THE SIEGE OF THE CAPITOL: ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROBERT MERCER ~~ Alex Constantine

https://constantinereport.com/the-siege-of-the-capitol-all-roads-lead-to-robert-mercer/

~~ article recommended by dreamjoehill2 and Introduction by dmorista  ~~

Introduction for article “THE SIEGE OF THE CAPITOL", Alex Constantine 

(Introduction written by dmorista)

This article “THE SIEGE OF THE CAPITOL: ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROBERT MERCER” written by Alex Constantine, is a long, complex, and highly detailed examination of the most extreme types of political operations, that were conducted to benefit the Republican far right, including most particularly Donald Trump.  Constantine is one of the few authors looking at the different layers of massive political movements / operations and their inter-connections.  This 16,500 word article is a challenging read but is unique in its serious examination of this issue. It does an admirable job of analyzing the role of Robert and Rebekah Mercer in funding the many initiatives and operations conducted to assist Trump in his accession to the Presidency in 2016, and the further campaign in 2020.  The article points out that Mercer kept funding operations after the loss of the election in 2020 and financially supported the various moves to annul the results of the election and install Trump in the Presidency by extra-electoral means.  Constantine does considerable work examining the powerful people who operate more-or-less behind the scenes.  Trump himself and the 300 or so people who actually occupied the Capitol Building on January 6. 2021 are the most obvious targets, but Constantine does not stop with them. 

The most obvious, and least important, layer of the January 6th “Siege of the Capitol” are the foot soldiers / ground level operatives. These are the people who actually physically attacked and occupied the National Capitol Building; the ones who posed for photos standing in the building or curled up at Nancy Pelosi’s desk, and their street-level organizations like the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and other paramilitary groups. The next level, or perhaps half level, up are the different immediate organizers, people like Ali Alexander who used the “Stop the Steal” meme on his organizational website.  Many operatives of this sort were present at the event.  The FBI has followed up and found a lot of these people, from the foot soldiers and low level leadership, and many of them will be prosecuted; but that will likely be as far up the organizational hierarchy that most law-enforcement and prosecutorial efforts will go.

The next level up are the many minor and mid-level officials from the Trump administration, and the associated pro-Trump non-governmental organizations and their staffs and leadership.  Then for the next level we go up to high-level advisors and current or former senior Trump Administration officials.  Here we begin to see names most of us recognize like Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Donald Trump Jr., and Rudloph Giuliani among others.  Also at this level are actual Congressional Office holders like Arizona Representatives Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, Alabama Representative Mo Brooks, and Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert.  Biggs and Gosar worked ahead of the January 6th events in rallying the ground troops at events in Arizona, Brooks exhorted the assembled MAGA forces at the Rally to Save America event on the Ellipse near the White House on the 6th, and Boebert was seen taking groups of people on tours of the Capitol Building on the 4th and 5th of January.  Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz also figure in at this level.  Many of the leaders of this operation stated they would march to the Capitol Building with the ground troops, but figures like Bannon, Stone, Giuliani, and Trump himself demurred and watched the events on TV.  The members of Congress were present in the Capitol Building, Hawley famously giving a clenched fist salute to the crowd around the building as he entered.  Trump occupies a sort of unique position at the very top of the layer of Senior officials and Congressional figures.  

Above all the various levels of political operatives discussed above, including Trump himself, we have the real leadership of the political operations of both of the two duopoly political parties; the Funders in the person of the Oligarchs.  The more socially liberal funders tend to give to the Democrats and the far-right funders tend to give to the Republicans.  Constantine makes a strong case that for the Trump Regime, Robert and Rebekah Mercer were the single most important figures at this highest level, at least where the events of January 6th are concerned.  Of course Trump had plenty of financial support from other politically active right-wing oligarchs. Open Secrets posted a list of the top 20 contributors to the 2020 Donald Trump Presidential Campaign, “Top Contributors, federal election data for Donald Trump, 2020 cycle”, Open Secrets, at < https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/donald-trump/contributors?id=N00023864 >.  This list is based on actual contributions and does not include the massive amounts of money that are now spent by unaffiliated advocacy groups; all this campaign money is raised and spent by tax-free 501(C3) and 501(C4) organizations.  Nonetheless the site provides some indication of the support Trump received and from whom.  Out of a total of $208.1 million worth of contributions in this top 20 t list $100 million is from publicly avowed extreme Zionist oligarchs, namely $90 million from Sheldon Adelson and $10 million from Bernard Marcus.  

In fact, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted that of the top 25 donors to political campaigns in the U.S. in  2020: “ … 15 are Jewish or of Jewish origin.”  It is simply a fact that, for the great majority of wealthy Jews who donate to political campaigns either to Democrats or Republicans, that support for Israel is a top priority.  (See, “Meet the top 15 Jewish political donors in this election cycle” Sep 24, 2020, Ron Kampeas, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, at < https://www.jta.org/2020/09/24/politics/meet-the-top-15-jewish-political-donors >).  This becomes a significant issue when evaluating this fine article.  Constantine writes an entire long section (one of the longest of his 10 sections in the long article) discussing Deutsche Bank, its German and Nazi roots, and its complex dealings with both Trump and Mercer.  But he never mentions that the Mercers are Jewish. Perhaps this is because, in the upper levels of finance capitalism, the types of political alliances and ethnic loyalties that animate members society in general are unimportant.  Deutsche Bank provided useful financial services to both Donald Trump and to Robert and Rebekah Mercer.  The history of Deutsche Bank was irrelevant. 

The general conditions in the U.S. have been adversely affected by twenty years of war in the Middle East, North Africa (MENA), and the Horn of Africa, since the events of September 11,  2001.  The massive costs in the range of $10 - $15 Trillion spent on those wars; in addition to the $30 Trillion spent on the military for standard expenses; when added to the $15 Trillion of tax cuts for the rich over the last 20 years; and the $50 or $60 Trillion given to the rich by the Federal Reserve Bank, have left the U.S. bankrupt.  The wars in the MENA area were fought for the benefit of Israel; they were not “Wars for Oil”.  In fact the U.S. Petroleum industry was pushed out of the MENA area afterwards and now operates primarily in West Africa and North America.  These are issues largely beyond the scope of Constantine's article, but the strain put on American society by the constant massive tax cuts, swindles, and the ongoing wars make the U.S. much weaker and more vulnerable to the advent of an authoritarian regime than it otherwise would have been.  He makes a final statement about Mercer saying that: 

“Robert Mercer, the Jefferson Davis of the current ‘civil war,’ is a computer scientist. He drew on Cambridge Analytica’s networking capabilities and election meddling experience to foment mobilization of neo-fascist shock troops in the aftermath of the 2020 Presidential election. Mercer’s deceptive sock puppets, including Trump and Republican congressional officials, directed them to the District of Columbia where the heavily-propagandized dupes stormed Capitol Hill, realizing Mercer’s dream of overthrowing a democratic system he loath

es. It was General Mercer’s opening fusillade.

“His ultimate objective is open fascist rule.”

=======================================

THE SIEGE OF THE CAPITOL: ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROBERT MERCER ~~ Alex Constantine 

1: The Plot Against the Peace

2: “HANG MIKE PENCE!”
3: A Premonition, FPayday, the Arizona GOP, Hit Men
4: The Devil’s Keepers, Veritas, Erik Prince, Michael Flynn
5: The Camp of the Saints, Civil War, Roger Stone’s Caveat: “An
Insurrection like you’ve Never Seen”
6: More Mercer Sock Puppets
7: Hitler’s Bank Finances a Nazi Revolt in America
8: Some of Mercer’s Paid Opinion Programmers who Claim that the Election was Stolen
9: Freedom Caucus Leader Andy Biggs, Ali Alexander and Charlie Kirk
Walk Across the Rubicon
10: SCL/Cambridge Analytica has Used the “rigged Election”Gambit to Incite Dissent in South America and Nigeria, Often Resulting in Riots and Mass Fatalities

Postscript: QAnon Exposed

 1: The Plot Against the Peace

The central strategist behind the radical right-wing siege of Capitol Hill is a matter of public
record in small, scattered pieces. But reporters used to taking dictation, and a parade of political experts gracing the airwaves with only a glancing knowledge of domestic fascism, ignore him. The insurrection was sponsored by one man, multi-billionaire Robert Mercer, Trump’s most generous donor.
How is it that accountability stops at Trump, and doesn’t bother to climb one more tier to the power behind the throne? The FBI rounds up the shock troops, but in this game of thrones the beating heart of the chaos is overlooked.
The press corps is accustomed to reporting and reacting to official statements (“what they say, not what they do”), and drawing “obvious” conclusions based only on appearances. So the press has concluded that Trump’s delicate ego was scarred by a lost election. To hold onto power, he claimed that the election had been stolen. Trump’s advisors in the outgoing executive branch, much of the GOP. commercial news outlets and social media all echoed and expanded in the Lie because they think Trump is keen.
All of this arose without meticulous planning, on the spur of the moment. Presumably, one deranged incompetent’s wounded vanity and will to power can move mountains, come within an inch of overthrowing a democratic republic that has survived periods of violent dissent, bloody civil and world wars, severe economic depressions.
Contrary to popular belief, the Don and Rudy Show was not the motive force of the ongoing civil war. All of the events preceding the “spontaneous” attempted coup were planned years ago. Trump’s social media trolls did not respond autonomically to the Big Lie and fake evidence of election fraud of their own accord. The Lie itself was not even his idea — it was based on a strategy that took over a decade to develop overseas. A majority of elected Republican officials did not endanger their own careers without prompting to reinforce Trump’s lie. They didn’t all fall into line when impeachment loomed after Trump left the White House without reason. It wasn’t Trump’s advanced training in psyhchological messaging that drove conservative, white nationalist, militia and neo-Nazi social networks with meticulously tailored emotional triggers to mobilize and charge Capitol Hill, nearly rendering Congress a human slaughterhouse (see section 10).
Independent Counsel Robert Mueller held a massive covert operation by the tail, and might have
exposed it had he been permitted to complete the Russiagate probe. Manafort, Kilimnik, Flynn
and all lied and were willing to endure criminal convictions to hide the truth. Barr and Rosenstein stepped in to limit the investigation before he could take his gaze off of the Russian ball and direct it to an internal threat much more serious than Kremlin meddling in the 2016 election. Mueller’s sole objective was scaled down to smoking out foreign influence, and he accomplished this objective.
The domestic fascistic schemer behind the 2016 election of Trump, and violent culmination of his presidency, wasn’t touched. Any capable news junky might suspect a coup was underway … Robert Mercer’s Plan —

“Destroy the Government of We the People”

Daily Kos, March 23, 2017

” … Jane Mayer has just published a must read article in The New Yorker: The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency (How Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency)

“The in-depth article gives us the historical and current perspective on how political operative [now deceased] Patrick Caddell, money man Robert Mercer and fake news media king Steve Bannon joined forces in a crusade to destroy the United States Government of The People, by The People and for The People as we know it. Their vehicle had to be a populist movement that they could exploit through propaganda, all they needed was a figurehead: Enter Don the Con. …”

Ted Cruz Steps Aside for Trump but Remains in the Game

Robert Mercer, the owner of Breitbart, initially chose Ted Cruz as key avatar in the plot. Even the brilliant AI developer Robert Mercer didn’t expect Trump to pull ahead in the primaries. But it was widely reported, once the fast-talking reality TV celebrity with the checkered past pulled ahead of Cruz, Mercer threw his considerable financial weight behind Trump. Cruz was no longer the Chosen One, but the Ivy-League Texan choked back his disappointment and personal disdain for Trump, and remained on the team. Publicly, Cruz appeared to be a simpering charlatan when he bent the knee for Trump, but his pride was irrelevant.

Josh Hawley Blunders Aboard the Coup Train

On October 5, 2017, Kevin Robillard and Maggie Severns at Politico reported, “Top GOP Senate recruit courts Bannon after threat.” The subhead: “Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley called Steve Bannon after a report Bannon wanted to defeat him in a Senate primary.” Politico: “The Republican establishment pick to take on Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill quietly reached out to former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon last week — the latest step taken by concerned Republicans to counter Bannon’s threats to wreak havoc across the Senate landscape in 2018.
“Two Republican sources said Attorney General Josh Hawley, a soft-spoken 37-year-old with an Ivy League pedigree who is expected to officially announce a run soon, called Bannon late last week, after the New York Times reported the Breitbart leader was targeting Hawley for defeat in Missouri’s GOP Senate primary. Republicans, who saw their last chance to defeat McCaskill slip away after they nominated gaffe-prone then-Rep. Todd Akin, fear Bannon’s interference could cause a similar outcome in 2018.

How to Launder a Bribe: “The Club for Growth, which has received millions from the Mercer family, and the Senate Conservatives Fund, which also got Mercer donations, quickly became Hawley’s biggest financial backers, by far. …” (Truthout, February 4, 2021.) “A prominent conservative PAC has spent nearly $65,000 on copies of book that hasn’t been published yet as part of its effort to boost Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley. The Senate Conservatives Fund, a PAC … emerged as one of the most vocal defenders of Hawley in the wake of Jan. 6 Capitol riot. …” (Kansas City Star, February 9, 2021.)

Leonard Leo Signs up Hawley (and Makes Key Decisions for Trump,

Suppresses the Vote in the 2020 Election)

Politico: “On the call, Hawley reminded Bannon of their mutual friends, including the Mercer megadonor family. which bankrolls much of Bannon’s political work. Hawley met with Robert Mercer last fall when he was running for attorney general, one Republican close to Hawley said. Hawley also mentioned Club for Growth President David McIntosh and conservative legal expert Leonard Leo, who advises President Donald Trump on judicial nominations.”
Leonard Leo is not as well-known as Cruz or Hawley beyond conservative political cliques, but his influence has been immense.
Leonard A. Leo is an attorney and conservative legal activist. He was the longtime vice president of the Federalist Society, co-chair of the organization’s board of directors. At the Society, he spearheaded campaigns in support of Supreme Court nominees John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. When Obama was in the Oval Office hot seat, Leo was central to the campaign to stop Merrick Garland from filling the SCOTUS chair previously held by Antonin Scalia. The Judicial Crisis Network, with ties to Leo, spent more than $7 million to head off Garland’s confirmation.
Leo was associated with some two dozen conservative nonprofits that raised over $250 million in 2014 through 2017. Donors who contributed to this network included Charles Koch and Rebekah Mercer. Leo has served on the boards of a number of organizations, including Reclaim New York, a charity with links to Robert Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah Mercer, said to be the most powerful woman in the country, and Steve Bannon.
Open Secrets reports, an LLC linked to Leo, he disclosed, “made a $1 million mystery donation to Trump’s inauguration.”

During the 2020 election campaign, “a conservative group fighting to restrict voting before the 2020 election is part of a dark money network run by Lenard Leo.

 

2: “HANG MIKE PENCE!”

God, the Koch Brothers & Robert Mercer

Mike Pence is an evangelical Christian and political painted lady. In 2016, he was a favorite of billionaire donors to the GOP, most especially the Koch brothers.
On October 18, 2017, Terry Gross, host and executive producer of NPR’s “Fresh Air” interviewed investigative journalist Jane Mayer. The thrust of the discussion involved the incredibly corrupt Koch brothers, but it was Robert Mercer, Gross explained, “who [Mayer] says has become a major force behind the Trump presidency.”:
MAYER: [Pence] acts as the connective tissue between the Trump administration and Congress,
between the Trump administration and the — kind of the socially conservative base of the party. And most importantly, he is THE CONNECTOR BETWEEN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION AND THE BILLIONARE DONORS IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. He is the guy who does MOST OF THE FUNDRAISING AND OUTREACH TO THE MONEY.”
GROSS: And the money includes the KOCH BROTHERS AND ROBERT MERCER.
MAYER: It does. And one of the interesting things to me in writing about Pence is it poses such
a juxtaposition between the way that Trump ran, which was as a populist outsider who was attacking the big-money forces in the Republican Party as corrupt, and saying that they were PUPPETEERS trying to CONTROL THE CANDIDATES AS PUPPETS. And Trump made a huge point of saying, I’m my own man; I’m so rich; no one controls me. Yet as his vice president, he chose Mike Pence.
“And you could hardly find a candidate in the American political scene who has closer ties to the big donors and particularly the Koch brothers. He’s been sponsored by them for years. … The Kochs invited him to come to their secret donor summits. And at that point on, they started showering him in money. So it was – it really became a working relationship then. And I hadn’t realized that until recently …”
“And a tremendous number of people who work with and for Pence have gone in and out of working for the Kochs to the point that you had Politico saying – they quoted a Republican operative saying that the KOCH OPERATION REALLY WAS THE SHADOW CAMPAIGN FOR PENCE FOR PRESIDENT.” (Emphasis added,)
Donald Trump, the ultimate glory hound, had long been wary of his vice president. There were the predictable spats. But after the rancorous, nail-biting, danger-high-voltage tensions of the 2020 election, Trump played the “Rigged Election” card, as he intimated he would before the election.
He fully expected Pence to play along.
“For vice-president Mike Pence,” the Irish Times website reported on January 14, 2021, “the moment of truth had arrived. After three years and 11 months of navigating the treacherous waters of President Donald Trump’s ego, after … moments where he employed strategic silence or florid flattery to stay in his boss’s good graces, there he was being cursed by the president.
“Trump was enraged that Pence was refusing to try to overturn the election. In a series of meetings, the president had pressed relentlessly, alternately cajoling and browbeating him. Finally, just before Pence headed to the Capitol to oversee the electoral vote count last Wednesday, Trump called the vice president’s residence to push one last time.”
“You can either go down in history as a patriot,” Trump said, “or you can go down in history as a “PUSSY!”
Pence’s oleaginous displays of sentiment were never actually convincing. Pence the white-haired feline stepped out of the closet and shut the door rather firmly behind.
Trump whistled for his rabid beast, and the creature — foam dripping from his jaws — responded.

A Mad Dog

L. Lin Wood is a lawyer with a utility vest stuffed full of tactics as scurrilous as the late Roy Cohn’s. He had handled lost causes before. His representation of Olympic bomber Richard
Jewell led Dan Rather to describe him as “the attorney for the damned.”
Wood’s upbringing undoubtedly contributed to his sour disposition. The Geeolastar site reports that Wood was raised in Macon, Georgia. He “has stated in news accounts that his family struggled financially with frequent episodes of domestic abuse involving his parents.” One evening, after a school dance, “the then 16-year-old Wood returned home to find his father had beaten his mother to death. L. Lin Wood Sr. pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter, a charge reduced from first-degree murder. He served a little over two years in prison. Wood has stated that it was this experience that solidified his earlier decision to become a lawyer.”
“Lucian Lincoln ‘Lin’ Wood Jr.,” his Wikipedia entry states, “(born October 19, 1952) is an American attorney and conspiracy theorist based in Atlanta, Georgia. Following his graduation from law school in 1977, Wood worked for decades as a personal injury lawyer, focusing specifically on the then-burgeoning field of medical malpractice litigation. He later shifted his focus, becoming known as a ‘celebrity lawyer’ with a specialization in defamation lawsuits. Wood first drew media attention in relation to his representation of Richard Jewell, the security guard falsely accused in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta in 1996. Wood’s representation of Jewell helped transform Wood from a personal injury lawyer to a nationally known defamation lawyer.
“By 2020, Wood was frequently garnering attention through his promotion of conspiracy theories, both in his capacity as a lawyer and as a political commentator and social media personality. After Joe Biden won the presidential election, Wood promoted conspiracy theories on Trump’s behalf, falsely claiming that Trump had won the election with 70% of the vote, and that a secret cabal of international communists, Chinese intelligence, and Republican officials had contrived to steal the election from Trump. Sometimes in association with Trump attorney Sidney Powell, Wood litigated on the president’s behalf in many failed lawsuits, which sought to prevent the certification of legally cast ballots in the presidential election.”
Lin Wood represented casino magnate Steve Wynn in legal matters. Both of them were Trump supporters.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Wood “crafted sensitive settlement pacts when Mr. Wynn faced accusations of sexual harassment, allegations Mr. Wynn has denied. Mr. Wynn arranged for the Atlanta-based lawyer to visit Mr. Trump’s Florida club as his guest. And the businessman volunteered to help Mr. Wood in his campaign to secure a Presidential Medal of Freedom for another high-profile client, the late Richard Jewell.”
Steve Wynn sent Wood to Trump, and Mercer couldn’t be far away.

GOP fundraisers scored cash from big donors Wynn and Mercer, 

who had gone quiet in Trump reelection push

Brian Schwartz, NBC, MAY 6 2020

“Allies of President Trump have been quietly reaching out for help to big donors who had previously limited their financial support of his reelection push.
“Those targeted included Steve Wynn, the former CEO of Wynn Casinos who resigned after being accused of sexual misconduct, and Robert Mercer, the former co-CEO of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies and investor in the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica.
“The effort, geared toward helping Trump defeat apparent Democratic nominee Joe Biden this fall, appears to have been a success….
“Until his recent contribution, MERCER HAD GONE MOSTLY DARK IN FINANCING TRUMP’S REELECTION. HIS FAMILY FOUNDATION, HOWEVER, WAS SPENDING MILLIONS ON CONSERVATIVE CAUSES THAT CLOSELY ALIGN WITH THE PRESIDENT’S AGENDA. …
“The RNC started receiving checks from Wynn in April 2019. That same month, Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, said the effort would cost at least $1 billion. ‘I definitely think we’re looking at a BILLION-DOLLAR OPERATION, minimum,’ Parscale told Eric Bolling in an interview at the time.” (emphasis added.)

A billion dollar operation? Taking the Shining City on the Hill, and extinguishing the beacon of freedom throughout the world, doesn’t come cheaply. And after all the disease-superspreading death cult rallies (at least 700 perished in their wake),
Leo’s voter suppression strategies, the tense debates, Fox News lies about Hunter Biden (concocted by Psy Group, a Mercer/Cambridge Analytica subsidiary operating in Ukraine), the loss of the election, 60 flatulent lawsuits, the attempts to stop certification of the ballots in key states, threatening state election officials and governors into finding “the missing ballots,” all of the lies and shenanigans, MIKE PENCE REFUSED TO COOPERATE when it came down to the wire, the final electoral ballot count. Pence patiently explained that throwing the election to Trump was impossible. But “impossible” is not an impediment to a man groomed for success by motivational speakers.
Lin Wood,. teeth bared, crouched to either intimidate Pence into throwing the election to Trump, or leaving a corpse for the crows:

Trump Election Lawyer Lin Wood Calls for Pence
to be Executed by Firing Squad

Attorney makes baseless claims
against George Soros and Bill Gates
Gustaf Kilander, January 2, 2021
The Independent, Washington, DC

“Trump election attorney Lin Wood tweeted that Vice President Mike Pence will ‘face execution by firing squad,’ in a string of tweets that prompted questions about his sanity. He called Mr. Pence a ‘coward’ who will ‘sing like a bird and confess ALL.’
“The lawyer has lost several lawsuits challenging Donald Trump’s election loss. In the Friday afternoon thread, Mr Wood said the focus had been on the Democrats during the effort to overturn the election but one of the main culprits of Mr Trump’s loss was his own party. Mr Wood also represented Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager charged with shooting two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin during this summer’s racial justice protests.’Over time, we have learned that the Democrats were joined by CCP & other foreign countries,’ Mr Wood tweeted, possibly referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
“Mr Wood went on to make baseless accusations against ‘globalists like George Soros,’ ‘elitists like Bill Gates,’ and the Republican Party.
“He then claimed that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Vice President Mike Pence would be arrested.
“Attorney and author Seth Abramson called Mr Wood ‘disturbed.’ Editor at large at The Daily Beast Molly Jong-Fast sarcastically questions Mr Wood’s sanity. …
“Mr Pence has been slammed by some Republicans for not fully backing the election challenges
lobbed in Mr Trump’s favour. A lawsuit by Texas Republican Representative Louie Gohmert [recipient of generous donations from PACs funded in part by Mercer], attempting to allow Mr Pence to only count the electoral votes for Mr Trump during Congress’ certification process was thrown out in court by a federal judge. Mr Pence’s lawyers asked for the case to be dismissed.”

Wood’s call for Pence’s execution coursed like a riptide through the online eco-sphere that soaked the brains of psyop-addled militia men, neo-Nazis and QAnon fantasists, exploded in the corridors of the Capitol:

“HANG MIKE PENCE! HANG MIKE PENCE! HANG MIKE PENCE! HANG MIKE PENCE!”

 

3: A Premonition, Payday, the Arizona GOP, Hit Men

Trump’s Premonition — “Could Get Bad”

Trump is known to lack impulse control, particularly when it comes to boasting. Self-aggrandizement trips off the tongue, even when he bites down on it. Then he may think it over, reconsider, walk it back, or more often, double down.
In March, 2019 interview published by Breitbart, he let it be known that Republicans are tougher than Democrats, but by nature gentle, submissive; Democrats were at heart vicious political ferrets.
““You know, the left plays a tougher game, it’s very funny, I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad,” he said said.
“But the left plays it cuter and tougher. Like with all the nonsense that they do in Congress … with all this invest[igation] — that’s all they want to do is — you know, they do things that are nasty. Republicans never played this.”
“Law enforcement, military, construction workers, Bikers for Trump … They travel all over the country …. They’ve been great,” Trump said. “But these are tough people … But they’re peaceful people, and Antifa and all — they’d better hope they stay that way.”
Some in the “the enemy of the people” press corps interpreted Trump’s statements as a threat. (“Trump suggests that it could get ‘very bad if military, police, biker supporters play ‘tough,’ The Hill, 3-14-19)
Trump’s uncanny Jeanne Dixon prophecy came to pass two years later.
After the coup, the FBI revealed that “dozens” of neo-Nazis on the FBI’s terror watch list traveled to D.C.
An official told the Washington Post that some of the individuals suspected of participation in the coup were current and former police and military personnel. And they were primed for :war.” Internal FBI reports mention an online thread that “discussed specific calls for violence to include stating ‘Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”

Payday

They were all well compensated.
Chainanalysis reports that over $500,000 in bitcoin currency was distributed to 22 far-right groups with online accounts on December 8, 2020. These accounts included the Nazi site Daily Stormer, and anti-immigrant hate group VDARE, as well as America First neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
Chainanalysis reported that the deposits were made by a French blogger who apparently took his own live shortly after making the donation. His identity was not disclosed by French authorities, but England’s Daily Mail reports, “a source close to the Paris police confirmed that ‘no crime was committed’ in connection with the death of Bitcoin millionaire Laurent Bachelier, 35.” Bachelier lived  a few miles from the Hyatt Regency Etoile Paris. where he apparently downed an overdose of drugs on December 8, having “funded the mob who stormed Congress in Washington with a $520,000 donation.” Bachelier’s corpose was found “by a member of staff. He had been dead some time.’  For the past eight years the computer programmer had suffered from trigeminal neuralgia, a chronic nerve condition.” His life was “shrouded in mystery and sinister intrigue.” Bachelier’s cyber-crimes fetched a fortune in Bitcoin. “His method was to blackmail and troll victims online, using his formidable skills to ‘enrage, threaten’ and expose anyone who expressed opposing views to his clients. His donation to the DC insurrectionists included some $250,000 to white supremacist Nick Fuentes, in the days leading up to the January 6 outrage. Bachelier committed suicide just hours after making the huge cash gift, in the form of 28.15 Bitcoin, from the central hotel room last month. His suicide note appeared on December 9, one day after his donations were recorded on a publicly available block chain.” (Nick Fagge and Peter Allen, “Revealed: Mysterious French blogger who made $520,000 bitcoin donation to Capitol rioters booked into luxury Paris hotel room and killed himself with drugs overdose,” Daily Mail Online, January 30, 2021.)

Online, the Frenchman lamented the “decline” of the West, the “rejection of our ancestors and our heritage.” Mercer is a contributor to “racial hygiene” groups that spew the same rhetoric domestically. (The Mercer Family Trust has donated tens of thousnds of dollars to the racist Anglosphere Society. Compare the rhetoric above with Anglosphere’s “cultural events for sharing ideas based on the historic values of English-Speaking Peoples.”)
Among the recipients of this digital largess, count VDARE, an anti-immigrant organization that receives much of its funding from Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah.

The Arizona GOP

The Mercers donated $1.5 million to PACs tightly affiliated with Arizona Republican Party
Chairwoman Kelli Ward, also state representatives Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar. (Biggs and Gpsar were reportedly involved in planning the rally on January 6.)
The state motto of Arizona is “God Enriches.”
These Arizonans “coincidentally” cheered on the Capitol siege with “Stop the Steal” rallies in Arizona and the District of Columbia.

They’re Stealing the Election — Let’s Kill ‘Em!

Philadelphia prosecutors ID’d a rioter from “Stop the Steal” rally videos. They requested bail be revoked for Navy veteran Joshua Macias, founder of Vets for Trump, age 42.
He was arrested on November 5 for several felony and misdemeanor weapons offenses after the FBI received a tip that he and an accomplice, Antonio LaMotta, were en route to the city from Virginia to to ‘straighten things out’ as ballot counting continued after the election.” Macias appears in a video shot at Trump Tower in 2016, posted online by C-Span.
On November 6, the AP reported, “a silver Hummer with Virginia license plates was parked Friday at the location where police say they found the men’s vehicle. It was adorned with an American flag, a window sticker for the right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon and a fresh parking ticket. … LaMotta is listed as an ambassador on the organization’s website.”
The next day, Forbes provided more details: “At an arraignment Friday night, prosecutors said that text messages reveal two Virginia men, who were arrested Thursday, drove to Philadelphia to ‘deliver a truck full’ of fake ballots because they were concerned about ballot-counting taking place at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, according to a local CBS affiliate. … Additional evidence from the vehicle, including a hat with a QAnon conspiracy movement logo, is being investigated.”
“QAnon is a positive military operation that is working to take down the deep state,’ Lamotta reportedly wrote on Facebook. … According to CNN, LaMotta told his work supervisor a few days ago that he needed leave for an ‘assignment’ in Philadelphia.”
As it happens, Robert Mercer dispatched a number of intimidating “poll watchers,” many of them armed, to raise a ruckus as ballots were counted, Police told reporters that they wanted an armed attack on the ballot counting center.”
Like Trump said two ears earlier, “my supporters play ‘tough.”
Despite entreaties of the prosecutors, the pair were released after posting $75,000 bail. At the DC rally, according to the Daily Beast on January 14, 2021, “the fringe duo appear to have promptly rejoined their Virginia-based political clique after getting out on bail over the most dangerous alleged threat to the 2020 vote count.”
Court filings state that Macias “even gave a speech as rioters stormed the building.”
Back in Virginia after the storming of the Capitol, “they acted as volunteer bodyguards for Amanda Chase, a far-right state senator and gubernatorial candidate, who attended the rally preceding the riot.
The night before the rally, “Macias appeared in a Facebook Live video with Chase and the head of the civil war-endorsing militia the Oath Keepers. The video participants boasted of being in D.C. for the Jan. 6 pro-Trump event, and encouraged others to attend.” (The Richmond, VA. ABC affiliate reports that “Democrats have moved towards a potential censure of state Sen. Amanda Chase, claiming in a resolution Wednesday that she instigated ‘insurrection against the United States.’ Last week, the caucus asserted that the Republican gubernatorial contender helped empower ‘a failed coup d’état’ at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and called on her to resign from office.)
“Macias previously told The Daily Beast he did not invade the Capitol, pointing to a video of himself dancing to a pro-Trump rap duo outside the building.
“Meanwhile, around 5:15 p.m. last Wednesday, after attackers had been pushed from the Capitol, a man who appeared to be LaMotta passed behind a CNN film crew on air [posted online at the Internet Archive website], accompanied by members of the Oath Keepers.”

 

4: The Devil’s Keepers, Project Veritas,
Erik Prince, Michael Flynn

“The mob was fed lies. They were provoked  by the president and other powerful people.” — Mitch McConnell

After the inauguration in the year 2017 of Our Lord, Trump wasted no time filing for reelection. He resumed campaigning, one red-capped sea of shrill fan rallies after another.
\His campaign staff hired the Oath Keepers to provide ad hoc security to chase off Antifa and
escort hecklers to the exits. Oath Keepers could be observed with official credentials pinned to
their chests behind security lines.
The Keepers, Daily Kos’s David Neiwert reported on October 11, 2019, “were “excited” about Trump’s tweet predicting “a ‘civil war’ likely to erupt if Democrats were to attempt to impeach him.”
The militia’s founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes tweeted back, “‘We ARE on the verge of a HOT civil war. Like in 1859. That’s where we are.’
“It’s one thing to include ardent supporters as part of a campaign. It’s completely another, however, to empower an extremist organization aligned with the often-violent and always paranoid Patriot’/militia movement, one with a history of being involved in armed standoffs with federal officers and attracting criminals and unstable characters to its ranks, particularly as part of a security operation for a presidential campaign.”
Since its founding in 2009, the Oath Keepers have been a staple of press coverage for smug, jingoistic standoffs with authorities, strutting about with oversized flags to justify armed belligerence and criminality.
Neiwert recalled a prominent early member, Charles Dyer, who attended Tea Party rallies in 2009, “when he wasn’t producing ominous videos urging his fellow ‘Patriots’ to prepare themselves for armed civil war. About a year later, Dyer was arrested for raping his daughter and eventually convicted.”
The organization claims some 30,000 members, many of them military veterans and police officers, but they aren’t choosy. They will sign up anyone interested in resisting the apocalyptic horrors of liberal oppression. The Keepers are anti-government — but currently engaged in a campaign of running in local elections,
The unregulated civilian militia rolled out to stop the the chimerical steal in DC on January 6, and were among the first redneck warriors to be identified by the FBI and arrested.
In his 2018 doctoral dissertation, “The Oath Keepers: Patriotism, Dissent, and the Edge of Violence,” Sam Jackson at Syracuse University addressed the ways conspiracism influenced “how those in the patriot/militia movement viewed the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The movement was already anticipating crisis, given the strong candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Since the 1990s,”anti-government extremists of all stripes have viewed Hillary and Bill Clinton as major enemies, willing – perhaps even eager – to violate Americans’ rights at any turn for their own benefit. A convergence of other factors (including Russian disinformation, much of which was aimed at the far right) exacerbated the movement’s concern about the election. Groups like the Oath Keepers pounced on information provided by Project Veritas, a conservative activist group known for conducting manipulative video stings of progressive organizations, that allegedly documented organized attempts by Democrats to rig the election.” Faux accusations of election stealing is a recurrent theme in Project Veritas propaganda, thanks to Robert Mercer.

Project Veritas

The Trump mega-donor finances Project Veritas. Buzzfeed notes: “The connection between the Mercer family and the controversial activist group recently busted for an undercover sting has not previously been documented.”
“Gravitas Maximus LLC — a Mercer investment vehicle through which he also funded the conservative outlet Breitbart — gave $25,000 to Project Veritas, according to a nonpublic portion of a 2012 tax form. … The filings draw yet another connection in the web of conservative enterprises funded by Robert Mercer, who recently stepped down from his role as co-CEO of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies after a BuzzFeed News exposé revealed the connections among the Mercers, Breitbart, and white nationalists and neo-Nazis.”
The Koch Brothers were also major donors to Project Veritas. It seems the organization needed vast amounts of cash not to underwrite operating costs, but to settle libel suits:
“James O’Keefe, the organization’s founder, came to national prominence for videos he made of employees of ACORN, a liberal organizing group, purportedly discussing illegal activities. He was later sued over the videos and paid out a six-figure settlement.”

Erik Prince

But Mercer wasn’t content to merely expose insidious liberal corruption. Cambridge Analytica, closely aligned with Mercer, had business ties to Blackwarer founder Erik Prince. As the New York Times reported on March 9, 2020: “Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents.
“One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.
Using another alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her. “Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations directed at news organizations, Democratic politicians and liberal advocacy groups.

Michael Flynn

“Mr. Prince, the former head of Blackwater Worldwide and the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, has at times served as an informal adviser to Trump administration officials. He worked with the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn during the presidential transition. In 2017, he met with White House and Pentagon officials to pitch a plan to privatize the Afghan war using contractors in lieu of American troops. Jim Mattis, then the defense secretary, rejected the idea.” Flynn is also a Cambridge Analytica advisor. Inside the Pentagon, it was widely reported, Michael’s brother Charles was instrumental in stalling the National Guard response to the Capitol breach.

 

5: The Camp of the Saints, Civil War, Roger Stone’s Caveat:
“An Insurrection like you’ve Never Seen”

Mercer, Breitbart’s sugar daddy, Bannon, Jeff Sessions and Trum advisor Steven Miller are fanatical white nationalist extremists. In November 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center published leaked e-mails in which Miller, between March 4, 2015 to June 27, 2016, discussed with Bannon and Breitbart editor Julia Hahn plans to promote white supremacist memes that surfaced in Trump’s campaign rhetoric and post-election executive orders. (cf., Michael Edison Hayden, “Stephen Miller’s Affinity for White Nationalism Revealed in Leaked E-Mails,” SPLC Hatewatch website, November 12, 2019.) The proposed policies included setting arrest quotas for undocumented immigrants, the exclusion of migration from Muslim countries, and family separation of refugee resettlement facilities. The source material for these ideas, Miller explained, included “a white genocide-themed novel in which Indian men rape white women, xenophobic conspiracy theories and eugenics-era immigration laws that Adolf Hitler lauded in “Mein Kampf.”
Miller is secretive in the extreme. He has steadfastly refused to discuss the e-mails. In a Sept. 6, 2015, e-mail message to Breitbart, he refers to The Camp of the Saints, a bigoted and violent French novel by Jean Raspail.
Miller: The Camp of the Saints is popular among white nationalists and neo-Nazis because of the degree to which it fictionalizes the ‘white genocide’ or ‘great replacement’ myth into a violent and sexualized story about refugees.”
Raspail’s apocalyptic novel involves a flotilla of Indian refugees who storm France. The invaders are led by a nonwhite savage called the “turd eater,” so-called because the staple of his diet is literally human feces.
In one chapter, a Caucasian woman, as SPLC details, is “raped to death by brown-skinned refugees.” In another chapter, “a nationalist character shoots and kills a pro-refugee leftist over his support of race mixing. The white nationalist Social Contract Press plucked the 1973 book from relative obscurity and distributed it in the United States.”
Nicole Hemmer, a researcher at Columbia University where she writes about right-wing communications, explains: “When the president invokes violence — as in a civil war — he sends encouragement to supporters already primed to perceive a coming apocalypse.”
This has been the function of Project Veritas and other propaganda outlets financed by Robert Mercer. In the white supremacist eco-sphere, civil and race war are one in the same.
James Scaminaci III at Political Research Associates observes, “over the last several years, a narrative around the threat of civil war — and more specifically, a racial civil war — has been growing on the Right. The most dangerous versions of that narrative come from leaders with paramilitary forces, while other appeals seem intended to generate a heightened sense of crisis.
Sometimes the racial aspects of that threat are made explicit, as when Michael Hill, head of the racist League of the South, claimed that the U.S. is ‘headed for a real civil war’ against a ‘globalist-progressive coalition of Jews, minorities, and anti-white whites.’ Other times, it’s more opaque, as when longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone warned, in mid-2017, that any Republican who voted for impeachment would ‘endanger their own life,’ while actual impeachment would produce ‘a spasm of violence in this country, AN INSURRECTION LIKE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN.'” (ames Scaminaci III, “Battle With Bullets: Advancing a Vision of Civil War,” SPLC Hatewatch, August 31, 2020; originally published by The Public Eye)
Scaminaci notes that civil war is “an increasingly common rhetoric, which appeals simultaneously to Donald Trump’s core supporters, the Christian Right, and the Patriot movement, didn’t emerge from nowhere.”
It came from The Camp of the Saints.
The novel has surfaced in white supremacist circles as a guidebook for revolution. Scaminaci: “In its simplest form, the narrative holds that the ‘White race’ faces extinction, ‘replacement,’ or ‘genocide’ due to high non-White birth and immigration rates (or non-White empowerment), and that patriots’ task is to ‘repel the barbarians.’
“As Breitbart News summarized the book’s message, “In response to these perceived threats, right-wing forces around the globe choose cruel anti-immigrant policies, massacres intended to ignite racial civil wars, and, in the U.S., threaten a coming racial civil war to save Trump.”If saving Trump is their mission, “some of them” must be “very good people [sic].”

 

6: More Prominent Mercer Sock Puppets

“If there is a dark, dystopian evil overlord behind everything that Trump has accomplished,
it’s Robert Mercer.” — Michael Kink, Democratic activist

They wear their “patriotism” on both sleeves. They are all enemies of the democratic state.

Parler, Rand Paul, Cruz Revisited, Etc.

The social media platform Parler, temporarily side-lined, styled itself “a ‘free speech-driven” space, gets funding from hedge-fund investor Robert Mercer and his daughter and conservative activist Rebekah,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Parler Chief Executive Officer John Matze, who describes himself as libertarian, has said he founded the company in 2018 as a bipartisan platform but has doubled down on marketing to conservatives as they took to the site.
“U.S. right-wing social media users have flocked to Parler, messaging app Telegram and hands-off social site Gab, citing the more aggressive policing of political comments on mainstream platforms such as Twitter Inc and Facebook Inc.
“Those who have joined include commentator Candace Owens, President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and right-wing activist Laura Loomer, who handcuffed herself to the door of Twitter’s New York office in Nov. 2018 to protest a ban on her by the site. “John and I started Parler to provide a neutral platform for free speech, as our founders intended, and also to create a social media environment that would protect data privacy,” Rebekah [Mercer] said in a post on Parler.
“‘The ever increasing tyranny and hubris of our tech overlords demands that someone lead the fight against data mining, and for the protection of free speech online,’ she added.” (Reuters, “Social media platform Parler gets backing from Mercer family – WSJ,” November 14, 2020) “[Parler] experienced a surge in popularity this month as other social media companies cracked down on election misinformation.
“Last week, it topped the download charts on Apple and Android devices, and its user base more than doubled to 10 million. Founder and CEO John Matze, who is just 27-years-old, told Fox News ‘people are tired’ of Silicon Valley censorship. …
“Parler was launched in 2018 as the self-declared ‘premier free speech’ platform, envisioned as a libertarian platform for conservatives who felt censored by social media platforms, and it gained high-profile users including Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo, talk show host Dan Bongino, and Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. Rebekah Mercer, daughter of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, is one of the company’s early financial backers.” (Alex Hickey, “Conservative Social Platform Parler Is Spreading Election Misinformation,” Morning Brew, December 12, 2020.)

The RNC, Rep. Kevin McCarthy

“… In 2016, the Mercers spent over $22 million on efforts to support Trump and other Republicans like Ted Cruz, who helped lead a dozen senators to baselessly challenge the election results. While they spent much less publicly this election cycle, they still pumped over $1.8 million into efforts to elect Republicans. Robert Mercer donated over $300,000 to the Republican National Committee and an additional $1.5 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s super PAC. McCarthy, R-Calif., was the highest-ranking member of Congress who sought to challenge the election results on January 6.” (The (Matthew Cunningham-Cook, “ARIZONA GOP CHAIR URGED VIOLENCE AT THE CAPITOL. THE MERCERS SPENT $1.5 MILLION SUPPORTING HER,” The Intercept, January 14 2021)

Gatestone Institute, DonorsTrust, VDare,
Government Accountability Institute

“In 2017, the Mercers gave $200,000 to the Gatestone Institute, which has advanced theories about a stolen election. The following year, they gave $8.1 million to DonorsTrust, which recently donated $1.5 million to white nationalist hate group VDARE, which has also advanced evidence-free theories surrounding the 2020 election results. In 2017, the Mercer Family Foundation donated $1.725 million to the Government Accountability Institute, whose research director, Eric Eggers, appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio show at the end of November, suggesting that fraudulent activity had tilted the election to Joe Biden. In 2018, they followed up with an additional $500,000. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., who has also used violent rhetoric around the election, has received $21,600 in campaign contributions from the Mercer family.” (Ibid.)

Milo Yiannopoulos

“Yiannopoulos sings ‘America the Beautiful’ in a Dallas karaoke bar as admirers, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, raise their arms in Nazi salutes. … “

Buzzfeed on Milo Yiannopoulos, Bannon & Mercer:

“The Mercers have funded Yiannopoulos’s post-Breitbart venture. And these documents present the clearest look at what these people may have in store for America. …”
The Breitbart employee closest to the alt-right was Milo Yiannopoulos, the site’s former tech editor known best for his outrageous public provocations, such as last year’s Dangerous Faggot speaking tour and September’s canceled Free Speech Week in Berkeley. For more than a year, Yiannopoulos led the site in a coy dance around the movement’s nastier edges, writing stories that minimized the role of neo-Nazis and white nationalists while giving its politer voices “a fair hearing.” In March, Breitbart editor Alex Marlow insisted “we’re not a hate site.” Breitbart’s media relations staff repeatedly threatened to sue outlets that described Yiannopoulos as racist. … Emails and documents, however, clearly show that Breitbart does more than tolerate the most hate-filled, racist voices of the alt-right. It thrives on them, fueling and being fueled by some of the most toxic beliefs on the political spectrum — and clearing the way for them to enter the American mainstream. …
It’s a relationship illustrated most starkly by a previously unreleased April 2016 video in which Yiannopoulos sings “America the Beautiful” in a Dallas karaoke bar as admirers, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, raise their arms in Nazi salutes. …
These documents chart the Breitbart alt-right universe. They reveal how the website — and, in particular, Yiannopoulos — links the Mercer family, the billionaires who fund Breitbart, to underpaid trolls who fill it with provocative content, and to extremists striving to create a white ethnostate.
They capture what Bannon calls his “killing machine” in action, as it dredges up the resentments of people around the world, sifts through these grievances for ideas and content, and propels them from the unsavory parts of the internet up to TrumpWorld, collecting advertisers’ checks all along the way. … The emails tell the story of Steve Bannon’s grand plan for Yiannopoulos, whom the Breitbart executive chairman transformed from a charismatic young editor into a conservative media star capable of magnetizing a new generation of reactionary anger. Often, the documents reveal, this anger came from a legion of secret sympathizers in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, academia, suburbia, and everywhere in between. …
The Mercers have funded Yiannopoulos’s post-Breitbart venture. And these documents present the clearest look at what these people may have in store for America. … Yiannopoulos, who would later describe himself as a “fellow traveler” of the alt-right, was the tech editor of Breitbart. In summer 2015, after spending a year gathering momentum through GamerGate — the opening salvo of the new culture wars — he convinced Breitbart upper management to give him his own section. And for four months, he helped Bannon wage what the Breitbart boss called in emails to staff “#war.” It was a war, fought story by story, against the perceived forces of liberal activism on every conceivable battleground in American life. …He reached out to key constituents, who included a neo-Nazi and a white nationalist.
“Finally doing my big feature on the alt right,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a March 9, 2016, email to Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, a hacker who is the system administrator of the neo-Nazi hub the Daily Stormer, and who would later ask his followers to disrupt the funeral of Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer. …
Yiannopoulos began to find the right targets. First it was a continued attack on Shaun King, the writer and Black Lives Matter activist whose ethnicity Yiannopoulos had called into question. Next it was then–Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who Bannon called in an email to Yiannopoulos the “poster child for the narcissistic ecosystem.”
And increasingly it was enemies of Donald Trump. In response to a Yiannopoulos pitch accusing a prominent Republican opponent of Trump of being a pill-popper. …
In May, Bannon invited Yiannopoulos to Cannes for a week for the film festival. “Want to discuss tv and film with u,” he wrote in an email. “U get to meet my partners, hang on the boat and discuss business.”
The boat was the Sea Owl, a 200-foot yacht owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who is a major funder of Breitbart and various other far-right enterprises. That week, Yiannopoulos shuttled back and forth from the Cannes Palace Hotel to the pier next to the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès and the green-sterned, “fantasy-inspired” vessel complete with a Dale Chihuly chandelier. The Mercers were in town to promote Clinton Cash, a film produced by Bannon and their production studio, Glittering Steel. On board, Yiannopoulos drank with, mingled with, and interviewed Phil Robertson, the lavishly bearded patriarch of Duck Dynasty, for his podcast.
“I know how lucky I am,” Yiannopoulos wrote to Bannon on May 20. “I’m going to work hard to make you some money — and win the war! Thanks for having me this week and for the faith you’re placing in me chief. The left won’t know what hit them.” …
After Cannes, as Bannon pushed Yiannopoulos to do more live events that presented expensive logistical challenges, the involvement of the investing partners became increasingly obvious. Following a May event at DePaul University in Chicago in which Black Lives Matter protesters stormed a Yiannopoulos speech, he wrote to Bannon, “I wouldn’t confess this to anyone publicly, of course, but I was worried … last night that I was going to get punched or worse. I need one or two people of my own.”
“Agree 100%,” Bannon wrote. “We want you to stir up more. Milo: for your eyes only we r going to use the mercers private security company.”
Copied on the email was Dan Fleuette, Bannon’s co-producer at Glittering Steel and the man who acted for months as the go-between for Yiannopoulos and the Mercers. …
Yiannopoulos’s star rose throughout 2016 thanks to a succession of controversial public appearances, social media conflagrations, Breitbart radio spots, television hits, and magazine profiles. Bannon’s guidance, the Mercers’ patronage, and the creative energy of his young staff had come together at exactly the time Donald Trump turned offensive speech into a defining issue in American culture. And for thousands of people, Yiannopoulos, Breitbart’s poster child for offensive speech, became a secret champion.
Aggrieved by the encroachment of so-called cultural Marxism into American public life, and egged on by an endless stream of stories on Fox News about safe spaces and racially charged campus confrontations, a diverse group of Americans took to Yiannopoulos’s inbox to thank him and to confess their fears about the future of the country.(Joseph Bernstein, “Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled White Nationalism Into The Mainstream,” Buzzfeed, October 5, 2017)

Douglass Mackey

There was no mistaking Ricky Vaughn’s influence. He had tens of thousands of followers, and his talent for blending far-right propaganda with conservative messages on Twitter made him a key disseminator of extremist views to Republican voters and a central figure in the “alt-right” white supremacist movement that attached itself to Trump’s coattails. … Ricky Vaughn also played an important role in amplifying disinformation injected into American politics by the Russian government. … Between early March and late August 2017. (@RapinBill also retweeted @Pamela_Moore13, another Kremlin-controlled account, at least 37 times during this period.) …

Ricky Vaughn’s real name: Douglass Mackey. ,,,

Douglass Mackey. … he was from New England and had gone to a private school and worked in “consulting or finance” in New York. He was smart and well-heeled, an urbane cosmopolitan elite. “You would never ever in a million years think that was Ricky Vaughn,” Feldman said. …
his apparent alter ego Ricky Vaughn had become a mighty pusher of propaganda, teaming up with other far-right operatives, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, to spread racist lies and dangerous conspiracy theories. (Luke O’Brien, “Trump’s Most Influential White Nationalist Troll Is A Middlebury Grad Who Lives In Manhattan,” HuffPo, April 5, 2018)

The French Connection: Roger Stone’s Protege Jack Posobiec

(also Ali Alexander & OANN)

Twitter personality Jack Posobiec worked alongside other American far-right extremists in amplifying the fruits of an apparent Russian military intelligence (GRU) hack intended to disrupt the outcome of the French elections in May 2017.

The hack – waged to target Emmanuel Macron, then a candidate for president, and benefit his opponent, the far-right politician Marine Le Pen – spawned a series of criminal charges in 2020. On Oct. 19, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI charged six Russian military intelligence hackers from GRU with cybercrimes including “spearphishing campaigns and related hack-and-leak efforts targeting French President Macron [and his political party] … prior to the 2017 French elections.”
Posobiec’s contribution to the effort to spread the hacked material through Twitter follows a pattern of behavior by the influential far-right activist. It bears superficial similarities to two other online campaigns he promoted. The first is 2016’s #Pizzagate, which manipulated the GRU-hacked emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair to create disinformation falsely linking Democratic Party officials to pedophilia. The other is a coordinated social media campaign targeting the personal life and business relationships of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, that he promoted in October 2020. This campaign happened around the time authorities issued charges related to the hacking of Macron and his allies and before Hunter Biden announced that the DOJ is investigating his taxes. The following analysis lays out what Hatewatch knows about Posobiec’s role in amplifying the May 2017 hack-and-leak campaign, which he dubbed “#MacronLeaks,” and his associations with other extremists at the time he did it.
Hatewatch reached out to the DOJ about Posobiec and other American far-right extremists who pushed the GRU-hacked material on Twitter, but the agency declined to respond. Hatewatch also reached out to Posobiec for this story via email, but he did not respond. When Hatewatch launched a series of stories on Posobiec in July 2020, he responded to a request for comment by claiming to call the FBI – falsely suggesting the reporting constituted an attempt to kill his family.
Posobiec’s use of Twitter has become notorious, and even more so in light of recent news events. Posobiec for years used Twitter to promote the so-called Stop the Steal movement. That protest movement, based in part on the effort to discredit votes cast in multiracial urban areas, helped inspire the violent insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. (Posobiec appears to have deleted his “#StoptheSteal” posts from Twitter but Hatewatch archived them.) On Jan. 27, the Department of Justice also charged white nationalist Twitter personality Douglass Mackey with an election interference-related offense, which allegedly took place during the runup to Trump’s victory in 2016. Hatewatch found fragments of conversations on Twitter from 2016 that included both Mackey and Posobiec’s handles, suggesting they were connected on the site. One of the co-conspirators named in Mackey’s indictment belonged to a pseudonymous, pro-Hitler disinformation poster known only as “Microchip.” Microchip told Hatewatch in 2020 that Posobiec was his “buddy.” Posobiec interviewed Microchip on television in 2018 without offering the audience any context about his views. …

Posobiec’s mentor Roger Stone Jr.

The anti-secrecy non-profit Wikileaks also buoyed #MacronLeaks. Wikileaks disseminated GRU hacked materials during the runup to the 2016 U.S. election, and #MacronLeaks served as a less successful replay of the same type of operation.

Posobiec publicized a boast about his involvement in the #MacronLeaks campaign through the Twitter account of his friend Cassandra Fairbanks, an ally of Wikileaks. Fairbanks, who once worked for Sputnik, a state-funded news agency with ties to the Kremlin, posted a photograph to Twitter on May 6, 2017, of Posobiec raising a beverage next to his wife. The timestamp precedes the start of the vote in France by a matter of hours. …
Ali Alexander, another Stone associate, also attended Milo’s event with Posobiec, based upon archived tweets. Alexander is the self-described leader of the Stop the Steal movement that pushed lies about the 2020 election in its aftermath. Alexander helped bring together a collection of far-right extremists, including Posobiec, who appeared at Stop the Steal events in the runup to the violence on Jan. 6.
Alexander tweeted, “@JackPosobiec and me, last night, after not talking about the #MacronLeak,” on May 6, 2017, along with a photograph of himself with Posobiec.
Archives show Roger Stone Jr. also appears to have attended the Yiannopoulos party. Posobiec allegedly referred to himself as “Roger Stone’s man” in a conversation with white nationalist Richard Spencer in 2016 and viewed Stone as a mentor figure. Stone, who was convicted in federal court of seven felonies stemming from the Mueller investigation, and who communicated with both Russian hackers and Wikileaks while promoting Trump, also worked with George Lombardi’s 501(c)(4) organization Citizens for Trump, and the Proud Boys. Hatewatch found an archive of Posobiec tweeting out a photo of LePen meeting with Lombardi at Trump Tower in New York City on Jan. 12, 2017, roughly four months before he and others staged #MacronLeaks. …

Posobiec promoted #MacronLeaks less than a year before OANN hired him

Hatewatch also reached out to Posobiec’s current employer, One America News Network (OANN), for a comment on this story but did not receive a response. Posobiec first started listing his role as a correspondent with OANN in his Twitter bio in early 2018, according to archives, which means he amplified the hack of Macron and other politicians less than a year before the low-standard, pro-Trump network hired him to his current position.

Posobiec repeatedly boasted about his involvement in disseminating #MacronLeaks after OANN hired him. His last post boasting about it was published on June 5, 2020. Hatewatch found no evidence of Posobiec addressing #MacronLeaks publicly since the DOJ and FBI announced criminal charges against the six GRU hackers. Critics of OANN have accused the station of publishing propaganda with a “pro-Kremlin slant.” …

Posobiec’s military status during #MacronLeaks

Posobiec served as a reserve U.S. naval intelligence officer while promoting the GRU-led hacking effort in Macron’s campaign in May 2017. The Navy revoked Posobiec’s security clearance in August 2017. (Michael Edison Hayden, “Jack Posobiec Central in Spreading Russian Intelligence-Led #MacronLeaks Hack,” SPLS Hatewarch, January 29, 2021)

The Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF)

“NBC recently revealed that the Rule of Law Defense Fund, an arm of the Republican Attanrneys General Association (RAGA), had sent out robocalls announcing that “at 1 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal. The elected leadership of the RAGA has denied culpability for the robocalls. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who heads the RLDF, said in a statement this week that he was “unaware of unauthorized decisions made by RLDF staff with regard to this week’s rally.” (Ibid.)

Citizens United, Cavid Bossie, Lawyers for Trump,

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Others

“Bossie is helping the Trump campaign lead a barrage of lawsuits to contest the outcome of the 2020 election.” (Alayna Treene, “Trump adviser leading election legal fight tests positive for COVID-19,” Axios, Nov 9, 2020.)
“The Mercers have donated $3.8 million to Citizens United, which is headed by David Bossie, Trump’s 2016 deputy campaign manager, who Trump tapped on November 6 to lead his efforts to challenge the election results in the states”. (Cunningham.)
“The RLDF’s executive director, Peter Bisbee, was a longtime official of the Federalist Society, which has received over $6.5 million since 2013 from the Mercer Family Foundation — roughly a quarter of its annual budget. Marshall and Leo were listed as ‘leaders’ in the Lawyers for Trump group when it was launched in July, along with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who have both peddled baseless claims about the 2020 election.” (Ibid.)
“Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton fueled [the stolen election] lie, filing a spurious lawsuit last month asking the U.S. Supreme Court to toss four states’ election results, then returning to Washington on Wednesday to tell Trump supporters, “we will not quit fighting.” After that crowd laid siege to the Capitol, our state’s chief law enforcement officer shielded their sedition with another lie, claiming on social media that those who stormed the building “were not Trump supporters” but members of the left-wing Antifa movement.” (American-Statesman Editorial Board, “Editorial: GOP leaders gave life to a dangerous lie. Austin-American Statesman, January 8, 2021.)
“Earlier today, Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. announced the launch of Lawyers for Trump. RNLA Co-Chair Harmeet Dhillon and RNLA Board of Governors Member Stefan Passantino are both serving as Co-Chairs of Lawyers for Trump. Arizona Chapter Chair Kory Langhofer, President David Warrington, and Executive Director Michael Thielen are also serving on the Lawyers for Trump Advisory Board. Other key leaders of Lawyers for Trump include: Co-Chair Attorney General Ken Paxton [co-hair of LFT, TX], Co-Chair Attorney General Leslie Rutledge (AR), Attorney General Kevin Clarkson (AK), Attorney General Lynn Fitch (MS), Attorney General Tim Fox (MT), Attorney General Jeff Landry (LA), Attorney General Steve Marshall (AL), Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg (SD), Attorney General Eric Schmitt (MO), Former Attorney General Pam Bondi (FL), Former U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese, Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Jon Berry, Will Consovoy, Madison Gesiotto, Maggie Hernandez, Leonard Leo, Curt Levey, Tom McCarthy, Joe Olson, Juan Reyes, and Carrie Severino.” (Republican National Lawyers Association press release, July 23, 2020.)

 

7: Hitler’s Bank Finances a Nazi Revolt in America

HITLER’S BANK

In 1999, Deutsche Bank, the largest financial institution in Germany, publicly confessed to granting loans to companies constructing Auschwitz with Jewish slave labor. Credit was extended to IG Farben for the production of Zylon B gas for murdering Jews imprisoned at the camp, and a company that manufactured crematoria.
The genocidal financial transactions were detailed in a report prepared by the US military in 1946. (BBC, “World: Europe German bank linked to death camp,” February 5, 1999.) The release of the document a half century later stalled the merger of Deutsche with Bankers Trust in the US.
Deutsche Bank’s collaboration with the Nazi Party began shortly after Hitler rose to power In 1933. The three Jewish directors of the bank were forced out. Hundreds of Jewish-owned businesses were subsequently expropriated and Aryanized.
Also in 1999, a French commission reported that five American banks operating in France during the Holocaust emptied the accounts of some 100 Jews and shared the proceeds with the Nazis. It identified the banks as Chase, American Express, J.P. Morgan, Manhattan-Guaranty Trust Co. of New York, and Bank of the City of New York. (James Besser, “German Bank Helped Nazis Steal,” New York Jewish Week, February 5, 1999.)
After the war, the Corporate Research Project CRP) reports, “Allied authorities determined that Deutsche Bank had not only actively supported the Nazi regime but had also maintained close ties to officials such as SS chief Heinrich Himmler.”
Deutsche was far and away the most powerful bank under Hitler. To curtail its monopolistic predations, according to CRP, “the occupying forces divided the bank first into ten and then three regional institutions, one each for the north, central, and southern regions of West Germany. In 1957, however, these operations were reunited and allowed to operate under the Deutsche Bank name once again.” (Philip Mattera, “Deutsche Bank: Corporate Rap Sheet.” CRP)
The resuscitated bank moved on to supplement its business interests by expanding into retail and international operations. Deutsche grew to become one of the leading traders in the Eurobond market.
Deutsche then stepped up and diversified investments in German companies, installed directorson the boards of more than 100 of them. These included some of the most powerful companies in German manufacturing.
In 1984, Deutsche snapped up a 4.9 percent interest in the British securities firm Morgan
Grenfell. Five years later, it took over the firm. “Deutsche Bank’s Nazi ties became an issue again in 1986,” the CRP notes, “when it purchased the Flick industrial empire.”
The old toxic rot was back, and it spread at a rapid pace.
In June, 1998 the bank was raided by German investigators looking for evidence of criminality. Regulators accused Deutsche of assisting well-heeled clients in tax avoidance schemes. Six years later, American customers who bought into undisclosed tax shelters sued the bank in US federal court, maintaining that they have been conned. Deutsche settled for an unknown sum.
This episode exposed a complex maze of tax evasion schemes, and resulted in a Senate investigation of these excesses, and money laundering as well.
In 2007 Deutsche paid out $25 million, and surrendered $416 million in unsecured claims, to settle lawsuits resulting from dealings with the bankrupt Enron Corporation.
Thereafter, the criminal penalties ballooned to many millions, then billions of dollars. The company hired private spies to jeep tabs on activist investors. Gradually, it was regressing to its old fascistic self.
Deutsche even tied its fortunes to an aspiring American fuhrer.

TRUMP’S BANK

Under Hitler, Deutsche had partnered with the Nazi regime. In 21st century America, it had Donald Trump.
Both felt regulatory walls closing in. On May 22, 2019, WNYC radio reported: “Whispers ofmoney laundering have swirled around Donald Trump’s businesses for years. One of his casinos, for example, was fined $10 million for not trying hard enough to prevent such machinations.
Investors with shady financial histories sometimes popped up in his foreign ventures. And on Sunday, the New York Times reported that anti-money-laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank internally flagged multiple transactions by Trump companies as suspicious. (A spokesperson for the Trump Organization called the article ‘absolute nonsense.’).”
Deutsche loaned “a cumulative total of around $2.5 billion to Trump projects over the past two decades, and the bank continued writing him nine-figure checks even after he defaulted on a $640 million obligation and sued the bank, blaming it for his failure to pay back the debt.
“Trump, Inc. isn’t the only one examining the president’s relationship with the bank. Congressional investigators have gone to court seeking the kind of detailed — and usually secret — banking records that could reveal potential misdeeds related to the president’s businesses, according to recent filings by two congressional committees.”
“House Financial Services and Intelligence committees say they are ‘investigating serious and urgent questions concerning the safety of banking practices, money laundering in the financial sector, foreign influence in the U.S. political process, and the threat of foreign financial leverage, including over the President.’ The inquiry includes investigating whether Trump’s accounts were involved in two large schemes involving Deutsche Bank and Russian clients.”
“Deutsche Bank’s private wealth division ‘loaned Trump $48 million — after he had defaulted on his $640 million loan and the bank’s commercial unit didn’t want to lend him any further funds
— so that Trump could pay back another unit of Deutsche Bank. ‘No one has ever seen anything
like it,’ said David Enrich, finance editor of the New York Times.”
Trump flushed many hundreds of millions of Deutsche dollars down the toilet. But the German bank clung to him, ignoring its own internal auditors and congressional investigations. It had engaged in financial schemes for decades, but always to extract a profit. What was the point of repeatedly throwing hundreds of millions away on Trump? Exactly why it had an interest in giving money away has been a topic of widespread speculation.
Perhaps the apparent hemorrhaging was actually an investment in the future.

MERCER’S BANK

The combination of Deutsche Bank, money laundering, politics and Russians also converged in the secretive world of Robert Mercer and his hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies (RENTEC).
Renaissance is the second largest hedge fund in the country, worth some $45 billion. It may even be the most successful hedge fund in history, employing advanced algorithmic investment strategies developed by leading computer scientists. Despite the sensational success of RENTEC, Mercer has a tax debt amounting $6.8 billion. There is no indication it will ever be repaid.
After the involvement of Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 Trump campaign, Mercer resigned from Renaissance. Martin Sheil, a retired supervisory special agent for the IRS Criminal Investigation Division, told Byline Times that Mercer reportedly “purchased what’s known as a bunch of basket options from Deutsche Bank, which just magically converted about $14 billion dollars in profit. They cut it in half by claiming it was long-term capital gains so it was taxed at a much lower rate, and he saved himself close to about $7 billion dollars.
A long-term capital gain “requires that you hold the asset before you sell it, for at least one year and a day. Now, the transactions that RenTec was undergoing were high speed buy-sell transactions where the stock or the instrument was held for not much more than nanoseconds as they tried to capture a few centime’s gap in time in those nanoseconds.”
This is one explanation for Mercer’s sudden, incredible acquisition of wealth. Another would make more sense and align with Deutsche Bank’s past business practices — money laundering.
Texas attorney Linda Minor, in a capsule history of RenTec, writes in her blog that the firm has been known to drift beyond the legal bounds of stock transactions: “When two RenTec physicists — Pavel Volfbeyn and Alexander Belopolsky — tried to leave their jobs for another hedge fund, RenTec wasted no time suing for intending to violate its trade secrets.” The pair testified that they ” left RenTec because it engaged in illegal trades ‘involving swap transactions — a massive scam’ that violated U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and National Association of Securities Dealers rules governing short sales.'” Telltale residue of RenTec’s participation on a money laundering schemse was analyzed in an anonymous Internet post on August 21, 2017:

—————————-

ROBERT MERCER —
MONEY LAUNDERER FOR VLADIMIR PUTIN

• Evidence suggests money laundering via financial markets works like this:
  SOURCE — Criminal organization invests in a hedge fund (Fund A) operating in a market with a high degree of corruption (for example Russia).
  TRANSACT — On behalf of Fund A, an international bank purchases a security in the corrupted market. The bank then sells (i.e. shorts) the same security in a second developed market (for example the UK), and forwards the proceeds to Fund B. Both funds are owned by the same criminal organization.
  COVER UP — The nature of the transactions are obfuscated with advanced financial techniques
  and the inner workings of the fund are kept secret.
  SOURCE — Russia is controlled by a vast organization comprised of the intelligence services, organized crime and big business. This organization is led by Vladimir Putin and control is
  maintained through corruption, blackmail and assassination.
  Because of the high degree of control Putin has over Russian centers of power, all Russians in positions of influence should be assumed to have at least Putin’s blessing. Any persons significantly connected with these Russians are likely contributing to Putin’s goals either witting or otherwise.
  Robert Mercer is co-CEO of RenTec. Mercer is the largest financial backer of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and an influential funder of Republicans and conservative causes including Citizens United.
  Mercer invested in data science firm Cambridge Analytica. Mercer insisted Trump campaign hire Cambridge Analytica to design its social media strategy. Through CA and its owner Vincent Thienguiz, Mercer is connected to Putin protégé Dmitry Firtash and Russian Intelligence Services (RIS). March 2017 Mercer’s yacht the ‘Sea Owl’ was spotted in the British Virgin Islands, anchored next to Dmitry Rybololev’s yacht the ‘Anna.’Rybololev is a member of Putin’s inner circle and likely his personal courier.
  Mercer is part owner of Breitbart news. The FBI is investigating BReitbart and Cambridge Analytica for cooperating with RIS during the 2016 US election. Evidence suggests that Cambridge Analytica and Breitbart used information warfare techniques in cooperation with RIS to support Trump and attack Hillary Clinton.
  Several of RenTec’S Russian born employees have been in the news:

In the late 1990s Alexey Kononenko was given a prominent role within RenTec’s equities group. His rapid promotion was questioned by colleagues and characterized as a “power play.”
In 2001 RenTec sued two Russian employees Alexander Blopolsky & Pavel Volfbeyn for intellectual property theft after they left for rival fund Millennium Partners. In 2006 Alexander Astashkevich shot and killed his wife and himself.
Prior to starting RenTec in 1982, the firm’s founder Jim Simons was a cryptologist, contracted to the NSA. Like Edward Snowden, Simons would have been a valued target for recruitment by
RIS.
2014 Rentec received media attention for increasing its holding in Russian telecom company Vimplecom. Newsworthy because the stock was dropping following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In 2016 RenTec further increased its holding in Vimplecom by 438%. Vimplecom is controlled by PUTIN insider Mikhail Fridman.
TRANSACT — In the past 20 years the average hedge fund returned 9% per year. In the same period RenTec’s Medallion Fund averaged 40%. After twenty years, one thousand dollars invested in the average hedge fund would be worth nearly six thousand dollars, the same investment made in Medammion would be worth over eight hundred-thousand dollars.
RenTec has long claimed that it must limit the size of its Medallion Fund (most recently at $10 billion) in order to preserve its high rates of return. So, it was newsworthy when shortly after the election of Donald Trump the firm announced that it would be increasing the fund’s size by fifty percent and that employees would only have several weeks to raise additional funds. This would increase the fund to $15 billion and at current rates of return would produce a profit of $6 billion in 2017. In normal years virtually all profits of the fund are returned to investors instead of being reinvested. This unusual degree of cash returned to investors could be used to facilitate money laundering.
Hedge funds are normally secretive in order to prevent competitors from copying their investment strategies. However, RenTec is not only secretive about its strategies, but also about its financial position and executive compensation. For this reason, very little is known about internal workings of the firm. What can be pieced together is RenTec uses quantitative models to buy and sell millions of stocks a year based on statistical arbitrage strategies. Statistical arbitrage attempts to make money by buying one security and selling another. These securities could be similar stocks in the same industry, or the same security trading in different markets.
COVER UP — In 2017 Deutsche Bank was fined $425 million by the US government for laundering $10 billion out of Russia using a scheme known as mirror trades. The scheme involved a customer in Moscow ordering Deutsche Bank to buy shares for rubles and then immediately sell an identical amount of the same shares in London for collars.
The money used in the scheme belonged to Igor Putin (cousin of Vladimir Putin) and the Rotenberg brothers who are old friends of Putin. Investigators speculated that mirror trades were a part of a much larger money laundering operation, but to date no additional evidence has been made public. To outsiders, mirror trades are nearly indistinguishable from arbitrage.
Mirror trades were kept under the radar by trading “over the counter”, and through a remote booking feature that did not require direct participation of the London office. Records showing losses at the end of the trading day would mysteriously show zero losses at the beginning of the next day. This strongly indicates traders were journaling assets (moving assets between accounts) in order to make up for losses in one account with gains from another.
RenTec is currently under investigation by the IRS for using a similar financial engineering structure to mirror trades known as basket options (an option containing many different securities). Congressional investigators have claimed basket options were used to avoid taxes and limitations on leverage, but they could also be used to facilitate money laundering. On behalf of the Medallion Fund, RenTec purchased an option from Deutsche Bank and then sold the option one year later and claimed the long-term tax rate (24%) applied. In reality RenTec exercised full control of the contents of the option, and executed hundreds of millions of high frequency transactions a year, most lasting only milliseconds. If the IRS finds that RenTec should be charged the short-term tax rate (44%), the fund will owe $6.8 billion. 2017 McClatchy reported on the investigation and specifically linked the possible tax bill with the increasing investments in political candidates made by RenTec executives. Two weeks after the report was published the author Scott Christianson died from massive head trauma at his home.
Evidence presented to US Congressional committee investigating RenTec show that Deutsche Bank allowed RenTec to journal assets between sub accounts, thereby avoiding market transactions of buying and repurchasing the same security that could be interpreted as manipulative trading. Other evidence included emails from William Broeksmit, the Deutsche Bank employee charged with managing the basket options for RenTec where he went into detail how the scheme was executed. In 2014 Broeksmit was found dead in his London apartment as a result of hanging.
RenTec is also currently under investigation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. RenTec has resisted calls from the agency to hand over the source code that runs Medallion’s trading algorithms.
RenTec manages three separate funds, two of these funds are available to outside investors. The third fund is the highly secretive Medallion and only accepts money from RenTec employees. Records show that only five executives own seventy percent of the fund. In 2009, investors in the public funds were unhappy that Medallion’s returns far exceeded returns of their investments.
These complaints led to an SEC investigation. Simons took the blame and resigned, making Mercer co-CEO together with IBM colleague and former roommate Peter Brown.
The preceding sections demonstrate RenTec has connections with Russian elites, produces extremely high rates of return via arbitrage transactions, and engages in financial engineering techniques that are functionally equivalent to known money laundering methods. These are all red flags that imply RenTec is involved in money laundering on behalf of Vladimir Putin. The evidence suggests that RenTec is a massive Russian money laundering operation hiding
under the guise of a highly successful hedge fund. The scheme functions similar to mirror trades where shares are purchased in Moscow, immediately sold by RenTec in the US, recorded as RenTec’s profit, and the shares journaled between US and Moscow accounts by Deutsche Bank. RenTec hides this scheme by executing hundreds of millions of trades a year, by using basket options, and by limiting investment of the fund to RenTec insiders. Every year RenTec is capable of washing funds equal to the annual profits of its Medallion Fund which are estimated at $6 billion this year.
For this scheme to be successful, all senior RenTec leadership would have been involved including Mercer and Simons. In the 2016 election cycle Mercer spent $15 million on Republican candidates with the majority going towards supporting Donald Trump. In the same year Simons also spent $15 million, but on Democratic candidates, much of it going towards Hillary Clinton. Regardless of the election result, Putin was guaranteed to have an agent with significant influence on the president of the United States.

Sources, Further Reading:

Nathan Vardi, Renaissance And Two Sigma, Growing At Stunning Pace, Now Nation’s 2nd Biggest Hedge Funds, Forbes, 2017.
Ed Caesar, Deutsche Bank’s $10-Billion Scandal, The New Yorker, 2016.
NY ST DEPARTMENT OF FINANCIAL SERVICES, In the Matter of DEUTSCHE BANK AG and DEUTSCHE BANK AG NEW YORK BRANCH, 2017.
Scott Christianson, Billionaire Robert Mercer did Trump a huge favor. Will he get a payback?, McClatchy, 2017.
US Senate PERMANENT SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS, ABUSE OF STRUCTURED FINANCIAL PRODUCTS, 2014.
Casey Seiler, Scott Christianson, 69, acclaimed journalist, author and advocate, Times Union, 2017.
Michael Gray, Why are so many bankers committing suicide?, NY Post, 2017.
Kevin Dugan, Quant fund is concerned about CFTC getting its software code, NY Post, 2017.
Mariah Blake, Why Are These Hedge Fund Kingpins Dumping Millions Into the Midterms?,
Mother Jones, 2014.
Miles Weiss, Renaissance’s Medallion Made a Stunning Shift After Trump’s Election, Bloomberg, 2017.
Pamela Roux, Is Trump Backer Robert Mercer a Billionaire? I Tried to Find Out, Bloomberg, 2017.

—————————————–

Deutsche made millions in fees from the sale of the options. “They did this after they had signed a non-prosecution agreement not to engage in any tax shelter type instruments. You can’t get a more tax shelter instrument than this,” Sheil said.
“So RenTec gets caught, the IRS says, ‘That’s bogus, you owe more than $6 billion, $7 billion in taxes, pay up Mr. Mercer. … And he says, ‘No, you’re gonna take me to court. We disagree.
These basket options are legit, and I can do this.’ So they go through all the different appeals, which drag out forever, and ultimately, Mercer goes to tax court, which should be the endgame. It sits in tax court for years.”
The IRS attempted to settle at each stage of appeal because the costs of litigation were actually putting a strain on IRS legal resources.
“Mercer and his attorneys and accountants know this so they drag it out, and drag it out, and figure they’re going to get a big settlement offer at some point. Well, the Service never does make that offer, Probably one of the reasons is this whole thing became a cause célèbre.” Byline Times described this as “the drag of dormancy,” a Republican strategy: inaction as a modus operandi.” (Heidi Siegmund Cuda, “THE TAX MAN COMETH: Robert Mercer, William Barr& Trump’s Chinese Bank Account,” Byline Times, December 1, 2020)
A sizable share of Mercer’s wealth derives from the Deutsche Bank options and related tax evasion. Ray La Raja, a political science professor who closely follows money in politics at the University of Massachusetts, told the Boston Globe. Robert Mercer is a believer in creative destruction, “bomb throwing,” civil wars.
The “rigged election” bomb has been lobbed by a team of well-paid Mercer avatars. By laundering Russian funds, Deutsche, “Hitler’s Bank,” provided the underpinnings Mercer needed to realize his boldest fascistic dreams, a fascisti revolt in America.

 

8.) Somer of Mercer’s Opinion Programmers
who Claim the Election was Stolen

Rudy Giuliani

CNBC, MAY 30 2018: “Two law firms linked to Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s lawyer and longtime confidant, worked for a super PAC that employed controversial data-gathering firm Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 presidential election.
“The firms in question, Bracewell & Giuliani LLP and Greenberg Traurig LLP, provided legal consultation to the pro-Trump Make America Number 1 PAC throughout the 2016 election cycle, Federal Election Commission records show.
“Robert Mercer, meanwhile, played a critical part in the super PAC’s formation, contributing $15 million to fund the committee.” Rebekah Mercer is “an influential force behind the scenes of conservative politics and daughter of billionaire donor Robert Mercer. Four years ago, before the super PAC was formed, Levy gave Rebekah Mercer legal advice regarding Cambridge Analytica’s potential involvement in U.S. campaign-related activities.
“Robert Mercer, meanwhile, played a critical part in the super PAC’s formation, contributing $15 million to fund the committee.”
“Giuliani told CNBC that neither the PAC nor the Mercers were his clients. ‘Not clients of mine,; Giuliani said in a text message. ‘In any event the rules of ethics would prohibit comment,’ he added.'”
Ah, the headline of this CNBC story: “GIULIANI-CONNECTED LAW FIRMS HAVE A
HISTORY WITH PRO-TRUMP PAC LINKED TO CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA.”

The Black Conservatives Fund

The Black Conservatives Fund’s largest previous donation from Robert Mercer came in 2014. He
contributed more than $150,000.
From a CNBC report that posted online on January 11, 2021: “A PAC once funded by conservative millionaire Robert Mercer promoted both the rally featuring President Donald Trump and the ensuing march on Capitol Hill that led to a deadly riot last week.
“The PAC, called the Black Conservatives Fund, promotes itself as ‘committed to turning out the black vote and elect black conservatives at every level of government. The PAC didn’t raise or spend any money in 2020, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. It has shifted primarily to encourage its followers to attend pro-Trump rallies, and it’s not clear who runs the group.
“Through social media posts, the committee pushed tens of thousands of its followers to attend the rally in front of the White House on Wednesday and then to participate in the march on Capitol Hill that led to a riot, leaving at least five people dead, including a police officer. “It is the latest Trump-aligned political group shown to be involved with encouraging or organizing Wednesday’s rally.”

“Dr.” Shiva Avyanuri

Robert Mercer harbors a particular disdain for Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and is determined to defeat her.
Shiva Avyanuri set out after her in the 2020 Republican primary. Ayyadurai is an anti-vaccine activist and pseudo-scientist who refers to himself as “Dr.” Ayyadurai said he reached out to Mercer in the last six months via e-mail.” the Boston Globe reported on October 28, 2017. Avyaduri: “People said, ‘Bob will never write you back. He wrote me back in a day,’
“He subsequently traveled to New York to meet with Mercer and his daughter Rebekah. The two men connected over a shared passion for technology, skepticism about climate change, and a general sense that the establishment is trying to stamp out innovation. Ayyadurai declined to say whether the Mercers planned to put any money into the race. “‘t’s not been meaningless conversation,’ he said. ‘It’s been meaningful conversation.'”
He lost the primary by a substantial margin.
“The losing Republican U.S. Senate candidate, Shiva Ayyadurai,” the Boston Herald reported on September 6, 2020, that he launched into “a long rant about his crushing defeat.
“To boil it down, the election was stolen.”
After all, his opposition was ultimately “the not-so-obvious establishment of the left and the so-called Black people.’He thanked “God for the Second Amendment,” but Massachusetts wa “a friggin’ Third World country.”
He turned up next at a GOP hearing on election fraud in Arizona where Mercer money provided a hidden impetus. “Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai presented data “showing the only way for Biden to have statistically caught up with Donald Trump was if Democrat votes came in at 130% for Biden and 30% for Trump.” (“Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai presents his data at the Arizona Hearing,” Team Trump Facebook page, November 30, 2020”)

The Heritage Foundation

The right-wing think tank maintains a “Voter Fraud Database” online that compiles incidents online. All of the cases posted are minor. Though interesting, no evidence of widespread fraud can be found in the database. But the tally, drawn from past election years, is prominently displayed in large print, creating the illusion of a critical problem that liberals, as Heritage editorializes, simply refuse to believe.
“The [Mercer family has funded right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation for more than a decade via their private foundation.” (Annie Linskey, “The Mercers bring their politics, and millions, to Mass,” Boston Globe, October 28, 2017,)

The Government Accountability Project, Eric Eggers,
Rep. Mo Brooks, the RNC, the Congressional
Leadership Fund, Rep, Kevin McCarthy Redux

“In 2017, the Mercer Family Foundation donated $1.725 million to the Government Accountability Institute, whose research director, Eric Eggers, appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio  show at the end of November, suggesting that fraudulent activity had tilted the election to Joe Biden. In 2018, they followed up with an additional $500,000. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., who has also used violent rhetoric around the election, has received $21,600 in campaign contributions from the Mercer family. …
“Robert Mercer donated over $300,000 to the “Republican National Committee and an additional $1.5 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s super PAC. McCarthy, R-Calif., was the highest-ranking member of Congress who sought to challenge the election results on January 6.” (Matthew Cunningham-Cook, “ARIZONA GOP CHAIR URGED VIOLENCE AT THE CAPITOL. THE MERCERS SPENT $1.5 MILLION SUPPORTING HER,” The Intercept, January 14, 2021.)

Most Republicans

“Most Republicans say the election was stolen” — Washington Post, January 19, 2021: “Which Republicans are most likely to think the election was stolen? Those who dislike Democrats and don’t mind white nationalists. …”

 

9.) Freedom Caucus Leader Andy Biggs,
Ali Alexander and Charlie Kirk Walk Across the Rubicon

House Freedom Caucus leader Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Az) was fit to be tied. He lashed out at press reports that he had played a key role in the Washington D.C. rally and incited the ensuing insurrection Biggs, who voted to reverse the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania, had been linked by the press to Ali Alexander, an organizer of the rally. As a result, Biggs claimed, he and his family had received death threats.
The extreme right Tea Party activist attributed his suffering to a Democratic plot. and compared his mistreatment to the patently “unfair” crucifixion of Donald Trump.
“All of the allegations are false.” Biggs insisted. “I do not know why the rumors started, why the media has repeatedly ignored the evidence, or how to state the truth more clearly.”
“The source of the “rumors” was not so difficult to nail down. The Arizona Republic reported on January 23, “much of Biggs’ recent scrutiny stems from a videotaped statement by Ali Alexander, who helped organize the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally in Washington.”
In taped statements made before the rally, “Alexander singled out Biggs, along with Reps. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., and Mo Brooks, R-Ala.,as “integral to an event intended to put ‘maximum pressure’ on Congress.”
Biggs further maintained that he had no contact whatsoever with Alexander before the rally.
“Even so,” the Republic responded, “he made audio remarks that Alexander played at a December rally in Phoenix.” A spokesman said “the taped remarks were made at the request of Gosar’s aides,” and were meant for them, not Alexander.” Biggs’ protestations have done little to quell the call for investigations of him and other Republicans who were vocal critics of the presidential election results.”
No evidence of pervasive election fraud exists, of course, yet in an interview on November 10 conducted by conservative radio personality Charlie Kirk, Biggs and Gosar (who denied knowing Alexander after the siege, but, the Washington Post reported, tweeted in November that Alexander is “a great patriot”) blasted an election riddled with chimerical Democratic corruption.
“Well, you’re talking about fraud, pure and simple. We’re talking about Pennsylvania is an utter disaster, and really your immediate remedy is to basically nullify Pennsylvania’s election,” Biggs said. He demanded audits there and in his own state of Arizona to restore the nation’s “confidence in election integrity.” Once “leftists in the media” fabricate “a false narrative,” correcting the record is nearly impossible, he said.
The Alexander videotape is only one of the pieces of evidence under investigation. “Biggs’ statement noted that some have falsely suggested he led ‘reconnaissance tours’ of the Capitol ahead of the rioting. He has also been linked to other controversies. Biggs has suggested in interviews that the rioters at the Capitol included people from the left.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind that there were just pissed off Trump people there that had come in. And then there were other people that were definitely not Trump people,” Biggs claimed on Tucson’s 1030 KVOI-AM after the riot. “You probably had some insurgents, you know, some Antifa or BLM type folks … we don’t know.”
He didn’t explain why leftists on the winning side of the election would rage into the Capitol to force Congress to call the election for Trump.
His alleged co-conspirator, Ali Alexander, born Ali Akbar, is a conspiracy theorist active on social media, where he served as a “national organizer” of the “Stop the Steal” movement. Politico reports that Alexander/Akbar was a strident pro-Trump advocate on Twitter where he pften lambasted feminist attorney Gloria Allred, and praised Kanye West.
“On the eve of the 2016 election, Robert Mercer donated $60,000 to a PAC that Alexander advises. Alexander, who identifies himself as black and Arab, brings a more new-age approach to the culture wars, calling himself an ‘interpreter of energy for this period.”
“A more prominent torchbearer is 25-year-old Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, [the Mercer-supported] nonprofit aimed at instilling conservative values in college students.”
TPUSA boasts of close ties to Trump.
“Kirk is a favorite of right-wing donors worried about campus leftism, and in the Trump era, he has deftly pivoted his organization from Koch-style free-market advocacy to a more nationalist, culture war take on politics — so far, without visibly hurting his donor support.” (Ben Schreckinger, “Trump’s Culture Warriors Go Home,” Politico, November/December 2018.) On its website, Turning Point states that its mission is “to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government.” The PAC claims to wield influence on more than 1,000 college campuses and high schools across the country.
Mercer-supported shock jock Charlie Kirk is the host of a radio program in West Palm Beach, Florida. From this venue, Kirk explains in an online advert, he wages a war against election fraud. The intent to put an end to it, and explain why it is “covered up.”
The Charlie Kirk broadcast on January 12, 2020 was billed as “Facts First in Trump’s Impeachment — the Good, Bad, and Insane.” The program streams on his website. A summary of the programL “After tackling the National Guard disgrace in DC., Charlie dives headlong into the imminent Trump impeachment trial heading to the Senate. Did Trump incite an insurrection? Do any portions of the president’s speech actually incriminate him? Is there footage from the
Capitol that casts a cloud over the Democrat’s case? Can you even hold an impeachment trial once a president has left office? Reviewing just the facts, Charlie answers all of these questions and much more.”\

 

10: SCL/Cambridge Analytica has Used the “rigged Election” Gambit
to Incite Dissent in South America and Nigeria, Often
Resulting in Riots and Mass Fatalities

“ … Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. … People don’t know it’s happening to them. …Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change … but it’s SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others … It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.” — Carole Cadwalladr, Guardian/Observer, February 26, 2017

Propaganda has one goal — to inspire receptive subjects to act in a desired way. Election
meddling by SCL/Cambridge Analytica (SCL/CA) is based on programs that accurately assess a
host of personality traits. Individual behavior is predicted and modified, ultimately converting entire political cultures toward a predetermined end. Commentators on the cable news networks are completely baffled by QAnon. They shake their heads over the “crazy accusations of Satanism and blood drinking by Democrats,” unaware that the bizarre claims are based on complex quantitative models designed to adjust behavior and manipulate people into making decisions that are definitely not in their own interest. There is a method to the madness.
Researchers at SCL/CA know that fraudulent election claims incite mobilization. The Journal of conflict Resolution (February 4, 2019) reports that information about election fraud shapes motivation to respond by mobilizing: “We distinguish between the mobilizing effects of actual incidents of election fraud and individuals’ subjective perceptions of fraud. While rational updating models would imply that both measures similarly affect mobilization, we argue that subjective fraud perceptions are more consistent predictors of protesting … shaped by attitudes, information, and community networks.
“Our empirical analysis uses geo-referenced individual-level data on fraud events, fraud perception, and protesting from the 2007 Nigerian elections.” (Cambridge Analytica’s central role in Nigerian elections in this period is described below.)”Our analysis yields two main findings: proximity to reported fraud has no effect on protesting, and citizens perceiving elections as fraudulent are consistently more likely to protest, and more so if embedded in community networks.”
As an example, the widespread perception of election fraud in 2020 reinforced by participation in networks like Mercer’s Project Veritas, Parler and QAnon. Subjective belief in election rigging is not merely a perception of actual fraud. Perceptions can be molded “by preexisting expectations of fraud, political attitudes on democracy more broadly, support for the losing party, among others. … The motivated reasoning model suggests that individuals systematically disregard information that is inconsistent with pre-existing conceptions.”
In one South American country, attempts by SCL/Cambridge Analytica to create perceptions of a rigged election were defused because the company got caught in the act.
St. Vincent of the Grenadines lies southeast of the Lesser Antilles off the coast of Venezuela, a small island in the Caribbean. In January, St, Vincent’s New Democratic Party ((NDP) accused (the opposition party of rigging the recent election.
Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves told supporters at a political rally, “the NDP continues to accuse the Unity Labour Party (ULP) of cheating. The opposition has in the past aligned themselves with Strategic Communications Laboratories/Cambridge Analytica, an entity known for rigging elections all over the world.”
“Imagine the NDP accusing us of rigging elections, and they hired a firm which is notorious for rigging elections in the whole of Africa and the Caribbean,” he said.
The Prime Minister described SCL as “mind benders” known to hack emails to view content a user browses on the Internet, and tap phones illegally.
“They have done it before,” he told a local radio station, referring to St. Vincent’s 2008 election. “SCL has contempt for black people. The leadership, they are a bunch of racists and those are the people the NDP get themselves hooked up with,” Gonsalves said.
He read passages from “Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America,” a book written by Christopher Wyllie, a former employee at CA turned whistle-blower.
“They tried to break SVG before they break America with SCL, but the ULP is stronger than the Democratic Party in the United States. We know how to fight them,” Gonsalves said.
He read a section of Wylie’s book concerning SCL interference in elections in Trinidad and Tobago. The company, Wylie wrote, also rigged elections in Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia.
Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix “once said to a colleague in an email, referring to black politicians in Barbados: ‘they are just niggas’ who vote,” Gonsalves said.

Nigeria

Robert Mueller’s investigation traced concerted Russian attempts to disrupt elections in the US to 2014, and an infiltration and influence campaign conducted via social media platforms. Cambridge Analytica presented executives of Lukoil, the Russian oil company, with a summary of capabilities, datasets and strategies. The presentation had nothing to do with marketing, but involved election disruption tactics. The first slide prepared by CA executives illustrated how a “rumour campaign” instilled fear during the 2007 Nigerian election with rumors that the “election would be rigged.” The last slide bore two logos, Lukoil’s and SCL’s, and in bold text: “PSYCHOLOGICAL MESSAGING.”
Nigeria is a federal republic with a population of roughly 40 million. The election was marred by coercive violence and accusations of graft. It ended in dispute, and was taken up by Nigeria’s Supreme Court.
The AP reported that the court upheld Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua’s election win, “dealing a blow to political opponents who sought to unseat him.”
“The seven-justice court ruled that the two runners-up in the vote had failed to show evidence that graft was widespread enough to force an annulment. But the judges acknowledged flaws in the election, and chided politicians on their combative conduct in the vote and during legal challenges since.
“’We’re not saying that all went well in the conduct of the election,’ said one justice, Niki Tobi, laying the blame on the country’s political elite. ‘The way politics is played frightens me. It’s a fight to the finish.’
There were claims that thugs “openly purchased votes, stole or stuffed ballot boxes, intimidated voters on election day, and about 200 people died in violence during the run up to the vote. Nearly a dozen governorship elections held a week before the presidential ballot have been overturned and several new races run.”
A judgement issued by a lower court had held that “former strongman Muhammadu Buhari and ex-Vice President Atiku Abubakar — who placed second and third in the election — had failed to prove that the fraud was so pervasive that the official results should be discarded.”

The parallels to the 2020 US election are obvious. Robert Mercer, the Jefferson Davis of the current “civil war,” is a computer scientist. He drew on Cambridge Analytica’s networking capabilities and election meddling experience to foment mobilization of neo-fascist shock troops in the aftermath of the 2020 [residential election. Mercer’s deceptive sock puppets, including Trump and Republican congressional officials, directed them to the District of Columbia where the heavily-propagandized dupes stormed Capitol Hill, realizing Mercer’s dream of overthrowing a democratic system he loathes. It was General Mercer’s opening fusillade.

His ultimate objective is open fascist rule.