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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.
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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