🌱THERE ARE PLANTS - Part 1🌱

Research into the modern online propaganda ecosystem

Yesterday on Side Scrollers Podcast I was asked if I had names of people who are “plants”, ie., influencers and creators who are recruited by state-funded orgs or PACs and used to push out agendas. The reason I didn’t name them on the spot is because I didn’t want to derail the conversation on this incredibly complex topic. I have done a lot of research on this subject and have named many of these individuals in the process.

What we are looking at here is not just a couple of creators paid to push DEI; it’s an entire propaganda ecosystem with many layers and a wide range of participation levels. On one end may be a for-profit “counter-messaging” podcast set up to try to divert audiences away from problem communities targeted by DHS. On another end may be a DEI nonprofit which reaches out to small communities on gaming platforms and offers some kind of unpaid affiliation to build their associated network.

I want to be very clear that I don’t support harassing anyone, especially not small creators who get roped into these programs. I believe most of them accepted the offer with good intentions and are exercising free speech in doing so. Many of them probably don’t even realize they are part of a broader state-funded initiative, as the funding sources are often heavily obfuscated and take a lot of time and research to unpack.

However, I do STRONGLY feel there should be a legal requirement to disclose when such orgs are funded, in full or in part, by federal agencies or state-funded NGOs, and that this disclosure should extend to the individual content created by their affiliates. From a 30,000 foot view, this constitutes state sponsored propaganda and is a NET BAD for society, regardless of whether individuals and communities within that ecosystem are doing good things.

With that said, let’s take a deeper look at some examples of this ecosystem in the creator space.

NOTE: I’ve decided to put this on Substack so that you can support my research, if you find it valuable and wish to do so. I do this research in my free time and of my own free will and I am not paid to do so. Various other individuals online have taken this research and expanded on it and used it to create their own content in the process. While I don’t necessarily feel like I need to be credited (I’m just happy it’s finally getting attention), I would like for my original research to get eyes on it. I spent a very long time on this project, so if you choose to use the information, please do me the courtesy of tagging me.

Please consider subscribing to support my independent research.

1. 🌱The PERIL Plants🌱

In 2023, a CVE organization called PERIL at American University was awarded $750,000 under the DHS TVTP program to “inoculate” teens against extremism. This program is overseen by an MSNBC columnist named Cynthia Miller-Idriss. You may remember Miller-Idriss for when she was recently flamed online by Elon Musk for her article relating physical fitness to white supremacy.

The PERIL grant proposal states it will use "short form video inoculation strategies" to interrupt pathways to violent extremism, and that PERIL has teamed up Google’s Jigsaw and with a media production company called Long Story Short Media (LSS) to do this.

Link to full grant proposal

LSS Media has quite the client list: The Clinton Foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, Yahoo! News, and the CDC among others. LSS was behind the popular Spotify podcast Conspiracyland, which they made for Yahoo.

Among the target populations for the PERIL program are content creators and social media influencers who are trained in the techniques of “narrative storytelling, short-form video, and evidence-based inoculation-style scripting and production.” The grant states that it will use its “support partners" in the military and tech sectors to recruit these people, though these pages seem to be withheld from the FOIA.

Also redacted from the FOIA is the name of a YouTube influencer with 585,000 subscribers who agreed to support the project by producing content and training others.

Over on the PERIL website, we find an example of an inoculation video about the Great Replacement theory, made in collaboration between PERIL, Jigsaw and Define American media, and disseminated by large YouTube content creator, Matt Beat.

A closer look at Define American reveals it's another media group similar to LSS which specializes in “pre-bunking” immigration narratives. Beat does disclose the collaboration at the end of his video, however, the specific funding avenues are murkier.

Propaganda used to fight more propaganda. So what’s the problem? For one thing, there’s no oversight in place to ensure that these NGOs operate ethically and that their work aligns with the intent of the DHS TVTP grant program. In addition to the propaganda, such programs also serve to collect massive amounts of data from online platforms which they use to for more nefarious tasks, like:

- Training AI machines that are used by social media platforms to find and censor vaguely defined “hate speech”.

- Justifying more counter-terrorism operations targeted at specific online groups who haven't broken any laws.

- Coercing Big Tech platforms to collaborate with the federal government and NGOs to censor specific people and topics.

Look around and ask yourself if terrorism in the US is better than it was 5 years ago.

In my opinion, it hasn't. These programs, taken as a whole, serve mainly to fuel the vast online censorship machine and justify even more Congressional spending on such ineffective counter-terrorism initiatives.

2. 🌱The Incelosphere Plants🌱

TW//Suicide

This information comes from my exclusive research on government funding avenues within the incel community.  I am in the process of writing a much more extensive piece on this, so please subscribe if you’re interested in reading it.

The “incels”, a fringe subsection of the greater Manosphere, have been targeted by DHS counterterrorism operations since around 2019, when Lamarcus Small and Diego Galante founded an online forum to house the more extreme members of this group. Small currently operates the main incel account on X. I refuse to link to any of his websites here, and I encourage not to give him traffic, either.

Lamarcus Small has also operated a “sister site” in which members are encouraged to commit suicide and given the resources to do so, including by being sold poison. This forum is responsible for an obscene number of deaths, including teenagers as young as 12 years old. The suicide encouragement website has been advertised as a “final solution” to incels on Small’s forum and is currently the subject of many law enforcement investigations around the world (yeah… it’s dark).

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67082224

Around 2019 the incels were declared to be a form of “Right Wing Extremism” and thus became the subject of counter-terrorism grant funding opportunities. Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) NGOs, many funded by the DHS TVTP grant program, flocked to the community to conduct radicalization and extremism studies on the forum members. These studies were facilitated by collaborations between forum owners Galante and Small and state-funded NGOs, which raises many questions on the authenticity of both the studies and the forum itself.

Light Upon Light and the Incel Podcast

The first NGO to take up residence inside the incel forum was called Light Upon Light. The founder of that NGO was a man named Jesse Morton, formerly a prominent Al-Qaeda recruiter and propagandist in the US. In 2019, LUL infiltrated the incel forum and recruited co-founder Diego Galante as a “Shape Shifter”, the NGOs term for former extremists used for vague purposes within the organization.

Galante openly worked for LUL, which was funded in part by the DHS TVTP grant program. He even co-authored an article for Homeland Security Today magazine under the pseudonym “Alexander Ash”. Naama Kates, an ex-Hollywood actress who now hosts the Incel Podcast on Spotify, also came out as a Shape Shifter shortly after the premiere of her first episode.

The Incel Podcast did not function as counter-messaging programs normally function. It functioned as a safe space for incels who, upon being interviewed by Kates, were allowed to openly espouse their extreme and often sick ideologies with very limited pushback. It also openly advertised the incel forum run by Small and Diego, and even platformed the men to speak favorably about their sites on several occasions.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the incel community continued to grow despite being subjected to overt counter-terrorism interventions. In 2021, the New York Times released an expose in which they doxxed Small and Diego and linked them to both the incel forum and the suicide encouragement website. In response, Jesse Morton and his NGO promptly pulled out of the incel forum and left it to the wolves. Amid the backlash, the House E&C requested a briefing on the matter. The very next day, Jesse Morton was found dead in a Florida hotel room. His cause of death has never been disclosed.

Buss Labs

CVE researchers also collaborate with influencers in the “Manosphere” to advertise and recruit incel participants for their studies, which are often funded by counterterrorism agencies. I have criticized these collaborations on the basis that they drive more traffic to the incredibly exploitative incel forum, where sexually frustrated young men are provoked to violent extremism and to suicide. One such study was a collaboration between UK-based Swansea University and Buss Labs, located at the University of Texas at Austin.

Buss Labs is headed by David Buss, a prominent evolutionary psychology professor who’s theories provided the structural framework for many of the misogynistic perspectives of the “manosphere”.

Here are a few of the individuals involved:

1. William Costello, the lead researcher, blocked me for asking questions about the validity of his study design and his strategic use of influencers to recruit study participants. I have also questioned his relationship with Lamarcus Small, the owner of both the incel forum and the suicide encouragement forum. 

2. Chris Williamson of the Modern Wisdom Podcast was used to recruit incel study participants.

3. Alexander “datepsych” is a frequent collaborator of this network who has relentlessly attacked me online after refusing to answer questions about his involvement. 

4. Notsoerudite, a close associate of Destiny, has promoted Costello’s research on incels. She has also attacked me for asking questions about the research, and has even appeared to do so in coordination with Lamarcus Small, calling me a crazy conspiracy theorist and then exchanging cordialities with Small.

Again, my main criticism of these individuals is that they drive traffic to the same extremist websites that the DHS and other agencies claim to be fighting against. They have also publicly interacted with and even thanked Lamarcus Small - a man we know to be associated with a sinister network of assisted suicide and mass shooting provocation - in their social media posts, which is just gross.