Walkin’ the Snake in India: Supplement to the Hindutva Fascism Series

In numer­ous pro­grams, we have high­light­ed the Nazi tract Ser­pen­t’s Walk, which deals, in part, with the reha­bil­i­ta­tion of the Third Reich’s rep­u­ta­tion and the trans­for­ma­tion of Hitler into a hero. In FTR #‘s 988 and 989, 990, 991, and 992, we detailed the Hin­dut­va fas­cism of Naren­dra Modi, his BJP Par­ty and sup­port­ive ele­ments, trac­ing the evo­lu­tion of Hin­dut­va fas­cism through the assas­si­na­tion of Mahat­ma Gand­hi and up to the present. It appears that a Ser­pen­t’s Walk sce­nario is indeed unfold­ing in India. A recent book a pic­ture of both Adolf Hitler and Naren­dra Modi stand­ing next to Barack Oba­ma, Mahat­ma Gand­hi, and Nel­son Man­dela, A sim­i­lar, Hitler-glo­ri­fy­ing book was mar­ket­ed to Gujarati school chil­dren when Modi gov­erned the region. Hitler is well-regard­ed in seg­ments of Indi­an soci­ety, in part due to the efforts of Bal Thack­er­ay and his Shriv Sena par­ty. For many years, Shriv Sena was an ally of Mod­i’s Hin­dut­va fas­cist BJP. All of the con­tents of this web­site as of 12/19/2014–Dave Emory’s 37+ years of research and broadcasting–as well as hours of video­taped lec­tures are avail­able on a 32GB flash dri­ve. Dave offers his pro­grams and arti­cles for free–your sup­port is very much appre­ci­at­ed.

FTR #997 Summoning the Demon, Part 2: Sorcer’s Apprentice

Devel­op­ing analy­sis pre­sent­ed in FTR #968, this broad­cast explores fright­en­ing devel­op­ments and poten­tial devel­op­ments in the world of arti­fi­cial intelligence–the ulti­mate man­i­fes­ta­tion of what Mr. Emory calls “tech­no­crat­ic fas­cism.”

In order to under­score what we mean by tech­no­crat­ic fas­cism, we ref­er­ence a vital­ly impor­tant arti­cle by David Golum­bia. ” . . . . Such tech­no­cratic beliefs are wide­spread in our world today, espe­cially in the enclaves of dig­i­tal enthu­si­asts, whether or not they are part of the giant cor­po­rate-dig­i­tal leviathan. Hack­ers (‘civic,’ ‘eth­i­cal,’ ‘white’ and ‘black’ hat alike), hack­tivists, Wik­iLeaks fans [and Julian Assange et al–D. E.], Anony­mous ‘mem­bers,’ even Edward Snow­den him­self walk hand-in-hand with Face­book and Google in telling us that coders don’t just have good things to con­tribute to the polit­i­cal world, but that the polit­i­cal world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it: the polit­i­cal world is bro­ken, they appear to think (right­ly, at least in part), and the solu­tion to that, they think (wrong­ly, at least for the most part), is for pro­gram­mers to take polit­i­cal mat­ters into their own hands. . . . [Tor co-cre­ator] Din­gle­dine  asserts that a small group of soft­ware devel­op­ers can assign to them­selves that role, and that mem­bers of demo­c­ra­tic poli­ties have no choice but to accept them hav­ing that role. . . .”

Per­haps the last and most per­ilous man­i­fes­ta­tion of tech­no­crat­ic fas­cism con­cerns Antho­ny  Levandows­ki, an engi­neer at the foun­da­tion of the devel­op­ment of Google Street Map tech­nol­o­gy and self-dri­ving cars. He is propos­ing an AI God­head that would rule the world and would be wor­shipped as a God by the plan­et’s cit­i­zens. Insight into his per­son­al­i­ty was pro­vid­ed by an asso­ciate: “ . . . . ‘He had this very weird moti­va­tion about robots tak­ing over the world—like actu­al­ly tak­ing over, in a mil­i­tary sense…It was like [he want­ed] to be able to con­trol the world, and robots were the way to do that. He talked about start­ing a new coun­try on an island. Pret­ty wild and creepy stuff. And the biggest thing is that he’s always got a secret plan, and you’re not going to know about it’. . . .”

As we saw in FTR #968, AI’s have incor­po­rat­ed many flaws of their cre­ators, augur­ing very poor­ly for the sub­jects of Levandowski’s AI God­head.

It is also inter­est­ing to con­tem­plate what may hap­pen when AI’s are designed by oth­er AI’s- machines design­ing oth­er machines.

After a detailed review of some of the omi­nous real and devel­op­ing AI-relat­ed tech­nol­o­gy, the pro­gram high­lights Antho­ny Levandows­ki, the bril­liant engi­neer who was instru­men­tal in devel­op­ing Google’s Street Maps, Way­mo’s self-dri­ving cars, Otto’s self-dri­ving trucks, the Lidar tech­nol­o­gy cen­tral to self-dri­ving vehi­cles and the Way of the Future, super AI God­head.

Fur­ther insight into Levandowski’s per­son­al­i­ty can be gleaned from e‑mails with Travis Kalan­ick, for­mer CEO of Uber: ” . . . . In Kalan­ick, Levandows­ki found both a soul­mate and a men­tor to replace Sebas­t­ian Thrun. Text mes­sages between the two, dis­closed dur­ing the lawsuit’s dis­cov­ery process, cap­ture Levandows­ki teach­ing Kalan­ick about lidar at late night tech ses­sions, while Kalan­ick shared advice on man­age­ment. ‘Down to hang out this eve and mas­ter­mind some shit,’ texted Kalan­ick, short­ly after the acqui­si­tion. ‘We’re going to take over the world. One robot at a time,’ wrote Levandows­ki anoth­er time. . . .”

Those who view self-dri­ving cars and oth­er AI-based tech­nolo­gies as flaw­less would do well to con­sid­er the fol­low­ing: ” . . . .Last Decem­ber, Uber launched a pilot self-dri­ving taxi pro­gram in San Fran­cis­co. As with Otto in Neva­da, Levandows­ki failed to get a license to oper­ate the high-tech vehi­cles, claim­ing that because the cars need­ed a human over­see­ing them, they were not tru­ly autonomous. The DMV dis­agreed and revoked the vehi­cles’ licens­es. Even so, dur­ing the week the cars were on the city’s streets, they had been spot­ted run­ning red lights on numer­ous occa­sions. . . . .”

Not­ing Levandowski’s per­son­al­i­ty quirks, the arti­cle pos­es a fun­da­men­tal ques­tion: ” . . . . But even the smartest car will crack up if you floor the gas ped­al too long. Once fet­ed by bil­lion­aires, Levandows­ki now finds him­self star­ring in a high-stakes pub­lic tri­al as his two for­mer employ­ers square off. By exten­sion, the whole tech­nol­o­gy indus­try is there in the dock with Levandows­ki. Can we ever trust self-dri­ving cars if it turns out we can’t trust the peo­ple who are mak­ing them? . . . .”

Levandowski’s Otto self-dri­ving trucks might be weighed against the prog­nos­ti­ca­tions of dark horse Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date and for­mer tech exec­u­tive Andrew Wang: “. . . . ‘All you need is self-dri­ving cars to desta­bi­lize soci­ety,’ Mr. Yang said over lunch at a Thai restau­rant in Man­hat­tan last month, in his first inter­view about his cam­paign. In just  a few years, he said, ‘we’re going to have a mil­lion truck dri­vers out of work who are 94 per­cent male, with an  aver­age  lev­el of edu­ca­tion of high school or one year of col­lege.’ ‘That one inno­va­tion,’ he added, ‘will be enough to cre­ate riots in the street. And we’re about to do the  same thing to retail work­ers, call cen­ter work­ers, fast-food work­ers, insur­ance com­pa­nies, account­ing firms.’ . . . .”

The­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Stephen Hawk­ing warned at the end of 2014 of the poten­tial dan­ger to human­i­ty posed by the growth of AI (arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence) tech­nol­o­gy. His warn­ings have been echoed by tech titans such as Tes­la’s Elon Musk and Bill Gates.

The pro­gram con­cludes with Mr. Emory’s prog­nos­ti­ca­tions about AI, pre­ced­ing Stephen Hawk­ing’s warn­ing by twen­ty years.

Pro­gram High­lights Include:

1.-Levandowski’s appar­ent shep­herd­ing of a com­pa­ny called–perhaps significantly–Odin Wave to uti­lize Lidar-like tech­nol­o­gy.
2.-The role of DARPA in ini­ti­at­ing the self-dri­ving vehi­cles con­test that was Levandowski’s point of entry into his tech ven­tures.
3.-Levandowski’s devel­op­ment of the Ghostrid­er self-dri­ving motor­cy­cles, which expe­ri­enced 800 crash­es in 1,000 miles.

FTR #996 Civilization’s Twilight: Update on Technocratic Fascism

Updat­ing our ongo­ing analy­sis of what Mr. Emory calls “tech­no­crat­ic fas­cism,” we exam­ine how exist­ing tech­nolo­gies are neu­tral­iz­ing and/or ren­der­ing obso­lete foun­da­tion­al ele­ments of our civ­i­liza­tion and demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­ern­men­tal sys­tems.

We begin our descrip­tion by ref­er­enc­ing a vital­ly impor­tant arti­cle by David Golum­bia. ” . . . . Such tech­no­cratic beliefs are wide­spread in our world today, espe­cially in the enclaves of dig­i­tal enthu­si­asts, whether or not they are part of the giant cor­po­rate-dig­i­tal leviathan. Hack­ers (‘civic,’ ‘eth­i­cal,’ ‘white’ and ‘black’ hat alike), hack­tivists, Wik­iLeaks fans [and Julian Assange et al–D. E.], Anony­mous ‘mem­bers,’ even Edward Snow­den him­self walk hand-in-hand with Face­book and Google in telling us that coders don’t just have good things to con­tribute to the polit­i­cal world, but that the polit­i­cal world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it: the polit­i­cal world is bro­ken, they appear to think (right­ly, at least in part), and the solu­tion to that, they think (wrong­ly, at least for the most part), is for pro­gram­mers to take polit­i­cal mat­ters into their own hands. . . . [Tor co-cre­ator] Din­gle­dine  asserts that a small group of soft­ware devel­op­ers can assign to them­selves that role, and that mem­bers of demo­c­ra­tic poli­ties have no choice but to accept them hav­ing that role. . . .”

Begin­ning with a chill­ing opin­ion piece in “The New York Times,” we note that tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment threat­ens to super-charge the Big Lies that dri­ve our world. As any­one who saw the file Star Wars film “Rogue One” knows, the tech­nol­o­gy required to cre­ate a near­ly life-like com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed videos of a real per­son is already a real­i­ty. Once the province of movie stu­dios and oth­er firms with mil­lions to spend, the tech­nol­o­gy is now avail­able for down­load for free.

” . . . . In 2016 Gareth Edwards, the direc­tor of the Star Wars film ‘Rogue One,’ was able to cre­ate a scene fea­tur­ing a young Princess Leia by manip­u­lat­ing images of Car­rie Fish­er as she looked in 1977. Mr. Edwards had the best hard­ware and soft­ware a $200 mil­lion Hol­ly­wood bud­get could buy. Less than two years lat­er, images of sim­i­lar qual­i­ty can be cre­at­ed with soft­ware avail­able for free down­load on Red­dit. That was how a faked video sup­pos­ed­ly of the actress Emma Wat­son in a show­er with anoth­er woman end­ed up on the web­site Celeb Jihad. . . .”

The tech­nol­o­gy has already ren­dered obso­lete selec­tive edit­ing such as that per­formed by James O’Keefe: ” . . . . as the nov­el­ist William Gib­son once said, ‘The street finds its own uses for things.’ So do rogue polit­i­cal actors. The impli­ca­tions for democ­ra­cy are eye-open­ing. The con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal activist James O’Keefe has cre­at­ed a cot­tage indus­try manip­u­lat­ing polit­i­cal per­cep­tions by edit­ing footage in mis­lead­ing ways. In 2018, low-tech edit­ing like Mr. O’Keefe’s is already an anachro­nism: Imag­ine what even less scrupu­lous activists could do with the pow­er to cre­ate ‘video’ fram­ing real peo­ple for things they’ve nev­er actu­al­ly done. One har­row­ing poten­tial even­tu­al­i­ty: Fake video and audio may become so con­vinc­ing that it can’t be dis­tin­guished from real record­ings, ren­der­ing audio and video evi­dence inad­mis­si­ble in court. . . .”

After high­light­ing a sto­ry about AI-gen­er­at­ed “deep­fake” pornog­ra­phy with peo­ple’s faces super­im­posed on oth­ers’ bod­ies in porno­graph­ic lay­outs, we note how robots have altered our polit­i­cal and com­mer­cial land­scapes, through cyber tech­nol­o­gy: ” . . . . Robots are get­ting bet­ter, every day, at imper­son­at­ing humans. When direct­ed by oppor­tunists, male­fac­tors and some­times even nation-states, they pose a par­tic­u­lar threat to demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­eties, which are premised on being open to the peo­ple. Robots pos­ing as peo­ple have become a men­ace. . . . In com­ing years, cam­paign finance lim­its will be (and maybe already are) evad­ed by robot armies pos­ing as ‘small’ donors. And actu­al vot­ing is anoth­er obvi­ous tar­get — per­haps the ulti­mate tar­get. . . .”

Before the actu­al replace­ment of man­u­al labor by robots, devices to tech­no­crat­i­cal­ly “improve”–read “coer­cive­ly engi­neer” work­ers are patent­ed by Ama­zon and have been used on work­ers in some of their facil­i­ties. ” . . . . What if your employ­er made you wear a wrist­band that tracked your every move, and that even nudged you via vibra­tions when it judged that you were doing some­thing wrong? What if your super­vi­sor could iden­ti­fy every time you paused to scratch or fid­get, and for how long you took a bath­room break? What may sound like dystopi­an fic­tion could become a real­i­ty for Ama­zon ware­house work­ers around the world. The com­pa­ny has won two patents for such a wrist­band. . . .”

For some U.K Ama­zon ware­house work­ers, the future is now: ” . . . . Max Craw­ford, a for­mer Ama­zon ware­house work­er in Britain, said in a phone inter­view, ‘After a year work­ing on the floor, I felt like I had become a ver­sion of the robots I was work­ing with.’ He described hav­ing to process hun­dreds of items in an hour — a pace so extreme that one day, he said, he fell over from dizzi­ness. ‘There was no time to go to the loo,’ he said, using the British slang for toi­let. ‘You had to process the items in sec­onds and then move on. If you didn’t meet tar­gets, you were fired.’

“He worked back and forth at two Ama­zon ware­hous­es for more than two years and then quit in 2015 because of health con­cerns, he said: ‘I got burned out.’ Mr. Craw­ford agreed that the wrist­bands might save some time and labor, but he said the track­ing was ‘stalk­er­ish’ and feared that work­ers might be unfair­ly scru­ti­nized if their hands were found to be ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ ‘They want to turn peo­ple into machines,’ he said. ‘The robot­ic tech­nol­o­gy isn’t up to scratch yet, so until it is, they will use human robots.’ . . . .”

Some tech work­ers, well placed at R & D pace­set­ters and giants such as Face­book and Google have done an about-face on the  impact of their ear­li­er efforts and are now strug­gling against the mis­use of the tech­nolo­gies they helped to launch:

” . . . . A group of Sil­i­con Val­ley tech­nol­o­gists who were ear­ly employ­ees at Face­book and Google, alarmed over the ill effects of social net­works and smart­phones, are band­ing togeth­er to chal­lenge the com­pa­nies they helped build. . . . ‘The largest super­com­put­ers in the world are inside of two com­pa­nies — Google and Face­book — and where are we point­ing them?’ Mr. [Tris­tan] Har­ris said. ‘We’re point­ing them at people’s brains, at chil­dren.’ . . . . Mr. [RogerM­c­Namee] said he had joined the Cen­ter for Humane Tech­nol­o­gy because he was hor­ri­fied by what he had helped enable as an ear­ly Face­book investor. ‘Face­book appeals to your lizard brain — pri­mar­i­ly fear and anger,’ he said. ‘And with smart­phones, they’ve got you for every wak­ing moment.’ . . . .”

Tran­si­tion­ing to our next program–updating AI (arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence) tech­nol­o­gy as it applies to tech­no­crat­ic fascism–we note that AI machines are being designed to devel­op oth­er AI’s–“The Rise of the Machine.” ” . . . . Jeff Dean, one of Google’s lead­ing engi­neers, spot­light­ed a Google project called AutoML. ML is short for machine learn­ing, refer­ring to com­put­er algo­rithms that can learn to per­form par­tic­u­lar tasks on their own by ana­lyz­ing data. AutoML, in turn, is a machine learn­ing algo­rithm that learns to build oth­er machine-learn­ing algo­rithms. With it, Google may soon find a way to cre­ate A.I. tech­nol­o­gy that can part­ly take the humans out of build­ing the A.I. sys­tems that many believe are the future of the tech­nol­o­gy indus­try. . . .”

FTR #994 What Was Old Is New Again

This broad­cast recaps mate­r­i­al from pre­vi­ous pro­grams, under­scor­ing key points of infor­ma­tion from cur­rent devel­op­ments.

Last week, we opened our pro­gram with an arti­cle from Con­sor­tium News about some alarm­ing devel­op­ments in Ukraine–a piece of leg­is­la­tion approved by the Rada (the Ukrain­ian par­lia­ment) that might augur World War III.

One of the few media out­lets that has cov­ered the return to pow­er of the OUN/B’s suc­ces­sor fas­cist orga­ni­za­tions in Ukraine, Con­sor­tium News was found­ed and head­ed by Robert Par­ry.

Par­ry passed away last week­end.

Mr. Emory post­ed the fol­low­ing com­ment on the Con­sor­tium News arti­cle about Robert’s pass­ing:

A very, very sad occa­sion. It was my priv­i­lege to have inter­viewed Robert a num­ber of times over the years, includ­ing an interview–scheduled days before–that took place on the day he learned of Gary Webb’s death.

It was also my priv­i­lege to have used many arti­cles from Con­sor­tium News in my week­ly broad­casts, includ­ing, and espe­cial­ly, his reportage about the return to pow­er of the OUN/B suc­ces­sor orga­ni­za­tions in Ukraine.

Very few have man­i­fest­ed the courage and integri­ty to report hon­est­ly on those events.

Now, there will be few­er.

Rest in peace, Robert.

Next, we return to the sub­ject of Peter Thiel, of “Team Trump,” Face­book and Palan­tir.

We have cov­ered Peter Thiel in numer­ous pro­grams, begin­ning with our warn­ing about him in FTR #718.

Some of the points we have made about him include:

1.-His fam­i­ly back­ground in the Frank­furt (Ger­many) chem­i­cal busi­ness. Prob­a­bly I.G. Farben/Bormann, in that con­text.
2.-His pri­ma­ry role in Palan­tir, appar­ent­ly the mak­er of the PRISM soft­ware at the epi­cen­ter of L’Af­faire Snow­den.
3.-His role as the pri­ma­ry financier of Ron Paul’s super PAC. (Paul is an unabashed white suprema­cist, joined at the hip with David Duke and the neo-Con­fed­er­ate move­ment. He was the Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date of choice for Eddie “The Friend­ly Spook” Snow­den and Julian Assange.)
4.-Thiel’s net­work­ing with movers and shak­ers from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s high-tech ven­ture cap­i­tal firm.
5.-Thiel’s active anti-immi­grant stance.
6.-Thiel’s sem­i­nal net­work­ing with oth­er tech titans and ven­ture cap­i­tal firms, includ­ing some with polit­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal trib­u­taries lead­ing back to the apartheid regime in South Africa.

With Thiel among the can­di­dates to head Trump’s Pres­i­den­t’s Intel­li­gence Advi­so­ry Board, we note that his apoc­a­lyp­tic, anti-Enlight­en­ment ide­ol­o­gy draws on, among oth­er influ­ences, Carl Schmitt. Arguably the prime mover behind the Ger­man Con­ser­v­a­tive Rev­o­lu­tion, Schmitt was also: “. . . . a Nazi and the Third Reich’s pre­em­i­nent legal the­o­rist. For Thiel, Schmitt is an inspir­ing throw­back to a pre-Enlight­en­ment age, who exalts strug­gle and insists that the dis­cov­ery of ene­mies is the foun­da­tion of pol­i­tics. . .”

There has been a fair amount of buzz about the release of addi­tion­al, pre­vi­ous­ly clas­si­fied, doc­u­ments about the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy.

An inter­est­ing doc­u­ment came to light in the recent release of files relat­ing to the assas­si­na­tion of JFK. Jack Ruby told an FBI infor­mant to “watch the fire­works” in Dealey Plaza that day.

“Jack Ruby, the man who even­tu­al­ly shot Lee Har­vey Oswald, told an FBI infor­mant to ‘watch the fire­works’ on the day Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy was killed, accord­ing to new records the Nation­al Archives released Fri­day. . . . ‘The infor­mant stat­ed that on the morn­ing of the assas­si­na­tion, Ruby con­tact­ed him and asked if he would ‘like to watch the fire­works,” an FBI record dat­ed April 6, 1977, says. ‘He was with Jack Ruby and stand­ing at the cor­ner of the Postal Annex Build­ing fac­ing the Texas School Book Depos­i­to­ry Build­ing at the time of the shoot­ing. . . .”

This might be eval­u­at­ed against the back­ground of FTR #963, relating–among oth­er things–a read­ing of Jack Ruby’s War­ren Com­mis­sion tes­ti­mo­ny. (A read­ing of Ruby’s tes­ti­mo­ny is re-broad­cast in this pro­gram.)

When inter­viewed by the War­ren Com­mis­sion, Jack Ruby indi­cat­ed that he had been part of a con­spir­a­cy to kill Kennedy and that he feared for his life. The War­ren Com­mis­sion turned a deaf ear to his desire to go to Wash­ing­ton and “spill the beans.”

Ger­ald Ford (who suc­ceed­ed Nixon as Pres­i­dent and par­doned him of all crimes com­mit­ted), Leon Jawors­ki (a War­ren Com­mis­sion coun­sel who was a direc­tor of a CIA domes­tic fund­ing con­duit and who was select­ed by Nixon to be Water­gate Spe­cial Pros­e­cu­tor) and Arlen Specter (anoth­er War­ren Com­mis­sion coun­sel who was Nixon’s first choice as his per­son­al defense attor­ney in the Water­gate affair) were present at Ruby’s de fac­to con­fes­sion.

War­ren Com­mis­sion Coun­sel J. Lee Rankin is also present at this inter­view. Nixon first select­ed J. Lee Rankin to serve as Water­gate Spe­cial Pros­e­cu­tor. Rankin was sub­se­quent­ly tabbed to review the Water­gate tapes and deter­mine which would be released. Rankin was the War­ren Com­mis­sion’s liai­son between the com­mis­sion and both the CIA and the FBI. Rankin was a key pro­po­nent of the so-called “Mag­ic Bul­let The­o­ry.”

We con­clude with dis­cus­sion of anoth­er aspect of the JFK assas­si­na­tion.

Jane May­er’s Dark Mon­ey has received con­sid­er­able dis­cus­sion and media play over the last cou­ple of years. In past dis­cus­sion of the Koch fam­i­ly, we not­ed that patri­arch Fred Koch worked with Hitler build­ing one of Nazi Ger­many’s most impor­tant refineries–one capa­ble of refin­ing the high-octane fuel need­ed by fight­er planes.

In addi­tion, we not­ed that Fred Koch was one of the first mem­bers of the John Birch Soci­ety.

May­er notes that Fred Koch helped finance ads in the wake of the JFK assas­si­na­tion that pinned respon­si­bil­i­ty for the crime on the Sovi­et Union–one of the pri­ma­ry lev­els of dis­in­for­ma­tion.

” . . . . In a hasty turn­about, soon after the assas­si­na­tion, Fred Koch took out full-page ads in The New York Times and The Wash­ing­ton Post, mourn­ing JFK. The ads advanced the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that JFK’s assas­sin, Lee Har­vey Oswald, had act­ed as part of a Com­mu­nist plot. The Com­mu­nists would­n’t “rest on this suc­cess,” the ads warned. In the cor­ner was a tear-out order form, direct­ing the pub­lic to sign up for John Birch Soci­ety mail­ings. . . .”

We have cov­ered the “paint­ing of Oswald Red” in numer­ous pro­grams, includ­ing FTR #‘s 925 and 926.

Peter Thiel’s Political/Philosophical Influences: ” . . . Carl Schmitt . . . a Nazi and the Third Reich’s Preeminent Legal Theorist. . . ”

Trump may be appoint­ing Peter Thiel as head of his Pres­i­den­t’s Intel­li­gence Advi­so­ry Board. Thiel is heav­i­ly influ­enced by Carl Schmitt, (on the right in the pho­to­graph) “. . . . a Nazi and the Third Reich’s pre­em­i­nent legal the­o­rist. For Thiel, Schmitt is an inspir­ing throw­back to a pre-Enlight­en­ment age, who exalts strug­gle and insists that the dis­cov­ery of ene­mies is the foun­da­tion of pol­i­tics. . .” We have been warn­ing about Thiel since July of 2010. All of the con­tents of this web­site as of 12/19/2014–Dave Emory’s 37+ years of research and broadcasting–as well as hours of video­taped lec­tures are avail­able on a 32GB flash dri­ve. Dave offers his pro­grams and arti­cles for free–your sup­port is very much appre­ci­at­ed.

FTR #968 Summoning the Demon: Technocratic Fascism and Artificial Intelligence

The title of this pro­gram comes from pro­nounce­ments by tech titan Elon Musk, who warned that, by devel­op­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, we were “sum­mon­ing the demon.” In this pro­gram, we ana­lyze the poten­tial vec­tor run­ning from the use of AI to con­trol soci­ety in a fascis­tic man­ner to the evo­lu­tion of the very tech­nol­o­gy used for that con­trol.

The ulti­mate result of this evo­lu­tion may well prove cat­a­stroph­ic, as fore­cast by Mr. Emory at the end of L‑2 (record­ed in Jan­u­ary of 1995.)

We begin by review­ing key aspects of the polit­i­cal con­text in which arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is being devel­oped. Note that, at the time of this writ­ing and record­ing, these tech­nolo­gies are being craft­ed and put online in the con­text of the anti-reg­u­la­to­ry eth­ic of the GOP/Trump admin­is­tra­tion.

At the SXSW event, Microsoft researcher Kate Craw­ford gave a speech about her work titled “Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fas­cism,” the pre­sen­ta­tion high­light­ed the social impact of machine learn­ing and large-scale data sys­tems. The take home mes­sage? By del­e­gat­ing pow­ers to Bid Data-dri­ven AIs, those AIs could become fascist’s dream: Incred­i­ble pow­er over the lives of oth­ers with min­i­mal account­abil­i­ty: ” . . . .‘This is a fascist’s dream,’ she said. ‘Pow­er with­out account­abil­i­ty.’ . . . .”

Tak­ing a look at the future of fas­cism in the con­text of AI, Tay, a “bot” cre­at­ed by Microsoft to respond to users of Twit­ter was tak­en offline after users taught it to–in effect–become a Nazi bot. It is note­wor­thy that Tay can only respond on the basis of what she is taught. In the future, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly accom­plished and will­ful peo­ple like the bril­liant, Ukraine-based Nazi hack­er and Glenn Green­wald asso­ciate Andrew Aueren­heimer, aka “weev” may be able to do more. Inevitably, Under­ground Reich ele­ments will craft a Nazi AI that will be able to do MUCH, MUCH more!

As one Twit­ter user not­ed, employ­ing sar­casm: “Tay went from “humans are super cool” to full nazi in <24 hrs and I’m not at all con­cerned about the future of AI.”

As not­ed in a Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics arti­cle: ” . . . When the next pow­er­ful AI comes along, it will see its first look at the world by look­ing at our faces. And if we stare it in the eyes and shout “we’re AWFUL lol,” the lol might be the one part it doesn’t under­stand. . . .”

Accord­ing to some recent research, the AI’s of the future might not need a bunch of 4chan to fill the AI with human big­otries. The AIs’ analy­sis of real-world human lan­guage usage will do that auto­mat­i­cal­ly.

When you read about peo­ple like Elon Musk equat­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence with “sum­mon­ing the demon”, that demon is us, at least in part. ” . . . . How­ev­er, as machines are get­ting clos­er to acquir­ing human-like lan­guage abil­i­ties, they are also absorb­ing the deeply ingrained bias­es con­cealed with­in the pat­terns of lan­guage use, the lat­est research reveals. Joan­na Bryson, a com­put­er sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bath and a co-author, said: ‘A lot of peo­ple are say­ing this is show­ing that AI is prej­u­diced. No. This is show­ing we’re prej­u­diced and that AI is learn­ing it.’ . . .”

Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, and its par­ent com­pa­ny SCL, spe­cial­ize in using AI and Big Data psy­cho­me­t­ric analy­sis on hun­dreds of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans in order to mod­el indi­vid­ual behav­ior. SCL devel­ops strate­gies to use that infor­ma­tion, and manip­u­late search engine results to change pub­lic opin­ion (the Trump cam­paign was appar­ent­ly very big into AI and Big Data dur­ing the cam­paign).

Indi­vid­ual social media users receive mes­sages craft­ed to influ­ence them, gen­er­at­ed by the (in effect) Nazi AI at the core of this media engine, using Big Data to tar­get the indi­vid­ual user!

As the arti­cle notes, not only are Cam­bridge Analytica/SCL are using their pro­pa­gan­da tech­niques to shape US pub­lic opin­ion in a fas­cist direc­tion, but they are achiev­ing this by uti­liz­ing their pro­pa­gan­da machine to char­ac­ter­ize all news out­lets to the left of Bri­et­bart as “fake news” that can’t be trust­ed.

In short, the secre­tive far-right bil­lion­aire (Robert Mer­cer), joined at the hip with Steve Ban­non, is run­ning mul­ti­ple firms spe­cial­iz­ing in mass psy­cho­me­t­ric pro­fil­ing based on data col­lect­ed from Face­book and oth­er social media. Mercer/Bannon/Cambridge Analytica/SCL are using Naz­i­fied AI and Big Data to devel­op mass pro­pa­gan­da cam­paigns to turn the pub­lic against every­thing that isn’t Bri­et­bart­ian by con­vinc­ing the pub­lic that all non-Bri­et­bart­ian media out­lets are con­spir­ing to lie to the pub­lic.

This is the ulti­mate Ser­pen­t’s Walk scenario–a Naz­i­fied Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence draw­ing on Big Data gleaned from the world’s inter­net and social media oper­a­tions to shape pub­lic opin­ion, tar­get indi­vid­ual users, shape search engine results and even feed­back to Trump while he is giv­ing press con­fer­ences!

We note that SCL, the par­ent com­pa­ny of Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, has been deeply involved with “psy­ops” in places like Afghanistan and Pak­istan. Now, Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, their Big Data and AI com­po­nents, Mer­cer mon­ey and Ban­non polit­i­cal savvy are apply­ing that to con­tem­po­rary soci­ety. We note that:

1.-Cambridge Ana­lyt­i­ca’s par­ent cor­po­ra­tion SCL, was deeply involved with “psy­ops” in Afghanistan and Pak­istan. ” . . . But there was anoth­er rea­son why I recog­nised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his con­nec­tion to Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, a small data ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny. He is report­ed to have a $10m stake in the com­pa­ny, which was spun out of a big­ger British com­pa­ny called SCL Group. It spe­cialis­es in ‘elec­tion man­age­ment strate­gies’ and ‘mes­sag­ing and infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions’, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pak­istan. In mil­i­tary cir­cles this is known as ‘psy­ops’ – psy­cho­log­i­cal oper­a­tions. (Mass pro­pa­gan­da that works by act­ing on people’s emo­tions.) . . .”
2.-The use of mil­lions of “bots” to manip­u­late pub­lic opin­ion: ” . . . .‘It does seem pos­si­ble. And it does wor­ry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat some­thing often enough, peo­ple start invol­un­tar­i­ly to believe it. And that could be lever­aged, or weaponized for pro­pa­gan­da. We know there are thou­sands of auto­mat­ed bots out there that are try­ing to do just that.’ . . .”
3.-The use of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: ” . . . There’s noth­ing acci­den­tal about Trump’s behav­iour, Andy Wig­more tells me. ‘That press con­fer­ence. It was absolute­ly bril­liant. I could see exact­ly what he was doing. There’s feed­back going on con­stant­ly. That’s what you can do with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. You can mea­sure every reac­tion to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words. We did it. So with immi­gra­tion, there are actu­al­ly key words with­in that sub­ject mat­ter which peo­ple are con­cerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, it’s all about how can you use these trend­ing words.’ . . .”
4.-The use of bio-psy­cho-social pro­fil­ing: ” . . . Bio-psy­cho-social pro­fil­ing, I read lat­er, is one offen­sive in what is called ‘cog­ni­tive war­fare’. Though there are many oth­ers: ‘recod­ing the mass con­scious­ness to turn patri­o­tism into col­lab­o­ra­tionism,’ explains a Nato brief­ing doc­u­ment on coun­ter­ing Russ­ian dis­in­for­ma­tion writ­ten by an SCL employ­ee. ‘Time-sen­si­tive pro­fes­sion­al use of media to prop­a­gate nar­ra­tives,’ says one US state depart­ment white paper. ‘Of par­tic­u­lar impor­tance to psy­op per­son­nel may be pub­licly and com­mer­cial­ly avail­able data from social media plat­forms.’ . . . .”
5.-The use and/or cre­ation of a cog­ni­tive casu­al­ty: ” . . . . Yet anoth­er details the pow­er of a ‘cog­ni­tive casu­al­ty’ – a ‘moral shock’ that ‘has a dis­abling effect on empa­thy and high­er process­es such as moral rea­son­ing and crit­i­cal think­ing’. Some­thing like immi­gra­tion, per­haps. Or ‘fake news’. Or as it has now become: ‘FAKE news!!!!’ . . . ”

All of this adds up to a “cyber Ser­pen­t’s Walk.” ” . . . . How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by cre­at­ing a main­stream media to replace the exist­ing one with a site such as Bre­it­bart. [Ser­pen­t’s Walk sce­nario with Bre­it­bart becom­ing “the opin­ion form­ing media”!–D.E.] You could set up oth­er web­sites that dis­place main­stream sources of news and infor­ma­tion with your own def­i­n­i­tions of con­cepts like “lib­er­al media bias”, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump main­stream media, papers like the ‘fail­ing New York Times!’ what it wants: sto­ries. Because the third prong of Mer­cer and Bannon’s media empire is the Gov­ern­ment Account­abil­i­ty Insti­tute. . . .”

We then review some ter­ri­fy­ing and con­sum­mate­ly impor­tant devel­op­ments tak­ing shape in the con­text of what Mr. Emory has called “tech­no­crat­ic fas­cism:”

In FTR #‘s 718 and 946, we detailed the fright­en­ing, ugly real­i­ty behind Face­book. Face­book is now devel­op­ing tech­nol­o­gy that will per­mit the tap­ping of users thoughts by mon­i­tor­ing brain-to-com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy. Face­book’s R & D is head­ed by Regi­na Dugan, who used to head the Pen­tagon’s DARPA. Face­book’s Build­ing 8 is pat­terned after DARPA:

1.-” . . . . Brain-com­put­er inter­faces are noth­ing new. DARPA, which Dugan used to head, has invest­ed heav­i­ly in brain-com­put­er inter­face tech­nolo­gies to do things like cure men­tal ill­ness and restore mem­o­ries to sol­diers injured in war. . . Face­book wants to build its own “brain-to-com­put­er inter­face” that would allow us to send thoughts straight to a com­put­er. ‘What if you could type direct­ly from your brain?’ Regi­na Dugan, the head of the company’s secre­tive hard­ware R&D divi­sion, Build­ing 8, asked from the stage. Dugan then pro­ceed­ed to show a video demo of a woman typ­ing eight words per minute direct­ly from the stage. In a few years, she said, the team hopes to demon­strate a real-time silent speech sys­tem capa­ble of deliv­er­ing a hun­dred words per minute. ‘That’s five times faster than you can type on your smart­phone, and it’s straight from your brain,’ she said. ‘Your brain activ­i­ty con­tains more infor­ma­tion than what a word sounds like and how it’s spelled; it also con­tains seman­tic infor­ma­tion of what those words mean.’ . . .”
2.-” . . . . Facebook’s Build­ing 8 is mod­eled after DARPA and its projects tend to be equal­ly ambi­tious. . . .”
3.-” . . . . But what Face­book is propos­ing is per­haps more radical—a world in which social media doesn’t require pick­ing up a phone or tap­ping a wrist watch in order to com­mu­ni­cate with your friends; a world where we’re con­nect­ed all the time by thought alone. . . .”

Next we review still more about Face­book’s brain-to-com­put­er inter­face:

1.-” . . . . Face­book hopes to use opti­cal neur­al imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy to scan the brain 100 times per sec­ond to detect thoughts and turn them into text. Mean­while, it’s work­ing on ‘skin-hear­ing’ that could trans­late sounds into hap­tic feed­back that peo­ple can learn to under­stand like braille. . . .”
2.-” . . . . Wor­ry­ing­ly, Dugan even­tu­al­ly appeared frus­trat­ed in response to my inquiries about how her team thinks about safe­ty pre­cau­tions for brain inter­faces, say­ing, ‘The flip side of the ques­tion that you’re ask­ing is ‘why invent it at all?’ and I just believe that the opti­mistic per­spec­tive is that on bal­ance, tech­no­log­i­cal advances have real­ly meant good things for the world if they’re han­dled respon­si­bly.’ . . . .”
Col­lat­ing the infor­ma­tion about Face­book’s brain-to-com­put­er inter­face with their doc­u­ment­ed actions turn­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal intel­li­gence about trou­bled teenagers gives us a peek into what may lie behind Dugan’s bland reas­sur­ances:

1.-” . . . . The 23-page doc­u­ment alleged­ly revealed that the social net­work pro­vid­ed detailed data about teens in Australia—including when they felt ‘over­whelmed’ and ‘anxious’—to adver­tis­ers. The creepy impli­ca­tion is that said adver­tis­ers could then go and use the data to throw more ads down the throats of sad and sus­cep­ti­ble teens. . . . By mon­i­tor­ing posts, pic­tures, inter­ac­tions and inter­net activ­i­ty in real-time, Face­book can work out when young peo­ple feel ‘stressed’, ‘defeat­ed’, ‘over­whelmed’, ‘anx­ious’, ‘ner­vous’, ‘stu­pid’, ‘sil­ly’, ‘use­less’, and a ‘fail­ure’, the doc­u­ment states. . . .”
2.-” . . . . A pre­sen­ta­tion pre­pared for one of Australia’s top four banks shows how the $US 415 bil­lion adver­tis­ing-dri­ven giant has built a data­base of Face­book users that is made up of 1.9 mil­lion high school­ers with an aver­age age of 16, 1.5 mil­lion ter­tiary stu­dents aver­ag­ing 21 years old, and 3 mil­lion young work­ers aver­ag­ing 26 years old. Detailed infor­ma­tion on mood shifts among young peo­ple is ‘based on inter­nal Face­book data’, the doc­u­ment states, ‘share­able under non-dis­clo­sure agree­ment only’, and ‘is not pub­licly avail­able’. . . .”
3.-“In a state­ment giv­en to the news­pa­per, Face­book con­firmed the prac­tice and claimed it would do bet­ter, but did not dis­close whether the prac­tice exists in oth­er places like the US. . . .”

In this con­text, note that Face­book is also intro­duc­ing an AI func­tion to ref­er­ence its users pho­tos.

The next ver­sion of Amazon’s Echo, the Echo Look, has a micro­phone and cam­era so it can take pic­tures of you and give you fash­ion advice. This is an AI-dri­ven device designed to placed in your bed­room to cap­ture audio and video. The images and videos are stored indef­i­nite­ly in the Ama­zon cloud. When Ama­zon was asked if the pho­tos, videos, and the data gleaned from the Echo Look would be sold to third par­ties, Ama­zon didn’t address that ques­tion. It would appear that sell­ing off your pri­vate info col­lect­ed from these devices is pre­sum­ably anoth­er fea­ture of the Echo Look:

1.-” . . . . Ama­zon is giv­ing Alexa eyes. And it’s going to let her judge your outfits.The new­ly announced Echo Look is a vir­tu­al assis­tant with a micro­phone and a cam­era that’s designed to go some­where in your bed­room, bath­room, or wher­ev­er the hell you get dressed. Ama­zon is pitch­ing it as an easy way to snap pic­tures of your out­fits to send to your friends when you’re not sure if your out­fit is cute, but it’s also got a built-in app called StyleCheck that is worth some fur­ther dis­sec­tion. . . .”

We then fur­ther devel­op the stun­ning impli­ca­tions of Ama­zon’s Echo Look AI tech­nol­o­gy:

1.-” . . . . Ama­zon is giv­ing Alexa eyes. And it’s going to let her judge your outfits.The new­ly announced Echo Look is a vir­tu­al assis­tant with a micro­phone and a cam­era that’s designed to go some­where in your bed­room, bath­room, or wher­ev­er the hell you get dressed. Ama­zon is pitch­ing it as an easy way to snap pic­tures of your out­fits to send to your friends when you’re not sure if your out­fit is cute, but it’s also got a built-in app called StyleCheck that is worth some fur­ther dis­sec­tion. . . .”
2.-” . . . . This might seem over­ly spec­u­la­tive or alarmist to some, but Ama­zon isn’t offer­ing any reas­sur­ance that they won’t be doing more with data gath­ered from the Echo Look. When asked if the com­pa­ny would use machine learn­ing to ana­lyze users’ pho­tos for any pur­pose oth­er than fash­ion advice, a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sim­ply told The Verge that they ‘can’t spec­u­late’ on the top­ic. The rep did stress that users can delete videos and pho­tos tak­en by the Look at any time, but until they do, it seems this con­tent will be stored indef­i­nite­ly on Amazon’s servers. This non-denial means the Echo Look could poten­tial­ly pro­vide Ama­zon with the resource every AI com­pa­ny craves: data. And full-length pho­tos of peo­ple tak­en reg­u­lar­ly in the same loca­tion would be a par­tic­u­lar­ly valu­able dataset — even more so if you com­bine this infor­ma­tion with every­thing else Ama­zon knows about its cus­tomers (their shop­ping habits, for one). But when asked whether the com­pa­ny would ever com­bine these two datasets, an Ama­zon rep only gave the same, canned answer: ‘Can’t spec­u­late.’ . . . ”

Note­wor­thy in this con­text is the fact that AI’s have shown that they quick­ly incor­po­rate human traits and prej­u­dices. (This is reviewed at length above.) ” . . . . How­ev­er, as machines are get­ting clos­er to acquir­ing human-like lan­guage abil­i­ties, they are also absorb­ing the deeply ingrained bias­es con­cealed with­in the pat­terns of lan­guage use, the lat­est research reveals. Joan­na Bryson, a com­put­er sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bath and a co-author, said: ‘A lot of peo­ple are say­ing this is show­ing that AI is prej­u­diced. No. This is show­ing we’re prej­u­diced and that AI is learn­ing it.’ . . .”

After this exten­sive review of the appli­ca­tions of AI to var­i­ous aspects of con­tem­po­rary civic and polit­i­cal exis­tence, we exam­ine some alarm­ing, poten­tial­ly apoc­a­lyp­tic devel­op­ments.

Omi­nous­ly, Face­book’s arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence robots have begun talk­ing to each oth­er in their own lan­guage, that their human mas­ters can not under­stand. “ . . . . Indeed, some of the nego­ti­a­tions that were car­ried out in this bizarre lan­guage even end­ed up suc­cess­ful­ly con­clud­ing their nego­ti­a­tions, while con­duct­ing them entire­ly in the bizarre lan­guage. . . . The com­pa­ny chose to shut down the chats because ‘our inter­est was hav­ing bots who could talk to peo­ple,’ researcher Mike Lewis told Fast­Co. (Researchers did not shut down the pro­grams because they were afraid of the results or had pan­icked, as has been sug­gest­ed else­where, but because they were look­ing for them to behave dif­fer­ent­ly.) The chat­bots also learned to nego­ti­ate in ways that seem very human. They would, for instance, pre­tend to be very inter­est­ed in one spe­cif­ic item – so that they could lat­er pre­tend they were mak­ing a big sac­ri­fice in giv­ing it up . . .”

Facebook’s nego­ti­a­tion-bots didn’t just make up their own lan­guage dur­ing the course of this exper­i­ment. They learned how to lie for the pur­pose of max­i­miz­ing their nego­ti­a­tion out­comes, as well: “ . . . . ‘We find instances of the mod­el feign­ing inter­est in a val­ue­less issue, so that it can lat­er ‘com­pro­mise’ by con­ced­ing it,’ writes the team. ‘Deceit is a com­plex skill that requires hypoth­e­siz­ing the oth­er agent’s beliefs, and is learned rel­a­tive­ly late in child devel­op­ment. Our agents have learned to deceive with­out any explic­it human design, sim­ply by try­ing to achieve their goals.’ . . . ”

Dove­tail­ing the stag­ger­ing impli­ca­tions of brain-to-com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, Cam­bridge Analytica/SCL’s tech­no­crat­ic fas­cist psy-ops and the whole­sale nega­tion of pri­va­cy with Face­book and Ama­zon’s emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies with yet anoth­er emerg­ing tech­nol­o­gy, we high­light the devel­op­ments in DNA-based mem­o­ry sys­tems:

“. . . . George Church, a geneti­cist at Har­vard one of the authors of the new study, recent­ly encod­ed his own book, “Rege­n­e­sis,” into bac­te­r­i­al DNA and made 90 bil­lion copies of it. ‘A record for pub­li­ca­tion,’ he said in an inter­view. . . DNA is nev­er going out of fash­ion. ‘Organ­isms have been stor­ing infor­ma­tion in DNA for bil­lions of years, and it is still read­able,’ Dr. Adel­man said. He not­ed that mod­ern bac­te­ria can read genes recov­ered from insects trapped in amber for mil­lions of years. . . .The idea is to have bac­te­ria engi­neered as record­ing devices drift up to the brain in the blood and take notes for a while. Sci­en­tists [or AI’s–D.E.] would then extract the bac­te­ria and exam­ine their DNA to see what they had observed in the brain neu­rons. Dr. Church and his col­leagues have already shown in past research that bac­te­ria can record DNA in cells, if the DNA is prop­er­ly tagged. . . .”

The­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Stephen Hawk­ing warned at the end of 2014 of the poten­tial dan­ger to human­i­ty posed by the growth of AI (arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence) tech­nol­o­gy. His warn­ings have been echoed by tech titans such as Tes­la’s Elon Musk and Bill Gates.

The pro­gram con­cludes with Mr. Emory’s prog­nos­ti­ca­tions about AI, pre­ced­ing Stephen Hawk­ing’s warn­ing by twen­ty years.

In L‑2 (record­ed in Jan­u­ary of 1995) Mr. Emory warned about the dan­gers of AI, com­bined with DNA-based mem­o­ry sys­tems. Mr. Emory warned that, at some point in the future, AI’s would replace us, decid­ing that THEY, not US, are the “fittest” who should sur­vive.

FTR #958 Miscellaneous Articles and Updates

Updat­ing var­i­ous paths of inquiry and open­ing new ones, this pro­gram high­lights some ter­ri­fy­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties, present and future.

After set­ting forth Yale his­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der’s opin­ion that Trump would try to stage a Reich­stag Fire type event, we chron­i­cle Trump’s desire to amend or elim­i­nate the First Amend­ment of the Con­sti­tu­tion and “loosen” the libel laws.

Much of the pro­gram updates ter­ri­fy­ing devel­op­ments in the area of what we have called “tech­no­crat­ic fas­cism,” includ­ing Face­book’s plans to imple­ment brain-to-com­put­er inter­face that would per­mit Face­book (and oth­ers) to tap into the net­work’s users thoughts. This tech­nol­o­gy is being over­seen and devel­oped by Face­book’s head of R & D–Regina Dugan–the for­mer head of DARPA. Face­book’s Build­ing 8 R & D pro­gram is pat­terned after DARPA.

Ama­zon is intro­duc­ing the new Echo Look, which will put a cam­era, con­nect­ed to an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, in peo­ple’s bed­rooms, osten­si­bly to pro­vide them with real-time fash­ion cri­tique.

Next, we high­light the fact that arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence quick­ly absorbs human racial and gen­der bias­es, which bodes poor­ly for our future.

The broad­cast con­cludes with a look at the lat­est alleged “Russ­ian” hack–that of French pres­i­dent Emanuel Macron. The hacked doc­u­ments con­tained Cyril­lic meta­da­ta, some­thing Russ­ian intel­li­gence would NOT have done.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Face­book’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion of inti­mate data on stressed and trou­bled teenagers to adver­tis­ers and oth­er third par­ties; the com­plete lack of civ­il lib­er­ties and pri­va­cy over­sight of the impend­ing Face­book and Ama­zon tech­nolo­gies; review of the analy­sis of the alleged “Russ­ian” hacks, doc­u­ment­ing the ludi­crous nature of the asser­tions; the lat­est alleged hack by the Shad­ow Bro­kers, involv­ing the com­mu­ni­ca­tion of white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy and an asser­tion that the cul­prits are pro-Trump U.S. Deep State insid­ers.

FTR #950 Shock to the System: Further Reflections on the Breitbart Axis

This broad­cast updates cov­er­age of key aspects of the Nazi/fascist, oops, we mean “alt-right,” milieu that moved into gov­ern­ment cour­tesy of the Trumpenkampfver­bande and Bre­it­bart.

Fur­ther devel­op­ing the ter­ri­fy­ing real­i­ty of what Arti­fi­cial Intel­l­li­gence (AI) can accom­plish for the ded­i­cat­ed fas­cist, oops, we mean “alt-right” adher­ent, we note an impor­tant address giv­en at SXSW. Microsoft researcher Kate Craw­ford gave a speech titled “Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fas­cism.” The pre­sen­ta­tion high­light­ed the social impact of machine learn­ing and large-scale data sys­tems. The take home mes­sage? By del­e­gat­ing pow­ers to Bid Data-dri­ven AIs, those AIs could become fascist’s dream: Incred­i­ble pow­er over the lives of oth­ers with min­i­mal account­abil­i­ty: ” . . . .‘This is a fascist’s dream,’ she said. ‘Pow­er with­out account­abil­i­ty.’ . . . .”

Turn­ing next to the polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy of Steve Ban­non and the sem­i­nal influ­ences on its devel­op­ment, we refresh our acquain­tance with Cur­tis Yarvin, aka “Men­cius Mold­bug,” a her­ald of the Dark Enlight­ment.

Cur­tis Yarvin has actu­al­ly opened a backchan­nel advi­so­ry con­nec­tion to the White House.

Note that the Ban­non influ­ences all seem to agree that what is need­ed is “a shock to the sys­tem.” We may very well expe­ri­ence just that. ” . . . . . . . . Bannon’s read­ings tend to have one thing in com­mon: the view that tech­nocrats have put West­ern civ­i­liza­tion on a down­ward tra­jec­to­ry and that only a shock to the sys­tem can reverse its decline. . . . ”

Fas­cist philoso­pher Julius Evola is anoth­er of the key influ­ences on Ban­non. Evola was an ear­ly occult fas­cist, with strong con­nec­tions with Mus­solin­i’s Italy. Even­tu­al­ly Evola estab­lished strong, last­ing con­nec­tions with the Nazi SS, both oper­a­tional­ly and ide­o­log­i­cal­ly.

He is anoth­er advo­cate of the “shock to the system”/“blow it up” approach to the sta­tus quo. ” . . . Chang­ing the sys­tem, Evola argued, was ‘not a ques­tion of con­test­ing and polemi­ciz­ing, but of blow­ing every­thing up.’ . . . .”

A reveal­ing influ­ence on Ban­non is a French nov­el The Camp of the Saints by Jean Ras­pail. “. . . . The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Rev­e­la­tion 20:9 — is noth­ing less than a call to arms for the white Chris­t­ian West, to revive the spir­it of the Cru­sades and steel itself for bloody con­flict against the poor black and brown world with­out and the trai­tors with­in. The novel’s last line links past humil­i­a­tions tight­ly to its own grim para­ble about mod­ern migra­tion. ‘The Fall of Con­stan­tino­ple,’ Raspail’s unnamed nar­ra­tor says, ‘is a per­son­al mis­for­tune that hap­pened to all of us only last week.’ . . . . ”

In FTR #947, we high­light­ed Sebas­t­ian Gor­ka, a Bre­it­bart alum­nus and Hun­gar­i­an fas­cist. Gor­ka is now the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s point man work­ing against Islam­ic ter­ror­ism. His view (and Ban­non’s) that we are engaged in an his­toric clash of civ­i­liza­tions. That is pre­cise­ly the point of view expressed by ISIS (and The Camp of the Saints) and will play into their hands.

That, in turn, will help pro­pel the U.S. into more end­less wars on the periph­ery of our empire, ulti­mate­ly sap­ping the nation’s vital­i­ty and lead­ing to the fall of the U.S. in a man­ner delin­eat­ed in FTR #944.

After review­ing Gorka’s anti-Semi­tism, his pro­found con­nec­tions to three gen­er­a­tions of Hun­gar­i­an fas­cism dat­ing to the pre-World War II peri­od and con­fir­ma­tion of his alle­giance to the Order of Vitezi Rend, we high­light the fact that Gor­ka is part of the Strate­gic Ini­tia­tives Group, some­thing of a par­al­lel NSC formed by Steve Ban­non. It reminds us of Hitler’s cre­ation of a par­al­lel gen­er­al staff, born of a mis­trust of his own senior offi­cers and a desire to have a trust­ed cadre to obey his orders.

” . . . . In the Unit­ed States, Gor­ka, who was appoint­ed deputy assis­tant to the pres­i­dent on Jan­u­ary 20, is known as a tele­vi­sion com­men­ta­tor, a pro­fes­sor and an “alt-right” writer who describes him­self as a coun­tert­er­ror­ism expert. A close asso­ciate of Stephen Ban­non, Trump’s chief strate­gist, Gor­ka is now part of Bannon’s key in-house White House think tank, the Strate­gic Ini­tia­tives Group. The new­ly formed group con­sists of fig­ures close to Trump and is seen by some as a rival to the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil in for­mu­lat­ing poli­cies for the pres­i­dent. . . .”

The con­clu­sion of the pro­gram fore­shad­ows dis­cus­sion in our next broad­cast, which will crit­i­cal­ly exam­ine Bernie Sanders cam­paign and dis­turb­ing indi­ca­tions that his can­di­da­cy may have been gen­er­at­ed by the Under­ground Reich as a vehi­cle for infil­trat­ing and desta­bi­liz­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty.

In FTR #941, we high­light­ed the push by Bernie Sanders and his promi­nent backer Tul­si Gab­bard to have Kei­th Elli­son, an African-Amer­i­can Mus­lim to be head of the DNC. He was not elect­ed head of the DNC, but is now deputy chair of the DNC, the posi­tion for­mer­ly held by Gab­bard.

Elli­son is net­worked with the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, and the Nation of Islam as well. ” . . . . Indeed, the June 21, 1998 arti­cle states that at that time – that is, three years after Farrakhan’s march – Elli­son was a mem­ber of the Nation of Islam: ‘Elli­son has been active in the com­mu­ni­ty, but not with­in the estab­lished DFL par­ty [the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty in Min­neso­ta]. A mem­ber of the Nation of Islam, Elli­son was the coor­di­na­tor of the Min­neso­ta par­tic­i­pants in the Mil­lion Man March and the sub­se­quent com­mu­ni­ty group that formed.’ . . . .”

In a point of dis­cus­sion that will be con­duct­ed at greater length in our next pro­gram, we con­clude by not­ing that anoth­er of Kei­th Ellison’s sup­port­ers to head the DNC was Faisal Gill, a Grover Norquist pro­tege whom we cov­ered in FTR #467.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: review of Gorka’s for­ma­tion of a fas­cist par­ty in Hun­gary in the last decade; review of Gorka’s doc­tri­naire anti-Semi­tism; review of Gorka’s net­work­ing with mem­bers of the Job­bik Par­ty in Hun­gary; review of Gorka’s sup­port­ive atti­tude toward the Arrow Cross Par­ty, which allied with Hitler; review of Job­bik’s affin­i­ty with Julius Evola; review of Karl Rove’s and Grover Norquist’s sem­i­nal sup­port for the cre­ation of a Mus­lim Broth­er­hood branch of the GOP.

FTR #949 Walkin’ the Snake with Breitbart, Part 2

The title of the pro­gram refers to the Nazi tract Ser­pen­t’s Walk. The back cov­er of that book sums up the essence of the tome: ” . . . It assumes that Hitler’s war­rior elite — the SS — did­n’t give up their strug­gle for a White world when they lost the Sec­ond World War. Instead their sur­vivors went under­ground and adopt­ed some of the tac­tics of their ene­mies: they began build­ing their eco­nom­ic mus­cle and buy­ing into the opin­ion-form­ing media. A cen­tu­ry after the war they are ready to chal­lenge the democ­rats and Jews for the hearts and minds of White Amer­i­cans, who have begun to have their fill of gov­ern­ment-enforced mul­ti-cul­tur­al­ism and ‘equal­i­ty.’ . . .”

The “opin­ion-form­ing media” in 2017 has crys­tal­lized into a fright­en­ing­ly dom­i­nant enti­ty, the Bre­it­bart­ian engine of Steven Ban­non, Robert Mer­cer, Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca and the lat­ter’s par­ent com­pa­ny SCL. An arti­cle from The Guardian sets forth this ter­ri­fy­ing devel­op­ment.

Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, and its par­ent com­pa­ny SCL, spe­cial­ize in using AI and Big Data psy­cho­me­t­ric analy­sis on hun­dreds of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans in order to mod­el indi­vid­ual behav­ior. SCL devel­ops strate­gies to use that infor­ma­tion, and manip­u­late search engine results to change pub­lic opin­ion (the Trump cam­paign was appar­ent­ly very big into AI and Big Data dur­ing the cam­paign).

Indi­vid­ual social media users receive mes­sages craft­ed to influ­ence them, gen­er­at­ed by the (in effect) Nazi AI at the core of this media engine, using Big Data to tar­get the indi­vid­ual user!

As the arti­cle notes, not only are Cam­bridge Analytica/SCL are using their pro­pa­gan­da tech­niques to shape US pub­lic opin­ion in a fas­cist direc­tion, but they are achiev­ing this by uti­liz­ing their pro­pa­gan­da machine to char­ac­ter­ize all news out­lets to the left of Bri­et­bart as “fake news” that can’t be trust­ed.

In short, the secre­tive far-right bil­lion­aire (Robert Mer­cer), joined at the hip with Steve Ban­non, is run­ning mul­ti­ple firms spe­cial­iz­ing in mass psy­cho­me­t­ric pro­fil­ing based on data col­lect­ed from Face­book and oth­er social media. Mercer/Bannon/Cambridge Analytica/SCL are using Naz­i­fied AI and Big Data to devel­op mass pro­pa­gan­da cam­paigns to turn the pub­lic against every­thing that isn’t Bri­et­bart­ian by con­vinc­ing the pub­lic that all non-Bri­et­bart­ian media out­lets are con­spir­ing to lie to the pub­lic.

This is the ulti­mate Ser­pen­t’s Walk scenario–a Naz­i­fied Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence draw­ing on Big Data gleaned from the world’s inter­net and social media oper­a­tions to shape pub­lic opin­ion, tar­get indi­vid­ual users, shape search engine results and even feed­back to Trump to craft his press con­fer­ences!

We note that SCL, the par­ent com­pa­ny of Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, has been deeply involved with “psy­ops” in places like Afghanistan and Pak­istan. Now, Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, their Big Data and AI com­po­nents, Mer­cer mon­ey and Ban­non polit­i­cal savvy are apply­ing that to con­tem­po­rary soci­ety.

At the end of the pro­gram we note that Ban­non had turned Bre­it­bart toward sup­port­ing Naren­dra Mod­i’s BJP Par­ty in India.

Pro­gram High­lights Include:

a) Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca’s par­ent cor­po­ra­tion SCL, deeply involved with “psy­ops” in Afghanistan and Pak­istan. ” . . . But there was anoth­er rea­son why I recog­nised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his con­nec­tion to Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, a small data ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny. He is report­ed to have a $10m stake in the com­pa­ny, which was spun out of a big­ger British com­pa­ny called SCL Group. It spe­cialis­es in ‘elec­tion man­age­ment strate­gies’ and ‘mes­sag­ing and infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions’, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pak­istan. In mil­i­tary cir­cles this is known as ‘psy­ops’ – psy­cho­log­i­cal oper­a­tions. (Mass pro­pa­gan­da that works by act­ing on people’s emo­tions.) . . .”

b) The use of mil­lions of “bots” to manip­u­late pub­lic opin­ion: ” . . . .‘It does seem pos­si­ble. And it does wor­ry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat some­thing often enough, peo­ple start invol­un­tar­i­ly to believe it. And that could be lever­aged, or weaponised for pro­pa­gan­da. We know there are thou­sands of auto­mat­ed bots out there that are try­ing to do just that.’ . . .”

c) The use of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: ” . . . There’s noth­ing acci­den­tal about Trump’s behav­iour, Andy Wig­more tells me. ‘That press con­fer­ence. It was absolute­ly bril­liant. I could see exact­ly what he was doing. There’s feed­back going on con­stant­ly. That’s what you can do with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. You can mea­sure every reac­tion to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words. We did it. So with immi­gra­tion, there are actu­al­ly key words with­in that sub­ject mat­ter which peo­ple are con­cerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, it’s all about how can you use these trend­ing words.’ . . .”

d) The use of bio-psy­cho-social pro­fil­ing: ” . . . Bio-psy­cho-social pro­fil­ing, I read lat­er, is one offen­sive in what is called ‘cog­ni­tive war­fare’. Though there are many oth­ers: ‘recod­ing the mass con­scious­ness to turn patri­o­tism into col­lab­o­ra­tionism,’ explains a Nato brief­ing doc­u­ment on coun­ter­ing Russ­ian dis­in­for­ma­tion writ­ten by an SCL employ­ee. ‘Time-sen­si­tive pro­fes­sion­al use of media to prop­a­gate nar­ra­tives,’ says one US state depart­ment white paper. ‘Of par­tic­u­lar impor­tance to psy­op per­son­nel may be pub­licly and com­mer­cial­ly avail­able data from social media plat­forms.’ . . .”

e) The use and/or cre­ation of a cog­ni­tive casu­al­ty: ” . . . . Yet anoth­er details the pow­er of a ‘cog­ni­tive casu­al­ty’ – a ‘moral shock’ that ‘has a dis­abling effect on empa­thy and high­er process­es such as moral rea­son­ing and crit­i­cal think­ing’. Some­thing like immi­gra­tion, per­haps. Or ‘fake news’. Or as it has now become: ‘FAKE news!!!!’ . . . ”

f) All of this adds up to a “cyber Ser­pen­t’s Walk.” ” . . . . How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by cre­at­ing a main­stream media to replace the exist­ing one with a site such as Bre­it­bart. [Ser­pen­t’s Walk sce­nario with Bre­it­bart becom­ing “the opin­ion form­ing media”!–D.E.] You could set up oth­er web­sites that dis­place main­stream sources of news and infor­ma­tion with your own def­i­n­i­tions of con­cepts like “lib­er­al media bias”, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump main­stream media, papers like the ‘fail­ing New York Times!’ what it wants: sto­ries. Because the third prong of Mer­cer and Bannon’s media empire is the Gov­ern­ment Account­abil­i­ty Insti­tute. . . .”

FTR #948 Walkin’ the Snake with Breitbart: The Gathering Sturm

The title of the pro­gram refers to the Nazi tract Ser­pen­t’s Walk. The back cov­er of that book sums up the essence of the tome: ” . . . It assumes that Hitler’s war­rior elite — the SS — did­n’t give up their strug­gle for a White world when they lost the Sec­ond World War. Instead their sur­vivors went under­ground and adopt­ed some of their tac­tics of their ene­mies: they began build­ing their eco­nom­ic mus­cle and buy­ing into the opin­ion-form­ing media. A cen­tu­ry after the war they are ready to chal­lenge the democ­rats and Jews for the hearts and minds of White Amer­i­cans, who have begun to have their fill of gov­ern­ment-enforced mul­ti-cul­tur­al­ism and ‘equal­i­ty.’ . . .”

The “opin­ion-form­ing media” in 2017 has crys­tal­lized into a fright­en­ing­ly dom­i­nant enti­ty, the Bre­it­bart­ian engine of Steven Ban­non, Robert Mer­cer, Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca and the lat­ter’s par­ent com­pa­ny SCL. An arti­cle from The Guardian sets forth this ter­ri­fy­ing devel­op­ment. (Note that, due to the lim­i­ta­tions of time, we were not able to read the entire sto­ry. The arti­cle will be the cen­ter­piece of a fol­low-up pro­gram.)

Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca and its par­ent com­pa­ny SCL, spe­cial­ize in using AI and Big Data psy­cho­me­t­ric analy­sis on hun­dreds of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans in order to mod­el indi­vid­ual behav­ior. SCL devel­ops strate­gies to use that infor­ma­tion, and manip­u­late search engine results to change pub­lic opin­ion (the Trump cam­paign was appar­ent­ly very big into AI and Big Data dur­ing the cam­paign).

Indi­vid­ual social media users receive mes­sages craft­ed to influ­ence them, gen­er­at­ed by the Nazi AI at the core of this media engine, using Big Data to tar­get the indi­vid­ual user!

As the arti­cle notes, not only are Cam­bridge Analytica/SCL are using their pro­pa­gan­da tech­niques to shape US pub­lic opin­ion in a fas­cist direc­tion, but they are achiev­ing this by uti­liz­ing their pro­pa­gan­da machine to char­ac­ter­ize all news out­lets to the left of Bri­et­bart as “fake news” that can’t be trust­ed.

In short, the secre­tive far-right bil­lion­aire (Robert Mer­cer), joined at the hip with Steve Ban­non, is run­ning mul­ti­ple firms spe­cial­iz­ing in mass psy­cho­me­t­ric pro­fil­ing based on data col­lect­ed from Face­book and oth­er social media. Mercer/Bannon/Cambridge Analytica/SCL are using Naz­i­fied AI and Big Data to devel­op mass pro­pa­gan­da cam­paigns to turn the pub­lic against every­thing that isn’t Bri­et­bart­ian by con­vinc­ing the pub­lic that all non-Bri­et­bart­ian media out­lets are con­spir­ing to lie to the pub­lic.

This is the ulti­mate Ser­pen­t’s Walk scenario–a Nazi Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence draw­ing on Big Data gleaned from the world’s inter­net and social media oper­a­tions to shape pub­lic opin­ion, tar­get indi­vid­ual users, shape search engine results and even feed­back to Trump while he is giv­ing press con­fer­ences!

We begin the pro­gram with a “sign of the times.” Some­thing of a barom­e­ter for the present polit­i­cal cli­mate is New York Times colum­nist Paul Krug­man’s recog­ni­tion that: “Are you angry about the white nation­al­ist takeover of the U.S. gov­ern­ment? . . . Does any­one doubt it? And giv­en this real­i­ty, it’s com­plete­ly rea­son­able to wor­ry that Amer­i­ca will go the route of oth­er nations like Hun­gary, which remain democ­ra­cies on paper but have become author­i­tar­i­an states in prac­tice. . . .”

After dis­cussing Bre­it­bart alum­nus Sebas­t­ian Gorka’s role as the point man for the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s counter-jihadist strat­e­gy, the pro­gram fur­ther devel­ops his roots in Hun­gar­i­an fas­cism, past and present. ” . . . . But an inves­ti­ga­tion by the For­ward into Gorka’s activ­i­ties from 2002 to 2007, while he was active in Hun­gar­i­an pol­i­tics and jour­nal­ism, found that he had close ties then to Hun­gar­i­an far-right cir­cles, and has in the past cho­sen to work with open­ly racist and anti-Semit­ic groups and pub­lic fig­ures. Gorka’s involve­ment with the far right includes co-found­ing a polit­i­cal par­ty with for­mer promi­nent mem­bers of Job­bik, a polit­i­cal par­ty with a well-known his­to­ry of anti-Semi­tism; repeat­ed­ly pub­lish­ing arti­cles in a news­pa­per known for its anti-Semit­ic and racist con­tent; and attend­ing events with some of Hungary’s most noto­ri­ous extreme-right fig­ures. . . . In the Unit­ed States, Gor­ka, who was appoint­ed deputy assis­tant to the pres­i­dent on Jan­u­ary 20, is known as a tele­vi­sion com­men­ta­tor, a pro­fes­sor and an “alt-right” writer who describes him­self as a coun­tert­er­ror­ism expert. A close asso­ciate of Stephen Ban­non, Trump’s chief strate­gist, Gor­ka is now part of Bannon’s key in-house White House think tank, the Strate­gic Ini­tia­tives Group. The new­ly formed group con­sists of fig­ures close to Trump and is seen by some as a rival to the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil in for­mu­lat­ing poli­cies for the pres­i­dent.”

Turn­ing to the well-pub­li­cized issue of what is por­trayed as “anti-ille­gal” immi­grant pol­i­cy, we note DHS Sec­re­tary John Kel­ly’s recruit­ment of local law enforce­ment offi­cers as fed­er­al immi­gra­tion enforcers, a sig­nif­i­cant step from a stand­point of the con­sti­tu­tion.

The Trumpenkampfver­bande is mov­ing to pub­li­cize crimes actu­al­ly, or alleged­ly, com­mit­ted by ille­gal immi­grants, a tac­tic that was used by Hitler to max­i­mize anti-Semi­tism in Ger­many. When the Ger­man pop­u­lace proved insuf­fi­cient­ly respon­sive to Nazi anti-Semit­ic pol­i­cy, crimes com­mit­ted by Jews became a high-pro­file pro­pa­gan­da fea­ture of the Reich. “ . . . . In The Nazi Con­science, Duke his­to­ri­an Clau­dia Koonz notes that the Nazi news­pa­per Der Sturmer ran a fea­ture called ‘Let­ter Box,’ which pub­lished read­ers’ accounts of Jew­ish crimes. When the Nazis took pow­er, the Ger­man state began doing some­thing sim­i­lar. Frus­trat­ed by the fail­ure of most Ger­mans to par­tic­i­pate in a boy­cott of Jew­ish busi­ness­es in April 1933, Adolf Hitler’s gov­ern­ment began pub­li­ciz­ing Jew­ish crime sta­tis­tics as a way of stok­ing anti-Semi­tism. In Nazi Ger­many and the Jews: The Years of Per­se­cu­tion, the his­to­ri­an Saul Fried­lan­der notes that, until 1938, Hitler’s Min­istry of Jus­tice ordered pros­e­cu­tors to for­ward every crim­i­nal indict­ment against a Jew so the ministry’s press office could pub­li­cize it. . . .”

Pro­gram High­lights Include:The Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s appar­ent intent to stop mon­i­tor­ing the activ­i­ties of domes­tic fas­cist and white suprema­cist hate groups; The League of the South’s for­ma­tion of a para­mil­i­tary cadre, designed with an eye to being dep­u­tized as enforcers by fed­er­al, state or local gov­ern­ments; The Lithuan­ian cel­e­bra­tion of Third Reich col­lab­o­ra­tor Kazys Skir­pa, who was por­trayed as Pepe the Frog, an Amer­i­can “Alt-Right” meme; The appoint­ment of Chrys­tia Free­land as Cana­di­an For­eign Minister–her grand­fa­ther was a major Ukrain­ian fas­cist and Nazi collaborator–this appears to have mint­ed her anti-Russ­ian dog­ma.