Thread by @propornot

THREAD: There's a small but telling detail in Mueller's new indictment of the #12Russians.

It mentions "Alice Donovan", a GRU persona that also published articles in the old far-left magazine Counterpunch... Which we highlighted as a Russian propaganda outlet in Nov 2016. /1

The @washingtonpost previously reported, on Christmas 2017, that the GRU was creating entirely fake "journalist" personas to pitch propaganda articles at credulous/complicit useful idiots & assets in the US.

It mentioned "Alice Donovan" as an example. /2 washingtonpost.com/world/national…

Till now, the public didn't know that Russian military intelligence created the "DCLeaks" Facebook page using the EXACT SAME FAKE-JOURNALIST PERSONA they were using to feed propaganda to horseshoe-bottom outlets like @NatCounterPunch... But now we know. /3 washingtonpost.com/world/national…

Note how this technique - Russia creating entirely fake "journalists" to pitch articles to credulous/complicit useful idiots & assets in the US - has not been extensively discussed in Congressional hearings, Facebook/Twitter's Russian propaganda audience counts, etc. /4

Any measure the scale of Russian propaganda's audience in the US would have to include the hits on articles supposedly written by "Alice Donovan", a fake-journalist persona created by Russian spy-propagandists. Here's some of their work here: /5 muckrack.com/alice-donovan/…

Russia's attack is ongoing, & much bigger than just Internet Research Agency-style troll farms (plural) running fake accounts, which Facebook/Twitter/Google/etc have tried to focus on as narrowly as possible.

Here's fake-"Alice"'s Twitter - it's still up: @_alicedonovan_ /6

Russian intel often plants articles in outlets they consider "friendly", so Russian propaganda's use of "anti-war", extremist, & conspiracy outlets like @NatCounterPunch & @WeAreChangeNYC makes sense: They're effectively Kremlin mouthpieces already. This is just more content. /7

In light of their blithely publishing articles by a Russian propaganda fake persona (let's call it "Alice Donovan-gate"), the outrage (OUTRAGE!) of @NatCounterPunch abt "McCarthyism" is especially hilarious in retrospect - they doth protest too much 😆 /8 counterpunch.org/2017/01/13/the…

We would also like to take this moment to relish the extent to which @NatCounterPunch hates us, here at PropOrNot 😇 They have written at least 24 articles about how mad they are at us for correctly saying they're acting as propagandists for Russia: /9 google.com/search?q=site%…

There's more to the story, though! Over a year ago we had a very interesting & seemingly-respectful exchange of emails abt this with @joshua__frank, managing editor of @NatCounterPunch. In an act of preemptive good faith, we removed them from our List. They're going back on. /10

Their response to getting caught "accidentally" spreading propaganda for the GRU was impressive: One of their writers promptly went on (where else?) Sputnik Radio, to, uh, tell their (whose?) side of the story 🤣

Can you believe these people!? 🇷🇺💩 /11

https://twitter.com/ThePolemicist_/status/945730067048681473

Even now, after everything, they STILL haven't actually admitted they got caught spreading propaganda for the GRU. Instead they just tried to muddy the water & cover it up, by deleting all of "Alice's" articles & writing a mealy-mouth excuse-a-palooza /12 counterpunch.org/2018/01/05/gho…

Instructively, this Alice-Donvan-gate episode inspired Putin's shills across the board to HILARIOUS new heights of mental gymnastics 😆

For example, Justin here heads "Antiwar" (.com), which was founded to support Russia's Serbian proxies in the 90s. /13

https://twitter.com/JustinRaimondo/status/945701875273277441

We took no end of criticism from all kinds of people, because we correctly called out Counterpunch for doing exactly what they were doing.

The headline of this article is: "No, Russian Agents Are Not Behind Every Piece of Fake News You See", here: fortune.com/2016/11/25/rus… 😆 /14

We also took criticism from people who REALLY should know better...

It's time for our critics to do a harsh reassessment of how exactly we got it right, while they so completely underestimated the scale of the threat - & if they don't, for others to do one of them, for them. /15

Some people, like Adrian Chen (@AdrianChen) at the New Yorker, were in a very good position to assess the larger scale of the threat - but they just... Didn't. They failed.

There's a lesson in that. Will they learn from their mistakes? The onus is on them. Time will tell. /16

Alice-Donovan-gate raises some significant questions:

1) How many other entirely-fake Russian-propaganda "journalists" do outlets like @NatCounterPunch publish?
2) Why do they think Russia found such fertile ground with them?
3) When can we expect a formal apology? 😇 /17

There's MUCH more to come on all this. What we are seeing, as with the Congressional hearings on Russian propaganda's use of Facebook & Twitter, are just tips of a MUCH larger propaganda (& espionage) iceberg.

There's been a LOT of collusion. /18 nymag.com/daily/intellig…

For example, Counterpunch (that "respectable left-leaning publication") was co-founded by noted Soviet asset Alexander Cockburn, whose dad literally worked for the NKVD back in the 1920s, & betrayed the Spanish Revolution for Stalin's brutal regime. /19 usefulstooges.com/tag/alexander-…

Anybody who has been naughty, & wishes this story would "just go away", is going to have a terrible 2018, & a terrible 21st century... Because this is just getting started.

For genuine patriots, across the political spectrum, though - it's going to be nice. 😎❤️🇺🇸 /END