“We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within….” — Nikita Khrushchev, 1956
This is a tangled and thorny path we’re about to mosey down, but stay with me. It will all make sense as you begin to connect the dots.
Our starting point is with Dirty Trickster Roger Stone, who has been selling his country out for a very long time. Stone is fascinated by elections and election integrity and that’s why he has gone out of his way to see how the system can be broken and then to do just that.
Let’s start out in present day and work our way back. Here is Roger Stone, who is an official part of Russian propaganda nowadays, as the Ukraine War goes into his second month.
The Kremlin now using Roger Stone in its official propaganda. If you’re not familiar with Stone, he’s Trump advisor who had dinner with Nigel Farage in July 2016 when he was trying to find go-between with Assange in London to coordinate release of Hillary’s Russian-hacked emails pic.twitter.com/qXtKmzGoVj
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) March 23, 2022
The text above is under Stone’s picture, if you click on the tweet.
This is what Stone is doing in real time, now that’s he’s pardoned and out of prison. He hasn’t missed a beat in getting involved spreading misinformation about Ukraine into Russia.
The Ukraine/Russian debacle has been going on for quite some time. It isn’t about the war that just broke out February 24. There has been a real skirmish going on in Ukraine for quite some time and this British reporter suggests that in the future this time may be looked back upon as the Great Information War. Last month’s invasion of Ukraine is just one more part of a greater war which has been raging for some time and which Roger Stone has been a part of, not to mention his buddy and fellow Trump pardonee, Paul Manafort.
Just by the by, Manafort attempted to escape to Dubai today but was taken off a plane at Miami International with a rejected passport. Tuck that fact away because when one of these clowns runs, it’s always the harbinger of a greater event to come. You remember when Parnas and Furman did exactly the same thing?
Back to the Great Information War.
It was Putin's fury at the removal of President Yankovych in Feb 2014 that kicked everything off. Information operations were first crucial step in invasion of Crimea & Donbass. A deliberate attempt to warp reality to confuse both Ukrainians & the world.
2/— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) February 27, 2022
But it wasn't just Ukraine. We now know Russia began another offensive in Feb 2014. Against the West. Specifically, but not exclusively, America. How do we know this? Because the FBI conducted a forensic, multi-year investigation. That almost no-one paid any attention to.
4/— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) February 27, 2022
And just *one* of the ways Russia attacked 2016 US election was via the tech platforms. Especially: Facebook. This was a military technique, it pioneered in Ukraine in 2014. By 2016, it refined, iterated & supersized these. Most brilliantly of all, they were entirely invisible
6/— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) February 27, 2022
But also it *was* Russia. That's what the Mueller Report proves. And, again, Ukraine is at centre of it all.(Read @profshaw's thread here. Note walk-on role for Arron Banks's business partner & his friend the Russian spy)
8/https://t.co/ycjRcCy2wh— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) February 27, 2022
We failed to acknowledge Russia had staged a military attack on the West. We called it "meddling". We used words like "interference". It wasn't. It was warfare. We've been under military attack for eight years now.
10/— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) February 27, 2022
Let us pause for just a moment and digest this. Cadwalladr is calling the 2016 election interference warfare. That comment was made at the time, that Russia was engaging in an act of war against the United States, but it was considered too outre, too radical a notion to come into widespread acceptance.
Therefore, that way of looking into the 2016 interference was reduced to “meddling” and “interference” which indeed have an entirely different connotation than “war.” We all live lives filled with meddling and interference, from the nosy neighbor to the guy cutting us off in traffic to the difficult co-worker, but we don’t call it war, right? That’s because it’s not. But what happened in this country during the 2016 election was an act of war and it should be called just that. Words have power and we did ourselves no favor by underplaying the importance of Russian interference in 2016 as anything other than an act of war.
At this point, what was in motion in 2016, and which started in 2014, is still in motion and maybe now that Ukraine is actually in a physical hot war and the lies and disinformation are pouring out of there and going global, maybe, finally, the Great Information War will be acknowledged. Because that is the other war going on in Europe now, the Ukraine War and the Disinformation war. If we had called it what it was in 2016 we would not be dealing with it now.
We fell for it. We said it was "just ads" that "don't work anyhow". And "a bot didn't tell me to vote". Facebook is still an open threat surface. Exploited by authoritarians from Philippines to India to Brazil to Hungary. It's maybe not a world war. But the world is at war.
12/— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) February 27, 2022
(Not that it mattered.) The US media & therefore public failed to understand the real lessons of Mueller Report. And in the UK? We didn't even bother trying. We allowed Johnson's govt to sweep 2016 under the carpet. Nigel Farage. Arron Banks. Facebook. Russia. The lot.
14/— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) February 27, 2022
And this new front, the invasion of Ukraine, is not just about Ukraine. We are part of the plan. We have always been part of the plan. And Ukraine is not just fighting for Ukraine but for the rest of us too.
16/— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) February 27, 2022
Wow. Take another pause there to digest. The issue with Ukraine is not just a humanitarian one, it is not just about the political global reality of whether an autocracy will swallow up a functioning neighboring democracy at will. It is about Truth v. Lies. And that is of vast human import to everyone on this planet. That puts the Ukraine War in a very different context.
If it helps, the penny dropped for me with Skripal. Planned by the GRU – Russia's military intelligence. As was the weaponised hack-&-leak of Hillary's emails. Military doctrine carried out by military officials in military operations. Just like the one now in Ukraine.
18/— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) February 27, 2022
Now we get back to Roger Stone, the new Kremlin Poster child and supposed informed person on What’s Really Going On In Ukraine. Over the years Stone has shown a propensity for the following: 1) Wage a war on truth; 2) Undermine and destroy faith in American elections; not coincidentally because to do both of those is to arrive at the fulfillment of what Nikita Khrushchev promised long ago in 1956, the taking over of the United States without firing a shot. No Red Dawn here. Don’t need it. We’ve got the Roger Stones of the world selling us out.
Roger Stone is a Republican “fixer” and he fixed the 2000 election, although he was around long long before that. This is Richard Nixon’s boy, Tricky Dick taught him whatever Roy Cohn didn’t.
This article is by Jennifer Cohn, an attorney and election integrity advocate. It was written December 23, 2021. This is one of those articles that you need to read in full because it is chock full of chunks of information, such as this.
Stone had been mentored by Roy Cohn, a New York attorney and infamous political hit man with ties to the mafia who “has been described by people who knew him as ‘a snake,’ ‘a scoundrel’ and ‘a new strain of son of a bitch,’” as reported by Politico.
Stone hooked up with George W. Bush after he had unsuccessfully mounted a campaign for Donald Trump to run on the Reform Party ticket. Many of the problems that we saw hit us in the face in 2016, and again in 2020 are still with us in 2022 and come out of that seminal election of 2000.
We would not be in the mess that we are climate wise had Al Gore been elected. And we would not be so willing to believe hooey about stolen elections, had not the great drama in Florida been staged in 2000. Roger Stone was key to that. Remember the “Brooks Brothers Riot?”
The 2000 presidential election was a “watershed moment” for U.S. elections and “harbinger of things to come,” as Jonathan Simon, a seasoned election-security advocate and author, remarked when I interviewed him last year. The election, he explained, was marred by “counting issues with [voting machine] memory cards,” a thwarted manual recount, and “ massive purging of voters who were absolutely entitled to vote.” All of these issues favored the GOP, but unscrupulous Republican “fixers,” including Roger Stone, deflected by falsely accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election. In the years since, these same fixers have emerged again and again to deceive voters with faulty narratives that have helped empower right wing extremists, including the Religious Right.
During the 2000 general election, then Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat and environmentalist, ran against former Texas Governor George W. Bush, an oilman and self-proclaimed evangelical Christian. Bush had won the Republican presidential nomination after an unusually brutal primary against Arizona Senator John McCain, a decorated war hero. During the primary, as reported in the Atlantic, fliers, emails, and push polls had falsely claimed that McCain was the father of an “illegitimate” African-American child (a defamatory reference to his adopted daughter from Bangladesh) and that he was mentally unstable due to his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. McCain’s staffers and daughter accused Bush’s campaign manager, Karl Rove, of orchestrating the smears.
Rove denied having done so, but this was the sort of tactic for which he was already infamous. In 1994, a Republican judicial candidate from Alabama named Harold See had hired Rove to run his campaign against an incumbent Democratic judge named Mark Kennedy. A former Rove staffer later acknowledged that Rove’s team had spread a false rumor that Kennedy was a gay pedophile. “It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information,” the staffer told journalist Joshua Green of the Atlantic. “The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that’s one of the ways that Karl got the information out — he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out.”
So as you see the dishing up of dirt by the GOP is nothing new. It’s old as the hills and twice as dusty. And Roger Stone has done very well for himself in Republican politics for a very long time. He’s profited from being a Dirty Trickster and he intends to do more right now with respect to the Ukraine War and Great Information War.
Bush rewarded Stone for his campaign “assistance” during the 2000 election by appointing him to the Department of Interior transition working group. According to the Village Voice, this “unannounced perch” allowed Stone to “market himself to [native American] tribes and developers from Louisiana to California, earning fat fees and contingent percentages of future casino revenue. Just two of the five deals examined by the Voice [were] projected to pay him at least $8 million, and perhaps as much as $13 million.”
Stone later also “assisted” Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. It was Stone who reportedly persuaded Trump to bring Stone’s pal (and former partner) Paul Manafort into the 2016 campaign. Likewise, it was Stone who reportedly claimed to have communicated with Wikileaks in the summer of 2016, before Wikileaks released emails that Russia had hacked from John Podesta (Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair), a sort of electronic version of the theft in the Nixon Watergate scandal.
Stone also accused the RNC of attempting to steal the 2016 nomination from Trump (in favor of Ted Cruz), the Democrats of attempting to steal the 2016 general election from Trump, and anyone and everyone of attempting to steal the 2020 presidential election from Trump. It was Stone who coined the phrase “Stop the Steal” in 2016.
Stone deployed the “Stop the Steal” slogan again during the Florida recount in 2018 and yet again in 2020.
In 2016, Stone began using a new organization called the Proud Boys as his personal security force. The organization had been founded the same year during the 2016 campaign season. Members of the Proud Boys breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 after the “Stop the Steal” rally protesting Biden’s defeat of Trump. Stone is reportedly close with Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio. Another Proud Boys member recently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win. He has reportedly agreed to cooperate with the government’s investigation.
On the morning of January 6, Stone was photographed flanked by members of another organization, the Oathkeepers, whose members breached the Capitol later that day using military style formations called stacks.
This is but a sampling of where Roger Stone has been and what he has done over the years.
The bottom line is that the Republican party has been getting dirtier and dirtier over the years and they finally reached a climax of both corruption and absurdity when they made Donald Trump their standard bearer.
Traditional conservative values have been in a state of deep erosion for some time. Along with the people eroding those values are characters like Roger Stone, who are have no problem disguising the truth and promulgating lies instead. As a matter of fact, I think they rather enjoy it. It appeals to their sense of perversity and their particular code of ethics, which is why earn something if you can possibly steal it.
The big question now is whether the GOP can right the ship and return to some semblance of normalcy or whether it is finished as a major political party and the fringe crazies in the group will now take over the helm. We won’t have to wait too long for the answers.
[A tip of the hat to fellow Zoomer Linda Mendoza who sent me the picture of Roger Stone with Russian subtitles.)
I’ll bet his hero, tricky dick, is spinning in his grave.