General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRepublican from Texas fighting alongside the Russians and filming propaganda videos for them
Link to tweet
MeidasTouch.com
@MeidasTouch
Heres a Republican from Texas fighting alongside the Russians and filming propaganda videos for them. This is treason.
Borzou Daragahi 🖊🗒
@borzou
Just a good ol boy apparently embedded with Russian forces in Ukraine
Embedded video
4:32 PM · Feb 28, 2022
d_b
(7,462 posts)Link to tweet
?s=21
Probatim
(2,502 posts)I can't take credit for Meal Team 6. Saw/read it enough during 1/6.
Faux pas
(14,645 posts)That's all I've got except for
C_U_L8R
(44,990 posts)Fucking traitor to humanity.
JoanofArgh
(14,971 posts)MLAA
(17,252 posts)hippywife
(22,767 posts)LisaL
(44,972 posts)NT
Baked Potato
(7,733 posts)icymist
(15,888 posts)Celerity
(43,128 posts)https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/son-wealthy-businessman-foot-soldier-vladimir-putin-russia-hacking/
At first, Russell Bonner Bentley III wasnt sure he would survive the winter. It was January 2015 in Donetsk, a war-torn city in eastern Ukraine, and the 54-year-old Texan was sequestered inside an abandoned three-story brick monastery, exchanging fire with Ukrainian troops. He and the dozen men fighting with him had been braving freezing temperatures for weeks. From the second floor, Bentley trained his rocket-propelled grenade launcher and his Kalashnikov rifle out of a tiny slit in the side of the building. There was no electricity or running water, and wood-fired stoves provided the only warmth. The wind came from the south, and it would blow the smoke right back into the rooms, he recalled.
Bentley had been husky and out of shape when hed arrived a month earlier, but on a battlefield diet of tinned meat and buckwheat porridge, the weight was melting off. With bright white shoulder-length hair and clear green eyes, Bentley had a well-developed sense of his own myth. He had led something of a swashbuckling life; hed been an Army engineer based in Germany, a hard-partying musician in South Padre, a marijuana legalization activist in Minnesota and Alaska, and a drug trafficker on the run from the U.S. Marshals. In the early nineties, hed even vied for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
But nothing hed ever done compared to this. Hed been drawn into the conflict while tapping away at his laptop in early 2014. He was living in Round Rock at the time, and though Russias involvement in the fightfirst invading Crimea, a peninsula in the south of Ukraine, and then supporting pro-Russian separatists who led an uprising in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbasswas denounced across the globe, Bentley immersed himself in Russian media sources that blamed the war on U.S.-backed Nazis. He imagined the struggle as something akin to the Spanish Civil War, which had been famously portrayed by writers such as Ernest Hemingway as a fight between democracy and fascism. He began fantasizing about banding together with like-minded freedom fighters against so-called Ukrainian fascism, and months later he started planning his journey to Donetsk.
He arrived in early December 2014, and after a week he found a militia group, the Vostok Battalion, that was accepting foreign fighters. It was led by Alexander Khodakovsky, a then 42-year-old who has since been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for being responsible for or complicit in actions or policies that threaten the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine. After enlisting, he went through two weeks of rudimentary military training and then settled into a unit called Sut Vremeni, or Essence of Time, a Stalinist communist movement. When he was asked to select his nom de guerre, Bentley, a fourth-generation Texan, anointed himself Texas, pronounced in Russian like the Spanish Tejas.
snip
Haveadream
(1,630 posts)Thank you for posting it.
Especially interesting is the part of the article that discusses Russia's favorite non-military weapon: Propaganda, outright lies, distortions of truth, rewriting history, blaming victims, and the creation and exploitation of divisions to confuse and destabilize enemies so they ultimately turn on themselves. Putin's been busy sowing discontent in the US for nearly twenty years and, as evidenced by the proliferation of RWNJs into the mainstream, it unfortunately works. I love the cyber counter measures we have been taking against Putin during the current crisis because he has for too long been the bully of that particular playground.
From the article. "War of the Words: Meet the Texan Trolling for Putin":
Though Moscow has been transmitting propaganda and dezinformatsiya, or disinformation, since the Soviets came to power in 1922, the propagandas tenor and volume have sharpened and increased over the past decade. At a NATO summit in Wales in September 2014, U.S. general Philip Breedlove described Russias actions as the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare.
The Russian propaganda campaign employs what political scientists from the nonpartisan RAND Corporation have termed the firehose of falsehood model: basically, an overwhelming number of half-truths and outright lies are spewed across a dizzying array of media channels. The goal is to sow confusion and exploit existing rifts inside Western democracies. And in 2008, around the time that Russia began refining this new model of disinformation warfare, there was plenty of internal unrest to exploit.
The Great Recession had given rise to political upheaval across the West. In the U.S., demonstrators protested near Wall Street when investment banks were bailed out after causing the economy to tank, and the populist anger spawned movements as varied as Occupy Wall Street and the tea party. In turn, the Russian propaganda machine exploited unsettling questions about economic inequality, globalization, and free trade. RT, the Kremlins biggest foreign-facing megaphone (founded in 2005 to, in Putins words, try to break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams), offered wall-to-wall coverage of the Occupy movement. The channels editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, later characterized this coverage as information warfare meant to propagate discontent in the U.S.
RT and others seized on the global migrant crisis to cultivate fears about security and identity. The Internet Research Agency, for example, created a Facebook page called The Heart of Texas to promote Texas secession, and it accumulated more than 225,000 fans before it was shut down late last summer. In May 2016 the group organized a rally outside a Houston mosque called Stop Islamization of Texas. Another troll-operated Facebook page, the United Muslims of America, was used to organize a simultaneous counterprotest. What neither side could have known is that Russian trolls were encouraging both sides to battle in the streets and create division between real Americans, Senator Richard Burr said at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last November. Even now the American public is only beginning to grapple with the scope and effectiveness of the Russian campaignand the extent to which people like Bentley are unwittingly drawn in.
Irish_Dem
(46,553 posts)If they want to be Putin's puppet, they should live under Putin.
See how they like it.
TomSlick
(11,088 posts)does not meet the constitutional definition of treason.
I don't know of any criminal statute being violated but I wouldn't want this POS living near me. His momma must be so proud.
Wingus Dingus
(8,052 posts)sinkingfeeling
(51,438 posts)Renew Deal
(81,847 posts)Because he will live in prison if he ends up back in the US.