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I would like to eat my words for an earlier post I made in response to @grognard. Apologies if this does not belong in a top level post but I'm not sure where to put it. I believe it does deserve its own post as a general commentary on the credibility of people on the internet.
I was extremely confident that this twitter post was posted by a disinformation, grift, or bot account. But it seems highly likely that this account is who he says he is, and has the credentials claimed.
After some google searching, I found a Facebook account under the same name, listing Army SF credentials with more specific details. I also found that account commenting on army related posts from around a decade ago. To tie that Facebook to the Twitter, going back to older Twitter posts I see posts from years ago referencing disc golf and jiu jitsu, both of which are found on his Facebook. The profile picture is similar enough though I'm not good at analyzing faces. Eric's public Facebook is mostly political posts similar to the Twitter, but is tagged in several posts from other local people who have not made political posts.
If this is a fake account, they played the looooooong game. So given the unlikeliness of that, I believe that it's highly likely that this twitter account is who he says he is and has special forces experience. I won't share the details to protect privacy but if you really want to it wouldn't be hard to dig up the same info.
So i guess the moral of the story is, maybe believe people when they say something, especially if it's been boosted by smart or influential people, since hopefully someone else out there has done their due diligence. Or at least don't dismiss them immediately at first glance. (I'm still triggered from when Nate Silver posted a link to a fake article) I'm also wondering if this is the first "real" entirely AI written piece to truly go viral and break out into the mainstream. I'm not aware of this happening before, though maybe it has. And goshdarnit I really, really, hate people who dump a huge wall of chatgpt because you have no idea what they were actually trying to say.
I think that the Twitter poster's use of military jargon is doing a lot of heavy lifting in his argument. Here is his key claim about what the anti-ICE forces are doing:
Let's break it down:
I don't know how Signal works, so I'll leave this one without comment.
I mean yeah, this is just specialization of labor, well-understood by humans for many thousands of years. Pretty much anyone who has been on a sports team or has had a job understands the idea of having different members of the organization focus on what they're good at.
This can just mean "some people are sitting around watching the feds and telling each other online where the feds are and how many of them there are, and there are enough such people that at least some of them are active at any time of day or night".
I don't know what a chat rotation is, but regularly deleting your data is the kind of thing that plenty of tech-savvy people would think to do, and would also recommend to others. And there is usually no shortage of tech-savvy people in large political movements in the US.
I mean, I should hope so. You don't have to be a military professional to figure out that this is a good idea.
Well yeah, of course sympathetic locals are going to help. That kind of goes without saying.
"People meet at each other's houses to discuss what is happening and plan further steps". I mean, yeah? Of course they do.
Yeah, most of them have cars. It's pretty easy for them to get around.
I think the Twitter poster's point is that these anti-ICE protests are being widely represented in the popular media as spontaneous grassroots affairs, when in fact they are much more organised and coordinated than that. Do spontaneous grassroots protests organically converge on "specialisation of labour", vetting the people attending the protest, purging chat history so there's no digital paper trail? Not in my experience. If his assessment of how these protests are being organised and coordinated is accurate (and you aren't disputing that it is, merely that the fact that they are is worthy of comment), they sound materially different from a great many leftist protest movements, many of which inevitably degenerate into directionless rioting and/or People's Front of Judea/Judean People's Front squabbling.
The Twitter poster's point, whether he is flesh and blood in realspace or bundle of bits in cyperspace, is that the right wing has absolutely nothing comparable. Leftoids organize and fight, rightoids are trusting the plan, polishing their guns and waiting for big boog.
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Sounds like you're not actually disputing any of his observations, as much as trying to dismiss their relevance to the conclusion because they individually make sense as tools.
Which is how most professional military, and paramilitary, things turn out to work when broke down into individual components. There are no magical secret ninja techniques to running a military, or an insurgency. At its heart, it's all a combination of individually simple, logical concepts that make sense with just a bid of explanation. It does not require a college degree, not least because they are often constructed to be executed by people without such credentials.
And yet, there remains a wide gulf between professional/competent organizations and those that fumble about. A large part of that comes from not only having the drive to actually make sure everything that needs to be done gets done, but also knowing the scope of things that needs to get done for a specific ends, and how to organize the allocation of tasks of develop those particular means, as opposed to getting drawn into irrelevant rabbit holes. That is where the indication of exceptional understanding, and deliberate intent, comes in.
So when you say things like this-
In response to this-
That the [specialization of labor] is developing a shared database, which entails a host of specialized efforts, and developing specialized reconnaissance efforts for the deliberate purpose of the database, which entails a host of allocation decisions, is far more important than the presence of [specialization of labor]. [Specialization of labor] is a means, not a reason, to develop such a database.
'Just specialization of labor' could be found anywhere, in any protest movement. Not any given protest movement has a reason to develop the means to build vehicle databases of law enforcement agencies. Even fewer have a need to develop such a database for the purpose of establishing real-time tracking networks of law enforcement agencies in the process of their work. Even fewer yet have a legal basis to use said real-time tracking networks for the purpose of targeting law enforcement agencies in the middle of their activities with the intent of disrupting those activities.
And because these reasons, needs, and basis are so rare, all the steps and sub-steps required to do them are not obvious common knowledge. They are not obvious common knowledge for people even when they intend to disrupt ongoing law enforcement agencies. The insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan underwent darwinian evolution to such collections of both deliberate targetting and operational security precisely because all the required elements were not inherently obvious to the people who got taken out.
In turn, we know that Americans don't know all these techniques either. You yourself admit to not recognizing the implications of signal chat caps or the call rotations. We have various Americans openly publishing their participation and crowdfunding off of it, which both the funders and fundees would recognize as a terrible idea if they actually cared about the OPSEC. Protestors are consistently inconsistent about whether they need face masks to protect their identity or not. They are not subject to darwinian organizational evolution.
These are not the people who know the various insurgency mechanics to start building into the organizing infrastructure. They do not know the 'sensible' things, or the importance of enforcing it with regularity, or the longer why's behind various guidance. They merely fall into the architecture that was set up for the purpose.
That architecture, in turn, required both specialized knowledge, and intent. No one 'accidentally' develops a government license plate tracking network. That the people who have are coincidentally cribbing from insurgency network practices is, as the tweet says, concerning.
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Regrettable, how the idea of a well-organized militia of private citizens is now so demonized. Civilian self-organization and initiative used to be the big selling points of the American way of life. I guess the US has grown used to dealing with either inept drama queens or actual enemy state actors (or propping up "organic resistance" themselves).
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It's entirely possible and in fact extremely likely he's who he really is and it's still disinformation/grift. There's selection bias here, if 95 of 100 Army SF people are reasonable and epistemically virtuous, 4 in 100 are a bit crazy but don't post on social media, and 1 decides to go all out telling ChatGPT to add color to their uninformed speculation and post it on twitter, you'll only see the 1.
There's a big difference between an unhinged boomer's rant, grifting, and state sponsored disinformation. All three have their danger in different ways, but I definitely misidentified this one initially.
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That guy had an interesting interview on Rumble talking about identifying this as an insurgency. (Starts at 35:30 or so)
Edit: "Your average person on the street doesn't know how to do this. There has to be a cadre teaching them."
Protestors in Australia have been organising into role-based teams for years. These guys, for example: https://disruptlandforces.org/our-commitment/
They had spotters, volunteers to be arrested, financing to get their legal fees paid for, organisers, logistics people who were caching immobile vehicles that were later used to block traffic, "legal observers", medics etc. They rented a nearby location to use as a base and store supplies like water, banners, paint, etc.
Their spotters were going around the facility working out if they could infiltrate it or cause mischief for the attendees. There are rumours they even paid for a stall inside under a false business name and were going to use their lanyards/business credentials to get in and set off fire alarms or flares etc.
So I disagree with the implication that you need shadowy influencers teaching this behaviour. You can have 15 lefties sitting around, playing "war" for a few weekends, who will work most of this out. The Disrupt Land Forces crew had "professional grievance collectors"/"Professional protestors" consulting with them and running training. These guys weren't exactly ex-NKVD assets or anything. Just people who had been going to protests for 20 years and had an idea of how to disrupt police operations for these events.
This kind of tracks. There's a floating body of knowledge that gets spread around left wing direct action organisations and its likely organically evolved over decades. Activists wear different hats depending on the protest of the week and which 'organisation' is best assigned to it. Being nebulous is part of their playbook.
It does make sense that there would be an interest by rival foreign powers to fund and support activist infrastructure in Western countries, but an incentive doesn't necessarily dictate that it is omni-prevalent.
I do think security services should investigate though. If I was the FBI I'd create a task force that includes ex-Green Berets and CIA SAD 'color revolution specialists' and go digging if they haven't already. If its American citizens acting autonomously, then fine, but if there are foreign agitators then pull them out root and stem.
We did in Australia and as I said in another comment, it wasn't so much former Iraqi tortures or NKVD agents. Just 55 year old women and 60 year old men who had been living off their fruitstall money in the NSW hinterlands for 20 years and attending protests as their "job".
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What do you mean, those are the shadowy influencers teaching this behavior!
a) Normal people don't have time to do this shit for 20 years. They are almost certainly sponsored by someone top-down.
b) If they were ex-NKVD, how would you know?
There are tens of millions of adults in the United States who are either completely unemployed or work part-time, and are not students.
The overwhelming majority most of them are that way due to some form of a dysfunction, or at best, because they have dependents to take care of. They're not going to be managing dispatches and databases.
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Lol true. I thought the WO was implying that an e.g. foreign expert in insurgencies was teaching them. Not the 55 year old grievance collector in this case.
The two people who were the defacto leaders have been doing these kinds of protests for decades while living on basically environmentally neutral hippie compounds out in rural australia. They're not normal, they're not "sponsored', they just do this kind of bullshit because they really like to.
We checked and you'd need to take my word.
These groups do think of themselves as insurgents against authorities. But I'm just saying the temperature of the message should be read a lot cooler than "and this is now Fallujah".
They're still comprised mostly of cringe, unemployed, lefties.
Hold on there, just how many Australian state operatives are hanging out over here?
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It definitely has that chatgpt voice, which is suspicious enough that I have trouble skimming through all of it. To be charitable, maybe he learned to write from chatgpt, or maybe it was proofread/rephrased by the LLM (I have noticed LLMs getting more aggressive at "proofreading" my writing nowadays. It is getting harder to ask for only minor edits.)
I am highly confident that every single token in that output went through chatgpt and there are literally zero words that were typed manually directly into the output.
Not sure how much human stuff went into chatgpt, or how much the output was reviewed.
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...or maybe ChatGPT learned to write from him?
Zero chance a boomer in the army wrote like this before the chatgpt era.
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You know, that tweet actually gives me a lot of hope. Without assuming intent, Trump is currently in a position where he has the power to create clients (instituting broad tariffs, but then making carveouts for just the companies that agree to bend the knee; going after illegal immigrants, but only in the places and workplaces that are politically opposed to him), and the cultural conditions around ICE's formation make it a force intrinsically predisposed to become his personal army (he got them a massive increase in funding, he got them their massive signing bonuses, and they're very aware that maintaining those things requires keeping his opponents out of power.) I'm therefore heartened to see the formation of a unified, counterbalancing force. I thought the blue tribe was too limp-wristed and fractious to ever gather the hard power required to physically (as opposed to memetically) counter the tribe of the 2nd amendment, but I'm glad to be wrong. I would obviously prefer that both sides disarm, but I'm sure that's impossible because-- among other reasons-- people are going to reply to me arguing that Trump is responding to some n-2 step on the escalation ladder and disarmament would necessarily require the blue tribe to not just disband their current militias, but also willingly bring into effect exactly the kind of deportation actions the current militia is trying to prevent.
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