Astroturfing MAGA

In their 2006 book, The Shadow Party, David Horowitz and Richard Poe penned the following insight on the structure of astroturf revolutions:

In a 1957 tract, Czech Communist Party theoretician Jan Kozák explained how a small number of communists managed to gain power in Czechoslovakia through parliamentary maneuvers. The trick was to exert pressure for radical change from two directions simultaneously—from the upper levels of government and from provocateurs in the streets. Kozák called this tactic “pressure from above and below.”

One way to exert “pressure from below,” as Kozák explained, was to fill the streets with rioters, strikers and protesters, thus creating the illusion of a widespread clamor for change from the grassroots. Radicals in the government would then exert “pressure from above,” enacting new laws on the pretext of appeasing the protesters in the street—even though the protesters (or at least their leaders) were themselves part of the plot. The majority of the people would have no idea what was going on. Squeezed from “above” and “below,” most would sink into apathy and despair, believing they were hopelessly outnumbered by the radicals—even though they were not. Thus could a radical minority impose its will on a moderate majority, even under a democratic, parliamentary system.

The purpose of that book was to expose the close relationship between Democratic financier George Soros—and his army of lavishly funded radicals—and the camp of Hillary Clinton, whom the authors expected to win the presidency in 2008. Barack Obama won instead, but he went on to inscribe the program described by Horowitz and Poe into the Democratic Party’s political DNA.

Countless times over the past decade, from the initial Black Lives Matter protests of 2015 to the “racial reckoning” of 2020 to the Gaza protests of last spring and summer, we’ve seen a version of this pincer tactic, in which activists posing as representatives of an illusory mass movement demanded changes from “below” that would then be granted from “above” by ideologically sympathetic politicians and other authority figures. Often, if you scratched the surface, it turned out that the activists and politicians were funded by the same people.

The analogy to the contemporary right is inexact; 2016 fever dreams of Matthew Yglesias aside, there are no MAGA mobs roaming the streets hunting for minorities and demanding that Donald Trump implement new Nuremberg Laws. But let’s accept, as a thought experiment, the idea that social media is the “new public square.” If that is true, then who might be deployed to create “the illusion of a widespread clamor for change from the grassroots,” with the implicit backing of figures at the top?

Rhetorical question. Entirely unrelated, here’s a collage of screenshots from Saturday morning, following the publication of a strange story in The Washington Post—famous for its trustworthy and disinterested reporting on Trumpworld palace intrigue—alleging that former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was ousted for “operating hand in glove with the Israelis,” engaging in “intense coordination” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Iran, and working to “subvert” Trump’s foreign policy on behalf of “another country,” per a handful of unnamed administration officials:

Now, one could note that the Post story doesn’t make much sense. One of the paper’s own sources dismissed the idea that Waltz was given the boot for Iran-related policy reasons, echoing reporting from Axios’ Marc Caputo that this was a “vibes”-based personnel decision—a claim strengthened by the fact that Waltz’s replacement as NSA, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is another Iran hawk. In our one unvarnished look into the Trump administration’s internal communications about foreign policy, the leaked Signal chat from March, it was Waltz, along with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who pushed to implement Trump’s decision to strike the Houthis, while Vice President J.D. Vance and a staffer for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard argued that the president was making a “mistake.” Netanyahu’s office, for its part, has issued a public denial that it had “intensive contact” with Waltz.

Instead, I’ll simply observe that there is nothing suspicious at all about the real-time convergence of messaging about the Post story from two blue-check MAGA influencers, a left-wing antizionist news outlet with a mysterious Rolodex of White House “sources” that just published a friendly interview with a member of the Hamas Politburo, and Trita Parsi, the Iran lobbyist who now serves as executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, part of the Koch foreign policy network that has supplied a number of high-profile “restrainers” to Trump’s Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

I also feel confident that this totally organic messaging campaign has nothing whatsoever to do with this upcoming panel at the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha later this month:

For those of our readers inclined to paranoia, it is completely unremarkable that Don Jr. is preparing to give a talk in Qatar on “monetizing MAGA” with his “partner” Omeed Malik, the “lifelong Democrat” who is the main financial backer of Don Jr.’s good friend Tucker Carlson, who recently interviewed the Emir of Qatar to the effect that the Zionists are attempting to engineer a regime-change war with Iran. Nor does it seem at all strange to us that Malik’s former “representative” Garrett Ventry is getting paid $1 million per year for PR services by the International Media Office of the State of Qatar. Come to think of it, it’s also perfectly normal that Malik somehow amassed enough money to start his own “merchant bank,” buy into The Daily Caller, float Tulsi Gabbard’s 2020 presidential campaign, launch a venture capital firm with the president’s son, and become Carlson’s sugar daddy, despite reportedly making less than $500,000 per year at the time he was fired from Bank of America in 2018, which is coincidentally right around the time that the Qataris made a major play to buy into Trumpworld. Speaking of which, here’s the website for Malik’s “merchant bank,” Farvahar Partners (i.e. Malik and two other guys):

Again, this is all just normal, conservative, MAGA stuff here—and exactly what Americans voted for last November. In fact, it’s all so normal that I forget what I was talking about at the beginning of this article.

Oh well. If it’s important, it’ll probably come back to me at some point.