i know i'll just get irony-poisoned meme replies but i honestly want to know.
I don't think so. He was a union organizer and he's done a shitload of drugs. He's definitely not a great role model (outside the union organizing) but he's probably not an op.
Brace is a lot like a lot of us here I think. Just trying to maintain some last shred of sanity in a world that doesn't make sense and is constantly trying to murder everything good.
This seems like the correct answer. I mean he's a very weird dude with his own fucked up history and experience trying to do what he can do not go insane.
Is he literally perfect? Of course not no one is but has he also literally done more than most for left causes? Ie union organizing? Yes.
Plus hes funny and good to listen to.
Also, he like, was in a band and wrote for Maximum Rock n Roll between Troubled Boy Farm days and Podcast YPG days. What he was up to pre-podcast is very well documented
No, but Robert Evans and likely everyone connected to him are probably literal state assets
He works for bellingcat a "open source intelligence agency" that is pretty opish.
I personally doubt he's literally on CIA payroll but that's largely irrelevant if his bosses bosses are and he parrots such propaganda frequently.
He has confessed to making $400,000 a year just from Podcasting. Maybe that is normal podcast money but gotdam
they're also 10+ times as popular as any one of Evan's projects
I coud see IHeartRadio giving somebody a million bucks on accident, though
Really? Wow. I doubt that's normal but he does have a lot of podcasts with a lot of backing it seems
He's admitted personally to working with federal intelligence services and his org takes money from the govt ala Operation Mockingbird. What else is there to say? The guy might personally see himself as an anarchist, but he's like every other dipshitted media guy getting blood money wired to them: full of shit and literally not working class.
Lmao I got bad vibes from his podcast (it could happen here) because he mentioned some weird stuff against assad/china and for the hong kong protesters, as well as being kinda annoying
Good to know my Fedometer is working
wasn't he the one that was saying "wait wait, it's more complicated" during the Bolvian coup? With US history of coups South of its border, and a popular Leftist government that is hostile to US/Capitalist interest, if you call youself a leftist and you don't smell the obvious stench of a CIA op, than yeah your Fedometer should be off the scale. Espcially when you know he works for Bellingcat which receives funding from the NED/CIA, yeah its annoying to see everyone as a Fed when you're a babyleftist, but if you know how much shit the CIA funded during the coldwar, you should be suspicious.
Yes
Also his takes on Ukraine immediately fell in lockstep with the state dept.
It's pretty :sus-soviet:
Is there weird stuff against Assad other than his family being full of genocidal maniacs and the only actual syrians who support them being the Damascus bourgeoisie?
I don't/didn't support US intervention over there, but the idea that someone like Assad using chemical weapons on people when his father flattened an entire city to quell unrest is not as unlikely as white bro conspiracy theory enjoyers will have you believe. Nor was it necessary to manufacture consent for US operations over there (the average American gave about 1/100th of the shit back then about Syria that they do about Ukraine, but US dropped bombs anyway). Even with something like Libya, there was very little actual lying and public consensus needed. US politicians just did whatever they wanted to do. Ukraine is different, as we've been manufacturing consent against Russia in overdrive since 2015/2016 and this mass "solidarity" with Ukraine we're seeing is the outcome of that.
Now I'm confused. You were the one who originally brought it up lol
I think people greatly inflate the relationship between Rojava/YPG and the US to come to this conclusion. The US has effectively abandoned the kurds at this point and maintain that the PKK (the group Ocalan created) are terrorists. (Read some of Ocalan's writings, maybe you won't like all of it, but he isn't an American op lmao.) I don't know what the feds would gain from PissPigGranddad convincing a bunch of online leftists into tacit support for American presence in Syria. I get it helps with the anti-assad/anti-russia push, but the anti-russia stance is ingrained in the American psyche without any additional propaganda needed. Also, no one gives a shit what leftists oppose/support in the USA. The Iraq war protests failed to do anything, and we have never seen a push against war like that since.
Anyone associated with Bellingcat is fed-friendly tho. And it wouldn't surprise me if Thiel money has made its way through the leftist podcast scene, but at times this feels like when libs were foaming at the mouth because so and so donated $20 to Trump or some shit.
At the end of the day podcasts, like all other forms of media, are simply part of the spectacle. The capitalist machine consumes all.
it wouldn’t surprise me if Thiel money has made its way through the leftist podcast scene
I think there was a scoop yesterday that some Thiel acolyte tacitly admitted that Anna K and Red Scare have received Thiel money to fund their podcasts, along with some other people in that sphere, so it's not much of a stretch.
Red Scare isn't even a leftist podcast lmao. But yeah, I believe it.
Oh yeah whoops I accidentally left out the bit about them being "left-adjacent at best" when I rewrote my reply, but yeah you're right.
Its cool, I know what you mean. They are dirtbag adjacent. They may also be two of the dumbest people to listen to lmao
They are so unbelievably dumb. Lose less brain cells listening to like Alex Jones or Glenn Beck tbh
Now that I would believe - that whole section of the internet is a level 5 cognito-hazard and should be regarded as an active MKULTRA operation.
Not saying Brace is or not an OP, because I don't follow him, but if he CIA would try to build a popular "leftist" from the ground up, they would not just throw him/her out there spewing pro-US interest stuff from the get go. That would throw leftist off him right away. Instead they would slowly build trust up, and what better situation that Rojava/YPG that the US has a strong presence. If Brace or any other popular leftist slowly shifts towards pro-US interest takes, they might've been an op from the get-go.
That's a very speculative position though and I don't see why they would try to mask it like that. It seems like an ostensibly "left" position would be enough to get people to listen, see: :funny-clown-hammer: but I don't even think he is an op, but just an idiot who understand his class interest.
That would also mean the current iteration of feds are far more patient and well organized than they seem to be (the Michigan plot is a good recent example of how much patience they have). Again, the left is not a threat anymore. Every leftist position is nearly immediately co-opted and defanged. I just don't see why it would be beneficial to pay someone like brace to be an op, because that is the longest set up for the smallest payoff. I feel like people would just simply stop listening to him if he pivoted to a pro-us hegemony position, and it's not like true anon is much more than a comedy show with some informative information and a small audience. My hot take on brace is he was a rich kid who hated his parents and made rebellion his identity. A reverse Mayor Pete in a sense. But that sums up a lot of left media, and gives no hint someone is an op, just liberals cosplaying. Podcasts are functionally useless media, like most media.
I honestly have no idea either way. I barely listen to true anon or any podcast unless I need background noise, but calling everything an op seems to hark back to a time when the feds needed to infiltrate communist parties due to their numbers and or potential strength. The last hurrah seems to have been the undercover shit that every state did to sow discord in every leftist group around. The internet does the majority of this work now. In a sense, the internet is the op. It pacifies and atomizes society to the point where there are no more groups or media that would ever truly threaten anything.
Again, maybe I'm wrong, and this was a lot to write about nothing lmao
That would throw leftist off him right away.
I don't know, :funny-clown-hammer: has almost 400k subs
:funny-clown-hammer: did far more to pose as an anarchist and had actual leftist sounding takes, his content initially was "leftist but anti-woke and edgy to attract right-wingers to turn them left", thus "tactical nword". It has only more recently turned to outright complete and total support for US interests as he double. tripled and quadrupled down on being against whatever the meanie tankies want.
I agree with @CommCat, we should be watching out for leftists that start leftist and then slide. That's precisely how they will always do ops. Treat them as ops even if they might not be, they are indistinguishable from what an op would do.
I don't follow Brace religiously, but I kinda feel like if he was an Op he would have gotten more blatant with the pro-US stuff by now. I'm 90% sure :funny-clown-hammer: is an Op and he's just full blazen repeating State Dept talking points now. Even if he was a "long con" it seems it's been a bit too long by now.
I don't think he's an op but...
Him going overseas and fighting for Rojava did benefit American foreign policy. The state department is always looking for volunteers willing to go fight its enemies for them - it's easy to recruit some chuds to go fight in Latin America, Middle East, wherever, and then the government gets to act like they had no hand in it.
But chuds aren't going to go fight for the YPG. Our anti-Assad allies talk too much about socialism and democracy and equality - stuff no right winger is going to risk their life over. So you need to pull your recruits from elsewhere.
Enter PissPigGranddad, cool edgy leftist twitter guy who doesn't have a lot going on in his life. He flies out to Syria to fight for an ostensibly good cause, and more importantly, convinces leftists that it is a very cool thing to do. It's like the international brigades in Spain! You can fight alongside cool communists!
And suddenly a bunch of people who are normally strongly against American military action are now supporting a force that is helping America to overthrow its enemies.
He would not have been able to go fight for socialists overseas and come back safely, if our government was not supporting that movement.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t the YPG backed down on their anti-Assad stance as of late and now say they’re willing to work with him in exchange for regional autonomy? I think Brace himself has said this and said he thinks it’s a good thing.
I have no idea, but that would be cool and good. They seem like they're trying to build a pretty decent society over there, and it's a shame their survival came with them fighting a proxy war for us.
I think it should be noted, the Kurds were divided into a lot of factions and almost all those factions were playing different sides of the conflict. For example the YPG took almost as much aid from Russia as they did the US, Russia had their own airbase in Rojava. The PKK has hostile relations with Turkey which means the US won’t work with them, but they and the YPG cooperate, and Assad hates Turkey so he probably kinda likes the PKK. Syria is a cluster fuck and I don’t really think even the smartest western leftist can get a good read on it.
Exactly, There is no "thing good" or "thing bad" for most of this stuff. If you are helping the US by helping the YPG then you are by that measure helping Russia, and if this is transitive then you are thus helping Assad. We should be hesitant on applying a transitive property to combat zones
The US pulled out of Syria (or at least pulled out its largest and most visible forces) in 2019, you might remember the news coverage of this event being "we're abandoning the Kurds to be killed by ISIS!" This basically forced the Kurdish militias to adapt or die, and most including the YPG ended up signing an agreement with Assad to maintain some autonomy but give up on total independence.
Yeah which I honestly thought was probably the best outcome for everyone. So idk, I guess if he was an op he didn’t do a very good job furthering Americas interests in the region.
That withdraw never really happened, Defence One or one of those weird military blogs has a good interview with Trump's former Syrian envoy about what happened. The Kurds are the singular instance of US support for violence that I'm pretty much alright with. I have a personal connection to it but I don't think that affects my judgment.
EDIT:
Four years after signing the now-infamous “Never Trump” letter condemning then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as a danger to America, retiring diplomat Jim Jeffrey is recommending that the incoming Biden administration stick with Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East.
But even as he praises the president’s support of what he describes as a successful “realpolitik” approach to the region, he acknowledges that his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria.
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number of troops in northeast Syria is “a lot more than” the roughly two hundred troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019.
www defenseone com/threats/2020/11/outgoing-syria-envoy-admits-hiding-us-troop-numbers-praises-trumps-mideast-record/170012/
TIL, it's also not worrying at all that a military official could just straight up say "we lied to the president in order to pursue a war he didn't sign off on" and nobody really cared.
Liberals bragged about this when this interview came out, actually.
Yeah, it's basically their only chance of survival now that Turkey is coming down hard on them.
I've heard that a lot of the successes attributed to the YPG & co were straight up US military operations with local militias as cover
the state department and intelligence services in general aren’t always the smartest at determining their best interests. don’t assume that because they do something or allow it that it’s actually of benefit to them. they’re extremely human and make mistakes. in this case, he’s almost certainly not an OP - it’s just as you said, the state department thought it was good for people to go fight Assad regardless of which side they picked. then they reversed on the policy after it backfired on them, most notably with ISIS.
The CIA has funded just about every movement out there. Hell they backed communists on quite a few occasions. Or how about Saddam's whole history with the US and Iraqi Kurds?
I wouldn't really begrudge anyone from doing something like that though, in a way that will get them on a watchlist but not killed by the CIA. If you wanna serve a leftist militia and have some chance of going home again (keep in mind he did it with very little contemplation and lied to his girlfriend and family about what he was doing) then yeah you are gonna have to help a group that the US tolerates the existence of.
It benefited US policy, but also ya know.....benefited the Kurds against ISIS, which I feel is worthwhile compared to what most of us do. Like said enemy here is literally The Islamic State in Raqqah. It serves US needs, but more immediately helped the Kurds. Sometimes awful people benefit from good things, beating the Nazis helped establish the US even further as a superpower for example. There are worse things for a deeply fucked up recovering addicts to do
I also fought with the Kurds and I'm not an op, for what it's worth.
This was late 2015 into early 2016. Met one USAID dickhead and some Naval Intel folks. Some were former coalition soldiers from the US-Iraq War and occupation who'd dealt with the Kurds at that time and wanted to help. I'm not really sure when Brace was in Kurdistan, but most of the folks I interacted with were a mix of suicidal but wanting to die doing something that's probably good (helping socialists repel ISIS...) like myself, ethnic Kurds from abroad, some vaguely leftist folks still probably hoping to die there, but I'd say a lot of the Westerners I met were former soldiers who liked the Kurds and didn't want to see them get massacred quite as much.
Yeah, they got a super raw deal and as shitty as many former military people are, there is definitely some who can recognize our government fucked over the Kurds hard and probably felt a bit of guilt over it, among other reasons
naval intel folks
:cia: but seriously :rat-salute: salutfor fighting ISIS
have you tried asking them? they have to tell you if you ask them
Yeah I think he said it best once when he said "if I'm CIA what's my mission?!?"
Like why would the US government sponsor someone whose primary function is to focus the gaze of as many people as possible towards the lives of the 0.001% and the deep state? What possible function could it serve?
No but he may be a victim of some more modern offshoot of MK Ultra
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jm5ng4/the-legal-industry-for-kidnapping-teens
Wait a minute: are those child abduction camps MK Ultra?
:illuminati:
I would 100% believe it.
I have been thinking about this kind of thing lately: like, I've heard that AOC, Tucker Carlson, Anderson Cooper, Obama's mom, Chelsea Manning, Chapo, and the Mayor Pete High-Hopes Dance are all CIA assets. Okay I made up the dance one, but still. I'm not saying any of these people are or are not CIA, but I just wonder what the speculation does for activism, organizing, the left, etc., and whether it just deflates people's enthusiasm, because if the bourgeoisie's intelligence agents have controlled everything, it reminds us the game is rigged from the get-go.
the "everything is CIA" meme is a product of an over-read, under-organized internet left that wants a simple answer to the question of why we suck so much. every marginal political faction has its narratives of external subversion, but those only take center stage when there's no other tools of analysis.
if solidarity is more than a lovely word, then it doesn't matter if the state is attacking our minds. if our comrades are known to us, our enemies can't stand against us.
It's small club and we ain't in it. Pretty much everyone who gets famous in media has some sort of connection to the "deep state"/CIA simply because media is full of nepotism and rich kids who can get their stuff out there. Menaker's grandpa was a double agent for the KGB and FBI. Felix's "neocon uncle" that he has alluded to was literally law partners with Paul Helliwell, Disney's CIA guy and iirc has connections to the Pritzkers.
I don't know but the Peter Theil stuff with their friends on the red scare pod (I think that's what it's called) and going over to fight for the Kurds is pretty suspicious
We have a user that's convinced that they're an op, you'll get their explaination soon enough
