DIGITAL GUERRILLA — The Curious Case of Douglass Mackey, Russian Propaganda Superspreader
DIGITAL GUERRILLA — The Curious Case of Douglass Mackey, Russian Propaganda Superspreader
A closer look at the orbit of convicted felon Douglass Mackey, a superspreader of Russian-intelligence lies during the lead up to the 2016 US election and beyond
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The Crime Scene
Twitter 2016 is a crime scene. The chalk outline around the decaying corpse is an ominous warning — metaphorical yellow tape serves as an attempt to keep people out. But I go in — probing the bombed out traces of memetic warfare. And navigating my way between the mounds of deleted tweets and suspended accounts, I forensically piece together the carcass of 2016 — an election stolen by Kremlin-sponsored attacks facilitated by misogynistic white nationalists — superspreaders of GRU lies.
I start pulling at threads, one at a time, because criminal propagandists reveal their crimes through projection. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones’ InfoWars, Dinesh D’Souza, Don Jr. and Glenn Greenwald are each defending Douglass Mackey, a convicted felon just sentenced to seven-months in prison for his role in a conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 election. He targeted people of color to vote for Hillary Clinton with ‘vote by text’ memes — and thousands of people contacted the line.
Voting by text isn’t a thing, but election interference is.
According to the FBI, Douglass Mackey, who went by the pseudonym “Ricky Vaughn” in multiple accounts, was previously convicted of the charge of Conspiracy Against Rights at trial by a federal jury in Brooklyn.
I had reported on Douglass Mackey, superspreader of Russian-intelligence lies during the run up to the 2016 election and beyond. In threads and investigations, I noted how he was a prolific tweeter of GRU propaganda from Prigozhin’s troll farm, and he wasn’t alone — Mike Flynn and Don Jr. also tweeted Russian state-sponsored lies from the St. Petersburg operation — Ten_GOP.
But the cabal of Russian fanboys simping for Mackey is a loud confession. They are trying to make the MAGA cult members believe that Mackey is going to prison for making Hillary memes.
Number one, that shows an overt downplaying of memetic warfare — trolling is a cheap way to destroy people and countries.
It’s guerrilla warfare in cyberspace and memes are the weapons.
Number two, why are they so worried? What are they trying to hide?
Well, it didn’t take long for me to find the same ‘vote by text’ scam tweeted in 2016 by an account associated with Roger Stone — “stonecoldtruth” — now since deleted, but here’s a screenshot:
The same Roger Stone who starred in a movie, where he boasted about his role creating Stop the Steal and we literally see him plot and then run from the violent Insurrection.
It also didn’t take long for me to find out that the ‘vote from home’ scam originated in the St. Petersburg, Russia, influence operation.
According to court documents, Mackey was told to style a ‘vote by text’ meme after one created for Brexit to encourage those who wanted to remain in the EU to vote for the referendum by posting on Facebook or Twitter. I could smell that as a Russian psyop from a mile away, and sure enough, the origin story begins in St. Pete.
In a Brexit post-mortem, researchers found more than 150,000 Russian-language Twitter accounts posted tens of thousands of messages in English to leave the European Union in the days before the referendum. These tools of the Kremlin were turned over to Congressional investigators, and here is an example from the Russia-state sponsored operation targeting US voters:
In court transcripts, I read how Mackey was using celebrity images to fake pro-MAGA stances. In the above sample from Russia, a celebrity image is used to trick people to vote for Clinton from home — a match for Mackey’s ‘vote by text’ lie.
Additionally, court documents reveal an informant who explained how operatives could pay $300 a month to gain inorganic fast ‘popularity’. And Mackey, who was fired from his job in New York in July of 2016, quickly reemerged as a MAGA influencer more popular than NBC, the Drudge Report and Newt Gingrich, according to an MIT study that highlighted one of his accounts Ricky_Vaughn99, which had 58,000 followers. Mackey, who just also happened to tweet the Ten_GOP account from Russia 162 times, wrote publicly about the need to suppress the black vote to favor Trump.
His associates in the Peter Thiel-linked operation MAGA3X promoted such narrative warfare lies as PizzaGate — based on GRU hacked emails — and the Macron leaks in 2017, also based on data stolen by the GRU.
“All these assholes got together in MAGA3X and got organized and went out in teams and literally coordinated with Russian intelligence — with the IRA accounts like the most famous being Ten_GOP — and hundreds of other ones — and they created propaganda with emails hacked by the Russians,” Jim Stewartson said on RadPod live. “It’s not a mystery what happened. One of the biggest problems that we collectively have is we have not grappled with the situation of 2016.”
As reports emerged of Mackey in the same clique as Roger Stone, it is clear that a group of white nationalist males worked with Roger Stone to promote crimes committed by GRU-led hackers against the US and France — essentially operating as an arm of Russian intelligence — and the US has done f**k all about it.
Limited Hangout
Mackey’s cover was blown in 2018, and yet it took another three years for him to be indicted.
And now, he gets a slap on the wrist. Mackey, who moved from New York to West Palm Beach, Florida, has expressed remorse and said he is receiving therapy. I do hope he makes a full recovery, and that his recovery leads to discovery.
He was associated with some truly venal characters, who are still attempting to overthrow our country at this very moment.
Bottom line, the seven-month sentence he received feels like a limited hangout, just like New York FBI Officer Charles McGonigal and his four-year stretch for being on Russia’s payroll.
I learned about a limited hangout from the work of Jack Bryan and John Mattes in ‘Laywers, Guns, and Money’ podcast. It’s when a prosecution occurs that is a small part of a much larger criminal coverup.
As I forensically comb though the rubble of Twitter 2016 — littered with old memes of Hillary Clinton agape, a MAGA-hatted Pepe the Frog urinating in her mouth — I acknowledge I’m wading through a crime scene sewer. A wreckage site of that time misogynistic white nationalists aligned with the Kremlin to install a Russian asset in our White House — just another Yanukovych to Putin, who even had the same handler in felon Paul Manafort, Roger Stone’s longtime partner in reputation washing the world’s worst criminals.
Guerilla Warfare in Cyberspace
Destructive memes are weapons of war, cheap tricks by traitors and foreign adversaries, they leach into our psyche slithering out of underground cesspools — planted by soldiers instructed by generals — rearing their ugly heads as spectacle in corporate media that has no clue how to cover guerrilla warfare in cyberspace. So the scarring of our minds continues.
I want accountability.
My team has reported on Mike Flynn and Roger Stone and their role in the J6 coup, and their ongoing radicalization of millions of Americans.
We want accountability.
I write about monsters.
Racist Russian fanboys and their seven-month sentences don’t move me. Russian spies in the FBI and their four-year sentences don’t move me.
I want some accountability.
I want truth and reconciliation. I want it all laid out for the American people — I want them to bear witness to this crime scene, so we can make the deep structural changes to strengthen our democracy from future attacks.
Geopolitical Disorder
As a coda, I want you to read this tweet by a since suspended Twitter account called jbro_1776. I picked it up because it was retweeted by a Mackey colleague, white nationalist and fellow Russian propaganda superspreader Jack Posobiec.
Here is how that tweet read in May of 2017:
“It is especially important to introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S.,” Dugin wrote.
Posobiec was promoting a book by fascist Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin on how to destabilize the US.
Posobiec is still on the platform formerly known as Twitter, superspreading fascist propaganda to 2.4 million followers.
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