Peter Jukes
@peterjukes
- The effect of Mercer funding - of both Young Americas Foundation and Young Britons foundation - shows the three pronged strategy of Steve Bannon's influence on both #Brexit and #Trump
- The first strategy is the Tea Party style insurrection from the right. (Kassam and Farage were inspired to invent their own British Tea Party until they realised that it was a rebellion against the Brits)
- Just like the Tea Party in the US, the YBF and Conservative Way Forward organised its own slate of councillors, aldermen and MPs which it lavished with attention, online dirty tricks and activism
- This was aided by endless spuriously funded Astro turfed campaigns and think tanks both sides of the Atlantic, and a dedication to trolling new media outlets like Breitbart or Fawkes.
- Students of course were a key target, and they were leveraged - as we say in the Tory bullying scandal - to provide incentives for middle aged MPs, and plenty of Kompromat
- But the other key tactic, apart from entryism, was a divide and rule attitude to other splitting up parties. The Republicans greatest fear was Trump running as a independent. In the UK, it became UKIP
- Key members of the YBF went over to UKIP, including Raheem Kassam and Matt Richardson, around 2013, after Bannon attended the 10th YBF anniversary
- This disruptive right flank attack was well thought out, and clearly approved of by key members who stayed within the Conservative Party, like Matt Elliott. It gave YBF alumni a classic pincer movement on moderate Tories.
- And just as Trump is 'talking' to Putin during the Miss Universe contest in 2013, so too many YBF members make visits to Moscow, often via the Conservative Friends of Russia group, closed down because of espionage concerns
10. With many of the YBF execs - particularly Matt Richardson and Matt Elliott - there was an early realisation fo the power of digital campaigning around this time or earlier.
11. And this is where things really converge, quite apart from the Bannon/Kassam/Farage love in. The use of Cambridge Analytica, the Mercer owned electoral machine, which included Bannon and Flynn as advisors
12. Despite ostensibly belonging to different parties Richardson to UKIP and Elliott to the Conservatives): despite helping to run different campaigns, Vote Leave and Leave EU, both Matt's used the services of Cambridge Analytica or its subsidiaries
13. So the first two prongs, entryism and 'splitting', from these Mercer backed groups, are finally turbo charged with Breitbart propaganda combined with weaponised dark ads from Mercer's analytics firm
14. So the much vaunted antipathy between Vote Leave and Leave.EU is surface only: they have the same mentors, funders, personnel, dark money and digital campaigning. They were the same project all along.
15. Two things remain unclear to date: why was Cambridge Analytica repeatedly offering help to Julian Assange over Russian hacked emails? And how deep do those Russian connections go with #Brexit?
16. However, there's little doubt that the Russian colonisation of UKIP really does begin soon after Farage becomes friends with Bannon in 2012 who then recruits Kassam to Breitbart
17. First there was the research work by 'dissident' Pavel Stroilov, the mysterious Zatutliviter case involving Arron Banks Russian wife, the expelled 'agent' Sergey Nalodin, and finally, in 2013 - Farage meets Ambassador Yakovenko, and gets regular RT spots
18. It's around then in 2013 Farage goes in to full Putin fan boy mode. But why? What was the quid pro quo?
twitter.com/peterjukes/status/938255663385464832
- But for all the Putinophilia, don't forget the real origin of this: Farage's friendship with Bannon - a man he admired so much he gave Bannon a painting depicting him as Napoleon
- The other Russia connections, like Dana Rohrabacher, prove the wider point. This whole scandal is created by the alliance between dark money in both US and Russia twitter.com/peterjukes/status/889240443166363654
- Sometimes there's an ideological alliance over 'nationism' or white supremacy, climate change, gun control, illiberalism or libertarianism, but two things never change in this YAF/YBF spawned takeover of classic conservatism.
- Dark money and deep data - these two consistent threads which link back to Mercer's RenTech: and even to former YBF President Dan Hannan's praise for the 'blue eye sheikhs' of Iceland banking before the crash.
- And paradoxically - by following the data and the money - US law enforcement is wrapping up and neutralising a large part of this network. However, no one has begun this process in the UK.