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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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