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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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