Media Archives - Doctor Paradox

Capitol Riots: The President led a terrorist attack on Congress

January 10, 2021January 10, 2021 doctor paradox

January 6: A Day that will live in ignominy. The day Capitol riots broke out when an angry mob, following instructions from Donald Trump, stormed the halls of Congress and came within minutes of a potential hostage situation or worse: a massacre.

I’m still processing the events of Wednesday, as are many. Even though I fully anticipated something horrifying given the utter obviousness of the confrontation brewing, I did not have a particular picture in mind of what that thing was going to be.

Despite having steeled myself for the past 4+ years, I wept many times at some of the imagery and video footage. The defilement of the people’s halls by a violent armed mob who took selfies with Capitol Police was just not something I could have conceived of.

There must be accountability

This was one of the darkest days of our nation. Even during the Civil War the Confederates never stormed the US Capitol, so to see the Confederate flag waving in Congress was a desecration. It twisted me up to have such a raw display of America’s deepest gash of white supremacist history taken symbolically and literally to the nation’s capital.

This event was broadcast around the world, to our allies and to our enemies. We received rebukes from Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran. We — the supposed bastion of democracy. The country that lectures other nations around the world on how to do democracy better. We have been humiliated for the entire planet to see.

We need answers about what happened here. The people deserve to know who planned this, who helped this along, who looked the other away, and perhaps most importantly: who still agrees with it (Hawley and Cruz, for one — they must go).

We must stop fascism in America

The rot of fascism has been allowed to spread to the point where a violent mob of white supremacists, QAnon conspiracy nuts, MAGA faithful and a demon’s host of all stripes came within minutes of taking hostages inside the chambers of Congress. Five people lost their lives and already are being made into martyrs.

This did not begin with Trump, but he certainly amplified the signal at a much more psychotic rate than under previous administrations, certainly of my lifetime. We are now at a dangerous precipice: in a time of staggering wealth inequality, a once in a century health crisis largely being ignored by the right wing, deeply bitter partisanship played out over decades, the creep of authoritarianism around the world — and now at home.

Wednesday’s Capitol Riots did essentially mark the “crossing of the Rubicon” that the Trump cult begged him to do — it was a coming-out day for fascism. It was the President of the United States instructing an armed mob to walk up to the Capitol where lawmakers were certifying the election for the guy who won it, and telling them to “take our country back” and give it to him — by force if necessary. Which, of course, was necessary.

That is the Rubicon — the Rubicon is the willingness to use political violence when you have exhausted all other legal, shady, illegal, and hideously criminal means. That is the fascist twist. If we do not react now; if we do not censure, remove, and allow justice to hold these individuals accountable — both inside and outside of the government — they will take it as permission to try again and again until we deal with this.

We must hold the insurrectionists accountable — if we are to keep this republic.

Sources and Media Outlets

I try to be choosy about my news, yet also read widely. I make it a habit to routinely consult sources outside the US, and to mix up the types of media ownership to avoid a monolithic class view.

Other habits: try to corroborate stories amongst multiple publications; evaluate the credibility of authors and references; read source material; do my own calculations; consult public data when available; go back further into history to understand the trajectory of preceding events; keep listening for new information on the subject. Adjust my views based on new incoming information, if warranted.

Having worked in media for most of my career, I have a lot of practice evaluating the quality and veracity of reporting. Cross-referencing comes second nature. I’ve studied the media industry as a professional imperative and understand a bit about its ownership structures and its history, both technical and economic. As a political philosophy buff, I’m aware of the great importance of a free press to our democratic republic.

Name	Country	Funding	Year founded	Age	Link
The Guardian	UK	Private	1821	200	https://www.theguardian.com/
The Economist	UK	Private	1843	178	https://www.economist.com/
Scientific American	US	Private	1845	176	https://www.nature.com/
Associated Press	US	Nonprofit	1846	175	https://apnews.com/
The New York Times	US	Private	1851	170	https://www.nytimes.com/
Reuters	US	Private	1851	170	https://www.reuters.com/
The Daily Telegraph	UK	Private	1855	166	https://www.telegraph.co.uk/
The Atlantic	US	Private	1857	164	https://www.theatlantic.com/
Nature	US	Private	1869	152	https://www.nature.com/
The Washington Post	US	Private	1877	144	https://www.washingtonpost.com/
LA Times	US	Private	1881	140	https://www.latimes.com/
Financial Times	UK	Private	1888	133	https://www.ft.com/
The New Republic	US	Private	1914	107	https://newrepublic.com/
BBC	UK	Public	1922	99	https://www.bbc.com/news
Time	US	Private	1923	98	https://time.com/
The New Yorker	US	Private	1925	96	https://www.newyorker.com/
CBC	Canada	Public	1936	85	https://www.cbc.ca/news/world
Spiegel	EU	Private	1947	74	https://www.spiegel.de/international/
Radio Free Europe	EU	Public	1949	72	https://www.rferl.org/
New Scientist	UK	Private	1956	65	https://www.newscientist.com/
Rolling Stone	US	Private	1967	54	https://www.gregpalast.com/
PBS	US	Public	1969	52	https://www.pbs.org/
Foreign Policy	US	Private	1970	51	https://www.euronews.com/
NPR	US	Public	1970	51	https://www.npr.org/
C-SPAN	US	Public	1979	42	https://www.c-span.org/
CNN	US	Private	1980	41	https://www.cnn.com/
The Independent	UK	Private	1986	35	https://www.independent.co.uk/us
Sky News	UK	Private	1986	35	https://news.sky.com/
Greg Palast	US	Independent	1976	45	https://www.gregpalast.com/
Euronews	EU	Private	1993	28	https://www.euronews.com/
MSNBC	US	Private	1996	25	https://www.msnbc.com/
Vox	US	Private	2005	16	https://www.vox.com/
Politico	US	Private	2007	14	https://www.politico.com/
Bellingcat	EU	Independent	2014	7	https://www.bellingcat.com/
Gaslit Nation	US	Crowdfunding	2015	6	https://www.patreon.com/m/1844970/posts
Axios	US	Private	2017	4	https://www.axios.com/
The Conversationalist	US	Nonprofit	2019	2	https://conversationalist.org/

28 Cognitive Distortions

Sometimes our minds play tricks on us. They can convince us that untrue things are true, or vice versa.

Cognitive distortions are bad mental habits. They’re patterns of thinking that tend to be negatively slanted, inaccurate, and often repetitive.

These unhelpful ways of thinking can limit one’s ability to function and excel in the world. Cognitive distortions are linked to anxiety, depression, addiction, and eating disorders. They reinforce negative thinking loops, which tend to compound and worsen over time.

Cognitive distortion	Explanation	Example
all-or-nothing thinking	viewing everything in absolute and extremely polarized terms	"nothing good ever happens" or "I'm always behind"
blaming	focusing on other people as source of your negative feelings, & refusing to take responsibility for changing yourself; or conversely, blaming yourself harshly for things that were out of your control
catastrophizing	belief that disaster will strike no matter what, and that what will happen will be too awful to bear	"What if tragedy strikes?" "What if it happens to me?"
counterfactual thinking	A kind of mental bargaining or longing to live in the alternate timeline where one had made a different decision	"If only I could have done it differently..."
dichotomous thinking	viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms
discounting positives	claiming that positive things you or others do are trivial, or ignoring good things that have happened to you
emotional reasoning	letting feelings guide interpretation of reality; a way of judging yourself or your circumstances based on your emotions	"If I feel that way, it must be true"
filtering	mentally "filters out" the positive aspects of a situation while magnifying the negative aspects
fortune-telling	predicting the future negatively
framing effects	tendency for decisions to be shaped by inconsequential features of choice problems
halo effect	belief that one's success in a domain automagically qualifies them to have skills and expertise in other areas
illusory correlation	tendency to perceive a relationship between two variables when no relation exists	https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_correlation
inability to disconfirm	reject any evidence or arguments that might contradict negative thoughts
intuitive heuristics	tendency when faced with a difficult question of answering an easier question instead, typically without noticing the substitution
just-world hypothesis	belief that good things tend to happen to good people, while bad things tend to happen to bad people
labeling	assigning global negative traits to self & others; making a judgment about yourself or someone else as a person, versus seeing the behavior as something they did that doesn't define them as an individual
ludic fallacy	in assessing the potential amount of risk in a system or decision, mistaking the real randomness of life for the well-defined risk of casinos
magical thinking	a way of imagining you can wish reality into existence through the sheer force of your mind. Part of a child developmental phase that not everyone grows out of.	http://doctorparadox.net/essays/magical-thinking/
magnification	exaggerating the importance of flaws and problems while minimizing the impact of desirable qualities and achievements
mind reading	assuming what someone is thinking w/o sufficient evidence; jumping to conclusions
negative filtering	focusing exclusively on negatives & ignoring positives
nominal realism	child development phase where names of objects aren't just symbols but intrinsic parts of the objects. Sometimes called word realism, and related to magical thinking
overgeneralizing	making a rule or predicting globally negative patterns on the basis of single incident
projection	attributing qualities to external actors or forces that one feels within and either a) wishes to promote and have echoed back to onself, or b) eradicate or squelch from oneself by believing that the quality exists elsewhere, in others, but not in oneself
provincialism	the tendency to see things only from the point of view of those in charge of our immediate in-groups
shoulds	a list of ironclad rules one lives and punishes oneself by	"I should exercise more" "I should eat better"
teleological fallacy	illusion that you know exactly where you're going, knew exactly where you were going in the past, & that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going	academia especially is rife with this one
what if?	keep asking series of ?s on prospective events & being unsatisfied with any answers

30 Common Psychological Biases

Two psychologists ended up unlocking important keys to both the mind and to economics. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman created the field of behavioral economics and revolutionized cognitive psychology with the discovery of cognitive biases that affect our decision-making abilities.

These systematic errors in our thinking and logic affect our everyday choices, behaviors, and evaluations of others.

Psychological bias	Explanation	Example
action bias	Belief that when we're faced with an ambiguous situation or challenge, that we must take some action vs. doing nothing, whether doing something is a good idea or not (and often quickly, without taking the time to fully examine the problem); also known as "naive interventionism"	sports enthusiasts rooting for their favorite teams are notorious for the superstitious rituals they are in psychological anguish if not able to perform, despite the objective fact that they have no ability whatsoever to affect the outcome (in pop culture, Robert DeNiro's character in Silver Linings Playbook exemplifies this)
adjustment heuristic	Tendency to start from an implicitly suggested reference point when assessing probabilities (the "anchor") and making adjustments to that reference point to reach an estimate
affect heuristic	We tend to underestimate the role of feelings of liking & disliking in our judgments and decision-making	Instead of considering risks and benefits independently, individuals with a negative attitude towards nuclear power may consider its benefits as low and risks as high, thereby leading to a more negative risk-benefit correlation than would be evident under conditions without time pressure (Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic, & Johnson, 2000)
anchoring effect	Fixating on a value or # that gets compared to everything else, b/c we tend to compare/contrast limited sets of items (aka “relativity trap”) — store sale items take advantage of this (so we compare the new value to the old, but not the old value on its own as a measure of worth)
availability heuristic	Tendency to make quick "intuitive" judgments about the size of given categories by the ease with which particular instances/examples of the class come to mind
bandwagon effect	Similar to groupthink, arising from our built-in desire to fit in and conform, we tend to "go along with the trend" when it becomes apparent to us
contagion heuristic	Tendency to avoid contact with people or objects viewed as "contaminated" by previous contact with someone or something else viewed as "bad"	Related to/inclusive of magical thinking — believing a person's sweater still carries their "essence," e.g.
confirmation bias	We tend to agree w/those who agree with us & avoid associating with those who don't, to avoid the discomfort of cognitive dissonance (the Internet has sadly made this worse)
conjunction fallacy	A formal fallacy that occurs when one believes a specific condition is more probable than a general one
current moment bias	Preference to experience pleasure now, & put off the “pain” til later; lack of ability to imagine ourselves in the future & altering today's behaviors accordingly
disjunction fallacy	Misjudging that the disjunction of two events must be as likely as either of the events individually (as definitionally, via probability theory)
false consensus effect	People tend to overestimate the degree to which the general public shares their beliefs and opinions	potentially related to the availability heuristic, the self-serving bias, and naive realism
focusing illusion	Placing too much emphasis on one aspect of an event, outweighing its importance and causing error in judgment
Gambler's fallacy	Putting a tremendous amount of weight on previous events, believing they will influence future outcomes (even when outcome is random)	also frequently a logical fallacy
Identifiable Victim Effect	Tendency for people to care deeply about a single, specific tragedy but seem disinterested in vast atrocities affecting thousands or millions of people	more broadly, abstract concepts motivate us less than individual cases (especially when given visual evidence)
ingroup bias	Overestimating abilities and values of our immediate group & underestimating that of outgroups (oxytocin plays a role)
naive realism	The belief that each one of us sees the world objectively, while the people who disagree with us must be either uninformed or irrational	"Everyone is influenced by ideology and self-interest. Except for me. I see things as they are."
negativity bias	We pay more attention to bad news
neglecting probability	Reason we're afraid to fly even though it's statistically far more likely to be in a car accident (same way we fear terrorism but not more mundane accidents that are far more likely)
observational selection bias	Suddenly noticing things we didn't notice before & assuming frequency has increased (also contributes to feeling appearance of certain things or events can't be coincidence)
optimism bias	Tendency to believe that good things happen more often than bad things
planning fallacy	Systematic tendency toward unrealistic optimism about the time it takes to comple
positive expectation bias	Sense that our luck has to change for the better
post-purchase rationalization	Making ourselves feel better after we make crappy decisions (aka Buyer's Stockholm Syndrome)
projection bias	Assumption that most people think just like us (false consensus bias is related: thinking that others agree with us)
resemblance bias	Tendency to ignore statistical facts and use resemblance as a simplifying heuristic to make difficult judgments
self-serving bias	Tendency to evaluate ambiguous or complex information in a way that is beneficial to the speaker's interests, as well as to claim responsibility for successes and attribute failures to others or to uncontrollable external factors
shifting baseline syndrome	We tend to use very recent data points in our research (even when more data is available) and thus can miss picking up on some long-term trends
status-quo bias	We fear change, so tend to make choices that guarantee things remain the same (& by extension, assume that any other choice will be inferior, or make things worse)
treadmill effect	Our desire for the new version of a product or service is acute, even if upgrades are minor & incremental; but the pleasure we get from the new object wears off quickly to leave us back at the original satisfaction baseline

24 Logical Fallacies

These flaws in rhetorical logic can be observed aplenty in modern political and civil discourse. They are among the easiest types of argument to dispel, because their basic type has been discredited and compiled together with other discarded forms of rational persuasion, to make sure that ensuing generations don’t fall for the same tired old unethical ideas.

Logical fallacy	Explanation	Example / Notes
ad hominem attack	attacking something about the character of the opposing side, instead of engaging with the argument or offering a critique
ambiguity	using double meanings and language ambiguity to mislead
anecdotal	appeal to a personal, individual observation as relates to the topic in question	often used to dismiss statistical analysis
appeal to authority	using opinion of authority figure or institution in place of an actual argument
appeal to emotion	manipulating emotional response in lieu of valid argument	a huge part of Donald Trump's playbook
appeal to nature	arguing that b/c something is “natural” it is valid / justified / inevitable / good / ideal
bandwagon	appealing to popularity as evidence of validation	Retort: "When everyone once believed the earth was flat — did that make it true?"
begging the question	when conclusion is included in the premise	one form of circular argument (tautology is another)
black or white	presenting two alternative states as the only options, when more possibilities exist	very commonly used by political and media resources as a way to polarize issues
burden of proof	claiming the responsibility lies with someone else to disprove one's claim (& not with the claimant to prove it)
composition/division	assuming what is true of one part of something must be applied to all parts
fallacy fallacy	presuming that a poorly argued claim, or one in which a fallacy has been made, is wrong
false cause	presuming that a real or perceived relationship between things implies causation
gambler's fallacy	putting a tremendous amount of weight on previous events, believing they will influence future outcomes (even when outcome is random)	also a psychological bias
genetic	value judging based on where something comes from
loaded question	asking a question with an assumption built in, so it can't be answered without appearing guilty
middle ground	claiming a compromise between two extremes must be the truth	the media establishment is often guilty of this for a number of reasons: lack of time for thorough inquiry; need for ratings; available field of pundits and wonks; established programming formats, and so on
no true scotsman	making an appeal to purity as a way to dismiss relevant criticisms or flaws
personal incredulity	saying that because a concept or argument is difficult to understand, it can't be true
slippery slope	arguing that a small change or decision will inevitably lead to larger-than-intended (perhaps even disastrous) consequences rapidly
special pleading	moving goalpost to create exceptions when a claim is shown to be false
strawman	misrepresenting someone's argument to make it easier to attack
texas sharpshooter	cherry-picking data to suit an argument, or finding a pattern to fit a presumption	the impending era of big data will increase the prevalence of this type of sheister
tu quoque	avoiding having to engage with criticism by criticizing the accuser

Hyper Partisanship: How to understand American politics today

December 17, 2020January 14, 2021 doctor paradox

Buckle up, we’re in for a wild ride. Many of the serious scholars of political history and authoritarian regimes are sounding the alarm bells that, although it is a very very good thing we are getting rid of the Trump crime family soon, it is still a very very bad thing for America to have so rapidly tilted towards authoritarianism. How did we get here?! How has hyper partisanship escalated to the point of an attempted coup by 126 sitting Republican House Representatives?

These are some of the resources that helped me grapple with that question, and with the rapidly shifting landscape of information warfare. This outline is a work in progress, and I’m planning to keep adding to this list as the tape keeps rolling.

Right-Wing Authoritarianism

Karen Stenner — Australian political psychologist Karen Stenner found that approximately 1/3 of populations are authoritarian, or have authoritarian tendencies.
- Her book: The Authoritarian Dynamic

Adorno (F scale) and Altemeyer (RWA scale) — a measurement of the authoritarian tendencies in individuals and populations
- Adorno’s book: The Authoritarian Personality

Hannah Arendt — The Origins of Totalitarianism
ketman — Ketman is the psychological concept of concealing one’s true aims, akin to doublethink in Orwell’s 1984, that served as a central theme to Polish dissident Czesław Miłosz’s book The Captive Mind about intellectual life under totalitarianism during the Communist post-WWII occupation.
Erich Fromm — coined the term “malignant narcissism” to describe the psychological character of the Nazis
Fascism — elevation of the id as the source of truth; enthusiasm for political violence
- Jason Stanley — How Fascism Works
- Robert O. Paxton — The Anatomy of Fascism
- Tim Snyder — On Tyranny
- Federico Finchelstein — A Brief History of Fascist Lies
Loyalty; hero worship
Richard Hofstadter — The Paranoid Style
Lakoff — moral framing; strict father morality
Neil Postman — Entertaining Ourselves to Death
Anti-Intellectualism
Can be disguised as hyper-rationalism (Communism)

Cognitive and psychological data

conservative minds don’t accept new information coming in
- vs. Bayesian logic
- vs. Thomas Kuhn scientific revolutions
Psychological biases
- Status quo bias
The Asch Experiment — more than 60% of the time, people bow to social pressure
Stanley Milgram 1974 — we will submit to the demands of authority to a far greater extent than we might expect
- it absolves us of responsibility
- a “loophole” to quickly route around our conscience, making “normal” persons susceptible to the appeals of psychopaths
The Marshmallow Experiment — drive towards instant gratification
Edward Bernays — Propaganda
Narcissism and Sadism | The Dark Triad — difficult personalities
- narcissism = seeing oneself “above”
- Christopher Lasch — Culture of Narcissism
- Jerrold Post — authoritarian parenting
- The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump
- Mary Trump — Too Much and Not Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man
- narcissistic injury
- narcissistic rage
- aggrieved entitlement — elevated expectations combined with resentment at society for not meeting them (Michael Kimmel, 2013)
- dehumanization of the Others
- splitting; black and white thinking
- object permanence
- magical thinking
- Political ponerology — the nature of evil; interaction of difficult personalities with power and politics
  - pathocracy — Andrew Łobaczewski (2007)
  - sadopopulism — Tim Snyder
- Narcissistic collusion — the interplay of the grandiose expectations of the tyrant and his followers. It gives him power as a meshing of mutually compatible needs.
- Narcissism of small differences — Freud 1991
- Scapegoating
- Psychological decompensation
- Psychopath World
  - The Upside Down — up is down, black is white
  - No conscience
  - No empathy
  - The ultimate narcissist
  - Obsession with power, dominance, and hierarchy
  - Primitive goals, relentlessly pursued
  - Rigidity; inflexibility
  - No access to higher human ideals
  - Performative; mask-wearing
  - See people as objects for their use
  - Control issues
  - Cruel and sadistic
  - Empty and thrill-seeking
  - Enjoy breaking rules
  - Inauthentic; insincere
  - Projectivity
  - Destructiveness; recklessness
  - Conspiracy-minded
  - Cold and inaccessible
  - Reptilian
- Terminology: ASPD and the shifting umbrella of personality disorder and Cluster B
- Malignant narcissism as a historical conception of this group of personality traits

Paranoia
Abuse culture
- Bullies
- Emotional abuse
- psychological abuse
- physical abuse
- financial abuse
- legal abuse
- abuse of power
- Alice Miller — Her work identified the psychological impact of childhood neglect and abuse, not just at the individual level but at the societal level — where it has a tendency to produce a hierarchical worldview characterized by the need to control the environment.
- One-sided development — Dąbrowski (1996)
Cults
- charismatic leaders
- psychology of followers
- brainwashing and mind control; hypnosis techniques
- vulnerabilities to “cult capture”
- Jackie Speier, survivor of the Jonestown Massacre and CA Representative, sees parallels between Trump and cult leader Jim Jones
“Big Cults” — rise to the level of nation-state and even beyond
- Strongmen — Ruth Ben-Ghiat
- Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy — Ian Hughes
- White nationalist / white power movement — see outline below under HISTORY section
- Mass shooters — many “lone wolves” are part of underground white nationalist cells
Psychological warfare
- Propaganda
  - Bernays –> Goebbels
  - Michiko Kakutani — The Death of Truth
- Emotional abuse
- Interrogation techniques
- Disinformation
  - Conspiracy theories
  - Fake news
    - “Flood the channel” strategy
    - Overwhelm and drown out the truth
    - Deep fakes
  - Lying with statistics
- Bot networks and cyborg botnets
  - agents
    - distraction
    - confusion
    - probing
    - persuasion
    - conversion
    - neutralization
  - flying monkeys
  - automated response
  - timed response
- Extortion
- Doxxing
Living on Fantasy Island
- Ernest Becker — The Denial of Death & the basis for fundamental self-deception
- Buddhist / Shambhala conceptions of “The Cocoon” — a mental place of safety we construct for ourselves to remain shielded from Real Reality
- Republican Denial Bubbles: climate change, trickle-down economics, “no one is racist,” birtherism, covid is a hoax, everything is hunky dory, you are getting very sleepy…
- Dominionism and extremist religious circles believing literally in the End Times and the rapture coming soon (Tim LaHaye et al), including at the highest levels of government (Pompeo, Pence, etc.)
- It Was All a Lie — Stuart Stevens, former GOP strategist and co-founding member of the Lincoln Project, spills the beans on the Republican capture of civic discourse with a set of false narratives all spinning out from the white supremacist backlash to the civil rights movement of the 60s.

HISTORY

Capitol Riots and Putsch — insurrectionists storm the Capitol
Raffensperger extortion call
Georgia runoffs
Biden elected + Big Lie begins (continues, really)
George Floyd murder and summer of protest
- long struggle with police brutality and “driving while Black”
Votings Rights Act gutted
Citizens United
Growing nationalization of politics parallels the demise of local news

Hyper Partisanship in Congress: The Gingrich Years

Newt Gingrich and the Contract on America — Steve Kornacki, Julian Zelizer
- The rapid rise and fall of the House Speaker from Georgia who made the 1990s a bitter toxic brew of hyper partisanship
- The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism — Steve Kornacki
- Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party — Julian Zelizer
Rise of Evangelicals and the deals with the devils (Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, prosperity gospel, etc)
- ALEC
- abortion as a 180-degree turn for use as a wedge issue
- Brown v. Board of Education & the fight over segregated Christian private schools
White nationalism’s reputational laundering
- David Duke popped back up in both the 90s and the 2010s
- Some Vietnam vets nurtured their own “stabbed in the back” culture after the war
- Rise of the militia movement
  - Many returning soldiers saw the fringe left Communist movement in the US as an “enemy at home”
  - Greensboro, NC massacre
  - The Order
  - KKK & KKKK
- Paramilitary operations in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere in Latin America to “bring the war home”
- After the fall of Communism, the movement needed a new enemy. During the immediate post-Vietnam era they claimed to be working on behalf of the state, but towards the end of the 80s they did a 180-degree turn to a hard anti-government stance
- Survivalist fringe
  - Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing
  - Waco
  - Ruby Ridge
  - Unabomber / Ted Kaczynski
- Intersection of militia movement with NRA
  - Intersection of NRA with Russian active measures

Post-Soviet Capital Flight and the Rise of Russian Organized Crime

The fall of the USSR and capital flight; “end of history”
- Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? — Karen Dawisha
- Russian oligarchs laundered money through real estate around the world, but mostly in the US
- They found mutual transactional interest in Donald Trump, whose casino failures left him 4x bankrupted, blackballed by US banks, and in need of capital
- House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia — Craig Unger
Replacement of the Italian mob by the Russia mafia starting in the 1970s
- they didn’t “send their best” — The Kremlin agreed to allow more Soviet Jews to emigrate, but to fulfill their “promise” they opened the prison doors of the gulags and sent 1000s of hardened criminals to the U.S.
- a huge community of them settled in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn
Putin’s revanchism leverages American belief that we won the Cold War and our conviction that it ended
- The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945-2020 — Tim Weiner

Rise of Dark Money

The explosion of Super PACs and other seemingly endless vehicles for anonymous money lending to political campaigns exploded after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010. The hyper partisanship tilted even further when the GOP quietly began accepting far more foreign contributions than many people realized.

Citizens United
Koch Brothers / Kochtopus
offshore tax havens
unregistered FARA agents (Flynn, Manafort, Elliott Broidy, etc)
Jane Mayer
Panama Papers — biggest offshore data leak in history
FinCEN files

Rise of Russian Hybrid Warfare

Gerasimov Doctrine
Vladislav Surkhov’s surrealistic war theater
- Fifth World War: all against all
Cheka –> KGB –> FSB / GRU
Psychological warfare
Cyber warfare
- energy grid
- US Treasury
- election infrastructure
- nuclear weaponry
Information warfare
- Disinformation
- Cyborg bot networks
- IRA & Robert Mueller indictments
- Cambridge Analytica, data theft, and microtargeting
- Astroturfing, fake activism, paid crisis actors
Financial warfare
- Magnitsky Act
  - Bill Browder
  - Natalia Veselnitskaya
  - Trump Tower meeting June 9, 2016
- Campaign funding
  - Marie Le Pen (France)
  - Viktor Orban (Hungary)
  - Brexit (UK)
  - Trump / GOP (US)
  - Law and Justice (Poland)
- Corruption — organized crime, money laundering, bribery, human trafficking, drugs, arms, fraud, racketeering, etc.
Proxy warfare
- Private security forces and arms’ length deniability
  - Yevgeny Prigozhin
  - Erik Prince
- Ukraine
- Belarus
- Syria

Role of Facebook, Google, and Big Tech

Silicon Valley played its part in enabling — and profiteering from — hyper partisanship not just in the U.S., but around the world. Facebook in particular has a reputation for being callously cheap about moderating content from hate speech to live mass shooting video, including arguably playing a significant role in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.

Facebook as a rogue nation state with almost 3 billion non-voting citizen-serfs
- Reluctant moderators require regulating
- Questionable ethics
  - Moral hazard in political leanings
  - Paid propaganda machine for dictators and authoritarian regimes around the world
  - Allow disinformation to “skirt around” the rules too often, or fail to police bad actors at all
  - Fail to live up to their own moderating standards repeatedly
  - Refuse responsibility for arguably essential roles in geopolitical disasters including the Rohingya massacre in Myanmar and
  - A business model that fundamentally benefits from human conflict
  - Cambridge Analytica
  - Traumatic conditions of the Facebook moderation team, in the US and abroad
Google’s capture of the web
- monopoly powers
- surveillance powers
- AI powers
- collapse of online advertising market
- collapse of local journalism
- Youtube radicalization
Surveillance capitalism
Data as the new oil

Economic insecurity and staggering inequality

Piketty
Gilded Age
Progressive Era
Anti-Trust
Herbert Hoover –> FDR
Great Depression –> New Deal prosperity
Keynesian economics
Hillbilly elegy
- Bowling Alone
- The Big Sort
Globalization
Opioid crisis

Republican Myths

As further enabled by the rise of the PR-state

White supremacy and the myth of American innocence
Trickle down economics –> Reagan
Powell Memo –> Think Tanks
McCarthyism; John Birch Society
America as a Judeo-Christian nation
Immigration is bad
Climate change denialism
Smoking is good for you

Americana and Hyper Partisanship through the ages

2020 election
2016 election
Obama years
2008-09 financial crash
9/11, WMD delusions, Iraq War, Islamic terrorism
2000 Bush v. Gore
Welfare queens
Clinton and the Crime Bill
Reagan years
Watergate
Spiro Agnew
Nixon’s war on drugs as a proxy for the war on 60s counterculture
White militia movement
Civil rights & Vietnam
Cold War
The Holocaust; Stalin’s Great Terror; Mao’s famine
WWII & fascism
New Deal
Great Depression
WWI
Gilded Age
Snake oil
PT Barnum
Great Awakening preachers George Whitefield & Jonathan Edwards
- they argued that church authorities should not own people’s direct relationship with God
KKK
Jim Crow
Reconstruction
Civil War & Confederacy — the ur-Hyper Partisanship.
States’ Rights
Anti-Intellectualism
Slavery
Racism, Misogyny
Federalism vs. Decentralization
The Constitution and the Rule of Law
Democracy overthrows monarchy
Spirit of the Laws — Montesquieu
Social contract; consent of the governed
Puritans
Religious freedom
Liberty vs. freedom
The Enlightenment
Magna Carta
The Bible

kompromat

October 22, 2020October 22, 2020 doctor paradox

What I do when I have compromising files to hide is I distribute them evenly across 3 different laptops and ensure that all 3 highly reliable “works for decades” Apple machines go kaput at the same exact time, at which point I leave my home and fly across the country to a jurisdiction patrolled by Rudy Giuliani to service these machines and perform data recovery because I am looking to add maximum inconvenience to my very busy life — a life so busy that I completely forget about my 3 precious laptops which once contained both my livelihood and my most deeply personal and secret materials.

You?

Also, data recovery for 3 laptops is totally $85.

Antidotes to the here and now

June 15, 2020June 20, 2020 doctor paradox

When the onslaught of news is overwhelming and oppressively Right Now, I like to escape by:

Getting out of Here — read non-US and non-US based news, media, culture, and history. Try to intellectually get out in the world.
Getting out of Now — read history, watch documentaries, read old novels, listen to classic (and classical) music, learn from the Stoics. Ponder ago.

War of the Worldviews: Hierarchy vs. Fairness

May 30, 2020January 2, 2021 doctor paradox

Hierarchy vs. Fairness is the dominant Manichaean struggle of our age, and perhaps every age before it: shall we structure our society with a strict hierarchical system of highs and lows, with power concentrated at the top? Or shall we have an egalitarian society where truth, justice, and fairness rule the day?

There are a lot of stories, myths, and narratives centered on this question: hierarchy or fairness? Cultural wars and actual wars have been waged — numerous times throughout history.

We are fighting a new incarnation of that war now in our nation, as civil unrest spreads following yet another extrajudicial murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin — who knelt on the neck of George Floyd for a jaw-dropping 8 minutes and 46 seconds: 2 minutes and 53 seconds beyond the point where Floyd lost consciousness and 1 minute and 54 seconds past the point fellow officers checked to confirm he had no pulse.

That is a staggeringly long time.

There is simply no credibility to the typical excuse that Chauvin somehow feared for his life — from an unarmed, handcuffed, prone, unconscious, and then lifeless George Floyd. Arrested over an allegedly counterfit $20 bill. Meanwhile Congress appropriates hundreds of billions and even trillions for big business and last I heard, no arrests had been made. Curious.

It starts in childhood

Psychologists like Alice Miller and Darcia Narvaez attribute this troubling mentality — this mentality that exhibits complete disregard for human life — as originating in our child-raising “techniques.” At one time corporal punishment for youth was the rule and not the exception; not uncoincidentally, the Hitler Youth of Germany had been largely raised under the “advice” of Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Shreber who advocated beating babies from a young age so the importance of obedience would be drilled into them early on.

It wasn’t until much later we learned that traumatized and neglected children display severe lesions affecting up to the 30 percent of the areas of the brain responsible for controlling emotions. In other words, “traditional” authoritarian child-rearing in the fundamentalist religion style of “spare the rod, spoil the child” produces emotionally crippled adults — who tend to enact the revenge fantasies of their internal repressed rage as adults later in life. They simply need be provided with an “authorized” scapegoat.

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt

Miller goes on to suggest the psychological survival mechanism of denial employed by abused children to survive their situation leads them to develop the kind of emotional blindness in adulthood that will turn the other way when witnessing violations of another person’s humanity — or may even be induced to carry them out. We’re all familiar with Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s “defense” of why he should be exonerated for behaving like a robotic killer: “I was just following orders.”

Teaching children to be obedient or be emotionally abandoned — whether through physical abuse or emotional abuse or both — is the key to unlocking this mystery of the appeal of hierarchy and authoritarianism which is seeing a resurgence not just in the United States but around the world — especially in Europe as well. Miller calls it “poisonous pedagogy” — not just parents but many other forms of authority indoctrinate youth in this vicious cycle and benefit from the creation of obedient individuals by amassing and maintaining power.

The kicker is we are not supposed to recognize this process — and if we do, we most certainly are not supposed to speak up about it. We are supposed to remain unaware that our deference to authority is merely a construct; a thin veneer over the insecurity of power that hopes desperately to continue wielding absurd moral authority over the masses. This collective and complicitous denial keeps us all locked in the dance of abuser and abused — essentially pretending it isn’t happening all around us including in our own homes.

The Founders advocated fairness

For all the right wing enjoys brandishing the Constitution as fundamental law, they tend to often miss the forest for the trees — that the founding fathers wrote extensively on their views and consideration in constructing a new nation towards the end of the 18th century, and that those views were decidedly against the arbitrary rule of kings and the strict striations of class as seen in the empires of Europe. They sought to get away from the cult of personality paradigm of the divine right of kings, believing that the rule of law should hold sway and that men ought to govern themselves through a political process with enough checks and balances to ensure no single branch or individual could wield too much power over others.

James Madison especially was a big believer in the “wisdom of crowds” to arrive at a better, more morally appropriate solution to legislation and problem solving. Moreover they were extremely uncomfortable with the role of slavery at the founding of the nation, despite being simultaneously apiece with the times and not entirely living up to those professed ideals.

Nevertheless, the role of ideals is to move us forward towards better times; to continually improve our individual and collective characters to get closer to living them out. Taking the founding ideals of fairness and equality as the guiding north star of a new nation and falling short is, in my humble opinion, still leagues farther along than giving in to the indulgent impulse towards supremacy and hierarchy and calling it a day. It’s the essence of progressivism as a vehicle for a narrative of self-growth — as opposed to the narrative hierarchy offers, which is static; dead; inert. There can be no change, no dynamism to a system which defines a priori everyone’s place in society.

Hierarchy is the politics of death.

Mass death is actually a bad thing for the economy

March 28, 2020March 31, 2020 doctor paradox

This past week we had a serious, unironic “debate” about whether or not senicide is a reasonable “plan” for handling the coronavirus crisis. This under the pretense that the other course of action — following the advice of medical professionals and epidemiologists to stay home and socially distance ourselves to curb the spread of covid-19 — is tantamount to shutting down the economy, which is tantamount to killing more people than the virus will.

Meanwhile, Congress passed a $2 trillion relief package, one quarter of which will go to the billionaire class with precious little oversight as to how it can be spent — and still apparently no one seems to have the slightest bit of confidence that the world’s richest economy can possibly weather the storms of depressed consumer demand for even several weeks much less the potentially many months this pandemic will rage across the planet. Perhaps this reveals that The Economy simply isn’t as robust as we tell ourselves it is during better times.

Dead Men Pay No Taxes

The proposed Sophie’s Choice between weeks or months of physical separation and allowing many people to die all around us is a false frame.

Millions of people dying is bad for The Economy in a very similar way to how having ICE eject millions of people from the economy is bad for The Economy. Insofar as economies require a labor force, and insofar as governments require revenue from taxation to pay for the infrastructure upon which The Economy rests, having millions of people depart from them is not a pathway to improving the economy — it is the opposite.

However, perhaps The Economy itself has become a contested concept. There may be a class-based and/or ideologically-based difference of opinion on what this concept means. Perhaps there is now:

the economy: the traditionally-held view of economies as markets in which individuals labor and contribute value, and trade assets in mutually beneficial ways to allocate resources efficiently
The Economy: a sort of shell game played by the right-wing authoritarian cohort in which the Plebes are starved of infrastructure and resources to the point of being mired inside an Eternal Present — in which we lurch from crisis to crisis — that brokers no hope for the future and no actual policy being made, other than the “policies” which continue to print money from the Federal Treasury for the purposes of propping up the precariously fragile billionaire class whose claims of meritocratic supremacy are stretched thinner and thinner each time the shells are moved yet again

Starving the Beast kills it: Feature or bug?

On paper, “Starving the Beast” is passed off as deeply held ideological libertarianism regarding the fundamental goodness of small government. In practice, starving beasts tend to die of preventable causes — and if governments are to retain the kind of power needed to be a check and balance on a growing hypercapitalist economy, they must indeed grow as well.

But beyond the general case, our specific circumstances of global pandemic lead us to a reasonable question: if laissez-faire capitalism and the free hand of the market is supposedly both sufficient to solve all human problems and vastly superior than the socialist hand of government at doing these things, then why are we in such a pickle? Why hasn’t the Invisible Hand managed to come up with its own solution to the mass death we are currently experiencing?

Or is the answer we might hear one that is too grim to bear — having been provided a clue this week in the grumbling of sacrificing the old to save the young — that a certain part of the political spectrum believe this is the market working as intended. That mass death is an acceptable “negative externality” of laissez-faire capitalism and that we bleeding-heart liberals ought to suck it up and grow thicker skin, rather than demand that governments step in to prevent preventable human atrocity.

Not only am I afraid of the answer — I’m afraid we’ll never get a straight answer in the world of political ketman we seem to have blundered into. In this world, right-wing elites including numerous elected officials continue to give lip service to a democracy that has been systematically hollowed out since the redoubling of the conservative movement in the 1970s to present, to currently resemble a geopolitical reality closer to that of modern Russia than to anything James Madison or Alexander Hamilton would have recognized.

It is technically possible that psychologically speaking, they themselves are actually unaware of this seismic shift in ideological views from that of democratic power and Constitutional authority to one of authoritarian rule and total technocratic control — but I think it’s more likely they’re simply not saying it out loud.

Mind Metaphors

March 1, 2020March 1, 2020 doctor paradox

metaphor	meaning	notes
pick your brain	I need to gather information that you have
mental space	a way to describe how much of your thoughts are occupied by a specific topic, event, person, etc.
in the back of my mind	stored for usage later
out of my mind	temporarily unable to think clearly; often, drunk, stoned, high, etc.	🤪
lose my mind	go crazy; generally in a more permanent sense than “out of my mind”
mind meld	to be completely in sync with someone else on an idea, plan, concept, etc. without having to communicate very extensively or at all
brainless	of low intelligence; stupid; without thought
on my mind	I’m thinking about you

Notes: Surveillance capitalism dystopia, with Zeynep Tufekci

February 22, 2020June 20, 2020 doctor paradox

speak, sistah!

see also: Shoshanna Zuboff (who wrote the seminal work on surveillance capitalism), Don Norman

Some takeaways:

surveillance won’t be obvious and overt like in Orwell’s 1984 — it’ll be covert and subtle (“more like a spider’s web”)
social networks use persuasion architecture — the same cloying design aesthetic that puts gum at the eye level of children in the grocery aisle

Example:

AI modeling of potential Las Vegas ticket buyers

The machine learning algorithms can classify people into two buckets, “likely to buy tickets to Vegas” and “unlikely to” based on exposure to lots and lots of data patterns. Problem being, it’s a black box and no one — not even the computer scientists — know how it works or what it’s doing exactly.

So the AI may have discovered that bipolar individuals just about to go into mania are more susceptible to buying tickets to Vegas — and that is the segment of the population they are targeting: a vulnerable set of people prone to overspending and gambling addictions. The ethical implications of unleashing this on the world — and routinely using and optimizing it relentlessly — are staggering.

Profiting from extremism

“You’re never hardcore enough for YouTube” — YouTube gives you content recommendations that are increasingly polarized and polarizing, because it turns out that preying on your reptilian brain makes you keep clicking around in the YouTube hamster wheel.

The amorality of AI — “algorithms don’t care if they’re selling shoes, or politics.” Our social, political, and cultural flows are being organized by these persuasion architectures — organized for profit; not for the collective good, not for public interests, not subject to our political will anymore. These powerful surveillance capitalism tools are running mostly unchecked, with little oversight and with few people minding the ethics of the stores of essentially a cadre of Silicon Valley billionaires.

Intent doesn’t matter — good intentions aren’t enough; it’s the structure and business models that matter. Facebook isn’t a half trillion dollar con: its value is in its highly effective persuasion power, which is highly troubling and concerning in a supposedly democratic society. Mark Zuckerberg may even ultimately mean well (…debatable), but it doesn’t excuse the railroading over numerous obviously negative externalities resulting from the unchecked power of Facebook in not only the U.S., but in countries around the world including highly volatile domains.

Extremism benefits demagogues — Oppressive regimes both come to power by and benefit from political extremism; from whipping up citizens into a frenzy, often against each other as much as against perceived external or internal enemies. Our data and attention are now for sale to the highest bidding authoritarians and demagogues around the world — enabling them to use AI against us in election after election and PR campaign after PR campaign. We gave foreign dictators even greater powers to influence and persuade us in ways that benefit them at the expense of our own self-interest.

Design guru Don Norman’s shortlist of everything wrong with the internet

July 4, 2019July 4, 2019 doctor paradox

When usability pioneers have All the Feels about the nature of our creeping technological dystopia, how we got here, and what we might need to do to right the ship, it’s wise to pay attention. Don Norman’s preaching resonated with my choir, and they’ve asked me to sing a summary song of our people in bulleted list format:

What seemed like a virtuous thing at the time — building the internet with an ethos of trust and openness — has led to a travesty via lack of security, because no one took bad actors into account.
Google, Facebook, et al didn’t have the advertising business model in mind a priori, but sort of stumbled into it and got carried away giving advertisers what they wanted — more information about users — without really taking into consideration the boundary violations of appropriating people’s information. (see Shoshana Zuboff’s definitive new book on Surveillance Capitalism for a lot more on this topic)
Tech companies have mined the psychological sciences for techniques that — especially at scale — border on mass manipulation of fundamental human drives to be informed and to belong. Beyond the creepy Orwellian slant of information appropriation and emotional manipulation, the loss of productivity and mental focus from years of constant interruptions takes a toll on society at large.
We sign an interminable series of EULAs, ToS’s and other lengthy legalese-ridden agreements just to access the now basic utilities that enable our lives. Experts refer to these as “contracts of adhesion” or “click-wrap,” as a way of connoting the “obvious lack of meaningful consent.” (Zuboff)
The “bubble effect” — the internet allows one to surround oneself completely with like-minded opinions and avoid ever being exposed to alternative points of view. This has existential implications for being able to inhabit a shared reality, as well as a deleterious effect on public discourse, civility, and the democratic process itself.
The extreme commercialization of almost all of our information sources is problematic, especially in the age of the “Milton Friedman-ification” of the economic world and the skewing of values away from communities and individuals, towards a myopic view of shareholder value and all the attendant perverse incentives that accompany this philosophical business shift over the past 50 years. He notes that the original public-spiritedness of new communication technologies has historically been co-opted by corporate lobbyists via regulatory capture — a subject Tim Wu explores in-depth in his excellent 2011 book, “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.“

Is it all bleak, Don?! His answer is clear: “yes, maybe, no.” He demurs on positing a definitive answer to all of these issues, but he doesn’t really mince words about a “hunch” that it may in fact involve burning it all down and starting over again.

Pointing to evolution, Norman notes that we cannot eke radical innovation out of incremental changes — and that when radical change does happen it is often imposed unexpectedly from the outside in the form of catastrophic events. Perhaps if we can’t manage to Marie Kondo our way to a more joyful internet, we’ll have to pray for Armageddon soon…?! 😱

RussiaGate Bestiary: Cast of Characters for the new Cold War

May 7, 2019February 24, 2020 doctor paradox

This list casts a wide net in enumerating the various principals of interest to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

Plus, don’t miss the RussiaGate Lexicon — and please note these are both works in progress and being updated frequently as new details emerge about Putin’s revanchist influence in American politics.

Bestiary

Huma Abedin	Top aide to Hillary Clinton
—	—
ABLV	One of the largest private banks in Latvia
—	—
Roman Abramovich	Russian steel magnate whose Evraz company was given the green light to supply steel to DAPL by the Trump administration
—	—
ACU Strategic Partners	A company seeking to build nuclear power plants in the Middle East in partnership with a sanctioned Russia company; Mike Flynn was working for them without having disclosed it to the US government as required.
—	—
Aeroflot
—	—
Aras Agalarov	Emin’s father; a wealthy Russian-Azerbaijani oligarch who has received lucrative construction contracts from the Kremlin. Known as “Putin’s Builder”
—	—
Emin Agalarov	Popular Russian-Azerbaijani singer and businessperson who may have facilitated a handoff of hacked information to Donald Trump Jr via surrogates
—	—
Rinat Akhmetov	Ukranian steel magnate who brokered the relationship between Paul Manafort and defeated presidential candidate Victor Yanukovich
—	—
Rinat Akhmetshin	Former Soviety spy who attending the June 9 meeting in Trump Tower between Don Jr, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya
—	—
Vagit Alekperov	CEO of Lukoil, Russia’s second largest oil and gas company, that sought the services offered by Trump data firm Cambridge Analytica

Vagit Alekperov	CEO of Lukoil, Russia’s second largest oil and gas company, that sought the services offered by Trump data firm Cambridge Analytica
—	—
Alfa Bank / Alfa Group	Largest private commercial bank in Russia, that reportedly had a mysterious secret server connection to the Trump Organization during the campaign. The head of Alfa Group is the father-in-law of Dutch lawyer Alex Van Der Zwaan, currently serving 30 days in federal prison after being indicted by the FBI in the Mueller investigation.
—	—
Leyla Aliyeva	Wife of Emin Agalarov and daughter of the president of Ajerbaijan.
—	—
Dmitri Alperovich	Head of Crowdstrike, the US security firm that first broke the results of the DNC hack investigation, concluding the Russian military intelligence agency was behind it.
—	—
@America_1st_	IRA-controlled Twitter account, an anti-immigration persona with 24,000 followers
—	—
American Media	Helped bury stories portraying Trump in a bad light before the election, via catch and kill methodology among others
—	—
Anbang Insurance
—	—
Michael Anton	Flight 93
—	—
Apple	The House might come after messaging records for principals.
—	—
Tevfik Arif	co-founder of Bayrock and Kazakh-born Soviet official turned real estate tycoon
—	—
Andrey Artemenko	Member of the Ukranian parliament who says Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen and business crony Felix Sater confirmed the White House received his “peace proposal” (suggesting Russia “lease” the country for 100 years)
—	—
Julian Assange	Editor-in-chief of Wikileaks and former hacker from Australia, currently holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London on the lam from rape charges in Sweden; he is suspected of coordinating with the Russian government on the cyber attack on the American election in 2016.
—	—
Artem Avetisyan	Russian banker and consultant who bought Bank of Cyprus’s Russian-based businesseses; a transaction overseen by Wilbur Ross
—	—
Mykola Azarov	Former Prime Minister of Ukraine who was ousted in the Maidan revolution along with President Viktor Yanukovych.
—	—
Bank of Cyprus
—	—
Steve Bannon
—	—
Andrey Baranov	Head of investor relations for Rosneft who met with Carter Page in Moscow after his 2016 speech.
—	—
Tom Barrack
—	—
Alan Baskaev	Worked at the Internet Research Agency
—	—
Fabien Baussart	Cooperated with Russia in the Syrian civil war and nominated Putin for a Nobel Peace Prize; Donald Trump, Jr. spoke at an event held by Baussart’s French think tank.
—	—
Bayrock Group	Employed Felix Sater for a number of shady real estate dealings involving Mr Trump. Founded by Tevfik Arif, a Russian oligarch.
—	—
Being Patriotic	An IRA-controlled Facebook group that bought ads in support of the Trump campaign, and had over 200,000 followers by the time it was finally deactivated in mid-2017
—	—
Brian Benczkowski	Trump’s pick to lead the DOJ’s criminal division; once represented a Putin-tied Russian bank
—	—
Berserk Bear	Hacker group
—	—
Jeffrey Berman
—	—
Leonid Bershidsky	Well-known journalist who was the founding editor of Russia’s top business daily, Vedomosti, as well as the first publisher of the Russian edition of Forbes; left the country during the Brain Drain. “The Kremlin doesn’t care because it doesn’t consider the likes of me Russia’s best and brightest,” he told me by email after his departure to Germany in the summer of 2014. “To them, we’re the traitors, the fifth column.”
—	—
Vitaly Bespalov	26-year-old former worker at the Internet Research Agency in Russia who has spoken to the US media about his experiences in the “factory of lies”
—	—
Preet Bharara	U.S. Attorney who was prosecuting the Prevezon Holdings case when he was fired by Trump, shortly after which the huge case about to go to trial abruptly settled.
—	—
Black Fist	IRA-controlled persona claiming to want to teach African-Americans self-defense to protect themselves when contacted by police, that hired an actual self-defense instructor in NY to offer classes sponsored by Black Fist
—	—
Black Matters US	IRA-controlled account posing as grassroots activists
—	—
Black Sea Cable
—	—
Darren Blanton	his company Colt Ventures provided data management services to the Trump campaign
—	—
Tony Blinken	John Kerry’s deputy secretary of state under Obama
—	—
Anna Vladislavovna Bogacheva	Worked for the Internet Research Agency from at least April 2014 to at least July 2014; she served on the translator project and oversaw the group’s data analysis operations. She is one of the operatives who traveled to the United States to gather intel.
—	—
Mikhail Bogdanov	Russian deputy foreign minister
—	—
Gen. Alexander Bortnikov	Director of FSB circa 2015
—	—
Maria Anatolyevna Bovda	Worked for the Internet Research Agency from at least November 2013 to at least October 2014. She was at one time head of the translator project, along with other positions.
—	—
Donna Brazile
—	—
John Brennan	Acting CIA director under Obama; one of the 3 who brief Trump and Obama about the Russian attack on Election 2016
—	—
Bridges LLC	LLC begun by Maria Butina and Paul Erickson in South Dakota
—	—
Elliot Broidy	Major Trump campaign donor and Deputy Finance Chair of the RNC, who suspiciously took hundreds of millions of dollars from the UAE and was working on a business deal with the corrupt Prime Minister of Malaysia implicated in a heist of $4.5 billion dollars. Had himself been charged with felony bribery, ended up turning state’s witness, plea-bargained his case down to a misdimeanor while those he bribed went to prison. Also, he was reportedly negotiating a deal wherein he stood to benefit to the tune of $75 million, to drop the Feds’ case into the Malaysian theft.
—	—
William Browder	Founder of Hermitage Capital, who worked with Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky to uncover a $230 million money laundering scheme from Prevezon Holdings into NYC real estate. He has sought justice for the murder of Magnitsky in 2009.
—	—
Mikhail Leonidivich Burchik	One of the 13 Russian nationals indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in February 2018, in connection with the Internet Research Agency’s attack on the U.S. 2016 election. Burchik was Executive Director, the #2 in the organization, from at least March 2014.
—	—
Christopher Bancroft Burnham
—	—
Sen. Richard Burr	(R-NC) and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the committees in Congress conducting Russia investigations
—	—
Richard Burt	Helped Trump write his first foreign policy speech
—	—
Evgeny Buryakov
—	—
Maria Butina	“Personal assistant” to Alexander Torshin, she claims to have started several gun rights organizations in Russia
—	—
Buzzfeed	Originally broke the story of the Steele dossier and published what of it they had.
—	—
Mikhail Bystrov	One of the 13 Russians indicted by Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel in February 2018, Bystrov was General Director — the organization’s highest-ranking position — by April 2014.
—	—
Matthew Calamari
—	—
Cambridge Analytica	Data analytics company that worked for the Trump campaign and has been indicted in the UK for data theft.
—	—
Michael Caputo	Member of Trump’s campaign team, in charge of communications for New York. Left the campaign after voicing approval of the installation of Paul Manafort, replacing Corey Lewandowski as Trump’s campaign manager.
—	—
Cendyn	Cloud computing company that hosted the Trump Organization and may have information on the Alfa Bank link during the campaign
—	—
Center for Political and Foreign Affairs	French right-wing group that hosted a Trump trip to Paris during the home stretch of the campaign
—	—
Mike Cernovich	Alt-Right personality in the U.S. who lives in Orange County, CA
—	—
Jason Chaffetz	Bowing out of politics after announcing a move to Fox and whining about the cost of living as a Senator
—	—
Yuri Chaika	Russian prosecutor general
—	—
James Clapper	Director of National Intelligence under Obama; one of the 3 who brief Trump and Obama about the Russian attack on Election 2016
—	—
Bill Clinton
—	—
Hillary Clinton
—	—
Dan Coates	Director of National Intelligence who testified that there is no doubt Russia sees its 2016 efforts as having been successful.
—	—
Michael Cohen	Trump’s personal lawyer. Convicted of various federal crimes including campaign finance violations; sentenced to 3 years in prison.
—	—
Roy Cohn	Trump’s mentor and ruthless, vicious lawyer
—	—
Susan Collins (R-ME)	Senator from Maine who has been a voice of moderation within the Republican-controlled Senate, siding several times with the Democrats and voting against her own party.
—	—
James Comey	Being fired by Donald Trump as the FBI Director
—	—
Mike Conaway	new leader of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe after the recusal of Devin Nunes
—	—
Concord Catering	Company owned by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, known to be nicknamed “Putin’s Chef” and inside the Russian president’s inner circle.
—	—
Sam Clovis
—	—
Colt Ventures	provided data management services to the Trump campaign, and an investor in VizSense — a social media company who worked reportedly for the campaign and for Michael Flynn
—	—
Columbus Nova
—	—
Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX)	Leader of the House Intelligence Committee, one of the Congressional committees investigating the Russia scandal
—	—
Concord Management and Consulting
—	—
George Conway	Husband of Kellyanne Conway, a lawyer who has represented a corporation accused of bribing Russian officials
—	—
Kellyanne Conway
—	—
Rep. John Conyers	Criticized the firing of Sally Yates: “If dedicated government officials deem [Trump’s] directives to be unlawful and unconstitutional, he will simply fire them as if government is a reality show.”
—	—
Alex Copson	Managing director of ACU Strategic Partners, a firm Mike Flynn was consulting for regarding building nuclear power plants in the Middle East.
—	—
Mark Corallo
—	—
Jerome Corsi	Intermediary between Roger Stone and Wikileaks, an arm of the Russian intelligence apparatus
—	—
Ed Cox	New York Republican Party Chairman and son-in-law of Richard Nixon who recommends Carter Page to the Trump campaign
—	—
Randolph “Randy” Credico	Roger Stone’s publicly identified intermediary between himself and Julian Assange of Wikileaks. When subpoena’d by Congress, he pled the Fifth.
—	—
Crocus Group	Real estate developmenr firm owned by the Agalarovs, that secured the Moscow location for Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe pageant
—	—
Crowdstrike	One of the US private security contractors who implicated the Russians in the hack of the DNC servers.
—	—
Olivia Culpo	The reigning Miss Universe at the time of the 2013 Moscow pageant (and former Miss USA, and noted Trump favorite)
—	—
Rep. Elijah Cummings	ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, one of the first to request an investigation into Michael Flynn
—	—
Michael Daniel	White House director of cybersecurity
—	—
Stormy Daniels
—	—
Keith Davidson
—	—
Davis Manifort Partners, Inc. (DMP)	Political consulting company created by Paul Manafort in 2005.
—	—
DCLeaks	A cutout of the GRU, this account directly released and coordinated with Wikileaks to release more widely the stolen emails from Clinton, the DNC, and the DCCC
—	—
Rick Dearborn
—	—
Definers Public Affairs	GOP strategy firm hired by Facebook to besmirch its rivals and tar them with accusations of being tied to George Soros
—	—
Wendi Deng	Ex-wife of Rupert Murdoch, friend of Ivanka Trump, and friend of Russian oligarhcs + Putin (rumored to be Putins’ girlfriend)
—	—
Diana Denman
—	—
Department of Justice
—	—
Oleg Deripaska	Russian billionaire and Kremlin insider barred from the US due to organized crime links [contact w/Paul Manafort]
—	—
Deutsche Bank	Both the Risk Division’s Goup Risk Office and Credit Risk Management teams are under scrutiny from House Democrats at the HPSCI for due diligence on Trump transactions that have anything to do with the bank’s own confirmed history of laundering Russian money.
—	—
Sheri Dillon
—	—
Igor Diveykin
—	—
Kirill Dmitriev	Chief executive of the state-run Russian Direct Investment Fund, their sovereign wealth fund, who met with Erik Prince at a bar in the Seychelles, with George Nader present.
—	—

—	—
DMP International, LLC (DMI)	Company started by Paul Manafort in 2011 to consult, lobby, and do PR for Ukranian dictator Victor Yanukovich, whom Manafort helped get elected in 2010 until fleeing the country in 2014.
—	—
Dmitry Dokuchaev	FSB handler of Russian DNC hacker
—	—
Annie Donaldson
—	—
Donbas region	Area of Ukraine where a counter-revolution emerged after students ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych and Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and overthrew the government.
—	—
Don’t Shoot Us	An IRA-controlled Facebook group with more than 250,000 followers by the time it was deactivated in mid-2017
—	—
Jack Dorsey	Co-founder and CEO of Twitter and Square
—	—

—	—
Alexander Downer	Top Australian diplomat in Britain, who had drinks with George Papadopolous in London the night he blabbed about the Russians having dirt on Hillary Clinton.
—	—
DragonFly	Hacker group
—	—
Alexander Dugin	Russia’s most well-known neo-fascist ideologue, & Kremlin confidant
—	—
Pavel Durov	Founder of the successful VKontakte social network website, often described as Russia’s Facebook. Durov said he had been forced out of the company over his refusal to co-operate with the security services, and that his company was now under the “full control” of Kremlin-friendly figures
—	—
Arkady Dvorkovich
—	—
Josh Earnest	Obama White House press secretary in 2016
—	—
Fedor Emelianenko	MMA star, former Trump business partner, and friend of Putin
—	—
En+ Group Plc	One of Oleg Deripaska’s companies whose sanctions were lifted by the Trump administration.
—	—
Energetic Bear	Hacker group connected to the Kremlin
—	—
Boris Epshteyn
—	—
Paul Erickson	Attempted to set up a backchannel between the NRA and the Russian government during the Trump campaign.
—	—
Oleg Erovinkin	ex-KGB chief linked to helping the Christopher Steele dossier on Trump, reportedly found dead in the back of his car in Moscow on Boxing Day
—	—
European Centre for a Modern Ukraine (the Centre)	NGO entity created by Manafort and Gates in Belgium in 2012 to serve as an “arm’s length” front for their work with Yanukovich.
—	—
EuroSibEnergo JSC	One of Oleg Deripaska’s companies whose sanctions were lifted by the Trump administration.
—	—
Facebook
—	—
FAN (Federal Agency of News)	Fictional corporate twin entity to the IRA (indicted by Mueller) that is suing Facebook on First Amendment grounds… surely to go up to a COTUS tipped by Kavangaugh, as all such hyper-controversial cases are liable to be?!?!
—	—
Fancy Bear	Hacked Democratic Party emails during the 2016 US presidential election; also hacked MAcros campaign emails in France.
—	—
Nigel Farage	Former UKIP leader now under investigation for ties to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange
—	—
FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation)	Investigation of domestic terror units and criminal cells, as well as foreign criminal groups within the U.S.
—	—
Federal Assembly	Russian Parliament
—	—
Federal Election Commission (FEC)	Overseeing the process generally of national and state elections
—	—
Diane Feinstein	US Senator from California who published Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS’s transcript of testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
—	—
FireEye	Security firm
—	—
Dmitry Firtash	Ukranian oligarch and nagural gas magnate who got sweetheart deals within Putin’s inner circle
—	—

—	—
Marc Elias
—	—
Jon Finer	John Kerry’s chief of staff
—	—

—	—
FL Group	Icelandic hedge fund with ties to Putin, that invested in Trump Soho via FBI informant and convicted felon Sal Lauria
—	—
Michael Flynn	As the new NSA director he advocated military intervention in the Middle East and an alliance with Russia; later it turned out he’d accepted undisclosed payments from the Rurkish government and lied about undisclosed meetings with the Russian Ambassador, Sergey Kislyak
—	—
Flynn Intel Group
—	—
Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts	Hosted the meeting in the Seychelles between Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund
—	—
Fox News
—	—
Free Beacon	see: Washington Free Beacon
—	—
Mikhail Maratovich Fridman	invested $200m in Uber (?)
—	—
Peter Fritsch
—	—
Frontier Services Group	Erik Prince’s company, who has ignored document requests from Congress relating to the meeting in the Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev
—	—
FSB	the Russian Federal Security Service
—	—
Fusion GPS	Political research firm hired first by conservative billionaire, later by the Clinton campaign, that ultimately led to the Steele dossier.
—	—
Dmitry Fyodorov	Worked at the Internet Research Agency before being employed at Facebook
—	—
Michael Gaeta
—	—
Gang of Eight
—	—
Alan Garten
—	—
Rick Gates	Paul Manafort’s right hand man, indicted along with the former Trump campaign manager for a number of federal crimes from money laundering to illegal foreign lobbying and tax evasion.
—	—
Gazeta.ru
—	—
Gazprom	Russia’s energy monopolgy and largest gas company
—	—
General Services Administration
—	—
Georgia	Former Soviet state
—	—
Gerasimov	Russian General who wrote seminal asymmetric warfare doc
—	—
Masha Gessen	Journalist and author who has lived extensively in Russia and studied the rise of Putin
—	—
Igor Girkin	Leader of the Ukranian pro-Russian separatists in Donbas, he is alleged to have been connected to the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17
—	—
Rudy Giuliani	Publicly “predicted” the Comey “re-opening” of Clinton’s emails when the Anthony Weiner laptop was found
—	—
Glavplakat
—	—
Nikolai Glushkov	Former Boris Berezovsky associate turned up murdered in the UK, 8 days after the poisoning and attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in London.
—	—
Richard Goettlich
—	—
Rob Goldstone	Publicist of Russian-Azerbaijani singer Emin Agalarov who set up the June 9 meeting between Don Jr, Kushner, Manafort, and the Russians
—	—
Google	Online search company whose system was gamed, hacked, or perhaps simply used intentionally to sow disinformation to some of the most vulnerable citizen targets, as identified by stolen and purchased predictive user data.
—	—
Mikhail Gorbachev	Glasnost
—	—
Sergei Gordeev
—	—
J.D. Gordon
—	—
Sebastian Gorka	Former counterterrorism analyst for Fox News who joined the administration as an adviser; his ties to the Hungarian right had come increasingly under scrutiny before his departure from the White House. Prior to immigrating to the United States, Gorka had mounted an unsuccessful political career in Hungary and, in doing so, once expressed support for a far-right militia in the country.
—	—
Sergey Gorkov
—	—
Nikolai Gorokhov
—	—
Government Accountability Office	A watchdog organization for financial and other high-profile crimes within the U.S.
—	—
Trey Gowdy	(R-SC) Chair of the House Oversight Committee
—	—
Rhona Graff
—	—
Sen. Chuck Grassley	(R-IA)
—	—
GRU	Soviety military intelligence services
—	—
GSA	Has been asserted by TFA that documents were “unlawfully” given to the Special Counsel’s Office by this agency, including parts susceptible to privilege.
—	—
Guccifer 2.0	A cutout of the GRU, this account directly released and coordinated with Wikileaks to release more widely the stolen emails from Clinton, the DNC, and the DCCC
—	—
Shane Hable	Hillary for America IT chief
—	—
Alex Halderman	Testified before the House Intelligence Committee on the probable ability of the Russians to hack an election
—	—
Sean Hannity	Made claims on his show that the Steele dossier launched the Russia probe, which isn’t accurate.
—	—
Hapsburg group	Informal name given to the set of former European politicians whom Paul Manafort and Rick Gates paid to espouse pro-Yanukovich talking points.
—	—
Charles Harder	Representing Trump in the Stormy Daniels case; also represented Terry Bolea in the Gawker trial
—	—
Rep. Denny Heck (D-WA)	Member of the House Intelligence Committee, one of the Congressional committees investigating the Russia scandal
—	—
Hermitage Capital Management	The investment fund client of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered a $230 million money laundering scheme through New York real estate via Prevezon, a Russian holding company.
—	—
Hope Hicks	Yet another former White House Communications Director, she resigned the day after giving 9 hours of testimony on the Hill to the House Intelligence Committee. Til then she had been the longest-running current member of the Trump campaign.
—	—
Rick Hohlt
—	—
Dylan Howard
—	—
Jon Huntsman	US Ambassador to Russia
—	—
William Hurd	Paul Erickson’s lawyer
—	—
Jon Iadonisi	Tied to VizSense Inc. and White Canvas Group, 2 firms that did business with Michael Flynn
—	—
Ivan Ilyin	Christian fascist philosopher who inspired much of Vladimir Putin’s political philosophy
—	—
Imgur	Platform used by the Russian disinformation campaign that House Democrats want to subpoena
—	—
Instagram	Platform used by the Russian disinformation campaign that House Democrats want to subpoena the transition team for records of
—	—
Andrew Intrater
—	—
IRA (Internet Research Agency)	Well-known troll farm with ties to the Kremlin, funded and run by Russian oligarch and “Putin’s Chef” Yevgeniy Prigozhin (who also oversees private mercenary military forces in Syria and Ukraine.
—	—
Iron Liberty
—	—
Iskra	The main Bolshevik newspaper in the early 20th century
—	—
Darrell Issa
—	—
Viktor Ivanov	One of Putin’s closest allies, he’s the head of anti-narcotics in Russia; has spoken out against marijuana legalization in the US (!)
—	—
@jenn_abrams	IRA-controlled Twitter account claiming to be a Virginian Trump supporter with 70,000 followers
—	—
Ramzan Kadyrov	Chechnya’s Kremlin-backed leader, who is thought to be behind the murder of Putin critic and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. Kadyrov received a medal from Putin the month after Nemtsov’s murder.
—	—
Brittany Kaiser
—	—
Oleg Kalugin	Former KGB agent who became a U.S. citizen and grew critical of Putin’s regime.
—	—
Denis Katsyv	Sole shareholder of Prevezon, implicated in the $230m theft of Russian taxpayer dollars
—	—
Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze	8th person at Don Jr’s June 9 meeting; VP at Crocus Group, owned by Aras Agalarov — a lawyer for the Russian real estate firm, he has been identified by the Government Accountability Office as part of a large ring of Russian money-laundering operations.
—	—
Robert Kelner	Mike Flynn’s lawyer
—	—
Brian Kemp	Georgia secretary of state who bristled at the idea of DHS’s warning about the election integrity and attempts to hack voter registration
—	—
John Kerry	Secretary of State under Obama from 2013 to 2018
—	—
Ketchum	Western PR firm that helps place pro-Russian op-eds in Western media (like Putin’s in NYTimes on 9/11/13)
—	—
KGB	The Soviet secret service, renowned for ruthlessness and duplicity
—	—
Eva Khan	Daughter of a Russian oligarch, married to Alex van der Zwaan — the first to go to prison in the Mueller investigation.
—	—
German Khan	Russian oligarch billionaire, principal of Alfa Bank (Russia’s largest privste bank) and the father-in-law of Alex van der Zwaan who has pleaded guilty to MUeller’s team.
—	—
Mikhail Khodorkovsky	Ex-oil tycoon unexpectedly freed by Putin ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics
—	—
Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova	FAN’s chief accountant and an indictee under Mueller’s Russian investigation
—	—
Konstantin Kilimnik	Paul Manafort’s business associate in the Ukraine
—	—
Sergey Kislyak	Russian Ambassador who spoke with Mike Flynn [tracker] about lifting sanctions in undisclosed series of meetings
—	—
KLS Research LLC	Company formed by Peter Smith to facilitate and manage his question to find Hillary’s missing emails.
—	—
Artem Klyushin	Young Russian billionaire who claims to have been instrumental in getting Trump elected.
—	—
Koala
—	—
Aleksandr Kogan	Cambridge Analytica researcher who oversaw the harvesting of 50 million Facebook user accounts’ info who also moonlighted as a lecturer at St. Petersburg University
—	—
Kommersant	Long-respected business newspaper purchased by pro-Kremlin oligarch Alisher Usmanov
—	—
Komsomol	Leninist Youth League organization for Communists aged 14 to 28 in the late 80s & early 90s
—	—
Konstantin Kosachev
—	—
Andrei Kostin	CEO of VTB, one of the largest Russian banks (and under US sanctions)
—	—
Béla Kovacs (KGBéla)	One of the leaders of Jobbik, Hungary’s pro-Putin rightist party, who is accused of being a Russian spy.
—	—
Dmitry Kovtun	One of the two main suspects in the UK’s murder investigation case of former FSB/KGB spy turned informant and expat dissident, Alexander Litvinenko — killed by polonium-210 poisoning after having tea with the two then-current KGB officers in November, 2006.
—	—
Vladimir Kozhin	Senior Putin aide who attended the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in lieu of Putin.
—	—
Kozy Bear	The Dutch intelligence community alerted the DNC way back in 2015 that they had been hacked back in 2014.
—	—
The Kremlin
—	—
Jody Kriss	Former Bayrock partner who filed a lawsuit in January, 2017 alleging tax evasion of as much as $250 million in income + Russian money laundering
—	—
Aleksandra Krylova	Served as Director and 3rd highest employee within the Internet Research Agency, from at least September 2013. She was one of two employees of the IRA who obtained visas and entered the United States on June 4, 2014.
—	—
Mikhail Kulagin	Russian diplomat recalled to Russia, fearing his cover would be blown re: heavy involvement in the 2016 election, including the veterans’ pensions ruse
—	—
Charles Kushner	Father of Jared, the elder Kushner committed campaign fraud, blackmailed his own sister, and spent time in federal prison before re-emerging to help run the family business and, of course, suck at the teat of the Presidency
—	—
Jared Kushner	The evil son-in-law so evil he owned a billion dollar building at 666 Fifth Ave. in Manhattan
—	—
Kushner Companies
—	—
David Laufman	Former chief of the DOJ’s Counterintelligence & Export Control Section
—	—
Sal Lauria	FBI informant and convicted felon who brokered a $150 million deal for Sater with FL Group, an Icelandic hedge fund tied to Putin that also invested in the Trump Soho project
—	—
Sergei Lavrov	Russian Foreign Minister
—	—
Platon Lebedev
—	—
Marie Le Pen	head of the French far-Right party
—	—
Pyotr Levashov	Russian hacker who ran the sprawling Kelihos botnet, a massive spam and scam network; indicted by a US grand jury on 4/21/17
—	—
Lenta.ru
—	—
Lev Leviev	Russian “king of diamonds” who was a partner in Prevezon (involved in the Magnistsky-exposed money laundering of $230m in Russian tax dollars) and sold several floors of the NYTimes building in Manhattan to Jared Kushner
—	—
Ruslan Leviyev	Former police investigator from the Siberian city of Surgut, who left the force after becoming disgusted by the “culture of corruption” he had witnessed, and moved to Moscow in 2009. Inspired, like so many others, by the anti-Putin protests of 2011–12, Leviyev, a tattooed 29-year-old, is now one of the country’s top “social media dissidents”.
—	—
Val Levitan	Russian Canadian CEO of developer Talon (Trump Toronto); had no previous experience in real estate or construction
—	—
Corey Lewandowski	Donald Trump’s first campaign manager; succeeded by Paul Manafort.
—	—
Robert LiButti	Alleged mobster and associate of John Gotti, who is on video with Trump in the 80s at a WrestleMania event
—	—
Ronald Lieberman
—	—
Vladimir Lisin	Russian steel mogul who made $830m in 3 days after the election
—	—
Aleksandr Litvinenko	former Russian FSB agent who informed on Putin’s connections to the Russian mafia and was assassinated by polonium-210 poisoning in 2006
—	—
Marina Litvinenko
—	—
Oleg Lobov	Ties to the Romneys?!
—	—
Andrey Lugovoy	One of the two main suspects in the UK’s murder investigation case of former FSB/KGB spy turned informant and expat dissident, Alexander Litvinenko — killed by polonium-210 poisoning after having tea with the two then-current KGB officers in November, 2006. Lugovoy is currently a sitting member of the Russian parliament: deputy of the State Duma.
—	—
Lukoil	Russia’s second largest oil company after Rosneft, they contracted with Trump data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica
—	—
Loretta Lynch	US Attorney General under Barack Obama
—	—
Lyovochin
—	—
Rachel Maddow	Host of the most popular nighttime news show on MSNBC; she’s been following the Russia story aggressively for over a year in meticulously detailed fashion.
—	—
Sergei Magnitsky	lawyer who tried to expose the theft of $230 million of Russian taxpayers’ money by Prevezon Holdings (laundered into NYC real estate) before being arrested and allegedly tortured prior to his death in a Moscow prison in 2009; the 2012 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act is a landmark human rights act named after him.
—	—
Main Intelligence Directorate	Division of the GRU that carried out the second half of the Russian attack on our democracy — cyber intrusions and hacking of stolen materials from the Clinton campaign, disseminated by WikiLeaks
—	—
Ted Malloch
—	—
Jason Maloni
—	—
Paul Manafort
—	—
Jeanette Manfra	Head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security who confirmed to NBC News that the Russians successfully infiltrated “an exceptionally small number” of voter regidstration rolls in 21 states.
—	—
@march_for_trump	IRA-controlled accouunt created in May 2016 to promote IRA-organized rallies in support of the Trump Campaign
—	—
John Mashburn
—	—
John McCain
—	—
KT McFarland	Deputy Nartional Security Advisor under Mike Flynn. Asked to step down by HR McMaster.
—	—
Don McGahn	White House counsel from XXXX-XXXX
—	—
Evan McMullen
—	—
Medium	Social media and blogging community frequented by the Russians during their efforts at sowing propaganda and discord during the American 2016 Presidential election.
—	—
Dmitry Medvedev	Russian Prime Minister
—	—
Menatep
—	—
Rebecca Mercer
—	—
Robert Mercer	Shadowy billionaire Trump backer and donor who also backs Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica, and John Bolton.
—	—
Met Life Insurance	Holds Trump debt
—	—
MI6	British intelligence agency; the rough equivalent of the American CIA.
—	—
Joseph Mifsud	Director of the London Academy of Diplomacy who meets with George Papadopoulos in Italy.
—	—
Leonid Mikhelson	part owner of Novatek who made $1.9b from the stock pop post-Trump
—	—
Military Unit 26165	GRU cyberunit dedicated to targeting military, politival, governmental, and non-governmental organizations outside of Russia, including the U.S. Separate from this investigation, Unit 26165 was charged by a grad jury for hacking the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, the World Doping Agency, and other international sport associations.
—	—
Military Unit 74455	A GRU unit engaged in cyber operations, including assisting in the release of the documents stolen by Unit 26165, the promotion of those releases, and the publication of anti-Clinton content on social media accounts operated by the GRU. This unit also hacked computers belonging to the stater boards of elections, secretaries of state, and U.S. companies supplying software and other technology related to elections.
—	—
Stephen Miller	Aggressively anti-immigrant advisor to Trump, co-writing many of his most vitriolic speeches
—	—
Sergei Millian	Trump associate, head of the Russian-American chamber of commerce, and one of the sources of the Steele dossier
—	—
Marat Mindiyarov	Former worker at the Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, who told the Western press what it was like inside the farm.
—	—
Semion Mogilevich	Notorious mobster
—	—
Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan	The crown prince of Abu Dhabi.
—	—
Mossack Fonseca	World’s fourth largest offshore law firm, whose files were published as the Panama Papers in a German newspaper
—	—
Robert Mueller	Special Counsel at the DOJ, investigating RussiaGate
—	—
MVD	Ministry of Internal Affairs; supervises all police, prisons, and “public order militias”
—	—
George Nader	Lebanese-American businessman who lobbies for the UAE, and was at the meeting in the Seychelles with Erik Prince and the Russians
—	—
Alexsei Navalny	Putin critic and activist blogger; has been arrested, charged, & sentenced several times (but recognized as a political prisoner by NGOs)
—	—
Boris Nemtsov	Putin critic and opposition politician who was shot dead in Moscow in 2015 by a member of the Chechen security forces
—	—
New Island	Restaurant of Yevgeny Prigozhin that became a favorite of Putin’s, netting Mr Prigozhin lucrative contracts for shady operations as “Putin’s Chef”
—	—
Newsru.com
—	—
Alexander Nix	CEO of Trump data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica
—	—
NKVD	a forerunner to the KGB under Stalin
—	—
NRA	Hosted a number of conduits between the Trump campaign and Russian nationals, particularly Russian billionaires and oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.
—	—
NSA (National Security Agency)
—	—
Sam Nunberg	Former Trump aide who made a series of bizarre statements on cable TV before testifying to Robert Mueller’s team
—	—
Devin Nunes
—	—
NY Observer	Website owned by Jarek Kushner as part of Observer Media
—	—
Observer Media	Media company owned by Jared Kushner.
—	—
Keith Olbermann	American TV host
—	—
Opposition Bloc	Successor ruling party in Ukraine after Victor Yanukovich fled to Moscow and his Party of Regions toppled.
—	—
Viktor Orban	President of Hungary, noted for his pro-Putin and anti-refugee beliefs
—	—
Orbis	Steele’s research firm
—	—
Alex Oronov	dead — Bryan Cohen’s father-in-law (brother of Trump’s personal lawyer
—	—
Ostankino	Russia’s TV network
—	—
Ozero Cooperative
—	—
Pacific Life Insurance	Holds Trump debt
—	—
Carter Page
—	—
@Pamela_Moore13	IRA-controlled Twitter account claiming to be a Texan Trump supporter with 70,000 followers
—	—
George Papadopoulos	Member of the Trump campaign who has pled guilty in the Robert Mueller investigation and flipped to become a cooperating witness. Will serve jail time.
—	—
Brad Parscale	Head of the Trump campaign’s digital operation
—	—
Party of Regions	Ukranian political party run by Victor Yanukovych, the pro-Putin dictator ushered into power by Paul Manafort.
—	—
Stefan Passantino
—	—
Sam Patten
—	—
PBK
—	—
David Pecker	Helped American Media bury stories unfavorable to Trump leading up to the election — a campaign contribution violation, not to mention a moral violation
—	—
Mike Pence	Vice President of the United States
—	—
Pericles Emerging Markets
—	—
Perkins Coie
—	—
Dmitry Peskov	Putin’s press secretary. Michael Cohen was in touch with him as late at June 2016, during the presidential campaign, in talks over the Trump Tower Moscow deal.
—	—
Walid Phares	Fox News counterterrorism analyst & one of Trump’s 5 initial national security advisors
—	—
John Podesta	His stolen emails were one of several tronches of stolen documents released by Wikileaks at strategic moments during the 2016 presidential election campaign.
—	—
Victor Podobnyy	Russian agent who received intelligence information from American energy consultant Carter Page beginning in January 2013
—	—
Sergey Polozov	Worked for the Internet Research Agency as its head of IT from April 2014 to at least July 2014; he oversaw the buildout of the U.S. infrastructure for the Russian operations.
—	—

—	—
Mike Pompeo	CIA Director who went from praising to condemning Wikileaks
—	—
Petro Poroshenko	Ukranian president
—	—
Prevezon Holdings	a Cyprus company that has invested in Manhattan real estate and which prosecutors allege was the receptacle for some of the $230 million stolen from Russian taxpayers in 2007; part of Hermitage Capital, the investment fund Magnitsky was investigating until his murder in a Moscow prison in 2009.
—	—
Reince Priebus
—	—
Yevgeniy Prigozhin	“Putin’s Chef” — a former caterer and restauranteur who now runs Vladimir Putin’s internet propaganda operations via the Internet Research Agency as well as overseeing mercenary forces operating in Syria and Ukraine.
—	—
Erik Prince	Sec. of Education Betsy DuVoss’s brother, who met a Russian oligarch in the Seychelles during the campaign to talk about lifting sanctions. Founded and runs Blackwater, a formidable private security firm often accompanying US military operations as the theater of war becomes increasingly privatized and mercenaries find themselves duking it out in the desert armed with the plausible deniability of being at arm’s length from their country’s official foreign policy.
—	—
Project Veritas
—	—
Pussy Riot
—	—
Vladimir Putin
—	—
Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL)	Member of the House Intelligence Committee, one of the Congressional committees investigating the Russia scandal
—	—
Reddit	Was asked by House Democrats on March 7, 2018 to provide intel on the scope and scale of the Russian disinformation effort on their platforms during the 2016 election
—	—
Relcom	One of the first private companies or “collectives” formed under Gorbachev’s glasnost reforms, it brokered the first proto-Internet within the Soviet Union and first connection to the outside world — playing a key role in thwarting the attempted coup against Gorbachev by the KGB in August, 1991
—	—
Right to Bear Arms	Moscow-based entity begun by Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin — odd, in a country with no gun rights at all.
—	—
Ritz Carlton	Hosted Donald Trump during his 2013 visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant
—	—
Rodina	extreme nationalist party in Russia c. 2003 that hinted at ethnic cleansing; The Guardian reported it had actually been set up as a prop by Putin & cronies, to draw votes away from the other far-right Communist Party
—	—
Ed Rogers	Hired by Alfa Bank: a former REagan administration official
—	—
Mike Rogers	Admiral and Director of the National Security Agency under Obama; one of the 3 who briefed Trump and Obama about the Russian attack on Election 2016
—	—
Dana Rohrabacher	Representative (R-CA 48th District) since 2013; dubbed “Putin’s favorite Congressman”
—	—
Sergei Roldugin	Putin ally implicated in the Panama Papers
—	—
Rosneft	Russia’s state oil company
—	—
Rossiiskaia Gazeta	Russia’s official government newspaper
—	—
Wilbur Ross	US Secretary of Commerce and single largest shareholder of the Bank of Cyprus, the famous haven for Russian oligarchs to stash their billions
—	—
Rossotrudnichestvo
—	—
Steve Roth	CEO of Vornado, a $20 billion real estate investment trust (REIT) that owns 49.5% of Jared Kushner’s building at 666 Fifth Avenue; he’s also on Trump’s economic advisory team
—	—
Andrei Rozov
—	—
RT.com	Russian state-owned news service
—	—
RUPTLY	The Kremlin’s new video news agency
—	—
Rusal	One of Oleg Deripaska’s companies whose sanctions have been lifted by Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
—	—
Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the USA
—	—
Russian Direct Investment Fund	Russia’s sovereign wealth fund
—	—
Russian Imperial Movement	part of the far-right coalition within Russia seeking to build an international consensus, this group advocates “Christian Orthodox imperial nationalism”
—	—
Sergei Ryabkov	Russian Deputy Foreign Minister
—	—
Paul Ryan	Speaker of the House (R-WI) and a Trump defender and denialist
—	—
Dmitry Rybolovlev	the “Fertilizer King” — fertilizer billionaire who purchased Trump’s Palm Beach mansion for $95 million, but never moved in
—	—
Konstantin Rykov
—	—
Anatoli Samochornov
—	—
Sheryl Sandberg
—	—
Sarah Huckabee Sanders
—	—
Felix Sater	Russian mobster and FBI informant who runs Bayrock, a money-laundering firm designed to hide dirty Russian money in Trump’s taxes
—	—
Saudi Arabia
—	—
Sberbank	Russia’s largest bank
—	—
Anthony Scaramucci	Trump press secretary for all of 10 days
—	—
Dan Scavino	Managed the Trump campaign’s social media
—	—
Rep. Adam Schiff	Top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee overseeing that chamber’s Russia investigation
—	—
Keith Schiller	Trump’s longtime security chief and confidant
—	—
Eric Schneiderman	New York State Attorney General who has a long history of legal cases with Trump
—	—
Chuck Schumer	(D-NY) and Sen. Minority Leader
—	—
SCL Group Limited
—	—
Igor Sechin	President of Rosneft at the time Exxon violated Russian sanctions to help protect his property interest
—	—
Secured Borders	An IRA-controlled Facebook group that bought ads in support of the Trump Campaign, and had over 130,000 followers at the time it was deactivated in mid-2017
—	—
Jay Sekulow	Trump’s personal lawyer
—	—
Jeff Sessions	Trump’s first US Attorney General, before Bill Barr. He has recused himself from the Russia investigation because of his curious, multi-part memory loss of meetings with Russian agents.
—	—
Alex Shnaider	Ukrainian steel magnate & partner at Talon International who is managing Trump Toronto hotel as it goes into default
—	—
Paula Shugart	President of the Miss Universe Organization, who reported directly to Trump at the time of the 2013 Moscow pageant
—	—
Konstantin Sidorkov	Director of PArtnership Marketing for vKontakte, a Russian social media site, that had communications with the Trump campaign about setting up a profile.
—	—
Siemens AG
—	—
Sinclair Media	Conservative broadcasting conglomerate gobbling up local TV stations and forcing them to air canned right-wing footage with each segment.
—	—
Glenn Simpson	Head of research firm Fusion FPS who commissioned the Christopher Steele dossier.
—	—
Paul Singer	Billionaire financier who originally commissioned research firm Fusion GPS to start compiling opposition research on Donald Trump. He abandoned the project after Trump secured the nomination.
—	—
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom	Law firm retained by Paul Manafort and Rick Gates to “whitewash” Victor Yanukovich’s imprisonment of his political rival, Yulia Tymochenko, in Ukraine.
—	—
Matt Skiber	An IRA-controlled Facebook account that organized a pro-Trump rally near Trump Tower in mid-2016
—	—
Sergei Skripal	Former Russian official turned British spy who was attacked with his daughter Yulia with nerve gas in southern England, reputedly by agents of the Kremlin.
—	—
Yulia Skripal	Sergei’s daughter
—	—
Dan Smith	Head of the State Dept’s intelligence bureau under Obama
—	—
Peter Smith	Alleged to have solicited help on the dark web in finding Hillary’s “missing” emails from the Russians
—	—
Snapchat	One of the social networks the Democratic oversight committees want to send document requests to, to request more intel on the scope and scale of the Russian campaign on their platforms
—	—
Edward Snowden	Controversial former employee for private firms working within the US government who absconded with millions of top secret NSA and other departmental intelligence documents, fled to Hong Kong where he alerted the press, and flew on to Moscow where he lives under the protection of the Kremlin.
—	—
Solidarity	Polish workers’ party confronting Communism in the late ’80s
—	—
Oleg Solodukhin
—	—
Reuben Sorensen	Nuclear non-proliferation expert who briefed Mike Flynn on the ACU’s nuclear program and rejoiced that he would be named head of the NSA.
—	—
Sean Spicer	Trump’s press secretary
—	—
Sputnik	Russian news wire proffering fake news
—	—
Joseph Stalin
—	—
Alex Stamos	Ex-Facebook security chief
—	—
Stasi	Nickname for the Ministry of State Security in East Germany during the Cold War
—	—
Christopher Steele	Former British MI6 intelligence agent who put together the Steele Dossier on Donald Trump’s dealings with Russia
—	—
Beny Steinmetz
—	—
Daniel Steinmetz
—	—
Raz Steinmetz
—	—
Roger Stone	Long-time political advisor best known for being part of Richard Nixon’s “Dirty Tricks” crew who perpetuated Watergate among much else; he “predicted” the release of Clinton’s hacked emails
—	—
Stop All Immigrants	An IRA-controlled Facebook group
—	—
Stop All Invaders	An IRA-controlled Facebook group that bought Facebook ads in support of Donald Trump
—	—
Lee Stranahan	Works for Sputnik in Russia. Never responded to an official Congressional inquiry.
—	—
Strana.ru
—	—
SUP Media	Russia’s largest blogging service via acquisition of LiveJournal from Six Apart
—	—
Vladislav Surkov	Putin’s disinformation machine
—	—
SVR	Russian foreign intelligence service
—	—
Eric Swalwell	Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee
—	—
John Szobocsan
—	—
Matt Tait
—	—
Talon International
—	—
Tambov-Malyshev group	organized crime ring based in St. Petersburg w/ties to Putin; led by Gennadiy Petrov and Aleksandr Malyshev
—	—
Targeted Victory	GOP strategy firm hired by Facebook
—	—
@TEN_GOP	An IRA-controlled Twitter account posing as the Tennessee GOP Party.
—	—
TFA	Trump for America, Inc., the business entity formed to handle the Trump transition
—	—
Rex Tillerson	U.S. Secretary of State and former CEO of Exxon
—	—
Gennady Timchenko	23% owner of natural gas company Novatek, who made $1.8b from surges in pro-Russian market following Trump’s election
—	—
Ivan Timofeev	Program director at the Russian International Affairs Council, a government-funded think tank, who met with George Papadopolous to try to establish a meeting between Trump and Putin.
—	—
Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov	Nicknamed “The Little Taiwanese,” he’s one of Russia’s most notorious mobsters. At the time of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, he had been indicted in the U.S. for protecting a high-stakes illegal gambling operation run out of Trump Tower.
—	—
Alexander Torshin	Russian central banker, Putin confidant, NRA whisperer, handler of Maria Butina
—	—
Vadim Trincher	Ran a Russian-American gambling crime ring out of Trump Tower. Serving 5 years for racketeering.
—	—
The Translator Department	Department within the IRA dedicated to U.S. operations
—	—
Donald J. Trump
—	—
Donald J. Trump Jr
—	—
Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust
—	—
Eric Trump
—	—
Fred Trump	Donald Trump’s father, who built the family real estate fortune and handed it off to his son to ruin it
—	—
Ivanka Trump	Daddy’s little girl
—	—
Trump Foundation
—	—
Trump Organization
—	—
Trump Transition
—	—
Tsargrad
—	—
Tumblr	Was asked by House Democrats on March 7, 2018 to provide intel on the scope and scale of the Russian disinformation effort on their platforms during the 2016 election
—	—
Turboatom	Ukranian state-owned company who was the target of a bribery offer from ACU Strategic Partners — who Mike Flynn was working with — to accept a $45 billion contract to build reactors in Saudi Arabia in exchange for supporting the lifting of sanctions levied against Russia by the US and EU.
—	—
Turkey
—	—
TV Rain	Independent Russian broadcaster
—	—
Twitter
—	—
Yulia Tymoshenko	Ran against Victor Yanukovich in the 2010 Presidentials elections, and was jailed by him under spurious charges following his Paul Manafort-aided win.
—	—
UAE
—	—
UBS Real Estate	Holds Trump debt
—	—
United Muslims of America	An IRA-controlled Facebook account that had over 300,000 followers at the time it was finally deactivated in mid-2017
—	—
United Russia	Political Party of Russian PResident Vladimir Putin
—	—
Viktor Vekselberg	Putin-connected oligarch with connections to secretary of commerce Wilbur Ross [tracker]
—	—
Natalia Veselnitskaya	Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin who met with Donald Trump Jr, Paul Manafort, and Kared Kushner at Trump Tower in June 2016 about the dirt Russia had on Hillary Clinton. At the time she was representing Prevezon Holdings in the case the U.S. Justice Department had brought against them for a $230 million money laundering scheme that lawyer Sergei Magnitsky had uncovered.
—	—
VizSense Inc.	Provided social media services to the Trump campaign and Michael Flynn
—	—
vKontakte	Russian social network; equivalent analog to Facebook
—	—
Vnesheconombank	Russian state-owned development bank, under investigation for Russian election interference
—	—
Vornado	$20 billion REIT that’s an ~equal partner with Jared Kushner in the 666 Fifth Ave. building in Manhattan; Steve Roth, CEO, is an advisor to Trump
—	—
Rosemary Vrablic	Executive at Deutsche Bank’s private wealth unit who helped finance many of Trump’s real estate projects after other banks (and the “regular” side of Deutsche Bank) wouldn’t deal with him any more, following massive losses
—	—
VTB Bank	Russia’s largest commercial bank; under US and EU sanctions for money laundering
—	—
Sen. Mark Warner	(D-VA) — top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee
—	—
Washington Free Beacon
—	—
The Washington Post	venerable local paper purchased by Jeff Bezos in 2013
—	—
Debbie Wasserman Schultz
—	—
Jeff Weaver
—	—
Anthony Weiner
—	—
Allen Weisselberg
—	—
WhatsApp	The House HPSCI committee wants to subpoena them for communication records relating to principals in the Trump campaign
—	—
Julian David Wheatland
—	—
Acting AG Matt Whitaker
—	—
White Canvas Group	Undertook Turkey-related work for Michael Flynn
—	—
The White House	Supposed to be a civil servant but often a lobbyist, The White House includes the President and high-level senior staff
—	—
Wikileaks
—	—
World National-Conservatism Movement (WNCM)	umbrella term for Russia’s movement to unite an international extreme far-right coalition
—	—
Christopher Wray	candidate for the next FBI Director, to replace James Comey
—	—
Christopher Wylie	Whistleblower from Trump data team Cambridge Analytica who revealed the existence of a formerly secret client: Lukoil, Russia’s #2 oil and gas company
—	—
Viktor Yanukovych	Ukraine’s former pro-Moscow president; he paid $12.7 million to help influence the Ukranian election his way before being ousted from power in 2013. Paul Manafort made many of the millions he later laundered with Rick Gates via undisclosed lobbying for Mr Yanukovych.
—	—
Sally Yates	Deputy Attorney General under Barack Obama and Acting Attorney General following the inauguration of Donald Trump. She was dismissed by him after 10 days when she instructed the Justice Department not to allow Trump’s Muslim ban to be enforced because it violated the law and the Constitution.
—	—
Steve Yates
—	—
Boris Yeltsin	First President of the Russian Federation, after he orchestrated Russia’s exit from the USSR (and thus, its downfall, as all the Soviet satellite republics followed suit). He ruled from 1991 to 1999, never quite managing to usher in a true democracy before settling on a successor, an obscure and unknown former KGB officer stationed in East Berlin during the Second World War: Vladimir Putin.
—	—
Youtube	Favored propaganda platform for Russian agents used in the cyberattacks against the 2016 election
—	—
Yukos
—	—
Yunarmia	“Young Army” — created in 2015 by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to “encourage patriotism among schoolchildren”
—	—
Mark Zuckerberg	CEO of Facebook, whose platform was used by the Russians in their influence campaign against the 2016 U.S. elections
—	—
Alex van der Zwaan	Dutch lawyer caught lying to the FBI about his law firm Skadden’s report on Ukranian dictator Victor Yanukovich’s imprisonment of his presidential rival Yulia Tymochenko in Ukraine. Has plead guilty to Robert Mueller’s team.
—	—

The internet is a rage machine

March 21, 2019January 4, 2021 doctor paradox

Anger is the defining emotion of the internet.

It’s designed to whip you up into a frenzy in order to foment cheap pageviews. Its interest is in you becoming a histrionic attention whore, such that you suck in as much clandestinely stolen user data to your platform of choice as possible. Turns out, conflict gets attention.

Anger is also notably the “loophole” emotion — it’s the invisible one men get to have, while claiming for generations upon generations that “women are too emotional to be entrusted” with leadership or anything meaningful, really. Meanwhile male anger and aggression have killed hundreds of millions and wreaked destruction upon the earth many times over, as fragile masculinity is repeatably and predictably triggered over any little old thing.

A neat trick.

A story.

A lie.