austria
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AN 4 25 ROBT R
A few days ago I had breakfast with my old friend John Shattuck, who, as president of Central European University in Budapest, saw firsthand how Viktor Orban took over Hungary’s democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state.
When Trump was elected in 2016, Trump endorsed Orban, and Orban started attacking universities — forcing the Central European University out of Hungary.
John believes Trump is emulating Orban’s playbook. (Steve Bannon once declared that “Orban was Trump before there was Trump.”)
Orban’s playbook has 10 parts, according to John:
One: Take over your party and enforce internal party discipline by using political threats and intimidation to stamp out all party dissent.
Two: Build your base by appealing to fear and hate, branding immigrants and cultural minorities as dangers to society, and demonizing your opponents as enemies of the people.
Three: Use disinformation and lies to justify what you’re doing.
Four: Use your election victory to claim a sweeping mandate — especially if you don’t win a majority.
Five: Centralize your power by destroying the civil service.
Six: Redefine the rule of law as rule by executive decree. Weaponize the state against all democratic opponents. Demonize anyone who doesn’t support the leader as an “enemy of the people.”
Seven: Eliminate checks and balances and separation of powers by taking over the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society. Target opponents with regulatory penalties like tax audits, educational penalties such as denials of accreditation, political penalties like harassment investigations, physical penalties like withdrawing police protection, and criminal penalties like prosecution.
Eight: Rely on your oligarchs — hugely wealthy business and financial leaders — to supervise the economy and reward them with special access to state resources, tax cuts, and subsidies.
Nine: Ally yourself with other authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and support his effort to undermine European democracies and attack sovereign countries like Ukraine.
Ten: Get the public to believe that all this is necessary, and that resistance is futile.
John noted that Orban’s influence now reaches across Europe.
In Austria, a political party founded by former Nazis will be part of a new coalition government this year headed by a leader who has close ties to Russia and opposes European support for Ukraine. A similar nationalist far-right government has taken over next door in Slovakia.
Europe’s three biggest countries, Italy, France and Germany, have all swung toward the far-right, but so far they remain democracies.
Italy has a nationalist government headed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who’s followed parts of the Orban playbook but has been pushed toward the center and has softened her position on immigration and Ukraine.
In France, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen won last year’s parliamentary elections, but a coalition of opposition parties, prodded by Emmanuel Macron, united to deny her party a parliamentary majority. Their resistance will be tested by new elections in June.
In Germany, the center-left government headed by Olaf Scholz fell at the end of last year. In late February, parliamentary elections took place that determined whether the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would become part of a new government. Viktor Orban, Elon Musk, and JD Vance all endorsed the AfD before the elections, but it came in second with just under 20 percent of the vote, and polls show that 71 percent of Germans believe that the AfD is a threat to democracy because of its overt connections to the Nazi past.
Poland, the biggest new democracy in Eastern Europe, at first adopted but is now resisting the Orban model. A far-right government elected in 2015 almost destroyed the independence of the Polish judiciary, but opposition parties united to defend the courts and defeated the government in 2023, replacing it with a centrist regime headed by Donald Tusk, with a strong commitment to restore Polish democracy.
What lessons can be drawn from all this?
John believes that the best way to respond to Orban’s right-wing populism is by building coalitions for economic populism based on health care, education, taxes, and public spending.
He points to historical examples of this, like the American Farmer-Labor coalition that brought together urban workers, white farmers, and Black sharecroppers and led to the Progressive Movement and the New Deal in the 20th century. Today there’s an urgent need for a new populist movement to attack economic inequality.
John says that defending democracy should itself be a populist cause. In the Orban playbook, the national flag was hijacked by the authoritarian leader. John believes that the flag of American democracy must be reclaimed as a symbol of the rule of law, a society built on human rights and freedoms, and international alliances and humanitarian values.
When these soft-power democratic assets are destroyed, a huge void opens up — to be filled by authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, who are the ultimate political models for Viktor Orban and Donald Trump.
John urges that we pro-democracy anti-Trumpers move quickly with protests, lawsuits, and loud resistance. He says that those who believe Democrats should just play dead and wait for the 2026 midterm elections are profoundly wrong. Speed is essential.
I was struck by John’s optimism. He believes that the U.S. is better situated than Hungary to resist authoritarianism. We are 30 times bigger and infinitely more diverse, and our diversity is the source of our economic and cultural strength. The U.S. has an enormous and active civil society, a judiciary that remains mostly independent, a free and open if partially captured and manipulated media, and a constitution that guarantees the rights of the people to challenge and change their government.
Trump won less than 50 percent of the vote in last fall’s election, and his approval rating is well below that in recent polls.
National polls show that 70 percent of Americans today see democracy as a core American value. Resistance to the assault on democracy is not only possible, John says, but it’s essential — and it can work, as shown by the growing number of successful lawsuits that have been brought against Trump’s flood of executive decrees and the rising tide of grassroots mobilization by civil society groups across the country who are organizing demonstrations and lobbying legislators to stand up for democracy.
For two and a half centuries, Americans have fought to expand the right to vote, to achieve equal protection, to oppose intolerance and political violence, to gain freedom of speech and religion, to guarantee due process of law.
These goals may now seem to be blocked by Trump, but the U.S. is not Germany in the 1930s nor Hungary in 2025. Americans across the country are beginning to resist. John believes American democracy will emerge stronger for our efforts.
NOW READ: There’s a new dress code in Trump’s DC — and it’s straight out of a dictator’s playbook
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/."
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an 12 23
the New York Young Republican Club recently held its annual gala in New York's financial district, and former President Donald Trump gave the keynote address with some of the global far right's most notorious political figures in attendance.
According to Talking Points Memo (TPM), the gala's attendees included not just American far-right politicians like Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), but also European right-wing extremists like Austrian politician Gerald Grosz and European Parliament member Susanna Ceccardi, who is from Italy's far-right Lega party. German politician Maximilian Krah — whose party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been criticized as a "neo-Nazi party" — was also at the event.
"Donald Trump rubbing elbows with Nazi-linked groups might be surprising if Trump’s last month wasn’t defined by him parroting Hitler and Mussolini, and promising to rule as a dictator so he can rip away Americans’ freedoms and round up millions of Americans into detention camps," said Ammar Moussa, who is the rapid response director for President Joe Biden's reelection campaign.
"The American people rejected Trump and his MAGA attacks on democracy in 2020, and it’s why he’s going to lose again next November," Moussa added.
Gerald Grosz was initially a member of Austria's far-right Freedom Party, which was founded by Anton Reinthaller — a former Nazi Party leader and SS officer. Grosz and his colleague Jorg Haider, who was the son of a Nazi stormtrooper who praised Adolf Hitler's regime, eventually joined a Freedom Party offshoot. While they all come from different countries, TPM described Grosz, Ceccardi and Krah as comrades-in-arms in movements that are "staunchly nationalist and anti-immigrant" in nature.
Prior to Trump's speech, he was introduced as the "45th, 46th and 47th presidents of the United States," which alludes to Trump's baseless conspiracy theory that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. Trump doubled down on his "dictator" comments during his speech, repeating that if elected to another term he would assume dictatorial powers on day one of his administration to build a border wall and "drill drill drill."
The New York Young Republican Club's flirting with global far-right figures is in line with how international political scholars have described the modern GOP. In 2019, Harvard University political scientist Pippa Norris surveyed roughly 2,000 political experts around the globe on the authoritarian leanings of various modern far-right parties. She found that the American Republican Party has more in common with authoritarian, fascist-adjacent parties like Turkey's AKP and Hungary's Fidesz than with their counterparts in G7 countries like the Tories in the UK and the conservatives in Canada.
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Grenell is one of the most odious Trump toadies in the administration, and that’s really saying something. Like so many others, he came to Trump’s attention as a sharp-tongued Fox News personality. It’s likely that Trump didn’t know much about him other than the fact he was a big fan. That’s all it takes. Truthfully, if he’d known Grenell’s whole story he would like him even more.
Grenell held a few PR flak jobs in the government, working for the likes of John Bolton at the UN, where he was universally reviled.But he is best known as a Twitter troll, just like the president. He quit Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, where he’d been hired as a foreign policy spokesman, after his Twitter feed was revealed to be full of nasty comments. During the 2016 campaign, he got back in the game and really made a name for himself as a crude and vicious Trump supporter.
Needless to say, Trump loved it and gave him the plum job of U.S. ambassador to Berlin, where he immediately alienated everyone in sight. On his very first day on the job, referencing the fact that Trump had withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal, Grenell tweeted that “Germans doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.” Obviously he had no authority to dictate any such thing, and people in Germany were not amused, to say the least. Leaders of two German political parties have called him a “brat” and a “failure” and requested that he be withdrawn. No such luck.
Grenell has gone on to cultivate the far right in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, particularly Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, the “boyish face” of his country’s far-right government. Grenell told Breitbart that he wanted to “empower” Kurz and others like him in Europe, which exceeds the job description of ambassador just a wee bit.
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/austria-greens-conservatives-climate_n_5e19011ec5b6640ec3d4598b
no lnx
HuffPost
Austria’s New Anti-Immigrant Green Government Stokes Fears Of Climate 'Nightmare'
POLITICS 01/18/2020 08:00 am ET
Austria’s New Anti-Immigrant Green Government Stokes Fears Of Climate ‘Nightmare’
Chancellor Sebastian Kurz may have traded his far-right governing partners for the progressive Greens, but his anti-Muslim views haven’t changed.
By Alexander C. Kaufman
Austria made history earlier this month when it swore in its first female-majority Cabinet. But the formation of the new government marked another, more consequential milestone: It’s the first national coalition made up of the conservative People’s Party and the progressive Greens.
The 300-page contract binding the two parties in a unity government lays out an agenda that includes expanding a ban on Muslim headscarves and opening new deportation centers as well as an ambitious goal to become carbon neutral by 2040.
“We deliberately combined the best of both worlds,” Sebastian Kurz, the conservative chancellor who returned to power last week, told the newspaper Bild. “It is now possible for the Greens to implement central election promises, such as ... the massive fight against climate change. But we, too, can keep our key election promises ... [with] a consistent line in the fight against illegal migration or a clear line in integration.”
The Greens say compromising with the center-right conservatives helped keep the country’s far-right Freedom Party from returning to power. But analysts say the party extracted few concessions from their new conservative bedfellows. And some experts fear the coalition could signal a shift in Europe’s resurgent political right ? away from climate skepticism and toward something that looks increasingly like eco-fascism, the once-fringe ideology scientists consider a “nightmare scenario” in which me-first nationalists exploit the chaos of a hotter world.
“It’s extremely worrying,” said Betsy Hartmann, a researcher who studies the intersection of white nationalism and environmentalism. “There’s a very fine line between political feasibility and pragmatism on the part of the Green party and appeasement of right-wing, anti-immigrant interests.”
Europe’s 13th largest economy began a rightward lurch in the mid-2010s as rising income inequality and waves of migrants fleeing war, poverty and drought in the Middle East and North Africa stoked a new nationalist fervor across the continent. In 2017, the country elected a conservative government for only the second time since World War II. Kurz, a conservative firebrand who campaigned on restricting Austria’s small but growing Muslim community, became chancellor and invited the hard-line Freedom Party to form a government.
The 33-year-old Kurz, the world’s youngest national leader, vowed to wage war on “political Islam” and clamped down on immigrants, cutting public benefits to noncitizens and seizing refugees’ cellphones.
But that coalition collapsed last May after the release of a video showing Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache attempting to trade state contracts for political donations from a woman he believed to be the wealthy niece of a Russian oligarch. The revelation scandalized Austrians and forced Kurz ? who, without a coalition partner, lost his mandate to govern ? to call an election.
Conservatives failed to win an outright majority, leading Kurz to seek a marriage of convenience with the Greens, who had never before served in a national government.
“The Greens could have squeezed more out of Mr. Kurz,” The Economist magazine wrote this week, citing Austrian analyst Thomas Hofer. But “the coalition is less a meeting of minds than a division of fiefs.”
A New Eco-Right
Unlike the Republican Party in the United States, which has long questioned climate science and protected polluting industries from regulation, mainline conservatives in Europe have generally accepted the realities of global warming. Outright climate denialism was mostly limited to the far-right fringe.
But even that fringe has started to shift on climate change. The surprising surge of Green parties in April’s European parliamentary elections prompted a degree of soul-searching among the right-wing populists. The far-right Alternative for Germany’s youth wing in Berlin urged its party leaders to abandon the “difficult-to-understand statement that mankind does not influence the climate.”
Others sought to surf the wave of international concern over the climate crisis. French far-right leader Marine Le Pen found fresh fodder for her brand of Nazi-like blood-and-soil rhetoric, declaring that those “rooted in their home” are “ecological” while “nomadic” people “do not care about the environment because they have no homeland. In Italy, meanwhile, a gang of tree-planting Mussolini admirers linked to murders of African migrants started blitzing Facebook with posts declaring nature cleanups as new “battlefronts.”
Austria’s Kurz “is not right-wing in that traditional, nationalist sense,” said Reinhard Heinisch, a professor of political science at the University of Salzburg. However, he said, his stance on immigration certainly overlaps.
“Kurz is an avid traditionalist, very right on cultural questions, very anti-Islamic and neoliberal economically,” Heinisch said by phone. “But fundamentally he’s interested in power, doing what is popular and maximizing what sells his party.”
On some issues, reflecting public opinion has tempered Kurz. As opposed to much of Europe’s resurgent far-right, which is animated by nationalism, he supports the European Union, as do 40% of Austrians, according to a recent Eurobarometer poll. That’s up from 25% in 2013.The Freedom Party’s leadership lashed out at teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg for “climate hysteria” as recently as September.Kurz, meanwhile, has long appealed for international cooperation on climate change ? an issue 7 in 10 Austrian called “a very serious problem” in an April 2019 survey.
Supporters of the far-right Freedom Party hold campaign posters featuring their party leader Norbert Hofer during a September
ALEX HALADA VIA GETTY IMAGES]
Supporters of the far-right Freedom Party hold campaign posters featuring their party leader Norbert Hofer during a September political event. The new government coalition has pushed back on the Freedom Party.
But on social issues, polling raises some concerns. A shocking 12% of young Austrians said they had never heard of the Holocaust in a 2018 CNN study. A 2017 Pew Research Center poll found that nearly half of Austrians said they would not accept a Muslim into their family, compared with just 15% of Americans. Those sentiments could worsen as temperatures rise, as study after study suggests that rising temperatures increase aggression and violence on both the geopolitical and individual levels.
Blossoms Of (Melting) Snow
Austria is feeling the heat on climate change. Receding snowfall in the Alps is hurting Austria’s snow-sporting industry, and higher temperatures are spreading invasive bark beetles in once lush alpine forests. But heatwaves are proving the most devastating. The hot spell that roasted Europe last June broke monthly records in mountainous Austria, where temperatures soared past 101 degrees Fahrenheit, shy of the all-time national record of 104.9 degrees.
Marc Olefs, head of the climate research department at Vienna’s Central Institution for Meteorology and Geodynamics, called heatwaves “the climate impact with the biggest consequences on health” and the most likely to cause increased mortality rates in Austria.
Globally, the bigger concern is how climate change will affect the billions living in poorer, hotter countries. Catastrophic weather events, which are expected to grow more intense and frequent as average temperatures climb, already have displaced an average of 24 million people per year since 2008, according to the Swiss-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. That sort of mass movement within borders creates political instability that potentially breeds conflict, driving even more to seek asylum in stable, wealthy countries like Austria, which ranks among the World Bank’s richest per capita.
There’s a very fine line between political feasibility and pragmatism on the part of the Green party and appeasement of right-wing, anti-immigrant interests.
Betsy Hartmann, a researcher who studies eco-fascism]
In 2018, Austria granted asylum to 20,326 applicants, nearly 6,000 of whom were initially rejected and successfully appealed the decision, according to data from the European Council on Refugees and Exiles. The country turned away 32,221, amounting to a 57% rejection rate.
For comparison, Germany ? a far larger country, whose Christian Democratic Union government is considered an ideological bedfellow of Austria’s conservatives ? rejected just under 50% of its applicants in 2018.
Austrians do seem to be struggling with demographic change and a desire for “only high-qualified migrants,” said Kathrin Stainer-Hämmerle, a political scientist and professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Carinthia. “But Kurz is not a far-right politician. He’s a young, modern conservative leader. He has an ideological flexibility.”
Political malleability in an increasingly chaotic world could bend a leader rightward. As it stands, climate researchers are modeling five Socioeconomic Shared Pathways (SSPs) policymakers could take as temperatures likely blow past the 1.5 degrees Celsius average beyond which the United Nations projects catastrophic changes. The bleakest of those scenarios, called SSP3, envisions “resurgent nationalism” and policies that “shift over time to become increasingly oriented toward national and regional security issues, including barriers to trade,” according to a 2015 paper in the journal Climatic Change. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the think tank Berkeley Earth, told Earther last week that the world is currently on an “SSP3-ish” trajectory.
That may not yet entirely apply to Austria. But in a country whose Nazi past, including with Third Reich’s reverence for the purity of nature, remains a living memory, Hartmann warned that adding the urgency of dealing with ecological collapse to Kurz’s anti-immigrant agenda represents a “dangerous slipperiness.”
“It’s not Marine Le Pen, exactly,” she said. “But it’s going in that direction.”
RELATED...
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El Paso Terrorism Suspect’s Alleged Manifesto Highlights Eco-Fascism’s Revival
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120 ew
Austria's New Government Sets Goal to Be Carbon Neutral by 2040
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manafort ukraine hit on Julia Tymo PM
https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/05/ex-trump-aide-paul-manafort-approved-black-ops-to-help-ukraine-president
no lnx docs
The Guardian -
Former Trump aide approved 'black ops' to help Ukraine president
Exclusive: Paul Manafort authorised secret media operation that sought to discredit key opponent of then Ukrainian president
by Luke Harding
Thu 5 Apr 2018 11.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 5 Apr 2018 20.00 EDT
Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort authorised a secret media operation on behalf of Ukraine’s former president featuring “black ops”, “placed” articles in the Wall Street Journal and US websites and anonymous briefings against Hillary Clinton.
The project was designed to boost the reputation of Ukraine’s then leader, Viktor Yanukovych. It was part of a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort carried out by Manafort on behalf of Yanukovych’s embattled government, emails and documents reveal.
The strategies included:
• Proposing to rewrite Wikipedia entries to smear a key opponent of the then Ukrainian president.
• Setting up a fake thinktank in Vienna to disseminate viewpoints supporting Yanukovych.
• A social media blitz “aimed at targeted audiences in Europe and the US”.
• Briefing journalists from the rightwing website Breitbart to attack Clinton when she was US secretary of state.
Manafort’s Ukraine strategy anticipated later efforts by the Kremlin and its troll factory to use Twitter and Facebook to discredit Clinton and to help Trump win the 2016 US election. The material seen by the Guardian dates from 2011 to 2013.
Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, has indicted Manafort on multiple counts. Manafort is accused of “laundering profits” from his lobbying work in Ukraine, carried out over a period of a decade for Yanukovych and his political party.
Mueller also accuses Manafort of hiring retired European politicians to lobby on behalf of Yanukovych, and paying them more than €2m (£1.74m, $2.45m) via offshore accounts.
The documents reveal another surreptitious operation to influence international opinion. In 2010 Yanukovych defeated his rival Yulia Tymoshenko in presidential elections. The following summer Ukrainian prosecutors arrested Tymoshenko and put her on trial. This provoked severe criticism from the Obama administration and the EU, which accused Yanukovych of locking up Tymoshenko for political reasons.
In 2011 Manafort approved a clandestine strategy to discredit Tymoshenko abroad. Alan Friedman, a former Wall Street Journal and Financial Times reporter, based in Italy, masterminded this project. Friedman has previously been accused of concealing his work as a paid lobbyist.
Also involved were Rick Gates, Manafort’s then deputy, and Konstantin Kilimnik, another senior Manafort associate who the FBI believes has links to Russian military intelligence.
In July 2011 Friedman sent Manafort a confidential six-page document titled Ukraine - A Digital Roadmap. It laid out a plan to “deconstruct” Tymoshenko via videos, articles and social media. Yanukovych deferred to Manafort, who gave the project the go-ahead, sources in Ukraine’s former government say.
Friedman’s proposed operation was ambitious. It included producing anonymous videos attacking Tymoshenko and comparing the opposition leader to a drunk Boris Yeltsin. “The social media space offers great opportunities for guilt by association,” Friedman wrote in the document.
He continued: “We know that video exists of Tymoshenko uttering some of her outrageous claims in court … The video can be floated into the social space to reinforce the impression that she is at best reckless and unstatesmanlike and at worst malicious, defamatory and antisemitic.”
[An anonymous video attacking Yulia Tymoshenko.
Twitters users, including “those ‘known’ to us”, could retweet hostile content. The “roadmap” included a website, blogposts and “blast emails”, sent out to a “targeted audience in Europe and the US”. One section was called “Black Ops”. It said: “This could include Wikipedia page modification to highlight [Tymoshenko] corruption and trial and modify the tone of the language being used.”
Friedman worked with Eckart Sager, a one-time CNN producer. Emails show they liaised closely with “Paul”, who in turn briefed Yanukovych’s chief of staff, Serhiy Lyovochkin. Lyovochkin declined to comment. He appears in correspondence as “SL”.
“He was under the radar,” one source said of Friedman. “Alan kept a low profile. Without Paul’s authorisation Alan would never have got a contract with the [Yanukovych] government.”
Friedman’s company FBC Mediawas retained on a “rolling contract”. It was paid around €150,000 every three months, sources in Kiev suggest. The money was deposited in an offshore account in Seychelles, they allege. Often the payments were late, prompting Friedman to complain, they add.
Quick guide
Paul Manafort Ukraine connections: who's who?
Show
Contacted by the Guardian, Friedman said these earnings were “declared”. He confirmed his company worked for Ukraine from late summer 2011 on what he called “a public relations and country profiling project”. He said: “It was not a secret or covert plan. We had PR people proposing interviews and features to newspapers very openly.”
He said its goal was to promote the Ukraine government’s then policy of moving closer to a partnership agreement with the EU. “Our aim was to keep a steady communication going in favour of dialogue between Brussels and Kiev. That was our message.
“We never supported a pro-Moscow stance and had already ended our relationship when the Ukrainian president abandoned closer ties with Europe.”
Asked whether he had registered with the US Department of Justice, Friedman said he had never worked as a lobbyist for Ukraine. He added: “I never registered as a foreign agent because I never was one.
“I was a communications guy, doing PR media strategy work in Europe for a client, like dozens of London PR companies that work for a variety of governments.”
The documents show Friedman reported directly to Kiev. In spring 2012 he told the foreign minister, Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, he had “generated dozens of positive op-eds/interviews/articles for print and TV” and “disseminated positive news stories” to nearly 2,000 publications.
Key to this strategy was a fake thinktank, the Center for the Study of Former Soviet Socialist Republics (CXSSR), set up with Manafort’s backing. Friedman used it to publish dozens of positive stories about Yanukovych, many of them authored by a “Matthew Lina”.
Lina’s comment pieces criticising Tymoshenko and Obama’s state department ran on the conservative US website RedState. Friedman told Manafort his editorial team ghostwrote an article by Yanukovych published by the Wall Street Journal.
He claimed credit for a Tymoshenko profile written by the Journal’s Matthew Kaminski. Kaminski said Friedman was never a source, “or even someone that as far as I can remember I had any contact whatsoever with”.
In April 2012 Friedman sent another “highly confidential” two-page document to Manafort. It set out plans to launch a “special website” entitled The Tymoshenko Files. The site would purport to belong to Inna Bohoslovska, a Ukrainian deputy and Tymoshenko critic.
In fact, Friedman would “discreetly prepare, implement and maintain” the site, the document said. It would include “ghost-penned” blogs and “a quasi-novella serialisation”. Asked about the website, Friedman said he had never written “any content”.
Emails seen by the Guardian show a regular pattern of interaction between Manafort, Friedman, Gates, Kilimnik and Ukrainian officials. Gates, who went on to work with Manafort on the 2016 Trump campaign, wrote several messages. In February Gates , and agreed to cooperate with Mueller.
At the time Kilimnik was the Russian manager of Manafort’s Kiev office. Kilminik is understood to be “Person A” in Mueller’s latest indictment, filed last week. It says the FBI believes Kilimnik has ties to Moscow’s GRU spy agency, and adds that Gates was aware of this. Kilimnik denies a connection. Friedman confirmed he had met Manafort and Gates but said he had done so “because the client asked me to”.
Manafort’s media operation included attacks on Clinton. In October 2012 Gates emailed Manafort and Friedman, flagging a piece written by the journalist Ben Shapiro. The Breitbart article criticised Clinton for her public support of Tymoshenko, who had recently made an electoral pact with the far-right Svoboda party.
The article cited a Jewish “leader” who accused Clinton anonymously of creating a “neo-Nazi Frankenstein”. Gates wrote: “Gentlemen – Here is the first part of a series of articles that will be coming as we continue to build this effort. Alan, you get full credit for the Frankenstein comment.”
The alleged use of offshore accounts is likely to interest the FBI. Manafort is accused of concealing more than $75m earned from his work in Ukraine.
Yanukovych’s attempts to woo western leaders ended in October 2013 when he accepted a bailout from Moscow. He fled to Russia after anti-government protests. In 2015 Friedman wrote an authorised biography of Silvio Berlusconi. Manafort continued to work for Yanukovych’s party up until he joined Trump’s campaign. Manafort denies wrongdoing and has said he will fight Mueller’s charges.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/the-disturbing-connections-between-trump-putin-and-austrian-neo-nazis/
Trump hadn’t even been inaugurated on December 20, 2016 when I wrote “Trump, Austrian Neo-Nazis, and Putin,” but I had already detected a troubling nexus between the three. Here is how I began that piece:
In the process of pointing out that their flirtations with John Birchers and other general “rightwing nutballish” behaviors are quickly turning the Trump administration “into the grease trap of American political history,” Charles Pierce stops to notice that incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is still in league with the Russkies. To wit, the lunatic far-right Austrian Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache traveled to New York in November to meet with Flynn. The Freedom Party presidential nominee, Norbert Hofer, just came within a whisper of winning an revanchist Anschlussian political victory in the early December election. He had hoped to do better, saying just prior to the vote that he was drawing “encouragement from Donald Trump’s presidential victory in the United States.”
The November meeting in Trump Tower between Michael Flynn and Austrian neo-Nazis wasn’t the reason I wrote the post, though. I was responding to an article in Foreign Policy that reported:
Heinz-Christian Strache, Freedom Party leader, and Norbert Hofer, the candidate who narrowly lost Austria’s presidential election earlier this month, signed a “working agreement” on Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party, according to a statement from the Freedom Party.]
Charles Pierce responded: “At the risk of being called a neo-McCarthyite, may I point out that this smacks an awful lot of the incoming administration’s involvement in a worldwide right-wing movement at the center of which is our good friend Vladimir Putin.”
Here was my reaction to Pierce:
Of course, this is impossible because liberals who lived through the Cold War keep telling me that all this Russia-bashing is just so much Dulles Brothers flimflam designed to distract the plebes from their rightful destiny at the head of the dictatorship of the proletariat. To bash Russia is to bash the left here at home in order to crush the left everywhere from Ho Chi Minh City to Buenos Aires.
It therefore cannot be that our president is in the thrall, if not the control, of a “worldwide right-wing movement” to restore the purity of essence to the European bloodstream and bring Christianity back to its former central and crusading glory.
Or, in other words, you need to check that “grease trap of American political history” carefully, because a few of the roles have been reversed.
I revisit this all today because Heinz-Christian Strache has just found himself in a pickle. He apparently took the “working agreement” with Vladimir Putin a few steps too far, and he did it on six-hour video tape recorded in July 2017. In truth, he was set up—by whom it is still not clear. People posing as highly-connected Russians discussed various corrupt schemes that involved trading favorable contracts for assistance in helping Strache’s political party in the upcoming elections. There was also this:
The supposed investor already had a plan: She proposed acquiring a 50-percent stake in the Kronen Zeitung, a highly influential Austrian tabloid, and to use the newspaper as a mouthpiece backing Strache and his FPÖ party in the election campaign. Strache, dressed casually in a slightly ratty T-shirt and jeans, seemed enthusiastic – mostly about the proposal, but also about the woman herself. “Are you kidding? She’s hot,” he said, with a Viennese lilt.
Strache, who is currently Austria’s vice chancellor and the head of the Freedom Party, took the bait and failed to notify the authorities that Russians were attempting to bribe him.
I don’t know who set this trap or why they waited almost two years to expose Strache, but the episode provides one more example of how neo-Nazis believe that the Russians are their allies and seek to work with them to further their political ambitions. As I pointed out in my November 2017 “A #TrumpRussia Confession in Plain Sight” piece, there’s plenty of evidence that something similar happened between the Trump campaign and Russia. That is why we need to see Robert Mueller’s counterintelligence report.
We already know that Trump used the National Enquirer to help him cover up his affairs and promote his candidacy. We know that Michael Flynn is currently awaiting sentencing after exposing attempts to bribe him into silence. Now we know that Heinz-Christian Strache is not only a nexus between Trump and Putin, but corrupt to the core. We’ve seen the white nationalist strains of Trumpism and the president’s strange affinity for Putin.
And yet somehow the president says he’s been exonerated.
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https://thinkprogress.org/austrian-party-founded-by-nazis-is-in-d-c-for-political-meetings
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n Austrian Identitarian leader with a presence on YouTube reportedly received a payment from the man charged over the Christchurch attacks. According to Reuters, Martin Sellner received roughly $1,690 last year from a man with the same name as the suspect, which prompted Austrian law enforcement to raid Sellner’s house on March 25.
Sellner subsequently acknowledged that he had pointed the New Zealand shooter to his English-language YouTube videos after receiving praise for his work. Sellner addressed the Christchurch shooter donation in a YouTube video, and in doing so, collected donations via the "super chats" feature.
Sellner’s group is a white supremacist organization focused on sanitizing its image to maintain mainstream appeal. Aided by glossy media coverage and YouTube influencers, Sellner has been able to get donations by spreading anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim messaging to a global far-right audience.
The Daily Beast's Kelly Weill described Sellner's "fascist" organization thusly:"This fascist movement falsely characterizes itself as under attack by immigrants, people of color, Muslims, and Jews. Sellner and his movement spread conspiracy theories about these racial and religious groups “replacing” white people. Generation Identity hosts a web page explaining the conspiracy theory. That page’s title was the also title of the manifesto Tarrant released before opening fire on Muslims, killing children as young as three."
In 2018, Tucker Carlson passionately defended Sellner and his partner Brittany Pettibone when they were refused entry to the United Kingdom, claiming the U.K.’s actions were evidence that the country “hates itself, its heritage, [and] its own people.”
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