At about 11:14pm on November 6th, 2012, enough states were called for President Obama that he was declared the winner of the election by NBC News. That was quickly followed up by a similar call on Fox News and finally by CNN. At 11:29pm, Donald Trump blasted out the following defiant tweet:
We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012
Somewhere in Russia, Konstantin Rykov saw Trump’s tweet pop up in his Twitter feed.
Almost exactly four years later, on November 12th, 2016, Mr. Rykov explained what happened next in a pair of Facebook posts. In the first post, Rykov explained how he first made contact with Trump:
[Trump] lifted his plane to the sky and flew between New York and DC, calling the whole world through his twitter — to start a march on Washington!
Without a moment’s thought, I wrote him a reply, which sounded like this in Russian: “I’m ready. What should I do?”
Suddenly! There was a thin squeak of warning in the DM.
It was a message from Donald Trump. More precisely a picture. In the picture he was sitting in the armchair of his jet, smiling cheerfully and showing me the thumb of his right hand.
In the second post, Rykov explained how things went from there:
What was our idea with Donald Trump?
For four years and two days .. it was necessary to get to everyone in the brain and grab all possible means of mass perception of reality. Ensure the victory of Donald in the election of the US President. Then create a political alliance between the United States, France, Russia (and a number of other states) and establish a new world order.
Our idea was insane, but realizable.
In order to understand everything for the beginning, it was necessary to “digitize” all possible types of modern man.
Donald decided to invite for this task — the special scientific department of the “Cambridge University.”
British scientists from Cambridge Analytica suggested making 5,000 existing human psychotypes — the “ideal image” of a possible Trump supporter. Then .. put this image back on all psychotypes and thus pick up a universal key to anyone and everyone.
Then it was only necessary to upload this data to information flows and social networks. And we began to look for those who would have coped with this task better than others.
At the very beginning of the brave and romantic [story] was not very much. A pair of hacker groups, civil journalists from WikiLeaks and political strategist Mikhail Kovalev.
The next step was to develop a system for transferring tasks and information, so that no intelligence and NSA could burn it.
Keep in mind that this was all written just four days after Trump was elected. It was before people started asking questions about Cambridge Analytica or targeted social media ads. Mr. Rykov might have been boasting as he spiked the football in the end zone, perhaps even elevating or exaggerating his role. What he didn’t think at that point, however, is that he had any reason to hide what he’d done.
You probably want to know who this guy is, and that’s understandable. If he’s just some dude on the internet, then his claims are of some interest but maybe hard to gauge as to their importance.
Let’s flash-forward to October 2015, just after the very first debate between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. In a piece David Drucker wrote for the conservative Washington Examiner called Putin Loves Donald Trump, Mr. Rykov plays a lead role:
Kremlin mouthpiece Konstantin Rykov said Wednesday in a Twitter post that Trump won the first Democratic presidential debate, held Tuesday in Las Vegas. In that tweet, Rykov linked to a Russian language, pro-Trump website with a Russian domain, www.Trump2016.ru, that he is likely behind. Until a few weeks ago, Rykov’s Twitter home page featured Trump and his 2016 campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
Western sources who monitor Russian politics told the Washington Examiner that Rykov is a propagandist arm of the Putin government machine. “Rykov is considered to be one of the leading pro-Kremlin bloggers in Russia,” said Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia under President Obama who is now a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution think tank. “As you can see from his Twitter feed, he is very active. And he loves Trump.”
One source told Drucker that Rykov was a “chief voice and troll for the Kremlin on Twitter.” His Wikipedia page describes him as “one of the first professional Russian Internet producers” who began working in 2002 as the “head of the Internet department of the First Channel of the state television.” In addition to that, he actually served in the Duma, Russia’s parliament, as a member of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia political party. But this is what most concerns me:
Rykov has created a series of websites, similar to Trump2016.ru, or used his Twitter page to post opinions on international politics. He often promotes rightwing political figures; for instance, he has previous promoted the National Front, a French nationalist political party, and its leaders, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and his daughter, Marine Le Pen. Rykov also uses events to draw favorable comparisons to Kremlin policy, such as likening Scotland’s independence movement to Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.
The international political figures that Rykov plays up, said the source, “tend to express views that are more friendly to the Kremlin,” at least as far as Moscow is concerned. These figures also tend to be “supportive of engagement” with Russia, if not outright apologists for what others describe as Putin’s aggressive foreign policy and repressive measures at home.
I recommend approaching the work of Nafeez Ahmed with some skepticism, but I do have to give him credit for the comprehensiveness with which his crowdsourced INSURGE Intelligence group investigated Vladimir Putin’s ties to Europe’s far-right and neo-nazi political parties. There’s an absolute correspondence between those who Putin favors (and Mr. Rykov promotes) and the parties and figures that got chummy with the Trump campaign. In addition to Marine Le Pen who showed up at Trump Tower in January to raise money with fascist fixer George “Guido” Lombardi, there’s Nigel Farage of Britain’s UKIP party, who dined with Steve Bannon in the White House in late February before meeting in early March with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. There’s Viktor Orbán in Hungary who was paid special attention during the campaign by Trump associates Carter Page and J.D. Gordon. There’s the Austrian Freedom Party that boasted of meeting with Michael Flynn. This excerpt was published on December 20th, 2016:
On Monday, the leaders of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party traveled to Moscow and signed a “working agreement” with Russia’s ruling United Russia party. In announcing the pact, Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache mentioned that he also met with retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s designated national security adviser, in Trump Tower a few weeks ago. “Internationally, the Freedom Party continues to gain in influence,” he wrote. Norbert Hofer, the Freedom Party candidate who recently lost his bid for Austria’s presidency, traveled to Moscow with Strache.
The Freedom Party, founded by ex-Nazis in the 1950s, is one of several far-right, anti-immigrant parties gaining popularity throughout Europe. After signing the cooperative agreement, Strache offered to act as “a neutral and reliable intermediary and partner” between the incoming Trump administration and the Kremlin.
I recently had a commenter at my blog scoff at the idea that Vladimir Putin would want to promote Naziism in Europe after all that Russian suffered from the fascists in the 20th Century. It may seen counterintuitive, but the facts are indisputable. Putin has been buddying up to Europe’s far right, loaning them money, hacking their political opponents, providing clandestine assistance of all kinds, and promoting them quite openly in Russia media. Russia encouraged the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom, and they obviously sided with Trump.
The far right in Europe is uncontroversially working hand in glove with Russian intelligence, so it’s highly relevant that the far right in Europe has increasingly close ties to the far right in the United States. A prime example of this is Frank Gaffney who served as the chief foreign policy adviser to Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign and then went on to enthusiastically stump for Trump.
Konstantin Rykov has been a key player in all of this, so when he says that he partnered with Trump beginning back on election night in 2012 and that together they came up with a plan to pay Cambridge Analytica to create “5,000 existing human psychotypes — the ‘ideal image’ of a possible Trump supporter and then “put this image back on all psychotypes and thus pick up a universal key to anyone and everyone,” I think we ought to take it seriously.
When Rykov made these statements, we didn’t know how Cambridge Analytica had been utilized or how they targeted users on Facebook in key districts in swing states in order to maximize Trump’s support. In retrospect, what Rykov was saying now makes a lot of sense and fits in with what we know.
Even Fox News recently reported that Cambridge Analytica sought to work with WikiLeaks in obtaining and releasing illegally hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s server. In Rykov’s telling, the initial conspiracy also involved “a pair of hacker groups” (presumably Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear) and a political strategist named Mikhail Kovalev. I can’t find much online about this Mr. Kovalev except a little fragment from a paywalled January Economist article about Moscow power players toasting President Trump’s inauguration: “We hope that Marine Le Pen will win next,” said Mikhail Kovalev, one of the party’s organisers, sporting a Trump-Pence baseball cap.
What it looks like to me is that on November 12th, 2016, Konstantin Rykov posted pretty close to a full confession in Facebook. We’ve spent over a year since then trying to piece together what happened, but there’s a strong sense in which he already told us.
Could he possibly have made such boasts without having any knowledge of what would soon be divulged or discovered about Russian hacking and collusion between Wikileaks and Cambridge Analytica or the work that was done by Cambridge Analytica and how it was utilized on social media?
Of course not. His boasts were rooted in facts and inside knowledge.
Trump is no different from far right European stooges like Viktor Orbán and Nigel Farage. They’re all in league together and we now have a nice roadmap for laying out the entire conspiracy.
“I recently had a commenter at my blog scoff at the idea that Vladimir Putin would want to promote Naziism in Europe after all that Russian suffered from the fascists in the 20th Century. It may seen counterintuitive, but the facts are indisputable.”
I am sure Mr. Molotov and Mr. Ribbentrop would back you up on your assertion if they were still around.
The thing about that Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact signed, August of 1939 is that part of the agreement included the shipping of tons and tons of raw iron ore and coal from the Russian Ural region to the German war machine. The Soviets dutifully shipped their coal and ore by train right up until the day before Operation Barbarossa in late June, 1941. In the months leading up to Barbarossa the Soviet propaganda machine even made films with content such as, “The Fascists are now are friends.” They fell for the bogus mutual friendship facade hook, line, and sinker. I think what we’re seeing now is a full on rekindling of Russia’s own brand of fascism.
As I’ve said before, if Brodie hadn’t been such a longtime commenter, I’d think he was a Russian troll. The absurdity of that comment with respect to destabilizing the region is especially ridiculous, given that Putin’s intervention and propping up of Assad is one of the most destabilizing events of the 21st century. If Assad hadn’t turned his guns on the people, there wouldn’t be a refugee crisis — or rather, it wouldn’t be as extreme, given people would still be fleeing warlords vying for control of territory.
The US and Europe aren’t innocent here of course. Indeed, the government of Italy is actively subsidizing the Libyan slave trade because they don’t want to meet their treaty obligations with respect to refugees.
But the refusal to see this nuance and desire to take the Russian governments’ talking points at face value? Please.
I doubt Putin wants to promote naziism, but he does want very much to destabilize democracies everywhere. The Eurozone immigration policies play to that fear and to the right wing groups in Europe. Trump made the same play here with banning Muslims and deporting Mexicans, and building the wall.
Thank you for this post. It confirms in spades that Trump is a Russian fascist stooge, and we have plenty of other evidence that he is easily blackmailed by Russian kompromat.
He needs to go down, hard, and truly spend the rest of his life in prison.
The Cambridge Analytica material is really the clincher. That’s extraordinary.
Yes, I agree. Thanks for bringing this to us, BooMan. It’s remarkable that this hadn’t been discussed before.
I wonder how many more evidences of this sort are being worked from by Mueller’s team.
If it has Mercer’s name attached to it, it can’t be anything good.
I was going to mention this. Robert Mercer is part-owner of Cambridge Analytica.
“Wikileaks editor Julian Assange told The Associated Press last week that Wikileaks received a “request for information” from Cambridge Analytica prior to the election.
“Assange would not specify the request, which he said was rejected, but The Daily Beast reported that the head of Cambridge Analytica reached out to Assange during the presidential campaign about the possible release of 33,000 of Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.”
https:/www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2017/11/02/trump-backer-robert-mercer-leaving-hedge-fu
nd-selling-stake-breitbart/826450001
For those who may not know, Mercer played a huge behind-the-scenes role in Trump’s rise to the presidency.
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/mercers/
Cambridge Analytica is said to have helped with the Brexit vote, then here in the US in 2014 and 2016. Here is a mildly disconcerting quote from Wikipedia:
That complaint about calling Putin a “Nazi” is a bit of a misdirection: of course Putin doesn’t subscribe to an ideology founded on the idea of Germans as a “master race”. More useful to map the Russian Federation government against one of the classic definitions of fascism in general, such as Lawrence Briit’s 14 Characteristics of Fasicsm. It’s pretty startling how tight the fit is.
It is also “startling” how close a fit those 14 characteristics are to the U.S., yastreblyansky. And not just recently…over the past 50+ years…since the JFK/RFK/MLK Jr. assassination years.
Particularly these:
I can look out of my Bronx window and see four flags without searching. Watched any mass media sports events recently? Seen what has happened to the football players who had the temerity to publicly protest the state of this country by taking a knee during the
Star Mangled…errr, ahhh, I meant Star Spangled…Banner festivities?C’mon…were Fallujah and Abu Ghraib so long ago? Drone strikes on non-combatants during our lovely “Peace President” years? The U.S. has the single highest percentage of it citizens in prison of any country on earth.
I repeat:” racial , ethnic or religious minorities.”
Do the math.
The U.S. spends more on its military than the next eight countries combined.
U.S.-$611 billion (And that’s not counting the dark money that goes to agencies like the CIA…multiple billions and billions more. Bet on it.)
The next eight countries? China, Russia, Saudi Arabia (!!!), India, France, the U.K., Japan and Germany? $595 billion.
Witness the…now almost three years old…absolutely anti-Trump media barrage of the major mass media. Witness the buildup to the Shock and Awe attack on Iraq under Bush II. Do you think that the anti-Trump thing is because he’s such a bad man??? I call bullshit. Of course he is, but if he was playing ball with the establishment instead of trying to essentially take over, they’d be praising him to the skies. Bet on that as well.
I could go on, but I’ll just include the relevant titles of Briit’s 14 Characteristics of Fasicsm. Anyone wth half a brain could provide examples of these points in U.S. policy over the past 50 years or so.
The only one of that I leave out from Briit’s list is “Rampant Sexism.” Why? As has been obvious in the headlines of recent months, there is most certainly a culture of rampant sexism in place in the U.S., but it is more subtly promulgated than in other…call them “Neofascist” for want of a better word…major powers like Russia. Less mainstream sexual choices are actually being supported by the centrist controllers and their media. In part this is due to political necessities…votes count here more than they do in more rigidly controlled systems…but also (as I have said elsewhere on this site) I think that birth control and homosexuality are gradually being recognized by the controllers as necessary parts of a depopulation movement. Too many people, not enough earth. Not enough work either, mostly due to the tech revolution combined with multinational corporations choosing to have their manufacturing done as cheaply as possible, thus sending work out the U.S. to more poverty-stricken areas of the world. Ross Perot quite accurately predicted what was about to happen during his 1992 debates with the two early neocentrists Bush I and Clinton I. (From the NY Times coverage of the 1992 presidential debates):
He was right on the money except for the “12 to 15 years” thing. It’s taking longer, but we are well on our way to wage parity with the poorer countries of the world.
Well on our way.
Look around.
AG
Now a stand-alone post:
Is the U.S. A Fascist Country? It Fits Lawrence Britt’s 14 Characteristics of Fasicsm Quite Well.
AG.
P.S. Sorry for the misspelling of Britt’s name above. Fixed in the new post.
I won’t deny all those ideas have been out there and many put into practice in various ways in US for decades. The sexism is huge in state governments too with anti-abortrion and anti-gay policy, as is alliance with religion. But it’s diffuse and in most areas very ineffective: especially in control of media, scapegoating opposition (hardly any true political prisoners), mobilizing corporations, which in US act on their own and disregard government altogether. The face of fascism in the US is the elderly couch potato who lives in the White House and has no clue how to exercise power or even how to acquire information about anything and his party which has been unable to pass any legislation in spite of its majorities (I know you think of Democrats as fascistic as well, but they’re not effective either in any case).
In Russia in contrast fascism has been focused for 18 years in a single all-powerful leader figure running a single political party, making his own relationships with Orthodox hierarchy, all the country’s billionaires who are entirely dependent on him and will be very severely punished if they step out of line, military, nationalist-mystical philosophers like Dugin, and so on, and really murderous against press, opposition figures, ethnic-religious minorities of North Caucasus region. It’s the most effective fascism since Franco died.
Economically, fascism is always on Perot’s side, protectionist and keeping unemployment very low, with fake jobs if necessary. Hitler didn’t export factory jobs to Poland. The economics Perot was criticizing, also bad no doubt, is neoliberal, allowing corporations to be more powerful than government.
You write:
I do not know if you are saying that Perot was a fascist, yastreblyansky…that’s how it reads…but this is a two-way street. Just because one believes in taking care of business at home rather than profiteering by exporting jobs does not make one a “fascist.”
Was FDR a fascist? He created jobs…jobs that were both important to the survival of the country and its infrastructure, and also important to its economic position…and in my opinion saved this country from total collapse by doing so.
AG
No, I don’t think everybody who supports high tariffs is a fascist. Moreover I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them in their place; protectionism was great for the US in the 19th century, not so much after the economy matured. You’re wrong about FDR, though, who campaigned against Smoot-Hawley and worked very hard and successfully for liberalized trade.
And the same goes for creating jobs: not just for fascists. New Deal job creation (WPA, CCC, etc.) was more valuable to society than Mussolini’s blackshirts and police spies though.
First, let’s note that Arthur will do anything to avoid talking about what Trump and the Russians did. That said…
“… I think that birth control and homosexuality are gradually being recognized by the controllers as necessary parts of a depopulation movement.”
What’s that now? Those Americans who fought successfully to win these vital civil rights were doing what the “controllers” want?
History, and plain common sense, refute this claim. But then we remember that a belligerent Ron Paul evangelist is the one bringing us this bizarre and regressive HOT TAKE.
A look at Ron Paul’s record finds him in association with a few of the 14 fascistic characterizations listed. His aggressive desire to suppress Labor power, for one of many examples.
You write:
And which of these 14 characteristics are parr and parcel of the neocentrist Democratic Party’s plainly evidenced efforts by the Clinton/Obama camps over 25+ years?
Let me count the ways.
You also write:
Yes, I believe that they would not have won otherwise. I mean…think on it. If the controllers wanted the financial system of this country well and fairly controlled, if they wanted the leak of hundreds of billions of dollar’s worth of dark money that disappears yearly through the (purposely legislated and maintained) holes in the taxation system closed…things for which equally “courageous” people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been fighting their entire lives…then they would indeed be closed.
But they are not, nor will they be until the entire fraudulent bubble bursts.
Nothing happens in this country without an OK from its owners.
Nothing.
They manufacture consent the same way they manufacture…and sell…bad food, useless drugs and shit culture.
By fiat.
Deal with it.
AG
LOL
Putin is said to follow Ivan Ilyin, who was an advocate of fascism and in particular in opposition to democracy. See NY Times article on Sept 16, 2016.
Times article
I mostly agree with you–up until now. The nature of the fascist parties that United Russia is allying with and the initial character of Trumpisms strategy with Bannon point to an ethnic grievance component that diverts party base sentiment from what corporations are doing with their life chances. For Russia, that takes the form of discrimination against minorities, suppression of non-Russia states and regions, and increasing ambivalence about their relation with China and the -stans. Ethnic Russians are considered the “real Russians” just like white Americans are considered the “real Americans” by Trump’s base.
Boo you are doing an excellent job laying all this out for us. You ought to write a book. I would not necessarily wait until Trump does a perp walk, there’s enough of the story out there already and you have led the charge, or are in the front ranks at least.
Great.
Now, who gets to
bell the cattell The Nation?What strikes me about the pre-election coverage you cite is how out of the Democratic and progressive news stream it was, even after there were pre-election hints of Russian involvement. Facts that could have been salient through the mainstream news media also weren’t. And despite the vague allegations, the intelligence agencies never came upon this nor did the Clinton campaign, even after the election. Or neither saw fit to make public what they new because of concerns about credibility as a result of their severe departure from US political norms. That provides the feeling of being blindsided, which was the intent of entire information warfare.
Where we must be careful thinking going forward is separating reasonable from aims by right-wing governments, which now de facto have the US as an ally so long as Trump is in office and Trumpism rules the Republican Congress. Reasonable aims include security of national borders against military and economic threat. Unreasonable aims include corporate fascism, cover for violation of human rights, political suppression of labor, ethnic suppressionn of nationals and refugees, and increasing arms race. What is common among these right-wing parties is the white supremacy inherent in all of their ethnic policies regarding refugees.
All of that together makes me think that the target of this right-wing alliance is nominally communist China and its Eurasian initiative although most of the nations are exploring the Belt-Road Initiative with China (no doubt including the Trump administration, bluster notwithstanding. And the Trump move will eventually be to at the appropriate moment of Western anxiety suggest that NATO ask Russia again to join as they did in that brief moment of euphoria after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Watch this changing global situation with the US less active and more “America First” to amount to a restructuring of the world order to NATO, Russia, China, India system with the Arab countries sorting themselves out internally and Africa being colonized by Chinese infrastructure development and whatever Western private investment can be raised by the likes of the Clinton Foundation and Bill Gates. It would be wise for some progressive Democrat with some foreign policy chops to outline how that looks after the Trump realignment because we might have a situation in which the largest and most expensive military in the world has no enemies, the largest stock of weapons of mass destruction, and the largest research efforts into mobilizing technology for war. And the least effectiveness because of the corruption in the appropriations and procurement activities.
Having a new take on foreign policy is only one part of the necessary political realignment that is coming after Trump finishes whatever wrecking his term (however long) allows him. And it will take rapid education of voters in the new world situation to avoid the Trumpist foreign policy entrenching itself. And there is only the time between Trump’s leaving office and a different Congress to build popular support for something besides endless war.
All of this slam-dunk information does any good only is Mueller can bring it to bear in his indictments and prosecution. I suspect that most of the witnesses and evidence being in Russia can be a problem. And I am assuming that Mueller is capable of putting on a persuasive argument for the faithfulness to the law and constitution by juror and expaning why jury nullification is a bad thing without ever mentioning jury nullification.
I might be mistaken, but I believe that Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear are US code names for those hypothesized attackers based on their behavior and the form of their attack and subsequent humint follow up. The “Bear” designation alleges Russian national government affiliation as surely in reference to aircraft it refers only to the fact that it is a specific bomber. Hopefully by now the US intelligence community can make an assignment of which actual organizations in the Russian cyberwarfare structure were involved.
The public is beginning to get sufficient information now to provide what they did not have in December and January — a narrative of the motive, means, and events (opportunities taken) that allowed for Russian help to the Trump election victory.
The critical next point is an assessment of how many votes Russian activities delivered that would not have been there without their intervention. If we can do that for US subverting of other countries, surely we can do that when our own has been subverted. Having that capability is why taxpayers shell out $60 billion a year.