
Cons
“Leftist slant on everything skews the truth sometimes. The building in Quito is mostly empty-space hasn’t been utilized well. Some staff are too affiliated with the Venezuelan government.”
Advice to Management
“Hire more journalists with journalistic qualifications and experience in order to grow the website further. Schedules are also subject to change without much notice.”
These concerns about professionalism are echoed by another commentator on February 6th, 2018:
Cons
“HR is rude and unhelpful, no clear lines of authority, low expectations, low accommodation for foreign staff, most people there aren’t journalists”
A Videographer and Senior Editor in Washington, DC — physically removed from the Quito location — is still able to feel the political pressure despite the geographic divide”
Cons
“Hard Left Ideology which makes very difficult to make real news”
Another anonymous source came to me directly.
After publishing my first article on Medium about TeleSUR English, I received an email that contained the following message from someone on staff:
The email closes with a re-iteration the themes of unprofessionalism and influence by the Venezuelan government:
“The top-down culture from Caracas to Quito and heedlessness regarding content quality and web management (which came to a head when the English page was accidentally un-published) consistently hobbles the performance of TSE, causing waves of talent to flee before TSE folds…”
There are, however, more than just anonymous sources that state that the TeleSUR is not a news station.
Unethical Journalistic Practices Claimed Openly by Current and Former Employees
After three years of trying to get TeleSUR to a specific level of professionalism and failing Aram Ahorian, one of TeleSUR’s founders, distanced himself from the organization saying thatit had become nothing but a cheap propaganda shop. “It is supposed to be a Latin American multi-state company. But it is not yet. It is a Venezuelan company, controlled by people who are interested in managing budgets and not news projects. It has to do with the internal struggle that exists in the Government of Venezuela.”
In October of 2018, TeleSUR anchor Daniela Vielman resigned from the network and released a statement stating that staff employed by TeleSUR are “treated as if they were working in a political party” and frequently imposed upon her and other “their political convictions.”
Following a post on Twitter that was critical of TeleSUR’s editorial choice to post an article supporting Donald Trump be Cassanda Fairbanks, former reporter Charles Davis saw all articles that he had previously written for them have their name taken off, and then shortly thereafter were deleted.
Jon Jeter’s article Betraying the Bolivarian Revolution goes into extensive detail about this. Given the conversation that the article was generating on Mint Press News, I created a employee satisfaction survey and posted a in the comments. The results as a whole were as I expected, and I include an except below.
What are some ways that TeleSUR English could improve?
1. Hire a new director [this was then Pablo Vivanco]
2. Value workers, develop clear journalistic standards
3. teleSUR could live up to the principals it espouses. Its operation in Caracas exists simply as a propaganda outlet for Venezuela foreign policy. I overheard star Spanish language reporters speculate how they could best portray the government in their pieces. If it truly represented the voice of the most vulnerable and traditionally underrepresented, we would hear the voices of Venezuela’s poorest, who are suffering the effects of the country’s worst ever crisis. Whatever the cause of that crisis may be, we never hear those perspectives. While many TeleSUR journalists are well intentioned, all content, no matter how insignificant or where it’s from, must pass through the Cold War like propaganda lens in Caracas before making it to air or online.
What three words would you use to describe TeleSUR English’s work culture?
1. Bad bad bad
2. Nepotism, back-stabbing, toxic
3. Disorganized, Dictatorial, Directionless
Anonymous sources of GlassDoor, anonymous sources obtained from an email and a targeted survey, as well as the comments of former employees all indicate that unethical journalistic practices are the norm at TeleSUR.
A conversation that occurred on March 21st, 2018 on Facebook in the comments section indicates that ethical violations went beyond the violation of professional standards, but also of labor law.
Unethical Business Practices with Journalists
In an exchange on Facebook former TeleSUR reporters Matt Sedillo and Irene Monica Sanchez, state that they were contracted for work and never paid.
In the comments section on the same post, anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan stated “they made me feel like a sleazy bill collector because I asked where the money that they promised me was.”
Given TeleSURs relationship with Jacobin writers and staff, as well as Jacobin’s business ethics, one wonders as to the specifics of their relationship.
Another unethical business practice of TeleSUR’s explains why it is that so few of the journalists associated with TeleSUR don’t respond — non-disclosure agreements.
I’ve learned from multiple former personnel in telephone interviews that following the publication of material on the Caracas Chronicle website, all foreign personnel on the TeleSUR English staff signed non-disclosure agreement addendum to their contracts. They did so under duress as Pablo Vivanco implied that they would be fired if they did not sign. They did so without consideration — typical for new conditions being inserted into the contract. And they did not provide a certified true-copy in English of the new conditions for those that did not speak Spanish.
I also received reports of significant violations of Ecuador’s labor law, such as scheduling people to work 6 or 7 days in a row.
Unethical Behavior Towards Other Journalists
In the article Struggle, Appropriation and Attacks on Indigenous Journalismin the online magazine Intercontinental Cry we learn the story of Courtney Parker, a University of Georgia College of Public Health PhD candidate. Parker was investigating Nicaragua’s northern Caribbean coast — where there are ongoing conflicts between Indigenous Miskitu people’s and colonialists. After publishing a series of sourced articles about the shooting of an Indigenous Miskitu leader by Sandanista youth and other issues in the area, a series of articles published online by a Sandinista-party associated “independent” media outlet. In what could be described as Orwellian irony,
“The politically motivated attack accused Parker and others of being part of some corporate imperialist power conglomerate trying to influence the upcoming November elections (where Daniel Ortega is set to run virtually unopposed with his wife as vice-president.) The byline claimed that “the reposting in various progressive outlets of biased report confirms the convergence in reporting international affairs between alternative and corporate media.”
Following the publication of these reports, TeleSUR then republished content contained there. Because of this and other examples of unethical behavior, The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas published an exposé about the Sandinista party and the Nicaraguan army intimidating and spying on journalists working for the magazine, Confidencial.
During their investigation the Knight Center documented multiple “campaigns to discredit journalists through official and unofficial media…” (i.e. the tag team efforts of Telesur and Tortilla Con Sal.)
It is not just reporters in countries that are aligned with Venezuela that face coordinated responses for coverage that contradicts the TeleSUR narrative. Within Venezuela a number of news stations that reported about corruption, electoral fraud, or systematic government problems have had their websites blocked. In The State of Internet Censorship in Venezuela, a group of digitalinvestigators analyzed the relationship between digital media access and censorship and was able to show how ISPs use DNS and HTTP means to prevent access to such material. In their summation the Venezuelan state — of which TeleSUR is an appendage of — is able to block the narratives that conflict with the one it wishes to promote.
“The censorship events identified as part of this study (particularly the blocking of news websites and blogs) contradict the rights outlined by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in its report on Standards for a Free, Open and Inclusive Internet. Media censorship and the blocking of blogs limit press freedom and the right to freedom of thought and expression. In examining each right outlined by IACHR, questions around the necessity and proportionality of these censorship events are inevitably raised, particularly in terms of how they relate to human rights.”
While difficult to determine whether or not Wikipedia contributor with DNS address 82.35.252.246 was a TeleSUR employee or not, given that this is the only article that they have ever worked on this is very likely the case.
It’s likely that in addition to the Venezuelan government’s attempts to silence journalists within their country; and coordinated attempts to delegitimize journalists that present a narrative contrasting to their own; that there also exists a need for TeleSUR to monitor public spaces like Wikipedia to ensure that content critical of its operation is not available.
Given that Chris Hedges, a regular TeleSUR and RT contributor, recently reported about how Wikipedia was a “tool of the elite” this is ironic in a special way.
Content and Imagery to Incite Violence
This set of pictures using Donald Trump’s campaign slogan is just one of many examples wherein internecine conflict is praised. By itself, there’s nothing innately problematic about this. Media, however, occurs within an symbolic ecosystem so a broader context to fully understand the images is required.
In my other case-study article on TeleSUR’s use of fake and alternative news sites and coordinated inauthentic journalism I illustrated how clustered use of a literary analogy in relation to a news event indicated that a number of showed there to be some kind of connection amongst the authors.
Given the journalists employment history; that Venezuelan media theorist and TeleSUR consultant Luis Britto frequently uses the term; as well as other TeleSUR-associated writers prior mobilization of the analogy I hypothesized that it was part of a concerted effort to attempt to influence Americans. This, however, is not the only manner in which their content seeks to shape their reader’s perceptions. Another way that they have sought to shape perceptions of America is by associating it with fascism through their own media and via the media channels of their partners.
Despite the fact that subject area specialists say that it is a “bad historical analogy,” since Donald Trump’s oath of office a veritable cottage industry of journalists and political commentator debating and editorializing as to whether or not he a fascist has formed (Riley 31). One political organization with extensive connections to Antifa — which is composed of members of various U.S. Communists groups such as the Revolutionary Communist Party and Workers World Party — is Refuse Fascism.
According to Influence Watch, Refuse Fascism is a project fiscally sponsored by Alliance for Global Justice, which is a front organization — like Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (A.N.S.W.E.R.); World Can’t Wait; Not In Our Name;and Stop Banking the Bomb – for the Revolutionary Communist Party. They desire the violent overthrow of President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, and justify this by asserting that the Trump administration functions is a “fascist regime.”
The group has been associated with “organizing demonstrations against President Trump’s inauguration as part of the “Disrupt J20” movement orchestrating demonstrations against right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopolous which devolved into rioting, and plann marches and occupations to last until President Trump and Vice President Pence leave office.
Via TeleSUR’s official media distribution channel — images reinforcing that it is imperative to kill fascists are shared, while through their coordinated inauthentic behavior network crasser propaganda images are shared. Not surprisingly, the suggestion that politicians should be killed by snipers occurred during the 2018 elections. If this seems just like a fortuitous juxtaposition, it’s important to know that the ANSWER Coalition has a long-standing association with the Cuba and Venezuela Solidarity Committee — Venezuelan and Cuban intelligence front groups.
This front group and it’s organizational core, the Revolutionary Communist Party, along with Venezuela’s other partners such as the Workers World Party and the Party for Socialism and Liberation thus not only provide a ready audience to consume TeleSUR’s content but also act on the political philosophy informing it.
TeleSUR’s Connections with Radical Political Activity
It’s operationally difficult to determine the impact the above content has on its audience. There are, however, instances I was able to determine through investigation on Facebook.
One was a Hands Off Venezuela member and Toronto Against Fascism associate, Mubarik Adams, who attended the Steve Bannon v. David Frum debate with a large group of political activists with the express purpose of using violence to end the event.
In the article Defend Antifa on the Workers World Party website the group states, “Communists and anarchists have proudly worn the mantle of antifa since the very beginning. Communists gave their lives in the tens of millions to fight Nazis in Europe, and armed multinational communist fighters have long battles the Klan’s fascist terror in the South.”
Considering Venezuelan political activist and former visiting professor to University of North Carolina and Consul General of Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in New Orleans, Louisiana Jesus “Chuco” Garciahas frequently encouraged students to engage in radical political activism, it’s no surprise that for TeleSUR, violent, organized armed conflict between racial groups is its vision of American Greatness (Brown-Vincent 11).
Given that George Ciccariello-Maher has a specialization in Venezuela and has been an outspoken defender of Antifa and participant in it’s female recruitment program, it begs the question as to his involvement as well.
TeleSUR Partners Work with Yemeni Intelligence to Doxx US Troops
Showing that 30 day bans can be like whack-a-mole — once an account goes down, associated accounts post new links to the same information. For context, VK is a social media and social networking service based in Saint Petersburg.
While previously they seemed to be just a pair of journalists that benefitted from the fake-backlinking and coordinated inauthentic behavior networks — now they’ve moved to active and open collaboration with Yemeni intelligence services by publishing the personal information of active U.S. military personnel.
Terrorist Threats Made in Florida Come to Life in Colombia
The day before a car bomb targeting a police academy in Bogota, Colombia exploded and killed at least 21 people — Tyler Miller, a resident of Lake Worth, Florida was arrested for spraypainting “Kill A Cop, Save a Life” next to a hammer and sickle.
Back in 2013, Miller had another run in with law enforcement when they say he tried to buy an SKS Semi-Automatic Rifle online.
According to the report, a witness reported seeing him at a firearms store and filling out paperwork, wearing a Chinese military uniform.
Deputies then made a visit to his house and found two AK-47 style airsoft guns in his room, which was decorated with Russian and Chinese communist-type paraphernalia.
What specific connections exist between Tyler Miller and media operations directed by the Venezuelan intelligence services intending to radicalize Americans is now unclear.
What is apparent is the connection between TeleSUR’s glorification of politically motived violence and it’s perceived need to “teach the public a lesson”.
Following the bombing of the police station in Bogota, I started receiving a apologias for it in WhatApps group chats that I’ve been able to get added to since moving to Colombia.
One of the things that the rapid, targeted deployment of such content suggests is that these media artefacts were prepared in advance of the bombing.
TeleSUR’s Connections with Violent Latin American Organizations
TeleSUR has long been accused of having institutional ties to the FARC-EP.
Besides discovering a number of FARC-EP documents stored on TeleSUR’s website — which can be perused here– and that FARC-EP associated accounts like to share TeleSUR content I’ve not yet been able to ascertain any new information on the relationship between TeleSUR and FARC-EP.
I did, however, find something else interesting.
After I started friending a large number of the accounts associated with TeleSUR’s coordinated inauthenic behavior network, besides the FARC-EP accounts being suggested to me as People You May Know a number of ELN and EPL accounts started being suggested to me.
A curious person, I friended them and started to see the type of content that they were sharing and groups they were involved in.
Reviewing a number of the likes and shares on FARC-EP, ELN and EPL accounts was notable as many of them were also sharing TeleSUR content.
While the current state of my research means that there is little to be said about all these connections — other than they at some level they exist — there are other questions to be raised about the relationship between TeleSUR and the promotion of violence.
Specifically questions relates to TeleSUR’s hiring practices.
Former correspondents for TeleSUR — like Gerardo Torres Zelaya — have been identified as participating in violent street protests while others have been linked to FARC.
Taken from an Ecuadorian Facebook Group of Feminists, who investigated Orlando Perez following his assault on his girlfriend.
The current Vice-President of TeleSUR English, Orlando Perez, was arrested and sentenced for a politically-motivated kidnapping in his 20s; was arrested in connection with the death of two people making bombs and then let go; and refers to people who disagree with his political positions as mentally-retarded.
My research in this area is underdeveloped due to a paucity of sources willing to provide on-record accounts — but these cases combined with the former employee assessments does seem to reinforce that notion that rather than journalistic talent, skill or ability driving hiring-decisions an antagonism capitalism and the United States is instead what is sought in employees — and those that push back in the name of truth are then pushed out.
Being an instrument of Nicolas Maduro’s political will, the anti-systemic political activity which TeleSUR disseminates is not limited to the United States.
Numerous accounts in Spain — specifically Valencia, Barcelona and Euskadi — all post content discouraging people from voting. Instead of traditional political activity people are encouraged to attend lectures on topics such as the Greatness of Stalin or political assemblies hosted by local radical organizations affiliated with the PSUV.
Coordinated Unprofessional News Reportage via TeleSUR Associated Journalists
Carlos Ballasteros — a longtime friend of then former director of TeleSUR English Pablo Vivanco, a fact not disclosed in the Newsweek article — had a correction added to his article by the editorial staff of Newsweek as in the original article he mispresented the facts.
After I published Censorship or Community Standards, I decided to test a hypothesis I had — specifically that none of the other TeleSUR-associated journalists that I’d found engaged in false reporting would correct their errors if notified.
I sent notification to all the Journalists that had also covered TeleSUR’s unpublishing informing them that they were mistaken and sharing a link to my investigation.
· I sent notification to Abby Martin’s producers via Facebook.
· I sent an email, a Facebook Message and left a comment on Twitter to notify Branko Marcetic.
· I tweeted to Jacobininforming them that the article by Branko Marcetic they are hosting was factually incorrect.
· I sent a Facebook message to Adriano Contreras asking for comment. He responded that he was not allowed to speak without the authorization of TeleSUR, which given the context, makes such a response another example of Orwellian Irony.
· I left a comment on the Twitter account of Aaron Mate.
In fact, over two months after I notified them they had published unverified false reports, not a single one of these self-proclaimed journalists has responded to my contacts or updated their coverage.
The only person that did respond was Andre Damon, of World Socialist Website. However after explaining the reason for my contact — to let him know that his reportage was wrong and to ask to speak with whomever is directing their black hat back-linking and coordinate inauthentic behavior network on Facebook — all communication immediately ceased.
Based upon the guidelines described in The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, this means that all of these people are in violation of the Principles of Ethical Journalism.
How TeleSUR’s Defenders Violate the Professional Community’s Ethical Norms
Unlike other professional associations, such the American Bar Association or Medical Board, there is no formal professional body by which charges of violations of ethical journalism can either be brought up. To some extent the Society of Professional Journalists can enforce their Rules through their official statements about the behavior of journalists, but they are not an enforcement body.
The Society of Professional Journalists states that there are four foundational principles for the ethical journalist:
· Seek Truth and Report It
· Minimize Harm
· Act Independently
· Be Accountable and Transparent
The full document can be found here.
I excerpt sections here in order to reference specific behaviors.
Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.
Journalists should:
· Take responsibility for the accuracy of their work.
· Verify information before releasing it.
· Use original sources whenever possible.
· Remember that neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy.
· Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility.
· Respond quickly to questions about accuracy, clarity and fairness.
By refusing to make transparency, honesty and integrity their operational principles all of the above mentioned TeleSUR and the Journalists associated with them all violate the Society of Professional Journalist’s principle to Be Accountable and Transparent by “exposing unethical conduct in journalism, including within their organizations.”
TeleSUR’s Rejection by Former Partners
Besides the journalists which have gone to work for TeleSUR only to leave because of an unprofessional work environment, a number of TeleSUR’s media partners in Latin America have also decided to part ways with the company.
The overarching narrative for why this is so is that the company’s issues described above are seen as part of systemic ethical issues rather than isolated incidences.
In 2016 Argentina decided that they were not going to renew the digital signal of TeleSUR.
The interview that Patricia Villegas, the President of TeleSUR, had with Alejandro Alfie is informative as to why the government chose not to renew.
Despite the fact that TeleSUR’s founders — Hugo Chavez, Andres Izarra, Aram Aharoiam and others — avow that their goal for this network to be a means of spreading Bolivarian Propaganda; that TeleSUR’s corporate documents states this as well; that workers for TeleSUR view themselves as spreading leftist content; that the PSUV views TeleSUR as an instrument for spreading its message — when faced with a question about political pluralism, Patricia Villegas states with conviction that they have “a plurality of perspectives”.
When then asked about TeleSUR’s Twitter Account promoting a protest march by Chavistas; about reporting done TeleSUR which disseminated false information that made a geo-political enemy look bad; and her own political activity online — Villegas evades any and all responsibility or accountability by stating that other people were responsible for the first two and then avoids answering the question as to whether or not she believes Argentina is a dictatorship.
In 2017 Ecuador similarly broke ties with TeleSUR.
Considering that Venezuelan political groups associated with the government hold events intended to encourage people to break the law, and that TeleSUR associated accounts promote it within Peru, one can only wonder how long they will stay on air in that country.
Penalties Given to TeleSUR’s Partners
CCTV from China, RT and Sputnik from Russian and HispanTV from Iran are some of the media partners that TeleSUR has made. While this may seem like normal coordination amongst upstarts media organization seeking to obtain market shares in regions seen as key for future success, since the state governments are paying for their operation instead of corporate sponsors or subscriptions, this isn’t a valid rationale.
In his article for the Center for International Media Assistance entitled “Foreign Media and Misinformation: How TeleSUR and RT Coordinate Programs and Messages” Patricio Provitina provides another explanation
“These news outlets claim that their content offers an alternative, developing world perspective that counters the interests and agendas pushed in Western media coverage of domestic and international events. However, in reality, these state- sponsored media outlets are only designed to convey the Chinese, Russian, or Venezuelan government’s perspective to the rest of the world. Since these governments are authoritarian regimes that often impede freedom of the press at home, their foreign-language media outlets reflect domestic habits of selective issue coverage, omitting or distorting important facts in news stories, and making up information to reshape public opinion regarding specific issues or events. Furthermore, there is growing evidence that when state interests align, these outlets coordinate news story coverage, messaging, and programming.”
Analyzing En La Mira, one of the examples of Russian and Venezuelan state media collaboration, Provitina describes it as follows:
“The shows create simplistic, conspiracy-driven explanations that tie a country’s internal problems to an external source of power meddling in the affairs of the country. The evidence presented as proof of a foreign plot tends to mix-up un-related facts, half-truths, or highly edited video interviews with policy makers, intellectuals, and academics who echo or truly believe the conspiracy narratives of each show.”
Argentina sought to cancel RT’s television contracts, but used economic pressure to stay on the air after Macri’s election (Cardenal).
Further Research TeleSUR’s Unethical Journalism
While many unethical journalist practices engaged in by TeleSUR employees and associates are covered here, this is only a small fraction of a full analysis. Venezuela’s PSUV has invested millions of dollars over many years into developing a company that at face is a news organization, but underneath is a propaganda organ for helping Nicolas Maduro achieve his geopolitical interests.
I am currently awaiting word from Social Science One as to the status of my research proposal: The Social Media Behavior of Venezuelan State Media: A Case Study in TeleSUR English. I look forward to sharing this research on Medium, which will focus less on the qualitative issues discussed above — like the widespread evidence of TeleSUR journalists nor following professional norms — and will instead focus on depicting their efforts quantiatively.
Sources
Barajas, Héctor. TeleSUR after the End of Chavismo.
Baerga, Vanesa Media Imperialism in Latin America and the Emergence of Telesur.University of Nottingham.
Brown-Vincent, Layla Dalal Zanele Sekou. We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for:Pan-African Consciousness Raising and Organizing in the United States and Venezuela
Canizalez, Andres. Framing Revolution and Re-Framing Counter-Revolution:
History, Context and Journalism in the new Left-wing Latin American Paradigm.
Cardenal, Juan Pablo. Sharp Power: Rising Authoritarian Influence Chapter 2: Navigating Political Change in Argentina. International Forum for Democratic Studies. National Endowment for Democracy.
Chirinos, Mariengracia; Azpúrua, Andrés; Evdokimov, Leonid; Xynou, Maria. The State of Internet Censorship in Venezuela: A study by IPYS Venezuela, Venezuela Inteligente and the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI). 16 August 2018
Clay Calvert and Robert D. Richards, Journalistic Malpractice: Suing Jayson Blair and the New York Times for Fraud and Negligence, 14 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L.J. 1 (2003). Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/iplj/vol14/iss1/1
Contreras, Adriano. Facebook.
Di Rocco, Massimo. The Arab Spring is a Latin American Winter: TeleSUR’s “Ideological Approach” and the Breakaway from the Al-Jazeera Network. Global Media Journal, Spring/Summer 2012 issue.
Hugh J. O’Halloran. Journalistic Malpractice: The Need for a Professional Standard of Care in Defamation Cases. Marquette Law Review
International Media Support (IMS). Threats, Lies and Censorship: Media in Venezuela. 2016.
Jairo Lugo-Ocando , Olga Guedes & Andrs Caizlez (2011) Framing Revolution and Re-Framing Counter-Revolution: History, Context and Journalism in the new Left-wing Latin American Paradigm, Journalism Practice, 5:5, 599–612, DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2011.601912
Provitina, Patricio. “Foreign Media and Misinformation: How TeleSUR and RT Coordinate Programs and Messages”. The Center for International Media Assistance.
Riley, Dylan. What Is Trump, New Left Review 114, November-December 2018
For the second time this year, the Facebook page operated by TeleSUR English was briefly unpublished. One of TeleSUR’s formal responses during that time was an article rebuking the host of their social media account on the platform of the New York based journal, Jacobin.
In the article “Why Did Facebook Purge TeleSUR English?”, the title an allusion to the popular movie franchise about a day long cessation of legal enforcement against crime, Branko Marcetic commits a number of grave sins against his readers and contains so much irony that it’s worth coining a new literary term, “Orwellian irony”, which I briefly describe in this article but which I go into depth on here.
For one, Branko Marcetic misrepresents the situation in such a way as to leave the reader misinformed of the facts of the matter.
Secondarily, he does not cite the proper precedents that accurately contextualizes the case he describes.
Additionally, he mis-attributes intentions to multiple actors and closes with a call to action that is based on these misunderstandings.
In other words, by close examination of a narrative intended to gain public support for TeleSUR English by claiming his employer has been victimized by a conspiracy, evidence is instead provided as to why it is that Facebook should permanently unpublish TeleSUR English’s Facebook page.
Misconstruing Censorship For Community Standards
Repeating many of the talking point made in the Jacobin article, the above video shows Adriano Contreras with tape over his mouth — as if he is being prevented from speaking. But framing the issue of their unpublishing as censorship ignores several facts — the most important being the fact that the unpublishing in no way impacted the ability for TeleSUR English to publish content.
Unlike the Palmer Raids in the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century, no equipment for the production of media was seized or destroyed and no reporters have been jailed. No news facilities were shuttered, as has been the case in Venezuela, and no reporters were attacked by state or para-state actors.
TeleSUR never lost their ability to send out mail, something that American leftists faced in the wake of the Espionage Acts, and neither was their daily email newsletter, nor their website taken down.
During the period of their brief unpublishing TeleSUR English’s web domain and other social media outlets — such as Abby Martin’s The Empire Files or The World Today with Tariq Ali — were able to be shared on Facebook’s social media platform.
If we are to accept Marcetic’s uncommon interpretation of American jurisprudence, Jacobin is similarly guilty of “censorship” should they chose not to publish ads on their website to promote a new edition of The Turner Diaries. However this is not the case as the right to free speech doesn’t mean that someone else is forced to distribute that speech.
It’s worth noting that this is not the first time that TeleSUR has misrepresented Facebook.
The issue at hand here is a fundamental misunderstanding of what protectedgroups are. TeleSUR English shifts away from legal terminology to instead talk about privileged groups in order to imply that Facebook is inherently racist. Could a better example have been given to those acting as Facebook censors? Yes, but as you can see from the below, protected groups don’t include drivers or children.
While it’s possible that Marcetic’s upside-down interpretation of the American legal terms and enforcement history relates to his having studied the United States in Australia, the second misreading of legal context hints at something more purposeful.
Misunderstanding Author-Publisher Relations
In the numerous defenses of TeleSUR English following their unpublishing, Frank Marcetic, Abby Martin and others ignore the fact that that prior to being granted access to the Facebook platform, users must agree to its terms and conditions.
This isn’t unique to Facebook, but goes across all social media publishing platforms as well as the news publishing industry. Letters to the editor in newspapers are vetted and sometimes edited before publication, just as articles written by paid staff members are fact-checked for quality assurance. Academic journals will send back original research for any number of reasons and similarly many Facebook groups have rules for posting that will lead to those violating them getting removed from the group.
The current director of TeleSUR English’s operations, Orlando Perez, has previously defended the rights of a publisher to set editorial guidelines that determines whether or not an article is published. He even stated that it was sensible to cease business relations with an author for attempting to make a public scandal of the incident.
Had the unpublishing of TeleSUR English been part of a large scale “purge” of leftist perspectives then we could accurately describe that event as censorship. But that didn’t happen, which then begs the question: if TeleSUR English wasn’t unpublished for it’s content, then why was it?
Paranoia and Conspiracy: What Happens When Journalists Don’t Research Their Stories
It’s at this point in their reporting on the issues that Branko Marcetic; TeleSUR reporter Abby Martin; comedian Jimmy Dore; and news commentators, such as Ben Swann and Caitlin Johnstone, all do something worse than merely misrepresenting the context of the news — they fail to examine the evidence.
Even worse than making no attempt to research why Facebook would unpublish TeleSUR English based on the statement provided to them, these “journalists” rely on the words of a TeleSUR employee who has not worked there in several months, Pablo Vivanco, to validate their view that this was censorship.
Let’s examine the evidence and see how it is that Facebook may have been correct in unpublishing TeleSUR English.
Examining Evidence Part I: Public Admission of a Bad Actor
Pablo Vivanco’s use as a source in this matter is another example of Orwellian irony — for it was his assigning or purchasing of marketing services to artificially boost follower and engagement numbers that likely lead to TeleSUR English being unpublished.
Google the name of the former Director of TeleSUR English — Pablo Vivanco — and you will learn that in contrast to his statement to RT on August 14th of this year, former TeleSUR English Director Pablo Vivanco admitted that he did this at the 2016 Building Left Media in the Digital Commons panel at Left Forum.
This fact was repeated in several interviews I’ve conducted with current and former TeleSUR English employees over the past year, who also stated that this practice was known about throughout the organization and that Vivanco’s former assistant, Cyril Mychalejko, helped direct it.
Though Pablo Vivanco implies that they stopped doing this in his official statement, had any of these “journalists” done any investigation they would have learned the real truth of the matter and come to a much different conclusion.
Examining Evidence Part II: Public Admission of a Bad Actor
Though current and former TeleSUR employees and contractors, like Branko Marcetic and Abby Martin, quote Pablo Vivanco as evidence as to why it is that Facebook’s unpublishing is censorship, a review of his personal profile provides evidence as to why it is that Facebook’s algorithm unpublished the account.
If one reviews Facebook’s Terms of Service, it immediately becomes apparent that Pablo Vivanco is not being honest when he states that there is no reason to have been unpublished.
Clearly TeleSUR English has violated Terms of Service.
Examining Evidence Part III: Private Admission of a Bad Actor
Pablo Vivanco is not, however, alone in violating or directing the violation of Facebook terms of service. In the wake of the first unpublishing, a new TeleSUR English related account was created called TeleSUR English Aggregate.
While I was not able to obtain the name of the person running the account from speaking with them, their actions speak for themselves.
During my interview with admin of the TeleSUR Aggregate account, he openly admitted that the sole purpose of the account was to promote their content.
When I asked him why he did this, he gave me a pretty clear answer why he was doing this: he wanted to disrupt the operation of Facebook.
Examining Evidence Part IV: What An Automated Bot Network Looks Like
It’s not just the purchasing of likes, which helped get TeleSUR English to its roughly half a million likes that lead to it’s unpublishing, nor was it solely the TeleSUR Play and TeleSUR Aggregate accounts — whose sole purpose is to repost TeleSUR English content.
The false profiles obtained by Pablo Vivanco have done far more than just “liked” TeleSUR English’s profile — they also continue to artificially boost it’s engagement numbers.
If you go look through the public comments, likes, and reposts of TeleSUR English’s content — you will uncover hundreds of Facebook accounts that rarely have photos, and often have only a small number of friends, but are characterized by a large amount of user activity which consists entirely of re-posting news.
Unsurprisingly, given the media agreement between the Russian and Venezuelan state media, they also re-post content from RT and Sputnik.
Suggesting a mix of accounts that are directly controlled and others that are operated by 3rd parties, a number of them also post on behalf of various companies — such as GreenMedInfo.com.
Examining Evidence Part V: What A Human Re-Share Network Looks Like
In order to artificially inflate the reach of TeleSUR English, bad actors on Facebook aren’t limited to automated accounts but include coordinated behaviors by a large number of individuals.
There are over 30 “Friends who like TeleSUR English” Facebook groups. What their function is given the above evidence, I can’t clearly say.
I messaged all the administrators of these groups in February of 2018 and only recieved two responses, one from someone in Africa and one from someone in India. Both denied being an admin, even though they were clearly listed, and neither would respond to my questions
Some of these groups are moderated by employees of the Venezuelan government, like the one above. Others by Cubans. One is moderated by Vlaudin Vega, an individual formerly on the U.S. State Department’s terrorist watch list for association with the FARC. The vast majority of these have not been active in years.
What I can say that they do is to re-publish content into public groups, in order to make the content seem more valuable in Facebook’s algorithm.
The Real Reason TeleSUR English Was Briefly Unpublished AND Why Leftist Media Saw a Big Drop in Google Traffic
While this type of marketing effort can lead to big increases in follower numbers, such behavior is prohibited by all the social media platforms as it degrades the user experience.
The reason that many leftist media outlets saw a drop in Google ranking and traffic being directed to their websites and why they posts have been deprioritized in Facebook feeds has nothing to do with selective targeting of companies or political viewpoints and everything to do with Facebook and Google holistically discouraging black hat marketing practices.
In their quest to create greater domain authority, media organizations all over the political spectrum as well as businesses bought followers from companies or created their own portfolios of sock-puppet accounts. They joined back-linking networks and compensated others to engage in practices designed to amplify the appearance of trustworthiness according to what the algorithms searched for and valued.
Lest this seem overly abstract, let me give some examples that feature links to TeleSUR English content.
Examining Evidence Part VI: Fake Backlinking
By name alone Los Angeles Post sounds like it could be a credible outlet, but the small number of followers and the lack of postings over the past 8 months suggests otherwise.
Viewing their website you’ll learn that there are similarly few current news articles listed on their landing page, which also hints at this being merely a means for marketing companies to monetize companies desires for backlinks.
Looking through their back pages, however, you’ll see a large number of links going to TeleSUR English, CounterPunch, MintPressNews and other “alternative news” websites.
Another page which does this is called Russia is not the Enemy. Unlike LA Post, they do not pretend to be a news site — but are simply a news aggregate website that posts RT, TeleSUR, CounterPunch, etc.
Another example of such a backlinking scheme, but with actual operators, is Geopolitics Alert. Their Facebook page lists 36,700+ people liking it, however the journalistic pair that makes up this “Media/News Company” has only five Patrons and under 50 listens to their SoundCloud Account.
I emailed co-founder Jim Carey to ask him if he has accepted marketing services or money from TeleSUR, which is sensible as almost a quarter of the content on their website is directly from TeleSUR English, and he denied this.
When asked the same question as to his relationship with other state or private media organizations, Carey refused to answer my questions.
Websites like these, which claim to be funded by donations given the paucity of income they get from that means, have links to thousands of new backlinks to leftist news sites such as TeleSUR English and CounterPunch.
Not Censorship, But Technics
Just as there is a difference between censorship and a Facebook page being unpublished due to non-adherence to terms and conditions, so too is there a difference between a conspiracy to silence leftist media and the effects of algorithmic updates that seek to holistically counter the actions of bad agents. Facebook has had to delete millions of such accounts.
The notion that those with capital to pay the fees for partnership with such networks shouldn’t be given an advantage is not an “anti-democratic” decision, but one that encourages democracy. This is why Facebook and Google have changed their ranking system, and since this is clearly stated on their website and in the press Branko Marcetic, Abby Martin and others statements is not an act of courageous truth-telling but an attempt to deflect the truth that groups such as DFR Labs are trying to uncover. Rather than examining what it is such groups do to inform their readers, they hint at global conspiracies.
Doing so they ignore the fact that to operationalize the functioning of their internet platforms in such a way that it is more open, democratic, enjoyed by their users and not a source for marketing spam or disinformation campaigns from bad actors working on behalf of foreign governments — algorithms need constant refinement.
Is This What Democracy Looks Like?: The Evidence TeleSUR English Won’t Address
I posted an earlier version of this article in the only Friends of TeleSUR English group that had any recent postings. Moderated by Arnold August, a journalist and political scientist with a specialization on Cuba, I was hoping to better understand the perspective of the “Friends who like TeleSUR English” given the above evidence. Given that I was previously blocked on Twitter and Facebook by Vice Director of TeleSUR Orlando Perez and former Director of TeleSUR English Pablo Vivanco after asking them to explain as well, I can’t say that I was shocked by what transpired next.
First it was suggested that I was committing slander. Then it was implied that I had received help from “unnamed sources”. Then Nicolaj Leonardo — a writer for RT and TeleSUR English, posted a photoshopped photo of me with a knife, and then I was banned from the group.
This is not what democracy looks like.
To be clear, I do not now nor have I ever worked or consulted for Facebook, the Atlantic Council, the Digital Forensics Research Lab or any other of organization and the only “help” that I’ve recieved in my research is in the form of information given to me by current and former TeleSUR English employees.
I am a graduate of NYU’s Masters program in the Experimental Humanities, a Doctoral candidate at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in their program for Innovation and Technology Management that has also worked in digital marketing for several years and the project leader of a team of researchers answering the call for research by Social Science One to depict the relationship between social media, democracy and elections.
Killer Mike and Bernie Sanders (DSA); a Democratic Socialists of America newsletter with a photo of Antonio Gramsci; Nicolas Maduro visiting Antonio Gramsci’s Grave
“If [Killer] Mike was to start his own country, which is always on the table, he would hire him (Bernie Sanders) as a consultant on how to set the institution up — cause he f*cks with the OG the long way.”
-El P, speaking for Killer Mike, Episode 1 of Trigger Warning with Killer Mike
“For Gramsci the rule of the bourgeoisie and the role and nature of the state was far more complex than orthodox and Leninist Marxists suggested. Control was exercised as much through ideas (ideology) as through force, and this gave a key role to intellectuals in what Gramsci called a “war of position,” a battle of ideas in which revolutionary forces must engage with bourgeois intellectuals. The function of intellectuals in capitalism is to organize beliefs and persuade the masses to embrace and accept the leadership and views of the bourgeoisie. Revolutionary intellectuals must disrupt and subvert this process of hegemony, thus making the sphere of ideology a battlefield, an arena of struggle. In the advanced capitalist countries the war of position must precede the overthrow of the state through a frontal assault (the “war of maneuver”).
– Historical Dictionary of Marxism
New Afrika: A Communist Goal Since the 1930s
1930s map made by Communist Party members in The Negro Question in the United States showing the borders of a “New Africa” in America; 1970s Workers Party poster; Killer Mike’s New Africa
In a single word Killer Mike’s new series on Netflix, Trigger Warning, is brilliant.
It manages to address a number of serious social, political and economic issues in a way that is both irreverently funny, humane and deeply insightful. I hope that Netflix provides Killer Mike another season to explore such issues.
First, the historic political connection between Atlanta and Caracas.
Second, an understanding of “21st Century socialism” as political theory and practice of Hugo Chavez, the PSUV and their allies the FARC.
After I explain these and their linkages, I will show real-life examples of Trigger Warning’s politics in action; postulate that the inclusion of Juggalos in the series has to do with the Democratic Socialists of America attempt at entryism via the Struggalo Circus and the connection of black liberation movements in America.
Killer Mike and The Georgia-Venezuela Radical Access
(1) Killer Mike wearing a Kill Your Masters shirt (2) Book cover by a professor connected to Nicolas Maduro’s Kultural Marxism network (3) 2012 tweet referencing an Anarchist group in ATL.
The comprehensive version of the story is still being researched and written by myself.
If this interests you, I encourage you to follow Facebook page — it’s coming up over the next several months.
The short version is this:
Following an unsuccessful military uprising in 2002, Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, aides, assistants, specialists and the Ministry of Popular Power for Communication and Information converged to cogitate as to how to stay in power and effect a longer-term plan to enact what they saw as their Bolivarian mission.
Towards this end, they decided to make a media front for their intelligence services apparatus, TeleSUR – the name alluded to their motto “Our North is the South” and idea of transmitting The Global South as well as The Southern Question by Antonio Gramsci.
Their perspective, like that of the Comintern in the 1930s-1950s – was that the politically, socially and economically underdeveloped racially charged South would be more open to their messaging. Plus it was of crucial importance in the Civil Rights Era. Thus the potential to attract activists there, especially those that might be part of activist families made the South the designated the location where efforts would be directed in order to help create a shift in the political orientation of Americans.
Building off of the successes of the World Social Forum first held in Porte Alegre by the Brazilian Workers Party in 2001, a National Planning Committee (NPC) was formed to help develop a movement of movements in the United States that would lead, it was hoped, to Socialism in the United States.
From Brazil and Venezuela to the United States, this convergence of community activists provided the opportunity to create linkages with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’s intelligence service and thereby tap into existent political activism and movement building networks and locate people they could assess, recruit, guide and develop as needed. Later efforts would involve Venezuelan Ambassador Jesus “Chucho” Garcia, and possibly others, working towards these ends (Brown-Vincent).
To facilitate people’s involvement they relied upon inchoate and established political activist networks; new media organizations and individual workers; academic networks and programs — such NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, where George Ciccariello-Maher (GCM) now teaches. On this last point, it’s worth noting that part of Hemi’s mission is to “offers an anti-colonial model for engagement between ‘north’ and ‘south’ by promoting multi-sited, multilingual collaborations” — which is almost the same as that of TeleSUR. It’s also worth asking here if GCM returned the $20,000 homebuying gift from Drexel to buy a house considering that it was Venezuela’s media partner Russia that used coordinated inauthentic behavior to make things so bad for him that he could not continue to teach there).
In 2007 the United States Social Forum convened its first national meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. Inspired by the 2006 Worlds Social Forum in Caracas, the NPC “organizers followed the Caracas model in merging the discursive and performative dimensions of public space.” The location “was specifically chosen as a site for the USSF to highlight the history of struggle against racism and white supremacy… Organizers specifically targeted groups involved in “movement-building,” by which they meant community organizing among grassroots communities of color… and oppressed communities. As a USSF document explains, “There is a strategic need to unite the struggles of oppressed communities and peoples within the United States (particularly black, Latino, Asian/Pacific- Islander and indigenous communities) to the struggles of oppressed nations in the Third World.” This model privileges community organizing, popular education, and leadership development. It also reflects an anti-imperialist, nationalist frame that views oppressed communities in the U.S. as “internal colonies. (Juris 363)”.
Left, Jesus Garcia at SHROC. Center and Left, Ajamu Baraka at SHROC and in Venezuela.
Following the close of events, black activists aligned with various socialist and communist currents held a follow-up meeting in North Carolina.
There’s little public information about this, but it’s known that amongst those in attendance was Ajamu Barak, the 2016 Vice Presidential candidate for the Green Party. I recently had the chance to ask him about this in a live appearance – but was ignored.
Also notable in this period and place is how several months after this event in Georgia, Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney was nominated by the Green Party to be the presidential candidate of 2008. McKinney, who was endorsed by the Workers World Party and Cindy Sheehan, later completed a Ph.D. on issues related to Hugo Chavez’s leadership, also worked for TeleSUR.
Maybe you think this is all a coincidence..? Well, wait until the end and then give me your thoughts.
What is 21st Century Socialism?
Defining the Five Motors for 21st Century Socialism and a graphic representation of how the FARC’s bottom up, Leninist approach to forming dual power and enacting a revolution.
21st Century Socialism is driven by five “motors” — the Enabling Law, Constitutional Reform, Popular Education, Reconfiguration of State Power, and an explosion of Communal Power.
“People’s Institutions” are created via encuentros (encounters between activists and potential assets), forums and councils. Actors connected to it claim they are the real government, then begin to attack it. This dual power system of governance is intended to lead to the overthrow of the existent political power structure and provide the foundation for the establishment of a new political order.
It is this conflict between these two bodies which, in part, informs the current conflict in Venezuela and it is this that President Donald Trump was referring to in Miami recently when denouncing socialism.
There are a wealth of books about how the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUC) in Venezuela; the Movement for Social (MAS) in Ecuador; and Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) in Colombia have used such tactics— but you can more or less get the basics just from watching Trigger Warning.
Trigger Warning and 21st Century Socialism
Left: Killer Mike cites Fela as the inspiration for his project. Right: Expelled Bolivarian ambassador to the US Jesus “Chucho” Garcia holding up a Fela CD several days after I first published this blog,
The last episode of season 1 of Trigger Warning opens up with Killer Mike telling the story of Fela Kuti, the same musician that the expelled-from-the-U.S. Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela Ambassador Jesus “Chucho” holds up in a Twitter post a few days after I first posted this article.
This could just be random coincidence or affinity – but given that Chucho’s activism in the United States aligns with Mike’s this seems unlikely.
After Mike’s citation of Fela as a frame and inspiration for his idea, the show continues. For those that have already watched Trigger Warning, rather than detail each of the five motors – I decided just to share screenshots that illustrate the series the policies leading to 21st Century Socialism.
Enabling Law
Even though a Civil War was fought the last time there was a serious attempt at secession in the United States — Chief Asaru says that all you need to do it is get some signatures. Seems legit…
Constitutional Reform
After it’s been written, Killer Mike has the inhabitants of New Africa swear an oath to a new constitution that neither he nor they have read.
An Explosion of Communal Power
One of the first tasks that Killer Mike has his citizens engage in is to begin self-defense exercises.
Popular Education
Large political and vocational education projects are enacted. Institutionally, those that align with the Party in power rather than those that are scientifically and technically oriented in their decision-making process.
Reconfiguration of State Power
If Trigger Warning was connected to Venezuela’s Kultural Marxism network it would be sublimely ironic that Killer Mike cheats during the electoral process.
While the elections and after party give the appearance that this iteration of New Afrika is liberatory – another way of looking it is that all these people have just signed up to live in a company town. The flag literally has a corporate logos on it and the money that citizens now use is scrip.
What Trigger Warning Looks Like as Non-Fiction
Left – Patricia Okoumou posting about a direct action before being arrested and then posting a highly incendiary #fakenews story to her followers. On the right, Black Sovereign Nation — a revolutionary communal/communist project based on Lenin/FARC’s theory & practice.
Properly holding up the reality to the art-mirror that is Killer Mike’s New Africa, we can see that in addition to the movements and parties mentioned about – there are a growing number of examples of New Afrika’s in America.
Unpermitted march threatening violence; an Antifa activist verifying Movement of Movements Thesis (many groups are connected to Venezuela; and an example of political action for meme’s sake.
And there are several more group just like this – which is probably why in part that the FBI made the Black Identity Extremism classification. That Teen Vogue, one of Antifa/Venezuela’s news outlets, has an article decrying the term makes me think that this is the case – because these and groups like them are, in essence, an inchoate FARC.
And speaking of FARC, it’s worth pointing out another connection between Trigger Warning and Venezuela’s allies:
Another “coincidence” – whereas Killer Mike has Crips and the Bloods to produce a drink that embraces their violent past whereas the FARC now produces beers with revolutionary women on their labels.
FARC recently released their own line of beers.
They, like Crip-a-Cola and Blood Pop, lean into the violent mystique.
Trigger Warning & White Allies
A textbooks example of Socialist Party Entryism – Struggalo Circus was a group of Radical DSA activists that sought to recruit Juggalos to their political cause by claiming compatibility. Sources: Vice and Twitter.
Another thing notable about Trigger Warning was Killer Mike’s solidarity with the Juggalos and choice to make them the only white people that were invited to New Afrika.
Given the racial attitudes of the other white musicians that were featured, it’s unsurprising. However I’d postulate that this creative decision was made not because there simply weren’t any non-racist white musicians to be found. Instead, I think it was because of the recent press in alternative news outlets about the Struggalo Circus. The Struggalo Circus was a short-lived front group made up of members of the Democratic Socialists of America – the face of the United Socialist Party of America (PSUA). Based upon their own social media outlets they were only formed to engage in an entryist project to recruit Juggalos to their party at a March in Washington to protest the decision by the FBI to name them a game. Which makes one wonder why those press outlets ran stories about them in the first place…
Trigger Warning & Venezuela’s Projected Vision
Examples of Venezuela’s Messaging via their coordinated inauthentic behavior network on Facebook: Trump is the KKK; Democrats are the KKK, Everyone who Doesn’t Agree with Us are Nazis
In writing this report it is not my intent to suggest that Killer Mike was approached and coached by some Venezuelan Intelligence Agent, or that he is their puppet, muppet, Hobbit or anything other than himself.
Yet given rapper, poet, actor and political activist Saul Williams recorded the anti-Iraq-war poem/song Not In Our Name on behalf of a Revolutionary Communist Party front group; that Rebel Diaz and Immortal Technique have performed at multiple Venezuelan intelligence services supported events such, as the United States Social Forum and Poor People’s Movement, the Maoist-rapper Boots Riley’s agitprop film Sorry to Bother You! (which is also brilliant) was funded by Chinese-capital; that China makes rap songs to promote Karl Marx; and many other possible examples – it seems highly unlikely that he would not have popped up on their radar.
TeleSUR’s posting about Residente is one of many examples of Venezuela’s Intelligence Services marketing on behalf of radical rappers.
Neither is it my purpose to delegitimize Killer Mike’s poignant criticisms. Mike’s smart as heck and the things that he’s talking about matters. Which is why I took the time to unwind the mind of an artist whose works I enjoy: to help provide a mirror showing the world that’s in his/Netflix’s work of art. And with this knowledge about the connection between Venezuela and Atlanta – specifically how the former sought to influence the later in order to help develop and enact multi-generational political and cultural change project that has vast geopolitical goals, it also becomes possible to pose what I think to be are some interesting questions:
First, to Killer Mike: I know you don’t mess with Mexican weed, but when you were trappin’ was your connect Venezuelan? Given the connection between the Venezuelan government and drug trafficking cartels, this seems like a smart way to raise money for intelligence projects in the United States without leaving a paper trail. It’d straight blow my mind if Trap music was in part funded by Venezuela’s Cartel Del Soles…
Second, to Senator Bernie Sanders: If consulting on Mike’s New Africa, would you concur with him that the process depicted is “what is to be done?”
Third, to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes: Considering the Green New Deal is basically a practical re-formulation of the principles described in the Ecosocialist International into the American context — what’s your take on all this? Also, when I go to New York City to present the final version of this research will you be my date?
Fourth, to the reader: What are your thoughts? Do you think it’s all coincidence, or is Killer Mike’s Trigger Warning and example of Venezuelan Propaganda? What sorts of conversations and actions have you taken after watching it? Are you ready to move to a farm with a group of people?
Sources
Brittain, James J. Revolutionary Social Change in Colombia: The Origin and Direction of the FARC-EP
Brown-Vincent, Layla Dalal Zanele Sekou. We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Pan-African Consciousness Raising and Organizing in the United States and Venezuela. 2016. Duke.
Juris, Jeffrey S. Spaces of Intentionality: Race, Class and Horizontality at the United States Social Forum (2008) Mobilization: An International Journal 13(4): 353–371
Rose Brewer, Katz-Fishman, Walda and Scott, Jerome.USSF 3 Evaluation and Documentation (4.10.16)
Walker, David & Gray, Daniel. Historical Dictionary of Marxism (2007) The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Lanham, Maryland
“The distinctions between leadership and management constitute a major shift in our thinking about how the private sector should be organized. A mere [six] decades ago, leadership was a conception business and industry generally chose to ignore. But now the best and brightest afree that leadership belongs in the private sector as much as it does in the public one. The only question is how exactly leadership and management should be defined” (147)
Reinventing Leadership: Making the Connection Between Business and Politics by Barbara Kellerman was published by the State University of New York press in 1999 and is volume in the SUNY series in Leadership Studies. At the time of the book’s publication, she was the Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Leadership at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland.
While an academic work, the book’s message is also directed to leaders and managers in both the upper reaches of the private sector as well as the public sector – something that is reflected in its style. The first premise of the book is that a number of significant failures of government has shown that earlier models of political leadership are inadequate. The second is that changes in social norms and conceptions of leadership wrought by political events have made traditional notions of management that came into prominence in the period of the 1950s to the early 1970s no longer relevant. The third and final premise is about the advantages of the convergence and synthesis of leadership values that embraces traditional government and business positions. Given the increased necessity of business and government leaders to communicate and collaborate this helps to develop a common language so as to better understand each other and the interests they represent – the public and private capital interests.
Kellerman defines management as the efforts of those who hold a position of authority at some level to ensure that the activities of a firm continue as needed and that leaders are those that engage followers in the mutual pursuit of agreed-on goal representing, usually, significant and not merely incremental change. These two conceptual inputs for the synthesis she believes is now needed were defined by various authors writing for either the professional or government leader/manager. By showing the typical continuing education paths for both the professional and the government official and analyzing professional literature – such as Harvard Business Review publications as well as an impressively large list of books on management and leadership in corporate America – Kellerman shows how divergently the ideals character traits and habits of thought for each social actor was first conceived – and how large political scandals and failures drew the two together in a way that more contemporary theorists would categorize as a mix of neoliberal or technocratic with a human face.
Whereas previously managers did not view their role as to influence – simply to command, control and if necessary to coerce – the changes in cultural and legal norms mean that this no longer was valid. In some workplaces where there hasn’t been much change wrought by America’s changing labor laws, such as extraction and agricultural industries, these were few alteration in norms. In worksites dealing with more intangible goods and services, like those of the many value-added business-to-business industries, the impact was significant and well commented on in the journalism and editorials of the professional and government press.
A number of seminal business leaders from the 1960s to the 1980s are presented as case studies to show the varying trends in how leadership was approached as a theory and practice and a number of common threads highlighted. One such theme found in the private industry, but not in that of the public, was of the need for management to “know themselves” in a way that included rigorous self-assessment so as to become more aware of the interpersonal dynamics at the workplace and within the market in general. If this all sounds curiously “new-agey,” or vaguely psychotherapeutic in nature” Kellerman says in one of her many amusing asides, “that’s because it is” (76).
Another of Kellerman’s observations is that while egalitarian ideas increasing permeated literature on leadership in business that in practice a noticeable change in work relations towards something that might be defined as “workplace democracy” never materialized. In its stead there became an infatuation with “collaboration” and “teams”. While anachronistic to this book, a good modern example of this is found in Agile, Scrum, and DevOps, coding and testing team practices associated with software development firms that shown in their literature and practice to be highly consultative and communicative in nature. The scandals of presidents and CEOs as well as changed in legal regulation – especially the opening of borders for trade – all feed into the changing workplace dynamics. Because certain types of labor could be more easily moved in the face of organized discontent by workers, which increased the reserve army of labor able to replace those in other, less at risk sectors, there was an additional shift in those work cites as well. Not a point which is gone into in detail – it seems that the effects of this would be another large influence for the imperative to blur the lines between public and private leaders and managers. And on this topic, Kellerman cites three specific imperatives wrought by the new, post-NAFTA globalized:
Politicians will have no choice but to take cues for their corporate counterparts
Business executives will have no alternative but to learn lessons from leaders in government
Leaders in both domains will have to reinvent themselves to create something altogether new.
In the closing section of the book Kellerman extensively quotes a number of business leaders to make the point that “although real-world problems are interdisciplinary, and solutions are interdepartmental, interprofessional, interdependent , and international, our institutions – particularly our institutions of higher education – start with a heavy bias against breadth.” (219)
The book closes with a description of the image of the new ideal for a political leader and business leader. The traits that they should have, the challenged they face, the strategies that they deploy and the values they embody to strive are listed as they could go on the back of a baseball card. All in all, it’s a fascinating read on how Leadership and Management as a concept and practice have evolved in America and how it is that one should act if one desires to be a Leader or Manager in the modern political-economic environment.
Example of art used by the IWW as a pedagological tool.
Over the past few weeks several articles in as many high-brow media outlets all took Cultural Marxism as a topic for discussion.
Several days after Samuel Moyn wrote an opinion articlein The New York Times calling the term “Cultural Marxism” a dog-whistle for conspiracy-minded racists that was too loaded for use, David Brooks published an opinion article in The New York Times whose topic was intergenerational economic struggles at the workplace over meliorism. One of his explanations as to why such conflicts happen was that Cultural Marxism is the lingua franca of the universities that had educated those workers.
Brooks use of this term caused a brouhaha on Twitter, and lead him to link to a series of articles related to the subject recently published on Tablet by historian Alexander Zubatov. Like me, he responded critically and at length to Moyn, which Ben Alpers publishing a blog for the Society for United States Intellectual History group on Facebook, who reiterated Moyn’s case.
Given my subject area knowledge mastery of the subject and as I’m currently researching and publishing about Kultural Marxism– a modern variant of the Cultural Marxism project — I decided to weigh in on this conversation as well.
In short, while I agree with David Brooks and Alexander Zubatov that Cultural Marxism exists and view the historiographical methodology of Ben Alpers and Samuel Moyn as fundamentally unsound — I also take issue with Zubatov’s periodization.
My claim is simple: before a single member of the Frankfurt School was even born, Cultural Marxism already existed in America.
Defining & Historicizing American Cultural Marxism
What exactly is Cultural Marxism?
I find Alexander Zubatov’s definition, which I now paraphrase here, to be suitable.
Cultural Marxism is a worldview that sees cultural productions (Films, TV shows, books, as well as the institutions which help them come to be), and ideas as emanations of underlying power structures. To understand them genuinely, rather than just on the surface, an honest reader must scrutinize and judge all culture and ideas based on their relation to economic and political relations. Following from this premise, advocates for the persecuted and oppressed must also attack forms of culture that re-inscribe the values of the ruling class, and also disseminate culture and ideas that support “oppressed” groups and “progressive” causes.
Why do I find this definition suitable? Because it matches the perspective Perry Anderson presents in his books In the Track of Historical Materialismand Considerations of Western Marxism. These works historicize the discourse of a number of leading Marxists and traces the shifts in the school’s practical concerns and theoretical innovations.
How do I know Cultural Marxism existed in the United States prior to the 20thCentury?
Because Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said so, for one.
Secondarily, there were numerous Socialist political and cultural organizations operating in the United States that were avowedly Marxist in orientation prior to the arrival of the Frankfurt School. The legal response of the existence of these organizations was censorship, jailing and deportation and the extra-legal included large private police forces and spy networks that were accountable often only to those paying them (Preston).
Last, but not least, there are myriad examples of American citizens creating their own cultural works which contested the legitimacy of America’s political and economic institutions as well as criticizing cultural works as being counter-revolutionary.
I’ll now illustrate each point in the order just presented.
Marx’s Assessment of American Politics
While Karl Marx is more often associated with Russia than the United States given the successes of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Red Scares, when periodizing Cultural Marxism in America it’s important to remember that he also wrote for the New York Daily Tribune, corresponded with Abraham Lincoln, considered moving with his family to Texas after the American Civil War, and worked directly and indirectly with socialist organizations in America. While these facts indicate that there was an organized effort by Karl Marx and his associates to propagate communist beliefs via various distribution channels in the United States — Karl Marx understood an inchoate Socialist movement to have existed in America since he was a teenager.
In Marx and Engels’ view of American history, it was the Workingmen’s Parties of the early 1830s that quickly rose to prominence across across the country and then dissolved was the first iteration of America’s “own social democratic school.”
Marx believed this was so because the Workingmen’s Parties were the first class-oriented political organization in America that stated in their literature that the interests of Capital were intrinsically opposed to the interests of Labor. This briefly lived organization, however, wasn’t the only iteration of such a “social democratic school”.
Marxism in 19thCentury America
The Knights of Labor were founded in 1869 and by 1886 they had over 700,000 dues-paying members as well as their own membership cards, arcane initiation rituals, newspapers and associated meeting halls. After the Knights had disbanded The Industrial Workers of the World were founded in 1905, and had all the same trappings as well as comics in their news publications, like Mr. Block, and songbooks by musicians like Joe Hill, who would later be assassinated for his political activity. They even published their own catechism that clarified the positions from which they opposed capitalism. Both groups sought to organize workers regardless of race, sex or skill level of occupation. Their goals were to create One Big Union and thereby extend the meaning of democracy such that it included what transpired at the workplace (Montgomery).
These weren’t the only Socialist organizations operating in the United States prior to the Frankfurt School’s arrival. There were also the Modern Schools, which operated in New York, Chicago, Milwaukee and other cities that founded on the educational principals of the Spanish Anarchist Francisco Ferrer (Higham).
There were also a variety of state and national political parties organized as well — from Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor Party to Victor Berger’s Socialist Party of America. In the 1930s Communist Party Members in Alabama consistently put their jobs, reputations, and in many cases there very lives on the line. Like a print version of Glassdoor — their newspapers contained information on prices of jobs in different regions; first person accounts of bad behavior by employers as well as the trials and tribulations faced by Communists (Kelley). These newspapers also shared stories of hope of what life could be like without the racism so endemic to the South (Horne). So desirable was the Grand Narrative presented through these media outlets that in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War began, Leftists and Blacks from throughout Africa, the Caribbean, and America volunteered to join the International Brigades to fight against the fascist forces of Spain, Germany, and Italy — much as contemporary Leftists have made cause with the Kurdish people in Rojava (Robinson).
There were also international socialist organizations operating in America. The International Working Persons Association, an organization once headquartered in Marx’s adopted home of London, which moved to New York in 1872. The IWPA was able to so successfully address themselves as able to help with the needs and concerns of workers that in Chicago alone in 1885 they had over 20,000 members that were of the mind that reforming capitalism would never be a sufficient means of improving their conditions and that a peaceful transition to socialism was not possible (Foner).
In fact, it’s in part because of the IWPA’s activity related to the legal defense of the group of radical political activists that came to be known as the Haymarket Martyrs, which included publishing their private correspondence and encouraging affiliated socialist groups to demonstrate on their behalf, that the first international holiday for workers — Labor Day — came in to being (Hill).
Such political projects were not monolithic, and the conflicts between the Marxists, Lasalleans and other tendencies played out in party debates, the pages of their theoretical and news publications and the policies they adopted. In Brian Lloyd’s book Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890–1922, the author provides an intellectual history of early socialist thought in America. After claiming that too much of the historical writings on this period has taken for granted the Marxist nature of American Socialists by simply categorizing the two major tendencies into Reform and Revolutionary Socialism — he subjects the writing of socialist journals published during the 1890–1922 time period — such as The Massesand The New Republic– as well as the books by leading intellectuals to a close examination. By doing so Lloyd is able to illustrate how William James and John Dewey exhibited a marked influence on the intellectuals then writing for the socialist press.
In sharp contrast to the current Prosperity gospel, early American radicals depicted Jesus as a Socialist.
Lloyd demonstrates how Spencerian notions of social/cultural development; Veblenian economic stages; Nietzschean and Bergsonian concepts of the Will and Interest as well as Darwinian determinism Socialist discourse and practice. The “Farmers faction” of the Socialist Party, for instance, propagated small-producer ideologies in order to act as an organizing principle.
By limning the conceptual limits of quasi-Marxist thinkers that he alternately denigrates as hayseed empiricists; practical idealists; inchoate liberals; “great men” followers; economic monists, etc. he shows that the intellectual framework of the “American Marxists”, and those within the Second International, was not always aligned with Marx even if he was often used as a referent.
Examples of Early American Cultural Marxism
Given the role that literature plays in the oeuvre of Karl Marx, that Marx did write a number of romantic poems and his impact on aspects of so many national cultures, it’s perhaps most appropriate to say that he is the first Cultural Marxist. And yet he never wrote a novel that had the same radicalizing effect that William Morris’ News from Nowhere or Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists had for British Marxists or that Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward had for radicals on the other side of the Atlantic. Edward Bellamy’s novelization of a man seeing the future illustrated the dynamic tensions between what was and what could be in a way that appealed to many Americans by showing how a Socialist organization of industry and governance could benefit them.
Bellamy’s book was a certifiable best-seller that sold millions of copies in America and the Socialist Party advertised it in conjunction with The Communist Manifesto. Eugene V. Debs, five-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party, cited conversations with Victor Berger and reading the novel as highly influential to his political development and was part of a large body of literature which recorded American’s thoughts, experiences and fantasies as they came to terms with industrial capitalism. Indeed, there was a flourishing trade in books and articles that addressed the dynamic tension between what was and what could be possible in the present.
Between the Haymarket Riots of 1886 and the Bryan McKinley election of 1896 in over 100 works of utopian fiction were produced by politicians, literary authors, businessmen, and journalists in response to the struggles of their time. Not all were revolutionary — indeed some were conservative or outright regressive — but they were so successful that the Charles Kerr Publishing house was able to specialize in selling Leftist Utopias. According to Mary Jean Pfaelzer, the Kerr utopias included:
Anonymous — The Beginning , A Romance of Chicago As It Might Be, 1893
Anonymous — Man or Dollar, Which?, 1896
Frederick Adams’ President John Smith: The Story of Peaceful Revolution, 1897
Zebina Forbush’s The Co-opolitan: A Story of the Cooperative Commonwealth, 1898
W.H.Bishop’s The Garden of Eden USA: A Very Possible Story, 1895
James Galloway’s John Harvey: A Tale of the Twentieth Century, 1897
19th century literary works aren’t the only novels that could be categorized as Culturally Marxism. The Jungle, published serially in the avowedly socialist magazine Appeal to Reason by Upton Sinclair in 1906 depicted the difficulty of production line work in the Chicago abattoirs. While modern Socialists look with disdain on the Socialism of renowned American novelist Jack London, in 1908 his novel of revolution in Chicago, The Iron Heel,was seen as a classic — even garnering praise from Leon Trotsky. Then there was the comics that were published and distributed in order to raise class consciousnes.
Published in 1912, this collection of illustrations could be seen as a precursor to today’s meme-warfare.
Though it’s difficult, if not impossible, to empirically determine the social impact of such Cultural Marxist works — just as it is hard to measure the impact Ayn Rand has had on Objectivists and Libertarians or The Turner Diarieshas had on White Nationalists — clearly they exist.
Towards A New Periodization of Cultural Marxism in America
While it is true that both Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács both wrote significant, innovative works in the Marxist canon; both worked at the ComIntern in order to propagandize on behalf of the Soviet government and International Communism; and both have had their theories applied to various cultural projects — to not include people such as John Reed; Morris Hillquit; Victor Berger; Eugene V. Debs; Joe Hill; Edward Bellamy; Bill Haywood; Charles Kerr; August Spies; Albert Parsons; Lucy Parsons; Jack London; Hosea Hudson; Stan Weir; Marty Glaberman; Ted Wellman; William Z. Foster; Clarence Hathaway; W. E. B. DuBois; George Padmore; Max Shachtman; and myriad other native and immigrant Americans in an accounting of Cultural Marxism the United States is to cover up the country’s rich history of political and cultural radicalism.
Ben Alpers’ and Samuel Moyn’s claims that Cultural Marxism is nothing more than a baseless conspiracy theory intertwined with far-right anti-Semitism can only be made if one excludes American history from the end of the American Civil War until members of the Frankfurt school arrived in New York City. Indeed, so pervasive, violent and ruthless was the legal and extra-legal suppression wrought against the members of the above described and similar themed organizations that it proves anyone who uses the term political correctness to refer to the “intolerant left” is themselves guilty of Orwellian irony (Preston).
Bibliography
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