Potential Book Titles on Venezuela’s Intelligence Operations in America

Since I’ve decided to expand the research I’ve been building into a book, I decided to do a creative exercise as to possible titles for it. Which of the below resonates with you the most?

The New Historic Block: How Hugo Chavez Used Oil Exports to Promote His Vision of Marx

Tracing 21st Century Socialism: A Political Revolution in Venezuela Meets an Epistemological Revolution via Data Science

Building The New Historic Block: How Hugo Chavez Exported Socialism to America

Marketing Marx in North America: Venezuela’s Gramscian Plan to Spread Socialism

Kultural Marxism and 21st Century Socialism’s Trajectory from Venezuela to North America

Marching South to North: How Hugo Chavez’s Specter Came to Haunt the United States

Children of the Bolivarian Revolution: Venezuela’s PSUV and the Birth of America’s First United Socialist Party

Towards a Multipolar World Order: How Hugo Chavez’s Multitude of Gramsican Agents Tried to Remake the World

Chavez’s Hopes and Gramsci’s Ghost: The PSUV’s Support of Socialism in America

Officer, Agent, Asset, Stooge: How Venezuela Helped Seed Revolutionary Socialism in the United States

Red Scare 3.0: The Definitive Guide as to the Who, What, Where and Why’s of Venezuela’s Attempted Socialist Infiltration of U.S. Institutions

Poets as Legislators of a New World Order: Anti-Globalization Activism, Solidarity and Why Technics Trumps Specious Ideologies

Ariel Sheen and the TeleSur Archive: How a Determined Activist for Truth Uncovered a Long-Running Violent Anti-Government Activist Network

Precursors to Transatlantic War? How CivOp and MilOp Intersect in Foreign Military Policy

How Guiado’s Superior to Gramsci: Why Pre-Information Age Radicals Add Little to Modern Politics

Illegalism as Pathology: A Longitudal, Iconographic and Textual Based Investigation Into A Foreign Communist Party’s Radicalization Efforts

PSUA: The Story of the Birth of the United Socialist Party of America

Inhibiting Agents of Multi-Polarity: How Political Cadres Funded By Russia and Venezuela Led to Legislation that Finally Addresses New Information and Communication Technologies

Venezuela’s Investments Into American Art and Culture: A Longitudinal Analysis of Systematic Negation of the American State

Building A Dual Power From Venezuela’s Chosen People: Foreign Artists, autistics, transexuals, and political Actors Interactions with American Law Enforcement

The Great Recategorization: How Evidence, Data Science and Rubrics Lead to an Algorithmic Shift in an Understanding of How Political Discourse Operates on Facebook

“Why having a Star by your Name on Social Media in the Colors of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is not the same as the one people were forced to wear in the 1940s, you hack!” and 19 Other Disdainful Phrases of Advice for Kultural Marxism Content Creator.

Tales from TeleSUR: An Open-Source Historical Investigation Into The Roots of Phenomenon of Kultural Marxism

Thinking like the CIA: A Case Study Examining Venezuela’s Intelligence Operations in America

Categorical Faces on Names and Places: A Case Study on the Possibilities Inherent in Modern Data

Project-Mapping After Public Data Source Grabbing: Why the FBI’s Investigation into American Political Group’s Funding by Venezuela is Valid and Should Start Again in Earnest

Why Later Historians Will Say Chelsea and Julian Sitting in a Jail Was “Just The Start”: How Venezuela Sought Revancha on America it’s Trans-Atlantic Allies and Lost

Findings of the Investigation Into Whether of Not Venezuela Had A Measurable Impact On America’s 2016 Elections: An Open-Source Research Project That Makes RussiaGate Seem Cute and Quaint

While Russia’s SciHub Subliminally Spreads Socialism, GrayZone Spreads Stupidity

The above image is proof that Sci-Hub is covertly trying to encourage students, researchers, academics – anyone who uses their services, really – to embrace communism!

Not only does Sci-Hub have a photo of Lenin pinned on their Twitter page, but they ask you to input text like pinkos, which is a reference to someone that is sympathetic to Communism, and clasts, which auto-corrects to class – a key concept in Marxist philosophy in order to download an article.

Considering that Sci-Hub is hosted in Russia, this must be another example of the Russian government attempting – subliminally – to sow discord around the world!

The below screenshot that I took from a National Bolshevik propagandist’s account provides further proof that what I claim is a 100% incontrovertible fact!

Or maybe not.

Now, to be clear, I don’t *really* think what I wrote above is true at all.

I made this false claim both as I think it’s funny, and as it’s a good manner to highlight the absurdity of this video by Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton from The Grayzone about the relationship between video games, the military and American citizen’s attitudes towards Venezuela.

In the video, Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton make the ludicrous claim that videogames have been “weaponized” into “regime change propaganda”.

And how do they operationalize this claim? They don’t!

Rather than make any sort of effort to justify their claim, they merely state that this is true, thus repeating a variation of long-debunked claims such as “heavy metal music leads listeners to Satan worship and human sacrifice” and “playing violent video games makes one violent”.

I’m not going to make the effort to structure a scientific case that proves them wrong, but I did Google some counterfactual indicators that would provide such evidence of the idiocy of their claims at the bottom.

But first, let me quickly share one more amusing aspect of all this – tracing the story’s origin.

*The short path from Venezuela’s state-media company, TeleSUR, to The Grayzone.*

The first iteration of paranoia about the 2013 iteration of Call of Duty originated from TeleSUR, which then gets shared by George-Ciccariello-Maher.

Despite the fact that the game scene is exposed selectively contextualized and edited to fit TeleSUR’s paranoid narrative by Charles Murphy, it still gets translated into English and then spit-polished by GrayZone.

Video Game, Violence, Venezuela and Military Indicators Without Any Real Order Below

It’s not propaganda when someone claims that Venezuela’s been deteriorating such that many people want to leave.

President Donald Trump, Civic Responsibility and Espionage: A Case Study in Fake News and Political Polarization Promoted by Venezuela

“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 to ongoing 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.

An Amicus Curiae for the DOJ: Definitions, Laws and Precedent

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.

TeleSUR – Venezuela’s State Intelligence Outlet – and Their Network of Associates

This is a working directory of people involved Venezuela’s plan for a Gramscian march through the United States news, cultural, educational, and political institutions. It is a work in progress.

Nicolas Maduro Moros

Vladimir Putin

In addition to having a military alliance, Maduro and Putin’s state media companies are also partners.

Diosdado Cabello

Ghazi Atef Nasserdine

Tareck Zaidan El Aissami

Julian Assange

Ernesto Villegas

Patricia Villegas

Orlando Perez

Aran Ahronian

Luis Britto Garcia

Andrés Izarra

TeleSUR’s Media Workers

Greg Wilpert

Pablo Vivanco

Helga Malavé

Che Brandes Tuka

Nicolaj Gericke

Tatiana Rojas

Abby Martin

Laura Flanders

Tariq Ali

Venezuela’s American Political Associates

Cynthia McKinney

Ajamu Baraka

Chokwe Lumumba

Rosa Clemente

2008 Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate and Hop Hope Activist

Brian Becker

Gloria La Riva

Cindy Sheehan

Medea Benjamin

Mike Prysner

Party for Socialism and Liberation member, former Empire Files Producer that encourages soldiers to commit sedition and espionage.

Jose “Chepe” Alcoff

Mark Bray

George Ciccariello-Maher

Sharon Black

Carl Dix

Takiyah Thompson

Gavin Lockard

Devin Cole

Bhakar Sunkara

Jeff Monson

Rebel Diaz

Sarah Sloan

Danny Haiphoing

Sara Flounders

Kali Akuno

Max Blumenthal

Caitlin Johnstone

Ben Norton

Anya Parampil

Adriano Cortez

Alexander Main

Bill Fletcher

Caleb Maupin

Chuck Kaufman

David Sirota

Deborah James

Eric Draitser

Eva Golinger

Greg Grandin

Greg Palast

James Early

John Ackerman

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Malcolm Harris

Mark Weisbrot

Michael Blosser

Randi Nord

Ricardo VazRobert Naiman

Ronald Gochez

Claudia De La Cruz

Edgar Franks Gordon Duff Joe Iosbaker Manolo De Los Santos Omali Yeshitela Vanessa Beeley

Steve Ellner

Vijay Prashad

Dan Cohen

Richard Wolff

Gerald HorneTrevor FitzGibbon

Jordan Flaherty

Gabriel Hetland

Alan Woods

Alex Rubinstein

Angela Davis

Carol Delgado

Chokwe Antar Lumumba

Dakotah Lilly

Dan Kovalik

Don DeBar

Eva Bartlett

Lizzie Phelan Max Rameau

Peter Joseph

Sameera Khan

Adrienne Pine
Alejandro Kirk
Charlene Carruthers

Chelsea Manning

David Swanson

Donald Courter

Kai Newkirk

Kathryn Johnson

Lee Camp

Leen Dweik
Marc Crispin Miller
Micah White

Mnar Muhawesh

Nestor Reverol
Alicia Garza
Opal Tometi
Patrise CullorsRichard Becker
Tom Goldtooth

Venezuela’s Associated News Networks

Paul Jay

Sharmini Peries

Lucy Diavolo

Jason Unruhe

Venezuela’s Celebrity Spokespersons

Danny Glover

Oliver Stone

Rosario Dawson

Boots Riley

Dead Prez

Immortal Technique

Residente/Rene Perez

Tef Poe

Institutions Associated with Venezuela

NYU’s Hemispheric Institute

Venezuela’s Official Ambassadors.

Jorge Arreaza

Carlos Ron

Jesus “Chucho” Garcia

Jorge “HOV” Martin

Venezuela’s International Associates

Hassan Nasrallah

Jesus Santrich

Prabir Purkayastha

Chico Whitaker

Alex Tsipras

Juan Carlos Monedero

Pablo Iglesias

WSWS: Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior, Unethical Journalism, Fundraising Fraud

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.

Andre Damon is committed to propagating a false narrative via his readers at WSWS, but also via his role as the National Secretary (US) of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality.

Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior: Fake Friends

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.

On Social Media’s False Democratic Promise: Virality, Newsworthiness, and Propaganda

Since the widespread adoption of social media by Americans, news outlets have sought to incorporate it into the new media landscape. Whether this takes the form of Tweets of those involved in a specific news story having their comments read on air; the views of established commentators being read; live events on Facebook; Ask Me Anything on Reddit, etc. – social media is seen as providing the means for reporting that is more democratic – not just for allowing more voices to potentially be incorporated into reporting but also as a story’s newsworthiness is increasingly being chosen for packaging by news companies based upon the things that are trending online.

The rationale for this is understandable, in an age wherein people now spend more of the time on their computer, this allows for a means of engaging audiences in a novel fashion and being able to discern what is important to the audience in advance allows news teams to produce content based upon what is cared about. But as an indicator of actual interest in a topic, virality itself is tricky as it can so easily be falsified.

Dianne Feinstein and the Climate Kids

After official treatment by TeleSUR, commentary spreads throughout the Kultural Marxism ecosystem and their sock-puppet army engages with it to create the appearance of virality.

In an article by Mark Heertsgard in The Nation entitled, On March 15, the Climate Kids are Coming you can see an example of how this plays out. Here is an extended quote describing the birth of the Green New Deal:

“Last November, Sunrise activists welcomed the incoming Democratic majority in the US House of Representatives with protest signs demanding that Democrats “Step Up or Step Aside.” Next, they occupied the office of incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to demand her support for a Green New Deal. The sit-in went viral after Ocasio-Cortez, likewise rejecting the wait-your-turn etiquette expected of freshmen members, joined the protesters. The mainstream media picked up the story, and voilà: The Green New Deal was on its way. “

Whatever one’s position on the Green New Deal, knowledge of the connection between it and Venezuela’s Gramscian Project in America as well as the image at the top of this section clearly shows virality not only to be an empty indicator of actual interest in political policy, but also as a means for getting content re-shared on older and more established media platforms with a wider audience. In other words, virality is manufactured by people with access to coordinated inauthentic behavior networks and thus the democratic promise of social media via genuine engagements dies.

Media workers can quickly turn political events into memes in an attempt to control the interpretation of events and give an impression that this interpretation is hegemonic.

The kids in the Sunrise Movement, Bay Area Earth Guardians and Youth vs. Apocalypse may not get this – but those that then booked them on Democracy Now and others do.

Regardless of the perceived imperative of their causes, online networks of digital activists, intellectuals and artists that falsify how many people actually care about something and to what extent they care about it do their own cause a disservice by opening them to criticisms of propagandists and via the normalization of such behavior. With many actors engaged in such same spam-like activities, social media platforms like Facebook become a staging ground for propaganda campaigns – something which is a far cry from the services most users signed up for.

This image was widely shared by Venezuelan and Russian coordinated inauthentic behavior networks on social media.

Another example of this is the news story of how the ‘Iconic’ image of Palestinian Protestor goes viral. The image was turned into memes connecting it with Lady Liberty Leading the People and the number of comments left on news sites with such features was high. Rather than a bunch of posts of pictures of comments by bots, I decided to quote someone often cited by critics of America, Noam Chomsky, who claimed that “Propaganda is to a democracy what a bludgeon is to the totalitarian state.”

Interestingly, this article on Teen Vogue begins with a variation on the virality theme addressed above. By alluding to perceived popularity, this article begins with the sentence: “You may have come across communist memes on social media. The man, the meme, the legend behind this trend is Karl Marx, who developed the theory of communism, which advocates for workers’ control over their labor (instead of their bosses).”

Considering that many if not most of these meme groups were developed with the assistance of Venezuelan Intelligence Officers and that Teen Vogue itself is deeply connected with them – this is yet another example of a false authenticity and virality being the cause to justify it publication.

The last case that I’ll cover here is that of George Ciccariello-Maher, the Drexel Professor who went ‘viral’ for a white Genocide Tweet. While not reported until several months after the events, it was later revealed that this and a number of other of GCM’s Tweets were in fact boosted by sock-puppet accounts connected to Russia – who is Venezuela’s media partner! Considering George Ciccariello-Maher’s long-standing connections to Venezuelan Intelligence what this means for his credibility as an academic, or political commentator is unknown – but given the extensive media coverage he received over it, it’s worth adding this fact to the historical record.

Newsworthiness and Propaganda

These three viral but not necessarily newsworthy narratives all draw on a similar and well-established framing for propaganda – the powerless standing up to the powerful. In the above cases we see a group of non-voting age students and their parents try to pigeonhole a Senator to get her to agree to the Green New Deal; a group of poorly armed activists entering the military zone of a neighboring power to dismantle its borders; a lone professor takes on White Supremacism with a single tweet.

And yet despite addressing vastly different subjects – the environment, Palestine and White Supremacy – all of them are not only connected the same coordinated inauthentic behavior networks but also demonstrate the same anti-systemic political sensibilities. I’m not saying that these narratives should be silenced, but when seeking to understand the current political moment it’s important to recognize that foreign powers see value in creating such political polarization and that this is destructive to the democratic process.

What Preparations for Warfare Looks Like on Facebook

Click on the photo to get a closer view of what I describe below.

The official Russian military is filled with sock puppets accounts. What their relationships are to any actual military or intelligence operations is currently unknown.

Trigger Warning and the Radical Atlanta-Caracas Axis

Before the episode in which Killer Mike illustrates 21st Century Socialism in action, he states his identification with Fela, a musician who is also revered and endorsed by former Bolivarian Republica of Venezuela Ambassador Jesus “Chucho” Garcia.

I can’t think of a better connection to illustrate the validity of my previously written article hypothesizing that Trigger Warning staring Killer Mike was Venezuelan propaganda than cultural activist Jesus “Chucho” Garcia holding up a CD of Fela. I wonder, did they ever meet?

This is a pretty dope album to listen to front to back. I get why they dig em.

Russian AND Venezuelan Bots; and How I’m Ahead of my Time

While I appreciate that Robert Windrem and Ben Popken shared their knowledge that official Russian outlets supported Tulsi Gabbard in February, I called it a few months before guys. And guess what, guys, it’s more than just the official outlets, and it’s also Venezuela.