Great Meme War

Ben Schreckinger in an article titled “World War Meme” for Politico, noted it wasn’t until the arrival of Bannon as Trump’s campaign manager, “who brought with him an in-depth knowledge of the internet’s underbelly acquired while growing the anti-establishment Breitbart News, that the campaign’s engagement with the fever swamps reached its apogee.”[1] By founding the notorious Cambridge Analytica with Robert Mercer, Bannon helped the campaign by resorting to all the dirty tactics of Meme Warfare and unleash the dark powers of Big Data, by target Russian-propelled fake news to specified audiences, in order to mobilize the seething resentments smoldering in the United States, to gain the election for Trump and pave the way for the conservative take-over of the so-called managerial state.

According to Luke O’Brien, “Not only does the Republican nominee seem to share certain character traits with many alt-righters—he is deliberately offensive, he clearly enjoys trolling people on Twitter—he also circulates their rhetoric and imagery.”[2] In an email, Trump’s spokesperson, Hope Hicks, wrote, “Mr. Trump has repeatedly disavowed these groups and individuals, as well as their hateful rhetoric, which he strongly condemns, and will continue to do so.” However, Trump and his son Donald Jr. have retweeted neo-Nazi alt-righters, including a racist Twitter celebrity named @Ricky_Vaughn 99, who Richard B. Spencer referred to as the “ultimate shitlord,” and someone named @WhiteGenocideTM, on multiple occasions. In October 2016, Trump retweeted an image of himself with the face of Pepe the Frog standing behind a presidential lectern.[3]

Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge Analytica and develop the company’s voter-profiling technology, said the company was an American pass-through with none of its own staff.[4] Cambridge Analytica’s work was done by UK-based SCL, which created Cambridge Analytica in 2013 as an offshoot to participate in American politics. SCL Group is a private British military contractor recognized as a global leader on the subject of disinformation and political influence. In 2015, Steve Tatham, the head of defense business of the SCL, edited Defence Strategic Communications, an official journal of NATO’s Stratcom, on subjects ranging from “Russia’s 21st Century Information Warfare” and “Memetic Warfare” to “Narrative and Social Media.”[5] The article on memetic warfare was written by Jeff Giesea, Thiel’s former employee, who founded MAGA-X3 with Pizzagate maestro Mike Cernovich, and who has also been in contact with the Trump transition team.[6] That same year SCL was hired by NATO for training services on disinformation, where they were trained by Tatham in “techniques to counter Russia’s propaganda.”[7]

In 2014, Giesea met Trump troll Chuck Johnson over Twitter. “When I met Chuck I wondered why we weren’t weaponizing people like him,” Giesea recounted. “He led me on this intellectual journey.”[8] In the article titled “It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare,” Giesea recommended the adoption of memetic warfare to combat ISIS. “The best way to counter ISIS is to unleash an army of trolls on them,” Giesea recalls Johnson joking. “I could totally mess with their recruiting and propaganda.” That conversation led Giesea to conclude:

Warfare through trolling and memes is a necessary, inexpensive, and easy way to help destroy the appeal and morale of our common enemies. … Trolling, it might be said, is the social media equivalent of guerrilla warfare, and memes are its currency of propaganda.

Veterans of what has been referred to as the “Great Meme War” boast that they won the election for Trump. As described by Schreckinger, a number of “meme warriors simply think there is no greater cosmic joke than electing Trump president.”[9] “For a lot of people, on the first day it was like, ‘This would be fucking hilarious,’ and then when he started coming up with policy stuff—the border wall, the Muslim ban—people on the boards were like, ‘This can’t be real. This is the greatest troll of all time,’” recounted “Marcus,” a former military intelligence officer in his 30s.[10] “Most of the people who took part in the Great Meme War hate Trump a lot,” insisted Gregg Housh, a reformed hacker and active 4Chan user who did a stint in federal prison a decade ago and was an early ringleader of Anonymous.[11] As Dale Beran, a veteran of 4Chan explained it, “Trump’s younger supporters know he’s an incompetent joke; in fact, that’s why they support him.”[12]

As noted in Slate, “journalists have often framed Trump as a troll, perhaps the greatest troll in American history.”[13] Articles published by Salon, the New York Post, the Daily Dot, the Daily Beast, Vox, FiveThirtyEight, the Daily Mail, the Washington Post, GQ, and Politico have all framed Trump’s antics as “trolling.” Through Milo Yiannopoulos, Bannon gained an appreciation for meme subculture, which Breitbart came to embrace. In June 2016, three days after Donald Trump announced his candidacy, Milo Yiannopoulos predicted in Breitbart that the most mischievous pranksters of the Internet would rally around him and that they would represent a significant electoral and cultural force. According to Milo, “And what begins on /pol/ and leaks out into Twitter has a way of coloring media coverage and, ultimately, public perception, even among people who don’t frequent message boards.”[14] Milo concludes:

I don’t know if Donald Trump spends time thinking about 4chan, but he has a character and a style that is perfectly in tune with what the web’s miscreants are looking for. And it’s clear from his Twitter account and speeches that he knows what’s going on and enjoys it.[15]

By the fall of 2017, a team at Trump Tower was monitoring social media trends, including The_Donald subreddit, a message board that acted as a conduit between 4Chan and the mainstream Web. The team would promote anything catchy to social media director Dan Scavino. But one former campaign official said the goal was to relentlessly tilt the prevailing sentiment on social media in favor of Trump: “He clearly won that war against Hillary Clinton day after day after day.”[16] “Daniel,” a young man who was a frequent /pol/ and 8Chan who professed to have friends in the White House, said he created several fake personas on Reddit and one on Twitter to post anti-Clinton material. “The reason I fought in the meme war is that as Andrew Breitbart said we are at literal war with the left. There is an ideological Cold War going on right now and the victor will determine the fate of Western Civilization.”[17]

Cambridge Analytica

In 2014, SCL executives persuaded Robert Mercer to bankroll a new United States-based branch of the company, Cambridge Analytica.[18] Cambridge Analytica was a company founded by Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, and that combined data mining and analysis with strategic communication for the electoral process.[19] Mercer joined IBM Research in 1972 where he helped develop Brown clustering, a statistical machine translation technique as part of a speech recognition and translation research program which was supported by ARPA (later DARPA), and laid the foundation for Google Translate and Apple’s Siri.[20] IBM had set up the Continuous Speech Recognition research task in 1971, which included Herman Goldstine, the right hand of John von Neumann in research leading to Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), amongst the earliest electronic general-purpose computers made. In parallel, ARPA set up Speech Recognition project in the same year. The main forces behind it were Allen Newell and J.C.R. Licklider. Funds were provided to Carnegie Mellon, Systems Development Corporation, Bolt Beranek & Newman, and probably SRI, Sperry-Univac, University of Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, and UCLA.[21]

In 1993, Mercer joined hedge fund Renaissance Technologies (RenTech), an American investment management firm founded in 1982 by James Simons, an award-winning mathematician and former Cold War code breaker. Between 1964 and 1968, he was on the research staff of the Communications Research Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) and taught mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. RenTech specializes in systematic trading using only quantitative models derived from mathematical and statistical analyses. In 2014, Mercer accepted a lifetime-achievement award from the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Documents detail Cambridge Analytica was involved with many other right-leaning billionaires, including Rupert Murdoch.[22] “I wouldn’t have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn’t known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine,” said Trump’s campaign manager Bannon. “Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power.”[23] As noted by Richard Wolffe, “Without Facebook, there would have been no Pizzagate, and the hacked DNC emails would have struggled to reach their intended audience. The strangely Russia-loving Green party would never have tallied enough votes to skew those three battleground states towards Trump.” [24] He added, “All roads lead to Facebook and the small company that plundered its vast user data: Cambridge Analytica.”[25]

Facebook

Peter Thiel was the founder CIA-backed Palantir, which collaborated with Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica to breach Facebook’s trove of data. Thiels’ Founders Fund was one of the earliest investors in Facebook. Facebook’s second round of funding came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel’s manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel. One of the Accel Partners’ key areas of expertise are in “data mining technologies.” Breyer and Louie also served on the board of R&D firm BBN Technologies, which was one of those companies responsible for the rise of the internet. In-Q-Tel’s board member Dr. Anita Jones also joined the firm. 

Christopher Wylie told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”[26] Time, in a May 18, 2017, report titled “Inside Russia’s Social Media War on America,” reported that “congressional investigations are probing not just Russia’s role” in the 2016 election, “but whether Moscow had help from the Trump campaign.” The investigators, according to Time, are focusing on “two Trump-linked organizations,” Cambridge Analytica and Breitbart. Investigators are looking at ties between those companies and right-wing web personalities based in Eastern Europe who the US believes are Russian fronts.

House Russia investigators were planning to call on Brad Parscale, the digital director of President Donald Trump’s campaign, came under scrutiny for exploiting the microtargeting capabilities of Cambridge Analytica, and possible collusion with the Russians, a charge he denies.[27] In a Channel 4 report, Hillary Clinton herself suggests that there might have been a connection between Cambridge Analytica and the Russians. “And the real question is how did the Russians know how to target their messages so precisely,” she says. “If they were getting advice from, let’s say Cambridge Analytica, or someone else, about, ‘O.K., here are the twelve voters in this town in Wisconsin, that’s whose Facebook pages you need to be on to send these messages’—that indeed would be very disturbing.”[28]

Thiel said that, “It’s hard to overstate” Kushner’s role in the campaign. “If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer.”[29] Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim at the New York Times reported that Jared Kushner was the reason the Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica.[30] The New York Times reported that a business associate of Kushner, and a close friend of Mark Zuckerberg, Russian technology magnate, Yuri Milner, made investments in Facebook and Twitter that were backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from the Kremlin.[31] Milner is Russia’s most influential tech investor. In September 2017, Forbes included Milner to the list of 100 greatest living business minds. Milner received an MBA at the Wharton, and after a stint at the World Bank, he returned to Russia and set up Mail.ru, which attracted the attention of Zuckerberg, who invited him to make an investment in his company. Milner once advised the Russian government on technology through a presidential commission chaired by Dmitry Medvedev, the former president and current prime minister. Now based in California’s Silicon Valley, Milner has invested $7bn in more than 30 online companies including Airbnb, Spotify and the Chinese retailers Alibaba and JD.com.

Milner’s investments came from the state-controlled VTB Bank and a financial arm of Gazprom, according to Milner. Alexander Vershbow, who was a US ambassador to Russia under George W Bush and to NATO under Bill Clinton, said the Russian state institutions were frequently used as “tools for Putin’s pet political projects.”[32] The New York Times said that Milner’s company once owned 8 percent of Facebook and 5 percent of Twitter before selling the holdings several years ago.[33] Milner said he invested in Facebook partly because he believes the social network could become the basis for artificial intelligence.[34] Milner believes that the Internet will develop into the transhumanist concept of a “global brain,” and that the advent of the “Internet of things” and ever increasing use of social media will increase humans’ collective intelligence.[35] Milner teamed up with Stephen Hawking to announce Breakthrough Starshot, a mission to send a nanocraft squadron to Alpha Centauri; Breakthrough Listen, to search for intelligent life in the universe, and Breakthrough Message, which will reward $1 million to whoever can best envision how we will communicate with distant life forms.

In 2015, Milner invested in a startup in New York that Kushner co-owns with his brother. Kushner initially failed to disclose his own holding in the startup, Cadre, when he joined Trump’s White House. In remarks at the White House in July, Kushner said he had “not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector.”[36] Kushner’s business partners included Goldman Sachs and George Soros, and Cadre has attracted an estimated $133 million of venture capital from backers including Peter Thiel.[37]

Open Source Intelligence

Russian journalist Elena Larina referred to Parscale’s statement in a press interview: “I had a few great scientists-advisers who brought us the victory.”[38] Larina points to Bannon, Kushner, Parscale and Naren Ramakrishnan in the formation of the Trump movement based on a database dubbed “Project Alamo.”[39] Ramakrishnan is a professor at Virginia Tech and director of its Discovery Analytics Center, leading the EMBERS project which was, according to Newsweek in 2015, “leading the arms race to turn big data into forecasts that U.S. policymakers and intelligence agencies can use.”[40] Virginia Tech is using algorithms and a variety of advanced tools to sort through big data for patterns that frequently point to events before they happen, such as civil uprisings, disease outbreaks, humanitarian crises, mass migrations, protests, riots, political routs, even violence.

EMBERS (Early Model Based Event Recognition using Surrogates) was the product of a 2012 contest organized by Jason Matheny, an associate director of the government’s Office for Anticipating Surprise and a program manager at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). IARPA is a program authorized by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in 2006, and modeled after DARPA, but focused on national intelligence needs, rather than military needs. IARPA was a consolidation of the NSA’s Disruptive Technology Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s National Technology Alliance, and the CIA’s Intelligence Technology Innovation Center. IARPA’s quantum computing research was named Science magazine's Breakthrough of the Year in 2010. In 2015, IARPA was named to lead foundational research and development in the National Strategic Computing Initiative. IARPA is also a part of other White House science and technology efforts, including the US BRAIN Initiative, and the Nanotechnology-Inspired Grand Challenge for Future Computing. In 2013, New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks called IARPA “one of the government’s most creative agencies.”[41]

The independent contractor that measures the accuracy of EMBERS’s forecasts is a nonprofit research facility called MITRE, a collection of government-funded research centers. MITRE, for its part, has deep connections to the nation’s defense, security and intelligence apparatus. According to MITRE, Terry Reed, the information systems engineer in MITRE’s Homeland Security Systems Engineering and Development Institute, represents the Department of Homeland Security’s information security chief on a committee within the National Security Systems Working Group focused on policy issues related to classified information systems.[42]

EMBERS conducts what is called Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), collecting data for intelligence purposes from “overt” or publicly available sources, like social media, satellite imagery and more than 200,000 blogs. It mines up to 2,000 messages a second and purchases open-source data such as Twitter’s “firehose,” which streams hundreds of millions of real-time tweets a day. “Anytime you tweet or post on Facebook, you are becoming a part of the big data economy,” says Ramakrishnan. According to Ramakrishnan, “A lot of analysts can give you forecasts for the coming year, but when we do forecasts, we’re talking about specific dates.”[43] Since EMBERS inception in April 2012, an average of 80 to 90 percent of its forecasts have turned out to be accurate. The project was first put to work examining open-source data streams in Latin America. It accurately predicted the impeachment of Paraguay’s president in 2012, the World Cup protests in Brazil in 2013, and the 2014 violent student protests in Venezuela. The program monitors 20 countries in Latin America and is beginning to venture into the Middle East and North Africa, covering Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Libya.

Strategic Communications

Steve Tatham, the head of defense business of the SCL Group, spent twenty-five years in the United Kingdom’s Armed Forces. A specialist in Strategic Communication, his final appointment was in the Operations Directorate of the Ministry of Defence where he was responsible for the development of advanced communication tools for senior strategy makers in the National Security Council. In a previous appointment he was the military Liaison Officer to the Strategic Horizon Scanning Unit in the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Cabinet Office, the UK’s highest intelligence structure. Over the last ten years he has mentored or advised senior leaders on the development of Strategic Communication capabilities in Japan, Nigeria, Iraq, Latvia, Uganda and Ukraine. Tatham is also a qualified training designer and training manager. During his military career he has seen operational service in Sierra Leone, Iraq and East Africa. He commanded a UK Psychological Operations Regiment operation in Afghanistan, which the Pentagon later described as the “single best thing to come out of Afghanistan.”[44]

Tatham explained that one of the benefits of using the company’s techniques is that it “can be undertaken covertly.” “Audience groups are not necessarily aware that they are the research subjects and government’s role and/or third parties can be invisible,” he wrote.[45] A former SCL intern referred to SCL’s work a “psychological warfare”:

Totally. That’s what it is. Psyops. Psychological operations – the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. We were just doing it to win elections in the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.[46]

Alexander Nix, one of the company’s directors, boasted that SCL secretly influenced more than 200 elections around the world, including those in Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech Republic, India and Argentina.[47] SCL Group calls itself a “global election management agency” known for involvement “in military disinformation campaigns to social media branding and voter targeting.”[48] SCL’s involvement in the political world has been primarily in the developing world where it has been used by the military and politicians to study and manipulate public opinion. SCL claims to have been successful to help foment coups.[49] According to Emma Briant in Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change, SCL has specialized changing the behavior of large groups for NATO, the US state department and others. Some of the SCL offshoots have been involved in elections from Ukraine to Nigeria, helped the Nepalese monarch against the rebels, whereas others have developed methods to influence Eastern European and Afghan citizens for NATO.[50]

The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), a trading fund of the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) which is the equivalent of US’s DARPA, conducted a study in 2013 called “Project DUCO” which contracted SCL and BDi to test their TAA capabilities. The evaluation was undertaken as part of the Human and Social Influence project, funded from the MoD Science and Technology research budget. SCL was contracted to do TAA work as well in early 2017 for the US State Department’s new Global Engagement Center, which evolved from the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) and its failed 2010s online propaganda & surveillance program.[51]

In 2012, SCL registered SCL Elections and appointed Mark Turnbull as Managing Director, who had for eighteen years worked at Bell Pottinger, a British multinational public relations. An undercover investigation by The Independent caught a number of Bell Pottinger executives boasting of being able to use “dark arts” to bury bad coverage and influence public opinion through their infiltration into the highest levels of UK government. The execs also boasted of their skills in “Google bombing” to “drown” out negative coverage of human rights violations and child labor, and how they had a team devoted to Wikipedia reputation management.[52] According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the company was hired by the Pentagon to create TV segments made in the style of Arabic news networks, and fake al Qaeda videos which could be used to track the people who watched them, for the reported sum of $540 million.[53] Bell Pottinger reported to the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Council on its work in Iraq.[54]

The single largest SCL shareholder for a decade, owning 23% from 2005–2015, was a British property tycoon, Vincent Tchenguiz, who has had ties to the shady Ukrainian billionaire and Putin protégé Dmytro Firtash, who apparently maintains strong ties with Russian mafia boss Semion Mogilevich, and who was one of Paul Manafort’s biggest clients.[55] Tchenguiz is Iranian-British entrepreneur born into an Iraqi-Jewish family from Tehran. As outlined by journalist Ann Marlowe, Tchenguiz and Firtash were connected via a series of shell companies and a questionable venture in Libya around 2005–6.[56] Tchenguiz was alleged to have been complicit in the planned collapse of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing during the economic collapse of 2008, which ultimately resulted in Tchenguiz suing the UK’s Serious Fraud Office for £3.5M. Tchenguiz was also involved in the infamous Russian spy and recruiter Anna Chapman , who was convicted as a foreign agent, and released from US custody to Russia in a highly publicized “spy swap.”[57] In March 2011, Tchenguiz and his brother Robert were arrested as part of an investigation into the 2008 collapse of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing. Kaupthing’s largest shareholder, Meidur, now called Exista, which owned 25 percent of its shares, had ties to Alfa Bank.[58]

Tchenguiz used the same holding company, Wheddon Ltd., to invest both SCL and in another privately held UK business whose largest shareholder was Firtash.[59] Bell Pottinger, which was affiliated with SCL Elections, was retained by the Firtash Foundation. The foundation’s director was Anthony Fisher, senior consultant with Bell Pottinger. Fisher also co-founded the Firtash front Scythian Limited, a consultancy company that according to The Independent, would advise on “corporate acquisitions in the former Soviet Union.”[60] While Tchenguiz sold his shares in SCL in 2015, the current SCL chairman Julian Wheatland, was formerly an executive of Tchenguiz’s Consensus Business Group.[61]

On two promotional documents obtained by The New York Times, SCL said it did business in Russia. In both documents, the country is highlighted on world maps that specify the location of SCL clients, with one of the maps noting that the clients were for the firm’s elections division.[62] According to the Channel 4 reports, SCL highlighted Russia on its client map. In July 2016, around the time that WikiLeaks posted hacked DNC emails, Mother Jones reported that Nix was photographed posing with Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador to the United Kingdom. At the time of the photo, Nix had already attempted to get access to the hacked emails by contacting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.[63] 

SCL’s employees, who often overlap with Cambridge Analytica, had contact in 2014 and 2015 with executives from Lukoil, the Russian oil giant.[64] Lukoil, which is now on the US sanctions list, has been used as a vehicle of government influence.[65] Cambridge Analytica met at least three times in 2014 and 2015 with Kremlin-connected executives from Lukoil, who “showed interest” in using data to target messaging to American voters. Cambridge Analytica reportedly gave a slideshow presentation to the Russians “focus[ing] first on election disruption strategies used by Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL.”[66] But Wylie said Lukoil showed interest in how the company used data to tailor messaging to American voters.[67]

In 2015, SCL was hired by NATO for training services on disinformation, including countering Russian information warfare.[68] In July 2016, around the time that Wikileaks posted hacked DNC emails, Mother Jones reported Nix was photographed posing with Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador to the United Kingdom. At the time of the photo, Nix had already attempted to contact Assange.[69]

Filings on U.K. Companies House show that the two top executives at Cambridge Analytica are Directors of a company along with one of Erik Prince’s closest business partners. The company, Emerdata Limited, listed SCL Chairman Julian Wheatland as Director and 25–50% owner, and Cambridge Analytica Chief Data Officer, Alexander Tayler, was also listed as 25–50% owner, along with Nix, the Chief Executive of Cambridge Analytica as an active Director. Rebekah Anne Mercer and Jennifer Mercer were both appointed as directors of Emerdata. Three new Directors include Ahmad Ashraf Hosny Al Khatib, Cheng Peng, and Johnson Chun Shun Ko, a very close business partner of Erik Prince. The address for Ko in the Emerdata listing is the same address as the Hong Kong headquarters for Frontier Services Group, where Prince is Executive Director and Chairman and Ko is Executive Director and Deputy Chairman.[70]

A December 2017 Haaretz article about Erik Prince described his ties to Israeli financier Dorian Barak, who “tried to interest Prince in investing in an African rail project — with the Spanish infrastructure company Eurofinsa — and in a joint investment with the Tehran-born, British-Jewish billionaire Vincent Tchenguiz.”[71] Prince also has deep connections as well with Barak’s business partner, Ari Harow, the disgraced former bureau chief to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.[72] In February 2017, following a two-year criminal investigation, Israeli police recommended indicting Harow for bribery, breach of trust, fraud and money laundering. In early August 2017, Harow reached an agreement with the prosecution to turn state’s witness in two corruption cases against Netanyahu.[73]

SCL is currently working with the US State Department on a $500,000 contract for countering ISIS propaganda. In the United States, the company’s efforts to win new government contracts are being led by Josh Weerasinghe, a former vice president of global market development at defense giant BAE Systems who previously worked with Michael Flynn at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Just before the end of the campaign, Michael Flynn entered into a consulting agreement with SCL.[74]

In conversations secretly recorded by Channel 4, Nix claimed Cambridge Analytica used bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians, but boasted that his operatives would never be caught because they worked all over the world using a number of front organizations. The executives made it clear that they worked with former intelligence agents from MI5, MI6, and Mossad who would be able to secure secret or damaging information. “We use some British companies, we use some Israeli companies,” Nix said. “From Israel. Very effective in intelligence gathering.”[73] Other methods involved making the publishing inaccurate facts about a certain candidate. “I mean, it sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true, as long as they’re believed,” Nix said.[74] “It’s no good fighting an election campaign on the facts,” Turnbull is reported as saying in November, “because actually it’s all about emotion, it’s all about emotion.”[75]

Senior managers at Cambridge Analytica then appeared to suggest that in their work for US clients was divided between official campaigns and unaffiliated “political action groups.” Tayler described spending on the campaign trail with the candidate organizing “positive” messages, with negative attack ads left to the super PACs, who are permitted to engage in unlimited political spending independent of the campaigns. Turnbull said the company sometimes used “proxy organizations” including charities and activist groups, to help disseminate the messages and keep the company’s involvement undetectable. “We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape,” said Turnbull. “And so this stuff infiltrates the online community, but with no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable.”[76]

Cambridge Analytica was heavily involved in manipulating the Brexit vote and exploiting Russian trolls.[77] Mercer, who is a close friend of Nigel Farage, played a key role in the Brexit campaign. Farage was also close to Steve Bannon who introduced to, among others, the staff of Jeff Sessions. According to Andy Wigmore, communications director of Leave.eu, Mercer donated Cambridge Analytica’s services to Farage in support of the UKIP’s activities.[78] According to Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute’s computational propaganda institute one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated “bots” – accounts that are programmed to behave like people and make topics trend in support of the Leave vote. Before the US election, bots were five-to-one in favor of Trump, many of them Russian.[79] According to Wigmore, he met with Trump’s team right at the start of the Leave campaign, and Jared Kushner and Jason Miller said, “the holy grail was artificial intelligence.”[80]

According to Wylie, Cambridge Analytica used the services of Black Cube, a private intelligence agency, which operates out of London, Paris and Tel Aviv. Black Cube was founded in 2010 by former Israeli intelligence officers and draws its manpower from elite and secretive Israeli intelligence units, Aman, Mossad and Shin Bet. The company’s personnel are known to maintain close ties to the Israeli government and intelligence agencies.[81] Beginning in 2011, Black Cube provided intelligence services to Vincent Tchenguiz in a number of cases.[82] Cambridge Analytica apparently hired Black Cube, which was also implicated in the Harvey Weinstein scandal, to hack the personal data of Nigerian President Buhari prior to his election to get access to his medical records and private emails, reported multiple sources on Wylie’s testimony.[83]

SCL is currently working with the US State Department on a $500,000 contract for countering ISIS propaganda. In the United States, the company’s efforts to win new government contracts are being led by Josh Weerasinghe, a former vice president of global market development at defense giant BAE Systems who previously worked with Michael Flynn at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Just before the end of the campaign, Michael Flynn entered into a consulting agreement with SCL.[84]

Also working with Cambridge Analytica was Sam Patten, an associate of Paul Manafort, who pleaded guilty to working as an unregistered foreign agent for a Ukrainian politician and a Ukrainian oligarch. Patten told the Daily Beast that he worked with Cambridge Analytica in its 2014 US elections work and on “several overseas campaigns.”[85] Patten worked for George W. Bush’s State Department, and has done work in Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Iraq, and Russia. He also worked as the Eurasian program director at Freedom House, between 2009 and 2011. Patten worked closely with Konstantin Kilimnik, who was indicted by Mueller alongside Manafort this year for attempted witness tampering. According to the criminal information document filed by the DC US attorney’s office, Patten and Kilimnik, referred to as “Foreigner A,” founded a lobbying and consulting company together. They did campaign work in Ukraine and lobbying work in the US.[86]

OCEAN

A 2016 article in the German Das Magazin , which spread virally with its English translation published by VICE’s Motherboard in January, reported that Michal Kosinsky, formerly Director of Operations for Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre and Leader of the e-Psychometrics Unit, seemed to be suggesting Cambridge Analytica and its parent company SCL Group might have stolen his team’s research. Kosinski and his colleagues collected millions of Facebook interactions as data point items using a Facebook quiz app and then ran through OCEAN profiling for personality cataloguing purposes. More than 6 million people ended up completing the quiz. Kosinski found that with knowledge of 150 “likes”, their model could predict someone’s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself.[75] Our smartphone, Kosinski concluded, is a vast psychological questionnaire that we are constantly filling out, both consciously and unconsciously.[76]

As of December 2015, Cambridge Analytica prided itself in having collected up to 5,000 data points on over 220 million Americans.[77] Cambridge Analytica analyzes information using “data enhancement and audience segmentation techniques” providing “psychographic analysis” for a “deeper knowledge of the target audience.” Using what it calls “behavioral microtargeting” the company indicates that it can predict “needs” of subjects and how these needs may change over time. Services then can be individually targeted for the benefit of its clients from the political arena, governments, and companies providing “a better and more actionable view of their key audiences.” According to Sasha Issenberg, Cambridge Analytica indicates that it can tell things about an individual he might not even know about himself.[78]

In March 2018, multiple media outlets broke news of Cambridge Analytica’s business practices. The New York Times and The Observer reported on the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data breach. In 2013, the personal data of about 50 million Facebook users were acquired via the 270,000 Facebook users who explicitly chose to share their data with the app “thisisyourdigitallife, developed by Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-born Jew who moved to the US at age seven.[79] By giving this third-party app permission to acquire their data, the app also gained access to information on the user’s friends network. This resulted in the data being collected of about 50 million users, the majority of whom had not explicitly given Cambridge Analytica permission to access their data.

During testimony on Capitol Hill on April 10, 2018, Senator Klobuchar asked Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg whether Cambridge Analytica and the Russian disinformation campaign run out of Saint Petersburg’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) many have been targeting the same users. “We’re investigating that now. We believe that it is entirely possible that there will be a connection there,” Zuckerberg answered.[80] The Internet Research Agency, also known as Russia’s “Troll Factory,” was largely staffed by college students from the St. Petersburg State University. Days before the hearing, Wylie raised the possibility that the data could now be in the hands of the Russian, given Kogan’s work on a project for the university and SCL’s connection with Lukoil. According to Wylie, “It could be stored in various parts of the world, including Russia, given the fact that the professor [Kogan] who was managing the data harvesting process was going back and forth between the U.K. and to Russia.”[81]

While he was exploiting Facebook profiles for Cambridge Analytica, Kogan was also an associate professor at St. Petersburg State University, taking Russian government grants for research into social media. “Stress, health, and psychological wellbeing in social networks: cross-cultural investigation” was the title of one research paper. Online posts showed Kogan lecturing in Russian. One talk was called: “New methods of communication as an effective political instrument.” One Cambridge Analytica employee mentioned Kogan’s Russian work in an email to Nix in March 2014, discussing a pitch to a Caribbean country for a security contract, including “criminal psychographic profiling via intercepts.” “We may want to either loop in or find out a bit more about the interesting work Alex Kogan has been doing for the Russians and see how/if it applies,” the colleague wrote.[82]

Quid Pro Quo

Wylie told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”[83] Wylie told a parliamentary inquiry that “senior Palantir employees” had obtained the data. A Palantir spokesperson initially denied Wylie’s allegations in their entirety. However, Palantir was later forced to admit that an employee was “engaged in an entirely personal capacity.” The employee of Palantir Technologies in London, The New York Times reported, recommended to Cambridge Analytica that the company develop its own software “to gain access to Facebook users’ friend networks.”[84]

In the summer of 2012, a British company named Intelligence Management Services Ltd (IMSL) conducted training for government officials of the Analytical Center of the Russian government in the data mining capabilities of Palantir. As one of the participants of the training told Forbes Russia, Palantir planned to use the structures of the Open Government in the Analytical Center under the Ministry of Economic Development. Russian officials seemed unperturbed by the association with American intelligence, wrote Pavel Sedakov & Dmitry Filonov. “As far as I know, the FSB was not against it, it was even interesting for them to learn the principles of Palantir’s work from the inside, and in the future—to create a Russian counterpart,” said Timur Khamdamov, former adviser to the Analytical Center for Continuous Monitoring and Operational Analysis.[85]

Larina’s two-part series, which was released in the monthly magazine by the Izborsk Group, entitled “Trump Revolution,” suggests that Cambridge Analytica was transferred data from Palantir and Quid, a company that Thiel invested in. Larina is a Russian analyst who belongs to the Community of Practitioners of Competitive Intelligence (SPKR), an association of experts in business intelligence, which includes professors, economists, and directors of security for heavy industry as well as operatives from the Russian FSB and its predecessor, the KGB. She also served as an expert for the Russian Interior Ministry, equivalent to the FBI.[86] Through his Founder’s Fund, Thiel partially funded Quid, which analyzes language in search of anomalies and trends for political campaigns and the private sector. In 2013, Quid was named by Fast Company as one of the World’s Top 10 Most Innovative companies in Big Data. The media has cited a handful of notable Quid clients including the Boston Consulting Group, the Department of Defense, the UN Global Pulse, various political campaigns, and the Knight Foundation.

Larina indicates that Cambridge Analytica purchased data was also a subscriber of data from all major data brokers, such as Acxiom, which has information on more than a billion people with an average of 150 parameters per person. Also, data is acquired from Google, Facebook, processing companies, credit bureaus, etc.[87] Larina indicates that Cambridge Analytica purchased data from Acxiom, which has data on more than one billion people around the world.[88] The Trump campaign also purchased this data from certified Facebook marketing partners Experian PLC, Datalogix, Epsilon, and Acxiom Corporation.[89]

According to Larina, Palantir identified eleven favorable states to target and, in particular, five traditionally Democratic states where its analysis indicated anomalies. Through a Quid forecast, the number of anomalous states were reduced to six: Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.[90] Statistical models from Cambridge Analytica also dictated locations of Trump’s campaign rallies, chosen by a Cambridge Analytica algorithm that ranked places in a state with the largest segments of swayable voters.[91] In accordance with the conclusions of Cambridge Analytica, the teams of Bannon and Prebius used social media to help citizens self-organize into action groups to ensure voter turnout from their town and vote for Trump.[92]

Black Cube

In conversations secretly recorded by Channel 4, Nix claimed Cambridge Analytica used bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians, but boasted that his operatives would never be caught because they worked all over the world using a number of front organizations. The executives made it clear that they worked with former intelligence agents from MI5, MI6, and Mossad who would be able to secure secret or damaging information. “We use some British companies, we use some Israeli companies,” Nix said. “From Israel. Very effective in intelligence gathering.”[93] Other methods involved making the publishing inaccurate facts about a certain candidate. “I mean, it sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true, as long as they’re believed,” Nix said.[94] “It’s no good fighting an election campaign on the facts,” Turnbull is reported as saying in November, “because actually it’s all about emotion, it’s all about emotion.”[95]

Senior managers at Cambridge Analytica then appeared to suggest that in their work for US clients was divided between official campaigns and unaffiliated “political action groups.” Tayler described spending on the campaign trail with the candidate organizing “positive” messages, with negative attack ads left to the super PACs, who are permitted to engage in unlimited political spending independent of the campaigns. Turnbull said the company sometimes used “proxy organizations” including charities and activist groups, to help disseminate the messages and keep the company’s involvement undetectable. “We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape,” said Turnbull. “And so this stuff infiltrates the online community, but with no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable.”[96]

Cambridge Analytica was heavily involved in manipulating the Brexit vote and exploiting Russian trolls.[97] Mercer, who is a close friend of Nigel Farage, played a key role in the Brexit campaign. Farage was also close to Steve Bannon who him introduced to, among others, the staff of Jeff Sessions. According to Andy Wigmore, communications director of Leave.eu, Mercer donated Cambridge Analytica’s services to Farage in support of the UKIP’s activities.[98] According to Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute’s computational propaganda institute one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated “bots” – accounts that are programmed to behave like people and make topics trend in support of the Leave vote. Before the US election, bots were five-to-one in favor of Trump, many of them Russian.[99] According to Wigmore, he met with Trump’s team right at the start of the Leave campaign, and Jared Kushner and Jason Miller said, “the holy grail was artificial intelligence.”[100]

According to Wylie, Cambridge Analytica used the services of Black Cube, a private intelligence agency, which operates out of London, Paris and Tel Aviv. Black Cube was founded in 2010 by former Israeli intelligence officers and draws its manpower from elite and secretive Israeli intelligence units, Aman, Mossad and Shin Bet. The company’s personnel are known to maintain close ties to the Israeli government and intelligence agencies.[101] Beginning in 2011, Black Cube provided intelligence services to Vincent Tchenguiz in a number of cases.[102] Cambridge Analytica apparently hired Black Cube, which was also implicated in the Harvey Weinstein scandal, to hack the personal data of Nigerian President Buhari prior to his election to get access to his medical records and private emails, reported multiple sources on Wylie’s testimony.[103]

Also working with Cambridge Analytica was Sam Patten, an associate of Paul Manafort, who pleaded guilty to working as an unregistered foreign agent for a Ukrainian politician and a Ukrainian oligarch. Patten told the Daily Beast that he worked with Cambridge Analytica in its 2014 US elections work and on “several overseas campaigns.”[104] Patten worked for George W. Bush’s State Department, and has done work in Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Iraq, and Russia. He also worked as the Eurasian program director at Freedom House, between 2009 and 2011. Patten worked closely with Konstantin Kilimnik, who was indicted by Mueller alongside Manafort this year for attempted witness tampering. According to the criminal information document filed by the DC US attorney’s office, Patten and Kilimnik, referred to as “Foreigner A,” founded a lobbying and consulting company together. They did campaign work in Ukraine and lobbying work in the US.[105]

Microtargetting

Of Cambridge Analytica’s tactics, Wylie explained, is the idea “that if you can capture every channel of information around a person and then inject content around them, you can change their perception of what’s actually happening.”[106] This is based on the idea of “information dominance,” of propaganda, the notion that if you can control all of the streams of information to your opponents, “you can influence how they perceive that battle space and you can then influence how they’re going to behave and react.”[107] In an interview on NBC’s Today, Wylie said Cambridge Analytica aimed to “explore mental vulnerabilities of people.” He said the firm “works on creating a web of disinformation online so people start going down the rabbit hole of clicking on blogs, websites etc. that make them think things are happening that may not be.”[108]

Wylie said Cambridge Analytica was Bannon’s “baby,” and “Bannon’s arsenal of weaponry to wage a culture war on America using military strategies.”[109] Wylie also told the Washington Post that among the first things he did for Bannon and the Mercers in 2014 was to test American views on Putin.[110] “It turns out, there’s a lot of Americans who really like this idea of a really strong authoritarian leader and people were quite defensive in focus groups of Putin’s invasion of Crimea.”[111]

Wylie told House Democrats that Bannon was behind much of the company’s early focus on promoting public discontent to influence American election.[112] One year before Trump announced his candidacy, Cambridge Analytica had apparently already identified a swath of alienated white Americans. Jane Mayer in The New Yorker reported that in 2013, an oil tycoon named William Lee Hanley, who had commissioned some polls from Patrick Caddell, asked him to show the data to Mercer and Bannon, which showed “mounting anger towards wealthy elites, who many Americans believed had corrupted the government so that it served only their interests. There was a hunger for a populist presidential candidate who would run against the major political parties and the ruling class.” The data “showed that someone could just walk into this election and sweep it,” Caddell told Mayer. When Mercer asked for the polling to be repeated, Caddell got the same results. “It was stunning,” Caddell said. “The country was on the verge of an uprising against its leaders. I just fell over!”[113]

In 2014, Caddell and two partners went public with what they called the Candidate Smith project, which promoted data suggesting that the public wanted a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” figure, an outsider as President. Caddell’s partner Bob Perkins, an advertising executive and a former finance director of the Republican Party, told Mayer, “By then, it was clear there wouldn’t be a third-party candidate. But we thought that a Republican who harnessed the angst had a real chance.” Caddell tested all the declared Presidential candidates, including Trump, as a possible Mr. Smith. “People didn’t think Trump had the temperament to be President,” Caddell said. “He clearly wasn’t the best Smith, but he was the only Smith. He was the only one with the resources and the name recognition.” Caddell worried, however, that there were sinister omens in the numbers, as Americans were increasingly desirous of a “strong man” to fix the country.[114]

Caddell circulated his research as widely as he could, including with people within the Trump campaign. “Pat Caddell is like an Old Testament prophet,” Bannon said. “He’s been talking about alienation of the voters for twenty-five years, and people didn’t pay attention—but he’s a brilliant guy, and he nailed it.”[115] Roger Stone was fascinated by the research and forwarded a memo about it to Trump. Caddell said that he spoke with Trump about “some of the data,” but noted, “With Trump, it’s all instinct—he is not exactly a deep-dive thinker.”[116]

Wylie described Cambridge Analytica as “Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer using a foreign, military contractor… to use some of the same techniques that the military uses… on the American electorate.”[117] Wylie said that Bannon’s push for the Trump campaign to endorse far-right positions on issues like immigration and law enforcement largely stemmed from Cambridge Analytica’s research on those topics. Wylie says he doesn’t know to what extent Trump’s campaign used the techniques. But he says Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was meeting with Cambridge Analytica in 2015, before Trump even announced his run for office.[118] In focus groups centered around the 2014 midterms, voters responded to the suggestion of a border wall, racism towards African-Americans shrouded in the term “race realism,” and tactics intended to “drain the swamp” and “deep state.”[119] “And a lot of these narratives, which at the time would have seemed crazy for a mainstream candidate to run on, those were the things that we were finding that there were pockets of Americans who this really appealed to,” Wylie added.[120]

Project Alamo

Ted Cruz was an early major client of Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 Presidential Campaign, but after he dropped out of the race, Robert and Rebekah Mercer started to support Trump. Bannon served as vice president and secretary of Cambridge Analytica from June 2014 to August 2016, when he became chief executive of the Trump campaign. Wylie reports that Bannon also considered himself enormously influential with Trump at the time.[121] A year before Bannon joined Trump’s campaign staff, he described himself in an e-mail to Jane Mayer as Trump’s de-facto “campaign manager,” because of Breitbart’s positive coverage of Trump. That coverage had largely been underwritten by Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah.[122]

In June 2016, with the campaign failing and in disarray, hedge-fund tycoon Robert Mercer, who had funded Breitbart, offered Trump a huge cash injection, but insisted that he hire Steve Bannon and pitched Cambridge Analytica’s services to Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale.[123] The company’s hiring was approved by Jared Kushner.[124] As Kushner related, “I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting.”[125] Kushner, through to his 100-person data team, run by Brad Parscale, who had previously built small websites for the Trump Organization, was one of the key decision makers by the end of the campaign, focusing on the use of Big Data instead of traditional media, as did Hillary Clinton, and at a fraction of the budget. The data team consisted of 100 staffers, including a mix of programmers, web developers, network engineers, data scientists, graphic artists, ad copywriters, and media buyers. As noted by Steven Bertoni in Forbes, by running the “secret data operation” of the Trump campaign “like a Silicon Valley startup, Kushner eventually tipped the states that swung the election.”[126] “I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff,” Kushner says. “They gave me their subcontractors.”[127]

Trump’s revolutionary database, named Project Alamo, contains the identities of 220 million people in the United States, and approximately 4,000 to 5,000 individual data points about the online and offline life of each person. As described by BusinessWeek, “Cambridge Analytica’s statistical models isolated likely supporters whom Parscale bombarded with ads on Facebook, while the campaign bought up e-mail lists from the likes of Gingrich and Tea Party groups to prospect for others.”[128] Following Trump’s official nomination as the Republican Party presidential candidate in July 2016, Parscale was tasked with building and scaling the campaign’s digital targeting capabilities. One main supplier was the Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Preibus and his team met in San Antonio with Parscale to discuss what they called “the merger.” Preibus and Parscale negotiated an agreement where Trump was given access to the RNC’s list of 6 million Republicans, and could keep 20% of any donations raised, with the remaining going to the RNC.[129]

Parscale played a critical role behind the scenes on the Trump campaign, directing online spending and voter targeting with the use of a highly sophisticated data bank built by the Republican National Committee. He says he was focused on competing with the Clinton campaign’s huge advantage in money and TV ads. What he decided to do was turn to social media, most importantly to Facebook. According to Parscale, “Twitter is not where Trump voters were. Over 95% (of the campaign’s online budget) went to Facebook.”[130] Parscale went so far as to hire pro-Trump employees from Facebook who were “embedded” in Parscale’s headquarters, working on location multiple days a week, to teach his staff how to achieve maximum use of the platform.[131]

Parscale told reporters, “We knew exactly where 14 million voters were that we needed in key swing states… Jared was an incredible leader to make this all happen…”[132] Parscale’s boss Jared Kushner, “understood the online world in a way the traditional media folks didn’t. He managed to assemble a presidential campaign on a shoestring using new technology and won. That’s a big deal,” said former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.[133] “Our best people were mostly the ones who volunteered for me pro bono,” Kushner says. “People from the business world, people from nontraditional backgrounds.”[134] Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions. Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface. They used artificial intelligence for fundraising, to make marketing companies compete for business. Ineffective ads were killed in minutes, while successful ones scaled. The campaign was sending more than 100,000 uniquely configured ads to targeted voters per day.[135]

Parscale raised over $250 Million for Donald Trump, primarily through Facebook. “Our biggest incubator that allowed us to generate that money was Facebook,” said Parscale. Over the course of the election cycle, Trump’s campaign funnelled $90 million to Parscale firm, most of which went toward digital advertising. This was less than half of what Hillary Clinton spent on television advertising. “Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing,” he says. “Twitter for Mr. Trump. And Facebook for fundraising.” On any given day, said Gary Coby, director of advertising at the Republican National Committee who worked on Trump's campaign, the campaign was running 40,000 to 50,000 variants of its ads, testing how they performed in different formats, with subtitles and without, and static versus video, among other small differences. On the day of the third presidential debate in October, the team ran 175,000 variations.[136]

Eventually, the Trump campaign spent about $15 million to hire Cambridge Analytica.[137] In conversations secretly recorded by Channel 4, Nix claimed he had met Trump “many times,” while Turnbull said the firm was behind the “defeat crooked Hillary” advertising campaign. Cambridge Analytica’s CEO Alexander Nix said “Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven.”[138] Nix made contact with Assange about the possible release of 33,000 of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.[139] “We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting. We ran all the digital campaign, the digital campaign, the television campaign and our data informed all the strategy,” Nix told undercover reporters.[140] The company’s head of data, Alex Tayler, added: “When you think about the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million votes but won the electoral college vote that’s down to the data and the research. You did your rallies in the right locations, you moved more people out in those key swing states on election day. That’s how he won the election.”[141]

As Nix explained, about the American investigators he had spoken with, they don’t understand what it is they are trying to investigate because they are politicians, not technical people. “They don’t understand because the candidate never, is never involved. He’s told what to do by the campaign team.” The reporter asks if that means the candidate is just a puppet, and Nix replies: “Always. But in every election. Nearly.”[142]

Shadow President

After Trump’s victory, Thiel was named to the executive committee of the President-elect’s transition team. Many of Thiel’s employees have been calling him “the shadow president.”[143] Thiel has been using his position to help staff the Trump administration with associates who, according to Maya Kosoff writing in Vanity Fair, “share the billionaire’s distaste for bureaucracy and regulation, which Thiel believes is holding the country back from a technological revolution.”[144] Thiel has been vetting candidates to lead the Federal Trade Commission and helping elevate associates from his investment firms to serve in the Department of Commerce, the Pentagon, and even the National Security Council.

Thiel has been assisted in his vetting of candidates by alt-right troll Charles C. “Chuck” Johnson, who was once called “the most hated man on the internet.”[145] Forbes reported that while Johnson does not have a formal position, he was working behind the scenes with members of the transition team’s executive committee, including Peter Thiel, to recommend, vet and give something of a seal of approval to potential nominees from the alt right. On his appearance on an online radio show with libertarian blogger Stefan Molyneux on December 22, 2016, Johnson declared that he had been “doing a lot of vetting for the administration and the Trump transition.”[146]

Thiel has overseen many of the science and technology appointments for the incoming administration. Johnson has helped in that effort, pushing for at least a dozen potential candidates to Thiel, including Ajit Pai, a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, whom Johnson hopes will lead the organization under Trump. Beyond recommending candidates, Johnson has also helped set up meetings between potential appointees and transition team members. He has worked with Jim O’Neill, who is being considered to head the Food and Drug Administration and is currently employed by Thiel at San Francisco-based investment firm Mithril Capital. Johnson has tried to arrange for O’Neill to meet with conservative influencers and political groups in an effort to build support for his potential FDA nomination. O’Neill declined to comment.[147]

“A lot of my friends are going to be in the White House, so it’s very exciting, to put it mildly,” boasted Johnson, who spent election night in the Trump victory party’s VIP room at the New York Hilton, mixing with billionaires, and claims access to members of the president-elect’s family. [148] Cernovich, who is friends with Giesea and Johnson, said that Johnson often has behind-the-scenes influence. “The media really likes to hate on [Johnson],” Cernovich said. “But if they knew how influential he has been—in ways they didn’t know—it would be kind of mind blowing.”[149] Cernovich discussed the transition team’s agenda but refrained from offering details of his own work. “I want to be free to say whatever I want to say. And in a way that limits what I can do officially,” Cernovich said, denying that he has had any direct communication with Thiel or other members of the transition team. “I don’t want anyone to get jammed up, vis-à-vis any association with me.”[150]

Thiel also donated $1,000,000 in October of 2016 to the Super PAC Make America Number 1, that paid Cambridge Analytica $231,352 toward the end of the same year.[151] The PAC is run by Rebekah Mercer. Its operations were headed by Kellyanne Conway from August 2015 until she was tapped to serve as the Campaign Manager of the Donald Trump campaign in mid-August 2016. The PAC also employed Bannon, who joined the campaign as CEO. After Conway’s departure, David Bossie took leadership.

Bossie, a member of the CNP, was the Deputy Campaign Manager to the Trump campaign and co-wrote Lewandowski’s memoir Let Trump Be Trump. Bossie is president of Citizens United, Political Action Committee (PAC) which produces smear campaigns. Citizens United was founded in 1988 by Floyd Brown, a longtime Washington political consultant, and a former Roger Ailes employee. Brown is noteworthy for his introduction of the “Willie Horton” television ad during the Bush-Dukakis presidential race, while Ailes was the Bush campaign’s leading expert on broadcasting. Bossie is a close friend and longtime acquaintance of Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, having introduced Bannon to Trump in 2011.[152]

[1] Ben Schreckinger. “World War Meme.” Politico (April 2017).

[2] Luke O’Brien. “My Journey to the Centre of the alt-right.” The Huffington Post (November 03, 2016).

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ashley Gold. “Wylie to House Dems: Bannon ordered Putin messaging tests.” Politico (April 25, 2018).

[5] Justin Hendrix. “Did Cambridge Analytica Leverage Russian Disinformation for Trump?” Slate (March 21, 2018).

[6] Ryan Mac. “A Troll Outside Trump Tower Is Helping To Pick Your Next Government.” Forbes (January 9, 2017).

[7] Paul Morgan-Bentley & Catherine Philp. “‘Dirty tricks’ firm SCL Group trained UK officials.” The Times (March 13, 2018).

[8] Joseph Bernstein. “This Man Helped Build The Trump Meme Army — Now He Wants To Reform It.” BuzzFeed (January 18, 2017).

[9] Ben Schreckinger. “World War Meme.” Politico (April 2017).

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Dale Beran. “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.” Medium (February 14, 2017).

[13] Whitney Phillips. “Donald Trump Is Not a Troll.” Slate (June 23, 2016).

[14] Milo Yiannopoulos. “Meme Magic: Donald Trump Is The Internet’s Revenge On Lazy Elites.” Breitbart (May 4, 2016).

[15] Ibid.

[16] Schreckinger. “World War Meme.”

[17] Ibid.

[18] Matthew Rosenberg & Nicholas Confessore. “Justice Department and F.B.I. Are Investigating Cambridge Analytica.” New York Times (May 15, 2018).

[19] Nicholas Confessore & Danny Hakim. “Data Firm Says ‘Secret Sauce’ Aided Trump; Many Scoff.” New York Times (March 6, 20127).

[20] Jane Mayer. “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency.” The New Yorker (March 27, 2017 Issue).

[21] Julian Versteeg. “VERY DETAILED TIMELINE – Renaissance Technologies, James Simons, Robert Mercer & the Medallion Funds.” Medium (April 21, 2017).

[22] Ibid.

[23] Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg. “Inside the Trump Bunker, With Days to Go.” Bloomberg BusinessWeek (October 27, 2016).

[24] Richard Wolffe. “The evil genius of Cambridge Analytica was to exploit those we trust most.” The Guardian (March 21, 2018).

[25] Ibid.

[26] Carole Cadwalladr & Emma Graham-Harrison. “Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach.” The Guardian (March 17, 2018).

[27] Cadwalladr. “The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked.”

[28] John Cassidy. “The Latest Cambridge Analytica Exposé Raises More Questions About the Firm’s Role in the Trump Campaign.” New Yorker (March 21, 2018).

[29] Steven Bertoni. “Exclusive Interview: How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House.” Forbes (November 22, 2016).

[30] Nicholas Confessore & Danny Hakim. “Data Firm Says ‘Secret Sauce’ Aided Trump; Many Scoff.” New York Times (March 6, 20127).

[31] Jesse Drucker. “Kremlin Cash Behind Billionaire’s Twitter and Facebook Investments.” New York Times (November 5, 2017).

[32] Jon Swaine & Luke Harding. “Russia funded Facebook and Twitter investments through Kushner associate.” The Guardian (November 5, 2017).

[33] Drucker. “Kremlin Cash Behind Billionaire’s Twitter and Facebook Investments.”

[34] Ben Parr. “Could Facebook Become the Basis for Artificial Intelligence?” Mashable (November 16, 2010).

[35] Joe Carmichael. “Eccentric Russian Billionaires Are Investing in Their Weird Futuristic Visions.” Inverse (May 5, 2016).

[36] Jon Swaine & Luke Harding. “Russia funded Facebook and Twitter investments through Kushner associate.” The Guardian (November 5, 2017).

[37] Ibid.

[38] Tolka. “Russian Analyst: Cambridge Analytica, Palantir and Quid Helped Trump Win 2016 Election.”

[39] Elena Larina. “Козыри Трампа. Часть 2.” hrazvedka.ru (January 20, 2018). Retrieved from http://krasvremya.ru/kozyri-trampa-chast-2/

[40] Leah McGrath Goodman. “The Embers Project Can Predict the Future with Twitter.” Newsweek (July 3, 2105).

[41] David Brooks. “Forecasting Fox.” The New York Times (March 21, 2013).

[42] McGrath Goodman. “The Embers Project Can Predict the Future with Twitter.”

[43] Ibid.

[44] “Dr. Steve Tatham.” Strategic Studies Institute (n.d.). Retrieved from https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/people.cfm?authorID=905

[45] Matea Gold & Frances Stead Sellers. “After working for Trump’s campaign, British data firm eyes new U.S. government contracts.” Washington Post (February 17, 2017).

[46] Cadwalladr. “The great British Brexit robbery.”

[47] Nina Golgowski. “Cambridge Analytica Execs Bragged Of Using Fake News, Sex To Sway Elections.” Huffington Post (March 19, 2018).

[48] Kenneth Vogel. “Cruz partners with donor’s ‘psychographic’ firm.” Politico (July 7, 2015).

[49] Ibid.

[50] Grassegger & Krogerus. “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down” Motherboard (January 28, 2017); translation of Das Magazine article (December 2017).

[51] Textfire. “A Special Relationship & the Birth of Cambridge Analytica.” Medium (May 19, 2017).

[52] Melanie Newman & Oliver Wright. “Caught on camera: top lobbyists boasting how they influence the PM.” The Independent (December 6, 2011).

[53] Lara Rebello. “Thatcher PR guru Lord Bell ran a $540m Pentagon false propaganda campaign in Iraq.” International Business Times (October 3, 2016).

[54] Crofton Black and Abigail Fielding-Smith. “Fake News and False Flags.” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (October 2, 2016).

[55] Ann Marlowe. “Will Donald Trump’s Data-Analytics Company Allow Russia to Access Research on U.S. Citizens?” Tablet (August 22, 2016).

[56] Ibid.

[57] Textfire. “SCL Group’s Eurasian Vacation.” Medium (Mar 20, 2017).

[58] Ann Marlowe. “Will Donald Trump’s Data-Analytics Company Allow Russia to Access Research on U.S. Citizens?” Tablet (August 22, 2016).

[59] Marlowe. “Will Donald Trump’s Data-Analytics Company Allow Russia to Access Research on U.S. Citizens?”

[60] “Big Data – Brave New World or Snake Oil Redux?” Brexit Shambles (March 19, 2017).

[61] Marlowe. “Will Donald Trump’s Data-Analytics Company Allow Russia to Access Research on U.S. Citizens?”

[62] Danny Hakim & Matthew Rosenberg. “Data Firm Tied to Trump Campaign Talked Business With Russians.” New York Times (March 17, 2018).

[63] Justin Hendrix. “Did Cambridge Analytica Leverage Russian Disinformation for Trump?” Slate (March 21, 2018).

[64] Hakim & Rosenberg. “Data Firm Tied to Trump Campaign Talked Business With Russians.”

[65] Carole Cadwalladr & Emma Graham-Harrison. “Cambridge Analytica: links to Moscow oil firm and St Petersburg university.” The Guardian (March 17, 2018).

[66] Hendrix. “Did Cambridge Analytica Leverage Russian Disinformation for Trump?”

[67] Hakim & Rosenberg. “Data Firm Tied to Trump Campaign Talked Business With Russians.”

[68] Hendrix. “Did Cambridge Analytica Leverage Russian Disinformation for Trump?”

[69] Ibid.

[70] Wendy Siegelman. “Cambridge Analytica executives created a company with the Executive Director & Deputy Chairman of Erik Prince’s Frontier Services Group.” Medium (March 18, 2018).

[71] Hagia Amit. “Revealed: Blackwater Founder Erik Prince's Business Ties With Netanyahus Disgraced Chief of Staff.” Haaretz (December 6, 2017).

[72] Siegelman. “Cambridge Analytica executives created a company with the Executive Director & Deputy Chairman of Erik Prince’s Frontier Services Group.”

[73] Raoul Wootliff. “Police seek indictment against former Netanyahu chief of staff.” Times of Israel (February 23, 2017).

[74] Matea Gold & Frances Stead Sellers. “After working for Trump’s campaign, British data firm eyes new U.S. government contracts.” Washington Post (February 17, 2017).

[75] Mikael Krogerus & Hannes Grassegger. “Ich habe nur gezeigt, dass es die Bombe gibt.” (in German). Das Magazin (December 3, 2016).

[76] Hannes Grassegger and Michael Krogerus. “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down” Motherboard (January 28, 2017); translation of Das Magazine article (December 2017).

[77] “About Us”. Cambridge Analytica (Retrieved December 27, 2015).

[78] Sasha Issenberg. “Cruz-Connected Data Miner Aims to Get Inside U.S. Voters’ Heads.” Bloomberg (November 12, 2015).

[79] Louis Ashworth & Todd Gillespie. “Who is Dr Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge academic accused of misusing Facebook data?” Varsity (March 17, 2018).

[80] Bethania Palma. “Zuckerberg: It’s ‘Entirely Possible’ Cambridge Analytica Activities Overlapped With Indicted Russian Firm.” Snopes (April 10, 2018).

[81] Ibid.

[82] Carole Cadwalladr & Emma Graham-Harrison. “Cambridge Analytica: links to Moscow oil firm and St Petersburg university.” The Guardian (March 17, 2018).

[83] Carole Cadwalladr & Emma Graham-Harrison. “Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach.” The Guardian (March 17, 2018).

[84] Nicholas Confessore & Matthew Rosenberg. “Peter Thiel Employee Helped Cambridge Analytica Before It Harvested Data.” New York Times (March 27, 2018).

[85] Pavel Sedakov & Dmitry Filonov. “Spy track: the Italian cyber group were Russian government customers.” Forbes Russia (July 8, 2015).

[86] Tim Tolka. “Russian Analyst: Cambridge Analytica, Palantir and Quid Helped Trump Win 2016 Election.” Medium (July 16, 2017).

[87] Ibid.

[88] Tim Tolka. “Russian Analyst: Cambridge Analytica, Palantir and Quid Helped Trump Win 2016 Election.” Medium (July 16, 2017).

[89] Joe Winston. “How the Trump Campaign Built an Identity Database and Used Facebook Ads to Win the Election.” Medium (November 18, 2016).

[90] Larina. “Козыри Трампа. Часть 2.”

[91] Winston. “How the Trump Campaign Built an Identity Database and Used Facebook Ads to Win the Election.”

[92] Larina. “Козыри Трампа. Часть 2.”

[93] “Revealed: Trump’s election consultants filmed saying they use bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians.” Channel 4 (March 19, 2018).

[94] Golgowski. “Cambridge Analytica Execs Bragged Of Using Fake News, Sex To Sway Elections.”

[95] Ibid.

[96] Emma Graham-Harrison & Carole Cadwalladr. “Cambridge Analytica execs boast of role in getting Donald Trump elected.” The Guardian (March 21, 2018).

[97] Massimo Calabrese. “Inside Russia’s Social Media War on America.” Time (May 18, 2017).

[98] “Hedge-fund billionaire and Donald Trump backer ‘played key role in Brexit campaign’.” The Independent (February 26, 2017); Carol Cadwalladr. “Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media.” The Guardian (February 26, 2017).

[99] Carol Cadwalladr. “Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media.” The Guardian (February 26, 2017).

[100] Ibid.

[101] Shuki Sadeh. “Don’t cry for me.” Haaretz (August 8, 2014).

[102] Efrat Peretz. “Investigating thee investigators.” Globes (February 3, 2014).

[103] “Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Claims Israeli Firm Black Cube Was Hired to Hack African Election.” Haaretz (March 27, 2018).

[104] Lachlan Markau. “Accused Russian Intel Asset Teamed Up With GOP Operative.” The Daily Beast (April 4, 2018).

[105] Andrew Prokop. “Robert Mueller got another cooperator.” Vox (August 31, 2018).

[106] Associated Press. “Cambridge Analytica ‘took fake news to the next level’ with Facebook data.” The Star (March 19, 2018).

[107] Ibid.

[108] Ibid.

[109] Curt Devine, Donie O’Sullivan & Drew Griffin. “How Steve Bannon used Cambridge Analytica to further his alt-right vision for America.” CNN (March 30, 2018).

[110] Hendrix. “Did Cambridge Analytica Leverage Russian Disinformation for Trump?”

[111] Ibid.

[112] Billy House. “Cambridge Analytica’s Promotion of Discontent Tied to Bannon.” Bloomberg (April 25, 2018).

[113] Mayer. “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency.”

[114] Ibid.

[115] Ibid.

[116] Ibid.

[117] Devine, O’Sullivan & Griffin. “How Steve Bannon used Cambridge Analytica to further his alt-right vision for America.”

[118] Associated Press. “Cambridge Analytica. “fake news to the next level”.” Business Insider (March 19, 2018).

[119] Craig Timberg, Karla Adam & Michael Kranish. “Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s collection of Facebook data, according to former employee.” Washington Post (March 20, 2018).

[120] Nonam Sheth. “Cambridge Analytica began testing out pro-Trump slogans the same year Russia launched its influence operation targeting the 2016 election.” Business Insider (March 20, 2018).

[121] Hendrix. “Did Cambridge Analytica Leverage Russian Disinformation for Trump?”

[122] Jane Mayer. “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency.” The New Yorker (March 27, 2017 Issue).

[123] Channel 4. “Cambridge Analytica: Undercover Secrets of Trump’s Data Firm.” YouTube (March 20, 2018).

[124] Craig Timberg, Karla Adam & Michael Kranish. “Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s collection of Facebook data, according to former employee.” Washington Post (March 20, 2018).

[125] Ibid.

[126] Ibid.

[127] Ibid.

[128] Joshua Green & Sasha Issenberg. “Inside the Trump Bunker, With Days to Go.” Bloomberg BusinessWeek (October 27, 2016).

[129] Winston. “How the Trump Campaign Built an Identity Database and Used Facebook Ads to Win the Election.”

[130] Tom LoBianco. “First on CNN: House Russia investigators want to bring in Trump digital director.” CNN (June 16, 2017).

[131] Lesley Stahl. “Facebook “embeds,” Russia and the Trump campaign’s secret weapon.” CBS News (October 8, 2017).

[132] Tolka. “Russian Analyst: Cambridge Analytica, Palantir and Quid Helped Trump Win 2016 Election.”

[133] Steven Bertoni. “Exclusive Interview: How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House.” Forbes (November 22, 2016).

[134] Ibid.

[135] Ibid.

[136] Issie Lapowsky. “Here’s How Facebook Actually Won Trump the Presidency.” Wired (November 15, 2016).

[137] Mikael Krogerus & Hannes Grassegger. “Ich habe nur gezeigt, dass es die Bombe gibt” (in German). Das Magazin (December 3, 2016).

[138] Hannes Grassegger & Michael Krogerus. “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down” Motherboard (January 28, 2017); translation of Das Magazine article (December 2017).

[139] David Smith. “Julian Assange confirms Cambridge Analytica sought WikiLeaks’ help.” The Guardian (October 26, 2017).

[140] Emma Graham-Harrison & Carole Cadwalladr. “Cambridge Analytica execs boast of role in getting Donald Trump elected.” The Guardian (March 21, 2018).

[141] Ibid.

[142] Ibid.

[143] Eliana Johnson. “Donald Trump’s ‘shadow president’ in Silicon Valley.” Politico (February 26, 2017).

[144] Maya Kosoff. “Donald Trump Has Made Peter Thiel ‘Immensely Powerful’.” Vanity Fair (February 27, 2017).

[145] Hatewatch Staff. “Trump’s Troll: Racist Internet figure aiding president-elects transition team.” Southern Poverty Law Center (January 11, 2017).

[146] Ryan Mac. “A Troll Outside Trump Tower Is Helping To Pick Your Next Government.” Forbes (January 9, 2017).

[147] Ibid.

[148] Joseph Bernstein. “How Malik Obama Became A Twitter "Shitlord" And Alt-Right Darling.” BuzzFeed (December 13, 2015).

[149] Ryan Mac. “A Troll Outside Trump Tower Is Helping To Pick Your Next Government.” Forbes (January 9, 2017).

[150] Ibid.

[151] Jack Morse. “Facebook board member Peter Thiel helped fund Cambridge Analytica's work.” Mashable (March 23, 2018).

[152] Nancy Benac & Jill Colvin. “Little heard in public, Bannon is quiet power in Oval Office.” Associated Press (February 1, 2017).

Volume Six

1. Culture Wars

2. Red Mafia

3. From Russia With Love

4. #MeToo

5. Conservative Media

6. Atl-Reich

7. Multipolar World Order

8. Katehon

9. Collusion

10. Russia House

11. Techno-Libertarianism

12. Military-Digital Complex

13. Fake News

14. Memetic Warfare

15. Big Data

16. Make America White Again!

17. In Trump We Trust

18. Israel First