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April 19, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
34:08
Spy vs. Spy

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comCharles Johnson joins the podcast for a wide-ranging discussion on the web of spies and influencers. Topics include Jack Tiexeria, Donbass Devushka, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ali “Alexander,” and more.

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I've actually done a lot of research on the issue of T-Shara and the Air National Guard and these leaks.
And I generally stand behind my speculation that there's more going on with this matter than meets the eye.
I don't know if you've read about this character.
Named Donbass Devushka, which means Donbass Girl, basically.
And reminds me a little bit of Partisan Girl.
And I think she goes by Syria Girl as well.
But it's a woman.
I guess she's probably in her 30s now.
I think I knew her actual name at some point, but it's immaterial.
She's the child of immigrants from Syria to Australia.
I think she lived some other places.
But she is a fiercely anti-war voice and a fiercely pro-Assad voice.
So she has the zeal of the immigrant, or even more so, the zeal of the first generation.
You know, I would defend her in a lot of ways.
She also goes into Alex Jones territory quite a bit.
But the least you can say is that she is a fiercely, as she notes herself, a fiercely partisan voice in the alternative media that is...
Effectively anti-American empire, pro-Assad, pro-Third World, one-struggle type things.
There's nothing that Washington can do which is good, and there's pretty much nothing that the non-American aligned world can do that is bad.
She would probably apologize for a ham sandwich.
She'd also apologize for a chemical attack.
Yeah, there just seem to be some parallels with this Donbass Devushka, who was the first person to start spreading these documents, or one of the first people to start spreading these documents that emerged on Discord channels and then went to 4chan and so on.
There's actually an interesting write-up by Bellingcat, which seems to be a bit of a...
But that being said, I think their information is accurate.
But again, just to reiterate what I was talking about last time is that you have this young man, and it's a type of young man that people in this group know very well.
He was...
In a Discord server.
I remember back in the alt-right days, Discord was the thing and everyone was bragging about how they'll never censor anyone, never deplatform anyone.
They're secret alt-righters.
I've heard all that stuff.
They obviously did do a lot of deplatforming eventually.
But Discord was this gamer chat and it was this crazy chat.
I remember sometimes going on to the alt-right Discord and...
You know, the amount of just posting was just so incredible that no single person could keep up with it.
And it was a kind of vicious cycle of, in order to get noticed, you had to post something fast and frequent and more outrageous and scatological or just insane just to get noticed.
Now, not all Discord servers are like that, I'm sure.
But that is the vibe of the, you know, young millennial or Gen X Discord server.
And you have this young man who is, you know, according to his friends, non-political or something like that.
But it's also very clear that he was part of a kind of alt-right shitposting Discord server.
I mean, I think that is the most accurate way to describe it.
Had just funny names.
I keep forgetting it.
I think I said Shady Thug Cult or something.
It's something of that nature, forgetting at the moment.
Just a kind of teenage type title.
And he was in all likelihood, or at least kind of ostensibly, he wasn't really a leaker.
In the sense that Julian Assange is a leaker, Edward Snowden is a leaker, or Chelsea slash Bradley Manning was a leaker, etc.
He seemed to be way, way over his head.
And he was posting things to get attention, to prove himself to be the real OG, which was his nickname on the server, to his friends.
So he was shitposting.
And so on.
There's also some report that he went to a gun range and yelled out anti-Semitic slurs while he fired into a gun range.
I mean, I don't even know what to make of this.
If it happened, it happened.
It probably speaks to his age and just immaturity more than it speaks to any ideology.
But what I would get back to...
Is just the fact that this mass hole is this townie type from Massachusetts.
Mark can't be with us today, but he would be chuckling along with these characterizations.
He's way, he's in way, way over his head.
He's way out of his league.
And he's posting for clout.
So he's not a leaker in the sense of someone who's ideologically driven.
Now, he's been defended as such by the typical people you would expect from this at this point.
Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who labeled him a right-wing Christian and thus, in a weird way, he can do no wrong.
But what strikes me as interesting is that...
He's exactly the type of person that this type of outreach from Russia goes to.
He's kind of like the perfect subject, the unwitting propagandist, the perfect patsy.
Now, I know Boris, who knows a lot more about this than I do and has much more experience in Russia and a thousand times more experience in Russia than I do.
Was pushing back on this, and I think that's good to push back on it.
Because we don't want to fall into everything's a Kremlin plot, or it's part of Section S deep cover agents, or something like that.
That being said, that kind of stuff is real.
And, you know, I mean, you guys have probably...
Heard of, at least, the show The Americans that was very popular on, I think it was FX or something.
You can watch it on Hulu.
I've seen about a half dozen episodes on the first season, and it's a good spy show.
It's interesting, and there's just enough spy craft and murder and assassination and sex and stuff like that to keep you interested.
But it's a good show.
That was based on a matter called Operation Ghost Stories from 2010.
It was actually written by a former CIA agent, which, again, you can make of this what you will.
Now, it was based on Operation Ghost Stories, which was about a Section S operatives who entered the United States through Canada.
So these were young people in the Kremlin, the Kremlin community.
Connected with.
The KGB, excuse me, connected with.
And the FSB afterward, because this program never ended with the Cold War.
But they would connect with young people.
They would make sure that they were the right type of person.
Someone that is smart, maybe just smart enough, not too smart.
Dutiful, but certainly not a dullard, because this is someone who's going to need to engage in deception for decades.
And someone that they could create a new backstory for after many months or years of training, particularly in the English language, they could create a backstory for mostly in Canada and then place in the United States doing some kind of job that would get them close to power and influence in some way.
So in the show, The Americans, they were travel agents, which is kind of interesting.
You have other examples of jobs like this where you are maybe once or twice removed from something important.
This was a very real thing, and this is something that was never canceled at the end of the Soviet Union and continued.
It was actually busted in 2010 by FBI counterintelligence.
Now, when they created the show at the time of 2013, they didn't believe that Americans would take seriously the notion that Russia was spying on them and not just spying on them, not just putting a little bug in the Pentagon or something like that, or hacking or something, which we might expect from all governments.
They were spying on them in this just diabolical, almost unimaginable, According to a book...
Which I've been taking a look at.
I haven't finished it, but it's called Russians Among Us.
This hasn't been done the other way.
America is not investing in deep cover agents that will spend decades in other parts of the world.
They're more invested in hacking.
I mean, again, make of that what you will.
It did offer the pretty plausible explanation that no one wants to go live in Russia.
If you're a college graduate from the United States, fair enough.
But again, I don't have any evidence that this is taking place, but there is a whole lot of evidence that it's taking place the other way.
These people will integrate into society.
they might not accomplish anything for decades, for years.
You know, on the show, The Americans, every week, there's a new assassination or plot or bugging or honeypot scenario where This husband and wife are, you know, having sex with half of Washington, D.C., and all that kind of stuff.
That, of course, didn't happen.
Probably months or years would go by where next to nothing would happen, but the deep cover agent continued their task.
I could very easily imagine that there are concentric circles to something like this, so that there might very well be someone who, you know, Entered through Canada, been in the United States for decades, is working in some think tank who is a travel agent for Washington, D.C. Senators or limo driver, all this kind of stuff.
I can easily imagine that.
I could also easily imagine a kind of concentric circle situation where this woman, Donbass girl, She was presenting herself as a young woman living in Donbass, rooting on the Russian invaders, spreading Russian talking points, etc., but also linking up with American right-wing types.
So I actually listened to a bit of about 10 minutes or so of a podcast that she was on with some unknown American right-wing.
You know, analyst of some kind.
And, you know, to be honest, I found it pretty boring because it's talking points that I've heard before, not something particularly interesting to me.
But I'm not the target and I'm not an average person.
So for a certain type of right winger, I'm sure what she was saying was enthralling.
And the notion that she has these kind of striking blue eyes and dark hair, porcelain skin, she's this hot chick in the Donbass future trad wife, all that kind of stuff.
It is interesting.
And, you know, she was one of the first people to spread these documents.
Officially, and I believe she spread them on Twitter.
So we can make a lot of this.
Now, there's a plausible explanation, and that is that we have a country of 330 million people.
Of course, there's going to be dozens, at the very least hundreds, who really identify with Russia for whatever reason, maybe...
hate the United States for justified and unjustified reasons, and kind of create these perspectives I mean, look, Gonzalo Lira.
I remember Gonzalo Lira.
I did a number of podcasts with Gonzalo Lira back in 2010.
At the time, he was an interesting South American guy who was a Ron Paul fanatic.
And his ideology was pretty much off-the-shelf libertarianism.
You know, gold standard, we're going to see hyperinflation, the Fed is evil, etc.
All the stuff we've heard before, and stuff that has some kernels of truth to it is rational, at the very least.
He transforms himself into a manosphere character.
He then transforms himself into a man living in Ukraine, rooting on the invasion and spreading...
You know, lies at some level, at the very least, heavy, heavy spin of the invasion, all while conveniently living in Ukraine.
Who are these people?
Now, you can say that they're just your average alternative media guy.
You know, what else is going on?
They seem to get on the same talking points very fast.
That could be explained through groupthink, but it also could be explained through conspiracy.
They are very quick to spread things of importance, like these top-secret documents that apparently came from a Massachusetts airport base.
now I again I would stick by my speculation it is speculation and it's a possibility and it's something to consider but I don't I'm not I don't have any proof for it unless I'm not You know, asserting it with authority.
But this type of kid seems to be exactly the type of person that Russia is generally targeting.
It's the young, heavy online, not too bright, but very right-wing shitlord.
Was this kid the person?
Did he just get these high-level, top-secret documents?
Were they just an email attachment and he started posting them?
Maybe.
Was he a kind of unwitting propagandist to someone else who acquired these through other means?
Is this Donbass girl, this hot, blue-eyed, exotic-looking woman, ostensibly living in a war zone, Is she just some warper from New Jersey who, you know, heard about this stuff?
She seemed to, I mean, there are millions of Discord servers or hundreds of thousands.
It's kind of remarkable that she got on this rather obscure one that was frequented by teenage and early 20s boys, but who knows?
And she was spreading them.
All of this stuff strikes me as A kind of influence campaign.
The other aspect of this, which I mentioned on Thursday, is that the degree to which the documents were altered, there were some, Bellingcat talked about this pretty compellingly, and that is that some of the numbers were fudged, and the spacing between the numbers didn't fit with the font used in the document.
And the numbers were fudged in the direction of Russia.
In other words, they were fudged in a way complementary to the Russian army, that they're taking less casualties than have been estimated elsewhere and were estimated in this document, in the authentic version of the document.
So what is going on here?
Is this a way of influence and a way of propaganda?
Which is extremely sophisticated.
It's not Radio America where you openly advocate for the American way of life in a foreign broadcast, which is obviously propaganda.
And, you know, fair enough.
You are who you are.
You're saying what you're about directly.
Who can criticize it exactly?
But is this a way of engaging a propaganda?
That kind of emphasizes pre-existing fractions or fractures in the American public and can be weirdly authentic in the way that RT can't.
RT is titled Russia Today.
You might as well title it, you know, Stalinism.
Propaganda network.
You all shall submit eventually.
We will crush you.
You might as well have that be the title of the network.
It's so overt.
But is there a way of gaining that cachet, that je ne sais quoi of authenticity by promoting this through the alternative media?
I think that this reading of events And, you know, again, I am open about it.
It's speculation, but it is informed speculation and it's rational speculation.
And you see how the authenticity of it that it captured makes it all the more powerful.
If Putin himself released these documents, even someone like Tucker Carlson would probably be inclined to say, well, that's just...
You know, outrageous.
You know, they're stealing things from our military and publishing them.
You know, he might criticize the military for having leaks and being incompetent, but even he would be offended by it.
When it's done in this weird teenage manner, through the alternative media, and even the alternative alternative media, the just kids on the Discord server, the alt to the alt.
It has authenticity, and so Tucker Carlson can defend it.
I saw some other of these, like, you know, Crystal Ball and Sarger and Jetty or whatever.
They're all defending it.
They're basically saying that he is a leaker.
He's trying to tell us what's happening.
Look, the NATO troops are on the ground.
Look at these.
The war is unrunable.
We're getting ourselves into World War III.
It has this authenticity quality to it, which is it's the anti-media.
And it's the most powerful thing in the world, authenticity.
It's something money can't buy.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene directly takes the side of someone who's being arrested by the FBI.
How can you get a person to do that?
It's a remarkable thing.
I don't think Marjorie Taylor Greene is some kind of Russian asset or whatever.
I think she's A crazy, drunk, dumb Georgia CrossFit mom who, if the rumors are true, hops into bed with everything in sight.
But, of course, the only rumor and speculation on that one.
But how can you get an elected official to take the side of someone subverting the government?
You can do that directly.
You can honeypot them.
You can directly blackmail them.
If they're in debt or whatever, or they've committed some kind of crime, you can force them to do something.
The carrot and the stick.
But this is more, it's kind of easier, and it's dirtier, and it's less expensive, but it's almost more powerful because it's done authentically.
Someone in Congress can directly take the side of So there was this event that was being
hosted.
I think Teal showed up.
I know Jeff.
Jeff Giese ran it, or some version of it, or maybe it was ran around him, but it was in Cleveland.
Honestly, I'm not a big party person in general, so I'm much more introverted in that way, so I didn't make the deplorable.
I'm not terribly interested in large groups of people in general.
It's not my thing.
I prefer the more intimate dinner party.
My brother jokes with me that...
Jesus had 12 disciples, and if he'd only had 10, one of them betrayed him and the other one denied him.
So keep the circle tight.
So that's always been how I've conducted myself, personally.
But it is interesting.
I've been thinking about it in the last few years.
What was the point of all that?
Was it just to see who would gawk or who would look or who would whatever?
I don't know.
I've been thinking about it a lot in the last few years.
You know, was it just innocuous homosexualness?
I don't know.
You know?
But I will tell you...
I don't know either.
But Ali is so connected.
So Ali is Emirati.
He's funded by the Mercers.
He's funded by...
Yeah.
Yeah, if you understand that Ali is an Emirati figure, right?
The Emiratis used George Nader, who was a child molester, convicted child molester.
And there's a sort of use of this sort of criminal world by some elements within the Arab world as basically emissaries, people that will do anything for them.
And Ali, personally, I haven't written what I want to say.
I mean, I've written what I want to say about Ali, but I'm kind of too cowardly to publish it, to be honest.
And what has been interesting to me was...
So I was being attacked by the Israelis rather aggressively online and elsewhere.
And Elise showed up out of nowhere, offered to be my PR person for free.
And given that he was likely homosexual, we never really brought it up because I have the opposite problem of homosexuality where I have too many women in my life, just frankly.
You know, he showed up, was extremely helpful.
He was a sort of, you know, gay, black, Arab person here to help me.
And he helped me, you know, rather like effortlessly.
He like rebutted some of the media inquiries that were all like, you know, the typical, you know, Israeli, you know, NBC News, whatever nonsense.
They were attacking me.
And I later learned that the reason the Israelis were attacking me was they were concerned about efforts I was making in the genetic space.
I sued, by the way, all the way up to the Supreme Court over the defamation of the Huffington Post.
I even met with the Huffington Post people about the defamation.
They were so shocked by what I was telling them, shock, shock, shock, that the Indian head of Verizon Media sold Huffington Post for a dollar to BuzzFeed.
And BuzzFeed, of course, is where Mike Cernovich used to leak all of his material.
So there's this sort of, shall we call it like, there's these sort of people who are perverts or disgusting or eccentrics or weirdos or whatever that have all these connections to foreign intelligence and to oligarchs who are backed by foreign intelligence.
So there's a lot of rumors about Robert Mercer having connections with the Russians, certainly his connections with the sort of Hong Kong Chinese.
And of course, Rebecca Mercer, his daughter, was a major backer of Armie Hammer's career early on.
So there's these sort of oligarch types.
And what they do is they have consiglieres, or they have fixers, or they have people that are their emissaries as well.
And Ali had basically positioned himself in that territory.
So remarkably well-connected, remarkably helpful, remarkably relational.
You know, I remember him, he was the first person to call me on my birthday one year, which I'd never told him my birthday, right?
Very kind of strange kind of things like that.
And, you know, to be honest with you, I don't know what I think about the allegations that are promulgated against him.
So for one, like, I'm not excusing this, okay?
Like, again, I'm not excusing this.
I'm not excusing this.
I'm not defending it.
Having been targeted by the homosexual parts of the Republican Party, the groomer right, if you will, I've written about this myself, my own experience with Thor Halverson, who runs a quote-unquote human rights outfit.
So I'm not defending this, but I am saying that there is a certain person who is a young gay man or gay curious man who both wants to be selected and is sort of like, also a participant in this kind of system, if you will.
And this gives their sort of sexual identity issues a form of meaning as well.
I mean, I'm not, again, not defending it.
It just is a thing.
And you also run into this when...
You get some notoriety and you're a heterosexual man where there will be the daughter of a congressman who will be absurdly friendly with you when she's 19 and you're 31 or whatever, 32. And there's a lot of that that goes on, particularly when you're perceived as having status or influence or power.
And I could imagine a 15-year-old sublimated gay boy...
Right?
Who sees Ellie Alexander and sees him with the Robert Mercers or the Jack Dorseys of the world.
And intuits, quite rightly, that he's a powerful person.
Right?
And wants in on that.
Right?
He may not even know it on a conscious level.
Right?
He may just be sort of attracted to it in the way that when you're young, you just kind of know that you're attracted to this or attracted to that.
And you don't even really know where these desires come from in the first place.
Now, I think what's indefensible on Ali's part is sort of taking advantage of those people, right?
And sort of like harming them in some way.
But I think that too is a big part of politics, which is in and of itself somewhat exploitative.
And maybe that's kind of true of the tech industry.
I mean, Heath Robloy has had a number of dalliances with people who worked for him, right?
I mean, we can point to many examples of people who carried on affairs with people who worked for them over the years.
And again, I'm not condoning that, but I'm not really condemning it either.
I mean, my mother worked for my father before they were married.
Okay?
Like, I've always taken the Me Too issue somewhat personally in that regard.
So, you know, human beings will meet each other.
They'll be sort of things that are not exactly on the up and up.
And this is just, I think, part of human nature is to sort of see these kind of things.
Now, what I find interesting here...
One, I know that Milo collects blackmail on people.
He's very open about that.
He's talked about that.
He's threatened people.
He's threatened to destroy them, harm them in different ways.
Okay, fine.
He's also an alien under an O-1 visa, which is the Einstein visa, quote-unquote, which is for an alien of exceptional ability.
What exceptional ability does he have?
Very unclear.
Well, he does have an exceptional ability.
I mean, he has exceptional abilities, but they're not exactly what we mean.
To be toxic.
Yes, they're exceptionally toxic, perhaps.
But I don't think that's exactly...
Yes, so then there's the question of, like, this information was saved up for quite a number of years to be deployed seven years later, right?
And there's no criminal filings, there's no...
There are text messages, and that's gross.
Like, okay.
But people text a lot of things in all kinds of states.
People's text messages get stolen.
They get rearranged.
They get turned into black propaganda.
They get, I mean, you know, show me the man's cell phone and I'll show you the crime, right?
I mean, there's lots of examples of this that one could do.
It should be noted that he has not denied these allegations.
He has not denied it, and he has apologized for it.
That's a good response to have, because if you have an allegation like this, your first instinct and a correct instinct is to deny it.
Just outright deny it.
He didn't deny it.
He apologized for text messages in general.
And in particular, he said that there are many instances of things being manufactured or made up.
I mean, he did make that clear.
Now, again, I'm not defending him.
He's not a friend of mine.
I've maybe met him twice in real life.
And just to be clear about this, I did warn the FBI about him many years ago.
So I'll get into that sort of side plot in a second.
I told Ali, many years ago, he felt he was being targeted by foreign intelligence in D.C. And he freaked out.
I've never seen somebody more scared in my life.
We FaceTimed.
He was sweating.
He was very disturbed, like he'd been chased or something.
And I told him to go to the FBI.
He said that he would.
I later found out that he did not go to the FBI in any meaningful way.
Then, during the whole January 6th matter, the FBI asked me about Ali.
I explained some of the stuff I've told you guys here.
I've explained other things that I sort of saw and things around him.
The FBI set a meeting to go meet me down in Waco, Texas at the time I was living in the Woodlands, Texas.
I drove there, was ready for the meet, and then the FBI agent, who was not the main FBI agent I knew, canceled the meeting.
The meeting at like the 11th hour.
What I've been told is that Ali has been extremely helpful in identifying a lot of these foreign intelligence networks to the FBI over the last, basically since January 6th, that he's basically gone informant.
So therefore, the attacks on Ali, you know, by a Marjorie, by a Milo Yiannopoulos, in my estimation, They are using a true thing, a disgusting true thing for that matter, maybe even a criminal true thing,
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