The Billionaire's Brain Hackers

a reply to: theantediluvian

You've done an amazing job writing and researching a fascinating and frightening thread!!

It is a shame that the first few 'responses' you had were by people who couldn't possibly have actually read it in the amount of time prior to their posting!

I would like to offer the opinion that your efforts here might get the attention they deserve, if you could get the thread moved to a different forum...

I realize that there is a political/election element to the OP, but I think the 'primary' point of the information (the "Brain Hackers" themselves) would allow for the thread being placed elsewhere...

It's just such a shame for such an important topic to be 'lost' in the muddle of the preconceived notions which placement of a thread in political/election forums entails...

a reply to: theantediluvian

I read all your words. I don't always agree with you however you are an amazing writer with tremendous info.

I have been so disappointed, more than ever before, in this presidential election.

For the first time ever, and I am old, I don't feel I have any influence in the process or that my core values are represented.

Thank you-you have opened my mind and eyes and I am not easily influenced. It may be that I have felt for so long now, as I have worked on political campaigns as have my family, something was amiss.

You just confirmed for me that something evil is afoot-my instincts were right.

And, yes, I too know more than 1 billionaire-more of acquaintances; not close.

originally posted by: lostgirlI realize that there is a political/election element to the OP, but I think the 'primary' point of the information (the "Brain Hackers" themselves) would allow for the thread being placed elsewhere

This is all about the election and Trump, make no mistake. He posted it in the 2016 US Election sub-forum for good reason.

a reply to: theantediluvian

Re-read through a few times, included the sources this time. Without sounding dismissive i want to point out that this is a very intricate marketing campaign.

To answer my own question previously asked; "do you think this applies to dems." I would say just take a look at Google and Facebook.

Still a great thread and deserves a read.

a reply to: BlueShaman

If you read the first of the the three threads, I did make the case that in my opinion, the Trump campaign at least, had been taken over by Mercer and friends.

Kellyanne Conway ran the Mercer PAC and her company has been paid just shy of a million dollars this election cycle with half of it coming from the Mercer PAC and half from the Trump campaign.

After it was over for Cruz, Conway joined the Trump campaign as a senior advisor to Manafort. About that time, there was an attempt to bring in Cambridge Analytica. From what I read, one of the biggest proponents was the guy who runs the company that does all of campaign's web dev (and in fact a lot of web work for Trump's company) who happens to be a good friend of Ivanka's husband, Jared Kushner (whose parents are actually big Dem donors but that's a different story).

Anyway, Manafort was supposedly totally against it. Then with the Ukraine corruption stuff breaking and Carter Page coming under investigation, etc — as you know I'm sure, Manafort left. After Manafort left, Stephen Bannon came in and the word was at the time that Robert Mercer's daughter, Rebekah, was the one who "nudged" Trump in that direction.

Also, Cambridge Analytica was brought on.

(I'd have to look back at my notes, but I think it was actually just prior to Bannon taking leave from Breitbart to be Trump's campaign CEO)

Then a few weeks after that, David Bossie — who took over Mercer's PAC after Conway joined the Trump campaign — took a leave of absence from being President of Citizens United to become Trump's deputy campaign manager.

So within a span of a few weeks:

Conway in, Manafort out, Cambridge Analytica in, Bannon in, Bossie in. Oh, and Lewandowski went out. I'm kinda wondering now if Michelle Fields wasn't put up to something re Lewandowski.

The point is, it was a total campaign regime change before the end of Summer. Cambridge Analytica it seems is their tool of choice.

A few other thoughts:

Remember Corey Stewart (Trump VA campaign director) getting canned for his RNC HQ protest? He was canned by Bossie. What he said is at the rally was very interesting:

Stewart, a 2017 gubernatorial candidate in the Commonwealth, told protesters he had been threatened by the campaign:

"Those RNC establishment pukes who have worked their way into the Trump campaign just moments ago threatened me...that they're going to terminate me as chairman of the campaign in Virginia."

Stewart told Melissa Francis he had no regrets about the rally, even after--as the Washington Post reported-- Citizens United president and Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie warned him about repercussions should he follow through.

The "establishment puke" who actually threatened him was Bossie. I assume the other "pukes" would be Conway and maybe/maybe not Bannon. There was an interview I read with him later where he elaborated a little bit about how he felt all these "establishment" types were surrounding Trump now yadda yadda but he was still supporting Trump. Clearly he disapproved of the operatives who had taken over the campaign.

What that means to you regarding Trump I can't say. My personal belief is that Trump is very impressionable. You might disagree. While we might have differences of opinion in that regard, the facts of the matter remain. All three of the top people in the campaign are heavily connected to Mercer.

Giuliani's firm is also being paid by Mercer's PAC. This whole FBI "mutiny" that we keep hearing about (from Giuliani in larger part) started with the Mercer funded Clinton Cash. That's that's where the second thread comes in.

I don't think it's fair to say that all Trump supporters are "brainwashed" (it's a loaded term) but clearly psyops exist because people can be manipulated/persuaded. This is a company with a decades long history of running psyops for governments, I'm sure they are responsible for persuading some people since they came onboard. Cambridge Analytica was contracted post primary season and obviously he won the nomination without them. It's hard to quantify how big of an influence they are having. It's not like we can do the whole thing with and without their work and see what happens but if they made an even 1-2% difference in votes, that could be a very big deal in a race this tight.

a reply to: theantediluvian

Well, I'm impressed with the amount of research you've done, so much so that sometimes I think you wear an isolator helmet for real.

But I think Cambridge Analytica's roll in Trump's campaign is less sinister than you make it seem. Trump's research team is using them as one of their data suppliers for their marketing database named Project Alamo, as seen in this article where Cambridge Analytica is mentioned several times. Some key passages:

To outsiders, the Trump campaign often appears to be powered by little more than the candidate’s impulses and Twitter feed. But after Trump locked down the GOP nomination by winning Indiana’s primary, Kushner tapped Parscale, a political novice who built web pages for the Trump family’s business and charities, to begin an ambitious digital operation fashioned around a database they named Project Alamo.

Although his operation lags previous campaigns in many areas (its ground game, television ad buys, money raised from large donors), it’s excelled at one thing: building an audience. Powered by Project Alamo and data supplied by the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, his team is spending $70 million a month, much of it to cultivate a universe of millions of fervent Trump supporters, many of them reached through Facebook.

The idea here is that even if Trump loses the election he will have his own massive audience, that he can address directly by email or through social networks, for whatever future ventures he wishes to promote.

The people who were served Trump ads on facebook etc asking them to provide contact information or make a donation, already were Trump supporters or were suspected to be by the analytics model, so I don't see it as a form of mind control to make people vote for Trump.

a reply to: BlueShaman

Well, that may be entirely true, but - once the election is over -

- I personally would like to see the info in the OP reposted in one of the more 'conspiratorial' forums with the focus shifted toward discussing just how insidious the stuff these companies are geared toward is (even aside from politics)...

...I mean, just imagine what sort of 'nefarious' agendas might might be served, and what possible long term, 'large picture' goals might be in the planning stages?

The FEC's beta site has a really nice set of searches. Under the disbursements for Cambridge Analytica:

DONALD J. TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT, INC. CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA, LLC VA DATA MANAGEMENT 09-01-2016 $5,000,000.00

DONALD J. TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT, INC. CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA, LLC VA DATA MANAGEMENT 08-18-2016 $250,000.00

DONALD J. TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT, INC. CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA, LLC VA DATA MANAGEMENT SERVICES 07-29-2016 $100,000.00

From June of 2015 to June of 2016, the Cruz campaign paid them a total of about $6 mil. A lot of the disbursements for media/digital media as well as web services and then donor modeling and voter modeling.

I'm guessing the Cruz campaign paid for a lot of donor/voter modeling that ultimately benefitted the Trump campaign.

There are some really interesting things in here. Carson America paid about $450k to CA. That's both of the primary competitors that are openly campaigning for Trump. There's not a lot of other campaigns/PACs with disbursementsto CA:

John Bolton Super PAC (~$700k) - multiple large sums for "survey research"
Keep The Promie II ($570k) - the pro-Cruz sister PAC of KtP / Make America Number 1. (12/8/15, 1/4/16)
Restoring American Leadership PAC (~120k) - 3 disbursements this year for "placed media" this is the Todd Wilcox (FL) PAC
Tim Tillis Committee - ($100k) - 4 disbursements spread out in 2015 for "micro-targeting"
North Carolina Republican Party ($65k) - 6/17/2015 for "microtargeting consulting fees"
Walters for Congress - ($20k) - 1 disbursment in August for "voter data media ads"
Friends of Roy Blunt ($12k) - 1 disbursment for "data services"
Rick Kozell for Congress (~$5k) - handful of tiny disbursements for "research"


John Bolton Super PAC has received $3 million from Mercer.

Mercer's donations are telling:

Make American Number 1 - $15.5 mil
John Bolton Super PAC - $3 mil
KelliPAC (Kelly Ward for Senate - AZ) - $700k (KelliPAC doesn't have any indexed disbursements)
RNC - $670k, all on 9/10/2015 or 4/25/2016
New York Wins PAC - $400k according to this Mercer is the sole donor. It's pro-Faso (19th Congressional District)
NRCC (Nat Rep Congressional Comm) - $460k, 2/6/2015, 9/15/2016
Black Americans For a Better Future PAC - $430k 95% funded by Mercer. All white donors lol
Warrior PAC (Rob Maness, US Senate, LA) - $400k
Club for Growth Action - $250k, PAC for Club for Growth (Stephen Moore et al) supported candidates (7/13/16)
Team Ryan (Paul Ryan)- $244,200.00 on 9/15/2016
Believe Again PAC (Bobby Jindal) - $250k on 6/29/2015
Fighting for Florida Fund (Ron DeSantis, Senate, FL) - $200k on 9/29/2015
Campaign for American Principles - $136k on 9/8/2016, looks to be a "religious liberties" PAC

That's all from Robert Mercer & Robert & Diana Mercer to orgs that received at least $100k. Wow. Diana Mercer (with Robert) has given it looks like $1.5 million to groups where she's given more than $100k in a single donation. They basically track Roberts/Robert & Diana donations.

Team Ryan - $244,200 on 9/15/2016.

Then there's daughter Rebekah.

Trump Victory - $449,400 on 6/13/2016
RNC - $334k on 6/13 as well

Total donations from the FEC filings alone for the Mercer family looks to be about: $25,619,935

a reply to: lostgirl

Thanks!

The responses aren't completely unexpected, I've slung a lot of mud in the Mud Pit over the last 3-4 months but I keep it to the Mud Pit.

I probably should have posted it in a different forum given the current volume of political threads but this seemed the most appropriate. The only way a thread really takes off around here is to make it the front page which right about now requires maybe 25 flags and 100 repsonses.

To that end, if you want to check out the other threads here and here, a little more activity might get the former noticed.

Kind of sad a reposted hoax about people unfollowing Clinton on Clinton has 50+ flags and 100+ replies.

a reply to: Justso

Thank you and you're welcome!

I imagine that the business of getting elected has always been a dirty one but as scientific understanding and technology have progressed, so has the sophistication of electioneering which of course overlaps with fields of marketing and public relations with which there is much cross-pollination (SCL is a prime example).

Both of the major parties have invested a very large amount of money on integrating big data and techniques like microtargeting in the last three election cycles.

Hefficide authored a thread about some of this last year. I'll quote myself from a post there:

I can't decide what's more interesting about this story, the fallout between the RNC and the Kochs or the light it shines on the massive data warehousing/aggregation operations and CRM platforms that are being used by campaigns to microtarget individual voters and tailor propaganda.

Here's a few:

i360
Voter Vault (recently renamed GOP Data Center)
Demzilla
VoteBuilder / NGP VAN
Catalist
rVotes
NationBuilder
FILPAC

and

What's more establishment than Orwellian data collection from 250+ million Americans for the purposes of targeting them with the most effective propaganda?

This is a rapidly emerging field. In my opinion what makes CA more dangerous than the above is that they're an offshoot of a company that specializes in things that are truly Orwellian. What good can be said of a company that markets itself as a turnkey disinformation solution for governments?

The CT community is appalling behind the curve on this and that means that society at large is even further behind. How many times is MKULTRA mentioned a week on ATS? How many times before this post was SCL ever? It might not be quite as sexy as psychoactive drugs but the results aren't somehow less horrible and these things are occuring now and on a large scale. We've got to keep up.

originally posted by: JinMI
a reply to: theantediluvian

Re-read through a few times, included the sources this time. Without sounding dismissive i want to point out that this is a very intricate marketing campaign.

To answer my own question previously asked; "do you think this applies to dems." I would say just take a look at Google and Facebook.

Still a great thread and deserves a read.

Re-read through a few times, included the sources this time. Without sounding dismissive i want to point out that this is a very intricate marketing campaign.

Well yes and no. It depends I'd say on what they're putting out. It's the difference between advertising and propaganda. Not that there's not something sinister in targeted ads. Most people are barraged with advertising from birth and have been for a while so we're just accustomed to the passive manipulation that is happening all the time but it's a constant stream of persuasion none the less.

To answer my own question previously asked; "do you think this applies to dems." I would say just take a look at Google and Facebook.

This is what I'm getting at. We're not talking about direct mailers and email blasts anymore. It's not even necessarily about "Correct The Record" type initiatives (though that would be an example of where this has already gone). Of course the Democrats are up to their eyeballs in the latest in high tech electioneering. When I was doing some light research a couple years back, the common belief was that the Democrats were ahead of the Republicans.

I don't see this as a partisan issue. It's not even an American issue. What alarmed me about CA most was discovering exactly what SCL is. Think about their exhibition. SCL is doing things straight out of 1984. I'm really curious what they're actually doing with CA beyond voter/donor profiling and microtargeting. I had downloaded these images with the intention of presenting them in a different post in this thread but since you brought up social media:




Ugh I'm getting tired. This next bit is worth of a thread of its own. It's scary and fascinating because there's no central control. The purveyors of this propaganda don't even care about politics, they're just trying to make a buck by generating propaganda and monetizing it with advertising. I mean, that's mind blowing when you reall thing about it.

How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake New

“This is the news of the millennium!” said the story on WorldPoliticus.com. Citing unnamed FBI sources, it claimed Hillary Clinton will be indicted in 2017 for crimes related to her email scandal.

“Your Prayers Have Been Answered,” declared the headline.

For Trump supporters, that certainly seemed to be the case. They helped the baseless story generate over 140,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.

Meanwhile, roughly 6,000 miles away in a small town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, a young man watched as money began trickling into his Google AdSense account.

Over the past year, the Macedonian town of Veles (population 45,000) has experienced a digital gold rush as locals launched at least 140 US politics websites. These sites have American-sounding domain names such as WorldPoliticus.com, TrumpVision365.com, USConservativeToday.com, DonaldTrumpNews.co, and USADailyPolitics.com. They almost all publish aggressively pro-Trump content aimed at conservatives and Trump supporters in the US.

The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don’t care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives: As Facebook regularly reveals in earnings reports, a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of US display advertising — a declining market for American publishers — goes a long way in Veles.

Using domain name registration records and online searches, BuzzFeed News identified over 100 active US politics websites being run from Veles. The largest of these sites have Facebook pages that boast hundreds of thousands of followers.

BuzzFeed News also identified another 40 US politics domains registered by people in Veles that are no longer active. (An April report from the Macedonian website Meta.mk identified six pro-Trump sites being run from Veles. A Guardian report identified 150 politics sites.)

You know we're sliding into oblivion when teenagers in Macedonia are blasting the most sensational propaganda from the fringes of the echo chamber to generate clickbait ad revenue from hapless Americans who think the "lamestream media" is so bad that geysers of pure bulls# are somehow preferrable.

Then there are troll farms. I know I posted this to somebody in one of the two earlier threads but I'll repost here.

The Agency: From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.

If Arthur had checked Twitter, he might have become much more worried. Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a disaster right down the road. “A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals,” a man named Jon Merritt tweeted. The #ColumbianChemicals hashtag was full of eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville. @AnnRussela shared an image of flames engulfing the plant. @Ksarah12 posted a video of surveillance footage from a local gas station, capturing the flash of the explosion. Others shared a video in which thick black smoke rose in the distance.

The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake YouTube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.

We're sliding into oblivion and we've got people running around repeating stupid Alex Jones crap and saying "I'm awoke" when really none of them has any idea. There's not enough attention to go around and we're wasting what there is sucking down clickbait propaganda.

As long as it seems "anti-establishment" people are eating it up at alarming rates and we're not getting wiser, we're getting more and more ignorant.

This election will be over shortly but it's just the beginning.

a reply to: BlueShaman

Thanks for the link. I just skimmed the article and it's full of really interesting information. Quite a bit to process. I'm going to read back through this in the morning and I'll comment in depth then.

originally posted by: theantediluvian
We're sliding into oblivion and we've got people running around repeating stupid Alex Jones crap and saying "I'm awoke" when really none of them has any idea. There's not enough attention to go around and we're wasting what there is sucking down clickbait propaganda.

As long as it seems "anti-establishment" people are eating it up at alarming rates and we're not getting wiser, we're getting more and more ignorant.

This election will be over shortly but it's just the beginning.

We are ultimately talking about both far right extremist ideologies of the Koch family (libertarian and conspiratorial) having taken over the Republican Party, due to unlimited amounts of money put into institutions and media by the Koch family and their followers, such as Robert Mercer and daughter, to spread both ideologies and make them mainstream. These ideologies are not recent phenomenon but were given political power by the GOP establishment over the years.

Robert Mercer has been the elitist billionaire backer of the Libertarian Party ideology (which is NOT solely concerned with marijuana!).

The conspiratorial Koch ideology goes back to the 1950s, when the Koch bros father helped start the John Birch Society.

Lincoln's worst NIGHTMARE! How Republicans became the Trump party of hate

Whether they know it or not, many ATS members espouse what became known as The John Birch fallacy:
"the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: we lost China to the Communists, therefore the President of the United States and the Secretary of State wished China to go to the Communists." Which led JBS members to further conclude that Eisenhower was a Communist!

Highly intelligent people are not immune to this illogical, paranoid way of thought.

Where Rush Limbaugh was the original voice for the right wing cultural backlash to the culture wars (sexist, misogynist, racist), Alex Jones gave voice to the Koch JBS paranoid, nutty conspiracists:

One of the most influential books from his teenage years was None Dare Call It Conspiracy, a book by John Birch PR representative Gary Allen, that Jones still cites as "the quintessential primer to understand the New World Order." Published in 1972, the book sold 5 million copies and laid out a scenario in which international bankers financed the communist revolution in Russia in something akin to a lab experiment. Flushed with that success, the bankers moved to the next phase: imposing global government, centralized monetary policies, income taxes and mass social welfare programs that would keep the populace dependant and subservient. To Jones, and a sizable chunk of other disenfranchised, paranoid souls, the book's logic-leaping premise made perfect sense.

SPL source

Both Rush and Jones gave voice to the angry white conservative male and female. Rush to the largely Reagan Dems and Jones to the GOP John Birchers. The RP allowed both their extremists to have access to political power, especially with the rise of their GOP Tea Party base.

The above combines with the rise of false equivalency and binary thinking (shamefully taken up by traditional journalists and promoted by new media journalist wannabes), making for a dumbed down citizenry, a great weakness. This rise in irrational/paranoid thinking was a weakness, ready for exploitation by outside forces, just as a weakness in defense or individual citizens were weaknesses for the old Soviet Union to exploit to their advantage, Putin being today's heir to the old KGB.

Yes, to "be awake" to paranoid, irrational fallacies and lies is to lay claim to ignorance. To then be taken in by non-Americans yanking one's chain is beyond falling prey to the American JBS. It is being useful idiots.

It looks like for the first time you've posted my kind of thread. I dont have time to dig in right now but I'm saving this for my archives.

a reply to: theantediluvian

Ante,

(Warning, what follows is an opinion-piece, no citations will be provided for my own thoughts...)


This is one of the best threads I've read on general conspiracy (albeit this one connects directly to the formation of an alt-right media/political empire by a particular Billionaire for the benefit of that ideology), and the real-life mind-control that we are all potentially vulnerable to given how the internet and social media fill our lives, how we are conditioned to advertising and to believing, at least at first, what we might see trending on twitter or here on ATS or Facebook, etc.

During this election, there seemed/seems to be that 1984 aspect of "double speak" where up was down and right was wrong and people were slowly conditioned to tolerate and embrace a more and more extreme point of view en masse. It has felt frightening to me, like a dark shadow was at work of an almost supernatural quality (yeah, I know, sounds woo woo, but intuitively that's what it felt like).

It is as if the worst qualities in people were being massaged and brought to the surface with a carefully planned series of psyop maneuvers designed to destroy internal integrity and the "enemy" embodied by the "opponent." Granted, me being on the left side of things, I saw and felt this from the opposing side, myself. So I know I've also been manipulated.

Meanwhile, the distrust (or trust?) of government was repeatedly sown and faith in the potential goodness of our fellow humans was eroded, natural anger over desperate economic times coupled with a willingness to blame a host of "others" was seeded and nurtured and fostered and fertilized with BS to the point where some noxious tentacled plant arose, and some who beheld it were horrified, and others thought it's orange blossom was redolent with the fresh smell of both revenge and sweet sweet victory. (Again, I'm not saying this is all the "right's" doing, but my experience of being on the other side of it...we have stinky flowers of our own on the left, and let's not forget the bee-like drones...)

The last year has been like watching a terrible car accident unfold before your eyes and you just can't look away, but what you see haunts your dreams for years to come.

For my own self, I will rail against that darkness, that manipulation based ultimately in greed and lust for power, with as much Light and Love as I can muster. Cliche and dumb-sounding as that is, I find, interestingly, that if I meditate and focus on sending that good energy out to the world, the BS crap and it's flowering madness releases its hold on my soul, and I'm clear of it, whole, free - at least until I let myself get sucked back into it, like an addict getting another hit.

I highly recommend meditation on positive feelings and on being of service to others. I will need to turn off the TV after the election is over, and detach from all media for at least a few days while practicing meditation, and see if I can realign with the better angels of my nature... I wonder if others would find both removal from the "source" of manipulation, and focussing on positive, connecting emotions and service would break the spell of the manipulators?

Sorry for the flowery lingo= it is late in my brain and I am sleep deprived...

Anyway. Excellent Thread!!!

a reply to: AboveBoard

This is such an excellent post!!

I have felt exactly the same way about how "frightening" and dark this conditioning/manipulation by means of social media has been...
...I've also had the same experience of recognizing that I too, was being manipulated!

What these companies are doing and the control it gives them over society as a whole is something everyone on ATS should be paying attention too -

- which is why I hope antediluvian will put the info together in a 'non'political way and make a new thread once the election is thoroughly over and done with (i.e. once people have settled down and accepted the results).

a reply to: theantediluvian

Found something that tied this to the opposite side of the political spectrum that you may like to see.
Henry Laufer

Laufer co-founded Medallion with billionaire James Harris Simons in 1988.[3] Laufer served as chief scientist and vice president of research at Renaissance Technologies, its parent company.[4] He now serves on its board of directors

Laufer and his wife donated 9.1 million to the Clinton campaign. Less than half of Mercer.
www.ibtimes.com...

See also.
Renaissance Technologies

The company is now jointly run by Peter Brown and Robert Mercer, two computer scientists specializing in computational linguistics who joined Renaissance in 1993 from IBM Research

I thought this was bigger than partisan BS.

a reply to: JinMI

Well that is indeed very interesting. I haven't verified it yet but according to the Wikipedia page on Laufer, he donated $500,000 to CTR directly too.

Thanks for the info!

a reply to: theantediluvian

Here you are:
www.opensecrets.org...

Top of the list.

So if this in fact does break the partisan molds, I would like to question this bi-partisan bill.
H.R. 5181

Written back in June.

“As Russia continues to spew its disinformation and false narratives, they undermine the United States and its interests in places like Ukraine, while also breeding further instability in these countries,” Kinzinger explained in a statement. “The United States has a role in countering these destabilizing acts of propaganda, which is why I’m proud to introduce [the aforementioned bill]. This important legislation develops a comprehensive U.S. strategy to counter disinformation campaigns through interagency cooperation and on-the-ground partnerships with outside organizations that have experience in countering foreign propaganda.”

theantimedia.org...

The government hates competition.