How one of America’s premier data monarchs is funding a global information war and shaping the media landscape
Through
his purchase of influence over the daily flow of information to
American media consumers, a dizzying array of connections to the
national security state, and a media empire that shields him from
critical scrutiny, Pierre Omidyar has become one of the world’s
most politically sophisticated data monarchs.
by
Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal
Part
3 - Reviving the neoconservative movement’s banner publication
In
November 2018, news arrived that Omidyar had invested no less than
$600,000 through his Democracy Fund into neoconservative granddaddy
Bill Kristol’s Defending Democracy Together. The seemingly
strange alliance of the funder of an outlet known for its exposés of
national security state abuses with one of the national security
state’s most hardline enforcers was covered almost exclusively by
right-wing media, with near-total radar silence from the world of
progressive online media.
Omidyar’s
support for Kristol’s ventures dated back to at least 2017, when
his Democracy Fund quietly funneled $300,000 into the Alliance for
Securing Democracy. Overseen by the neoconservative Kristol
protege, Jamie Fly, this initiative hyped the phantom threat of
Russian bots through its Hamilton 68 dashboard. The dubious
Omidyar-backed tool claimed to track Russian active measures on
social media, but actually did no such thing and refused to even name
the supposed bot accounts it was purportedly tracking. The
Alliance for Securing Democracy nonetheless
played a pivotal role in driving public fear and loathing of Russia
by generating reams of articles and statements by prominent lawmakers
about the role of Kremlin-controlled Twitter bots.
Kristol
was best known for publishing the Weekly Standard, the
neoconservative movement’s banner publication. He was also
co-author of the initial letter of the notorious Project for a New
American Century (PNAC). This post-Cold War umbrella group united
neoconservatives and liberal interventionists into a coalition that
laid the political groundwork for the invasion and occupation of
Iraq. In 2008, Kristol was panned for his role in shopping Sarah
Palin to John McCain as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee,
setting up a fiasco that helped elect Barack Obama as president. That
same year, he rebranded PNAC as the Foreign Policy
Initiative (FPI), hoping to summon what he called a “war
weary” post-Iraq American public with a pro-war
“rallying.”
Since
the election of Trump, Kristol has engaged in a personal rebranding
campaign, organizing the “Never Trump” movement of neocons and
establishment Republicans into an alliance of convenience with angry
Democrats. Kristol has found a perfect vehicle for the rehabilitation
of his image at MSNBC, where he has appeared several times a week,
and most recently in contrived buddy comedy-style segments with Fat
Joe, the washed-up rapper, and “The Beat” host Ari Melber. The
three were recently filmed bobbing their heads to hip-hop and
bantering in a limo as they rolled through Manhattan. Reflecting on
the experience, a visibly enthralled Melber hailed the unreformed
militarist as “Woke Bill Kristol.”
Having
been koshered in the eyes of anti-Trump liberals, Kristol had all the
political space he needed to launch his new magazine, The Bulwark,
which he listed as a “project of the Defending Democracy
Together Institute.” And thanks to Omidyar, Kristol also had a
solid base of funding for the new project.
To
oversee the day-to-day operations of The Bulwark, Kristol
turned to a veteran conservative pundit and operative, Charlie Sykes,
hiring him as the magazine’s editor-in-chief. Kristol will serve as
editor-at-large at the new venture, and at least half a dozen
retreads from The Weekly Standard are slated to join the
project.
The
Bulwark fundraised about $1 million for its revamping, according
to CNN. It isn’t clear who that money came from, but a statement
from Sykes hints that appeals were made to anti-Trump mega-donors
such as Omidyar. “As far as I’m concerned, we are not going to
get any Russian or Saudi money, so we are going to have to hope to
get support from donors across the country and political spectrum who
are willing to put country over party,” he said.
“The
Bulwark was an aggregator,” Sykes told CNN in a recent
interview. “We are going to turn it into a full-fledged opinion
news website, with really the core digital staff of The Weekly
Standard.”
Sykes
was a longtime operative of the right-wing Bradley Foundation,
a major pipeline of conservative movement funding that once awarded
Charles Murray $250,000. Murray co-authored the book The Bell
Curve, which relied on bunk race science to claim that whites and
Asians are genetically superior to people of African and
Latin-American descent. Bradley Foundation President and CEO
Michael Grebe said that the money was awarded to Murray in order to
“recognize distinguished conservatives that we feel have made
outstanding achievements that are consistent with our mission.”
Based in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Bradley Foundation propelled the
union-busting efforts of the state’s former Republican governor,
Scott Walker. After Walker gutted collective bargaining laws, Sykes
worked to export the Bradley Foundation model, recruiting
“pro-freedom” cadres to run for local elections and ram through
privatization schemes across Wisconsin. The right-wing push focused
heavily on academia, planting conservative pundits in public
universities to present “alternative views and findings,”
then spinning their work out to the public as credentialed research.
Currently,
Sykes sits on the advisory board of the “Committee to Investigate
Russia” alongside a de facto spook retirement community comprised
of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, former Acting Director of
the CIA Michael Morell, and ex-CIA Directors Leon Panetta and Michael
Hayden.
Actor
Rob Reiner and neocon pundit David Frum have functioned as the public
faces of the organization, pumping up a new Cold War on cable news
and in online media.
A
grand total of zero Russia experts have been involved with the
Committee to Investigate Russia. Instead, the
group has relied on cranks like Molly McKew, a former foreign
lobbyist who has made the rounds in mainstream media with
inflammatory and demonstrably false charges, such as that Mexican
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is compromised by the
Russians and that Russia has a policy to nuke its own population. The
faux committee is best known for an unhinged public-service
announcement featuring Morgan Freeman — the actor who assumed the
role of God in the film, Bruce Almighty — soberly warning Americans
that we “are at war” with Russia.
Kristol’s
Defending Democracy Together has supplemented these propaganda
efforts to cultivate Cold War fever among the public, leveraging
Omidyar’s money into online initiatives like The Russia Tweets
and Republicans Against Putin.
While
Omidyar helps revitalize the neocons, he has invested in a Democratic
operative who sought to weaponize what he called “Russian-style”
tactics of disinformation against American citizens.
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