A dark money group is funding high-profile Democratic influencers
wired.com
wired.com
If you are losing the chess game to adveraries who started playing the game mere months ago, you need to strip your play down to the bare fundamentals and start anew. What you've been doing isn't working against the softest possible opponents, it's time to pivot.
This type of propaganda may well be counterproductive. Lobotomising your sides' best influencers could ruin their appeal and risk having them create weird echo chambers.
Google says Joe Rogan alone has more than 14 million followers on Spotify and 16.4 million subscribers on YouTube all predominantly male (71-80 percent) as of March 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/us/politics/kamala-harris...
We have the most incompetent POTUS in history in office right now; he's so stupid he makes GW Bush look like a Rhodes Scholar. And yet, with all that surface area, and Trump at all-time low popularity... nothing exciting is heard from the Dems.
It can backfire. Democrats did it to talkshow-Trump, thinking he'd be easy to crush in the general against stateswoman-Hillary.
Just imagine if those funds had instead been used to give the candidate's family members cushy six figure "jobs", or if one of their PACs was burning 5 million dollars a month on the candidate's private legal fees [1] to the tune of well over 100 million dollars in aggregate [2]. That would be truly beyond the pale and I am certain that hard working responsible fiscally conservative persons would be outraged at such naked corruption.
And it would be significantly worse if those aggressive donation emails were designed to systematically trick people into weekly recurring donations when they were only intending to make a one time contribution [3]. Shenanigans indeed!
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/us/politics/trump-legal-b... [2] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/trum... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donatio...
Real talk though, of the two major parties in the US: one party is significantly flawed, the other has installed the most obviously unfit excuse for a human as president and is using every ounce of power that it can seize to make that man an unlimited king. He has deployed the military on US soil in peacetime to disappear the homeless; has prioritized sending masked goons onto the streets to snatch men, women, children, regardless if they are elderly or the infirm, at which point they are forced into concentration camps and/or deported to some foreign gulag without an ounce of due process. The economy is in free fall for regular people, the country's top infectious disease experts are being railroaded for having the audacity of knowing things, our crown jewel research infrastructure is being decimated at the same time that the government is taking large ownership stakes in public companies.
If a person can't see the forest for the trees here then the whole idea of America was completely lost on them from the jump. Regardless we're all going to miss it when it's gone.
I think I heard about there being disclosure rules for people taking money to promote commercial things. Maybe that needs to apply to politics as well?
Surprisingly, many politicians love campaign spending limits, much like tobacco companies quite like tobacco advertising bans.
After all, unlimited spending means unlimited time spent begging wealthy donors for just one more $10k donation, so you can match your opponent who's outspending you.
Whereas with a limit, of, say, $0.30 per voter? Both you and your opponent will reach the limit pretty quickly, allowing you both to get off the fundraising treadmill.
That was a good idea. But we stopped.
Plus if your income is above sat 150,000 USD you can at most donate say 10000 per year to all political candidates, PACs and anything related to influencing political activities.
Or better yet, all these donations must be fully published with the name of the people or all companies related to the company donating. No dark money at all. The published list must be in plain language and downloadable as a plain Text File.
This isn't recent; we've been heading this way for decades, and not by accident.
The voting public gets tired of the squabbling and seeing the constructive type of reform fail, and switches its attention to the other professional party. The "reforms" then put forth by Republicans are all about getting rid of restrictions on corporate interests, appealing to a fallacy that restrictions on corpos are akin to restrictions on individuals (from the same vein as Steinbeck's "temporarily embarrassed millionaires"). When the Republicans get the green light, it's then full speed ahead for sidelining the US government in favor of unaccountable corporate power - as we've seen demonstrated in stark relief with Trump.
People will then slowly realize they've been had, and support for Democrats will grow. But any attempt to rebuild what got destroyed then fails (the original dynamic), and the cycle repeats.
https://apnews.com/article/russian-interference-presidential...
Also Tim Pool? Rubin? Those are small fries. Putin couldn't afford Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro?
A brief visit to Twitter will show you the hordes of bots constantly farming outrage bait, which then gets picked up by the micro-influencers, which then gets picked up (with some FSB financial assistance) by Tim Pool, Rubin, and Benny Johnson, which then gets picked up by Rogan and Shapiro, which then gets picked up by the Department of Homeland Security's official press releases and finally encoded into next week's executive order.
This is a description of a successful information op.
(Edit: The other commenter is correct that this is also happening within the BLM and BLM-adjacent movements and the green party -- all the same dynamic, but only one has found a direct route to an especially mercurial president's ear)
If sowing division is the goal of KGB, they don't need to do anything. Americans are way better and have been way longer in that game. Honestly just pretending to give people money would be most cost effective.
If getting to own/buy Trump is the goal, they fucked up in that department. Ukraine is still getting support. China and India are getting tariffs, etc.
Neither of us have any clue how divided we’d be sans FSB information ops. We know for a fact these ops are happening and have infiltrated at least up to the White House’s shortlist of media personalities.
IMO it’s extremely naive to believe that information ops for some reason wouldn’t be effective in our own country. This stuff is based on some pretty basic psychological understanding (some of the most highly replicated) and our information infrastructure is especially fertile ground for it.
The division in American weren't created by a foreign entity. The class war simply never ended.
If you're rich you want to keep less rich off your lawn. So you let the guys with torches fight the guys with pitchforks, by convincing they are each other's enemy.
> IMO it’s extremely naive to believe that information ops for some reason wouldn’t be effective in our own country.
It's another form of naivete to think that average CIA operative is any better at his job than average Joe.
You're stating this as if class tensions preclude the existence or effectiveness of foreign information operations. Do you actually believe that to be true?
Frankly you are not thinking very hard if you're making definitive monocausal statements about something like "divisiveness" in America.
Class tensions hurt us, race tensions hurt us, cultural and historical tensions hurt us, ideological tensions hurt us, and all of these are opportunistically weaponized by people (both foreign and domestic) who benefit from a more fractured America.
We're talking about one such entity, which is Russia.
> It's another form of naivete to think that average CIA operative is any better at his job than average Joe.
This isn't required to be effective at a job, which is why there are hordes of totally average yet gainfully employed people in the world. No one stated anyone is better than the average Joe at anything.
I'm saying, what could Russians possibly do that Americans aren't already doing to themselves? Look at: The War on drugs, The War on terror, and omnipresent surveillance. These weren't instituted by Russian agents.
And if Russia was that omnipotent, then their "special op in Ukraine" would actually be a few days "special OP".
Whatever paltry ops Russia has is like a drop in the ocean compared to what the US (or other actors) are doing on US.
Who said Russia is omnipotent? Also wasn't me!
> Whatever paltry ops Russia has is like a drop in the ocean compared to what the US (or other actors) are doing on US.
This, however, is an actual assertive claim of fact. Can you tell me any other intelligence services that we know has assets invited to the White House on a regular basis in order to do the actions they were hired by Russia to do?
If no, then I don't think you have evidence to substantiate this claim.
(edit: context) https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/maga-commentator-who...
That's how he won, he exploited the gap between Republican voters and Republican politicians. As soon as I heard him sounding exactly like your average R voter chattin' at a diner, I knew he was dangerous and we were in for a wild ride.
It wasn't always that way. Democrats like Bill Clinton used to be able to go out and talk to normal people and make them feel like he liked them and sympathized with them. I remember when Clinton came to my town after the 1993 Mississippi flood, and even Republicans who met him were impressed and felt like he really cared. It may have been fake (as it certainly is with most Republicans), but he could pull it off. They can't anymore; the contempt is too strong. There's not a single prominent Democrat whom normal people look at and feel like he or she cares about them.
What about Bernie, AOC, Zohran? I think there are a few but probably none of the establishment ones.
You realize support among hispanics will drop to almost zero with that strategy because they know from experience in Latin and South America that such crazy ideas bring nothing but misery to everyone.
AOC? Normal people think she's nuts because she's been propped up as "far-left" to make the rest of the party look moderate, but it's not working as well as it used to.
Mamdani hasn't been prominent long enough to say, but his biggest surge in votes came from high turnout among well-off progressive whites, the group that's most out-of-touch with normal people. He also got the youth vote, which is famously fickle. The working-class and poor vote went to Cuomo, so I'd say Mamdani has some work to do to reach "normal people" outside some NYC enclaves. He also has the same limitation Bernie has of labeling himself a socialist.
She's a bit too left on some things for my personal taste, but I find her reasonable and still un-jaded/un-corrupted by her time in politics -- so far, time will tell if she caves like so many other who refuse to get out when they stop caring about the people they represent and only care to kiss the ring that stuffs their pockets. I would see her a vote worthy for that alone, compromise is all but forgotten these days. She reached out to Ted Cruz (of all people on the other side of the isle!) to work on banning the use of former congressional member from lobbying or becoming "shadow lobbyists" and reduce the effects of lobbying's influence on politics. Ofc, few others would get behind it. But if that is not an example of some one willing to not only do something for the people (at the cost of a very lucrative future career prospect after her own political career) but also having a willingness to work together with political rivals, I don't know what you are looking for in a representative.
Ted Cruz is one of my direct representatives and too far right for my support, I can respect times like the above where he shows a care for politics by the people. That was before he did a full 180 from vocally calling Trump out to securing his seat in the senate by kissing the ring. If our crazy corrupt AG Ken Paxton wins Cornyn's senate seat -- and it looks like he will -- it will make Cruz look like a political saint.