Is Russia Behind a Secession Effort in California?

[liminalOyster]

"Disruptive" domestic social movements are now gently suggested to be the nefarious product of Russian geopolitical strategy. IOW Putin did #BLM, did NoDAPL and even Cliven Bundy too.

Why again am I such an idiot for feeling that all this is like the extremely cynical and corrupt product of a gang of McCarythism re-enactors (LARP-ers?).

[Rory]

It's a neat, if somewhat ridiculous solution to the mysteries.

Why Trump? Putin
Why corruption? Putin
Why Oscars screw up? Putin
Bad Traffic? Putin
Roof leak? Putin
Hangnail? Putin

ad reductio absurdum

[Nordic]

Yesterday on FB I was accused of being on Putin's payroll.

So if you don't like me? Blame Putin.

[seemslikeadream]

odd that you can not see that is exactly what you do here to people that disagree with you....I have NEVER called you names...NEVER personally attacked you for your views ...you have every right to believe what you want to believe and so do I..it would be nice if you could afford me the same in return

[brekin]

Why is it so hard to juggle two evil empires in ones mind at the same time?
No one in the "leave progressive mother Russia alone!" has challenged the OP.
Screwball endeavors can drain off energy from more pragmatic and positive endeavors.
The Kremlin is giving the "Californian Secession" freaks free office space when it is trying to outlaw their own Russian NGO's that are against domestic violence.

And fringe things like this can gain traction.
We had a civil war in America over states rights and slavery.
I could see some refugee/immigrant/women's rights/policing practices issues & laws being amplified and used as a wedge to polarize Red & Blue states.
Britain and France had their own agendas to see a weakened and divided US, as well as one side winning to reinforce their interests.
Why wouldn't other big players in the new Great Game do so now?

Ok, I feel like I'm still not reaching some of you.
Mmh, how about this:
Russia is like your best friend who tells you the truth about your girlfriend.
"You know, Man, I hate to tell you this but she's did this, and she's run around with etc. So, I think you really should dump her."
And so do you do.
And two days later you see your best friend cruising by with his new girlfriend, your old girl friend.
Have a snickers and think about it.

[Rory]

"I know I'm a broken record in the age of curated vinyl on this, but the doppelganger to Trump/Putin/Russia is HRC/Soros/Ukraine."

https://twitter.com/chinahand/status/83 ... _src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^tweet

[82_28]

Yesterday on FB I was accused of being on Putin's payroll.

So if you don't like me? Blame Putin.

You also said yesterday that Raw Story was raw sewage on FB. I check the site out to see the links to the various comedy shows that I missed. Meyers, Colbert etc. Meyers "Closer Look" is especially good. But I don't give a shit. I check out Raw Story daily and sift out what I will or won't read. But yeah that is funny. I saw that comment to you too.

[0_0]

[82_28]

Well, she sure would be fun to chat with at a party. Yikes.

[km artlu]

This thread title is an embarrassment.

[brekin]

This thread title is an embarrassment.

Did you read the OP? The thread title is a repeat of the original article. And this doesn't even qualify as a conspiracy theory but a basic reportage of facts. The organization, leadership and base of the California seccession effort is housed in Russia, has free office space donated by the Kremlin, and led by a right-wing activist who has lived in Russia for 10 years. So the answer is YES.
Jeebus, even those involved are probably surprised at the naivete of those knowing this, would still believe Russia isn't behind it. Are they in Russia because it is more convenient to run a US state wide campaign from across the world? I mean what more do you need a video confession? Can someone please argue against what has been reported instead of abstractions "US wants war with Russia!" "Redbaiting!" "The new McCarthyism!" blah, blah, blah, further displaying symptoms of the True Believer Syndrome?

True Believer Syndrome:

True-believer syndrome is an informal or rhetorical term used by M. Lamar Keene in his 1976 book The Psychic Mafia. Keene used the term to refer to people who continued to believe in a paranormal event or phenomenon even after it had been proven to have been staged.[1][2] Keene considered it to be a cognitive disorder,[3][4] and regarded it as being a key factor in the success of many psychic mediums.[2]
The term "true believer" was used earlier by Eric Hoffer in his 1951 book The True Believer to describe the psychological roots of fanatical groups.
In his book The Psychic Mafia, Keene told of his partner, a psychic medium named "Raoul" in the book. Some in their congregation still believed that Raoul was genuine even after he openly admitted that he was a fake. Keene wrote "I knew how easy it was to make people believe a lie, but I didn't expect the same people, confronted with the lie, would choose it over the truth. ... No amount of logic can shatter a faith consciously based on a lie."[1][5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True-believer_syndrome

The San Jose Mercury News took note of this in a November 26, 2016 article that began:

After a Manhattan billionaire led a wave of working-class discontent to the White House, perhaps it’s fitting that the two men steering a left-leaning movement to get California out of Donald Trump’s America lack liberal bona fides. Louis Marinelli and Marcus Evans were both registered Republicans two years ago when they formed what is now known as Yes California, a homegrown separatist movement. At the time, the 30-year-old Marinelli, who grew up in upstate New York, had spent more years living in Russia than the Golden State.

And Evans, 39, briefly hosted conservative talk radio shows in his native Fresno. In an interview this past week, Evans wouldn’t say if he voted for Trump, but he insisted that he doesn’t fit the bill of a right-wing radio blowhard.

Is the separatist movement “home grown”? I am not so sure. On December 13, 2016, KQED’s The California Report delved deeper into those Marinelli ties to Russia:

On paper, the leader of the California secession movement lives in an apartment complex near San Diego’s Golden Hill neighborhood. But in reality, the Calexit campaign is being run by a 30-year-old who lives and works in a city on the edge of Siberia. Louis Marinelli heads the secessionist group Yes California. Following the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the organization has gone from an unknown fringe group to one discussed seriously in mainstream media.

What has not been discussed as prominently is Marinelli’s deep ties to Russia. A former right-wing activist from Buffalo, New York, Marinelli first moved to Russia almost a decade ago. He studied at St. Petersburg State University, the alma mater of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He returned to the United States to campaign against LGBTQ rights as part of the National Organization for Marriage. Marinelli then returned to Russia. He would marry a Russian citizen, and the couple moved to San Diego, where Marinelli launched a political career based on a platform of California secession.

“I immigrated to California, and I consider myself to be a Californian,” Marinelli says from his apartment in Yekaterinburg, a city of about 1.4 million just east of the Ural Mountains and about 1,000 miles from Moscow.
That brings us to Moscow itself.

On December 18, 2016, Russia Today, a media outlet controlled by the Kremlin, reported that “a campaign calling for the independence of California from the United States has opened an ‘embassy’ in Moscow. The movement, Yes California, is hoping for a ‘Calexit’ break from the US. Speaking at a press conference on Sunday, Louis Marinelli, leader of the movement, said the embassy will not deal with diplomatic issues, but will act as more of a cultural center that will educate Russians about California's history, boost trade ties and promote tourism.”

How does a fledgling secession movement with little grassroots support afford a Moscow “embassy”? Snopes says a group funded by the Kremlin is letting them use the space for free.
Over the weekend, Marinelli gave a television interview to MSNBC host Alex Witt. “Do you think people might grow skeptical and concerned that this movement is just part of a bigger strategy by the Kremlin to destabilize the West?” she asked.
“Sure, we believe that’s certainly a reasonable skepticism for people to have,” Marinelli said, “but the truth of the matter is that the American government has for a long time tried to rally the American public against Russia no matter what the issue is.”
That wasn’t quite a denial, was it?

[liminalOyster]

I think as the empire declines over the next few decades, the fractures are likely to become more severe, the differences more pronounced. The federal government is going to become less powerful. One can imagine breakaway states and the like. It's kind of the sci-fi scenario, but one that seems like a possibility. I see the signs of this happening on my travels around the country already, with a real popularity for secessionist movements, from Texas to Vermont. source

[seemslikeadream]

thank you for taking the time and energy to respond to our drive by pundits

I think they are under the impression we are in the 5 word thread in the lounge

But in reality, the Calexit campaign is being run by a 30-year-old who lives and works in a city on the edge of Siberia

what a fucking con artist

This thread title is an embarrassment.

Did you read the OP? The thread title is a repeat of the original article. And this doesn't even qualify as a conspiracy theory but a basic reportage of facts. The organization, leadership and base of the California seccession effort is housed in Russia, has free office space donated by the Kremlin, and led by a right-wing activist who has lived in Russia for 10 years. So the answer is YES.
Jeebus, even those involved are probably surprised at the naivete of those knowing this, would still believe Russia isn't behind it. Are they in Russia because it is more convenient to run a US state wide campaign from across the world? I mean what more do you need a video confession? Can someone please argue against what has been reported instead of abstractions "US wants war with Russia!" "Redbaiting!" "The new McCarthyism!" blah, blah, blah, further displaying symptoms of the True Believer Syndrome?

True Believer Syndrome:

True-believer syndrome is an informal or rhetorical term used by M. Lamar Keene in his 1976 book The Psychic Mafia. Keene used the term to refer to people who continued to believe in a paranormal event or phenomenon even after it had been proven to have been staged.[1][2] Keene considered it to be a cognitive disorder,[3][4] and regarded it as being a key factor in the success of many psychic mediums.[2]
The term "true believer" was used earlier by Eric Hoffer in his 1951 book The True Believer to describe the psychological roots of fanatical groups.
In his book The Psychic Mafia, Keene told of his partner, a psychic medium named "Raoul" in the book. Some in their congregation still believed that Raoul was genuine even after he openly admitted that he was a fake. Keene wrote "I knew how easy it was to make people believe a lie, but I didn't expect the same people, confronted with the lie, would choose it over the truth. ... No amount of logic can shatter a faith consciously based on a lie."[1][5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True-believer_syndrome

The San Jose Mercury News took note of this in a November 26, 2016 article that began:

After a Manhattan billionaire led a wave of working-class discontent to the White House, perhaps it’s fitting that the two men steering a left-leaning movement to get California out of Donald Trump’s America lack liberal bona fides. Louis Marinelli and Marcus Evans were both registered Republicans two years ago when they formed what is now known as Yes California, a homegrown separatist movement. At the time, the 30-year-old Marinelli, who grew up in upstate New York, had spent more years living in Russia than the Golden State.

And Evans, 39, briefly hosted conservative talk radio shows in his native Fresno. In an interview this past week, Evans wouldn’t say if he voted for Trump, but he insisted that he doesn’t fit the bill of a right-wing radio blowhard.

Is the separatist movement “home grown”? I am not so sure. On December 13, 2016, KQED’s The California Report delved deeper into those Marinelli ties to Russia:

On paper, the leader of the California secession movement lives in an apartment complex near San Diego’s Golden Hill neighborhood. But in reality, the Calexit campaign is being run by a 30-year-old who lives and works in a city on the edge of Siberia. Louis Marinelli heads the secessionist group Yes California. Following the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the organization has gone from an unknown fringe group to one discussed seriously in mainstream media.

What has not been discussed as prominently is Marinelli’s deep ties to Russia. A former right-wing activist from Buffalo, New York, Marinelli first moved to Russia almost a decade ago. He studied at St. Petersburg State University, the alma mater of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He returned to the United States to campaign against LGBTQ rights as part of the National Organization for Marriage. Marinelli then returned to Russia. He would marry a Russian citizen, and the couple moved to San Diego, where Marinelli launched a political career based on a platform of California secession.

“I immigrated to California, and I consider myself to be a Californian,” Marinelli says from his apartment in Yekaterinburg, a city of about 1.4 million just east of the Ural Mountains and about 1,000 miles from Moscow.
That brings us to Moscow itself.

On December 18, 2016, Russia Today, a media outlet controlled by the Kremlin, reported that “a campaign calling for the independence of California from the United States has opened an ‘embassy’ in Moscow. The movement, Yes California, is hoping for a ‘Calexit’ break from the US. Speaking at a press conference on Sunday, Louis Marinelli, leader of the movement, said the embassy will not deal with diplomatic issues, but will act as more of a cultural center that will educate Russians about California's history, boost trade ties and promote tourism.”

How does a fledgling secession movement with little grassroots support afford a Moscow “embassy”? Snopes says a group funded by the Kremlin is letting them use the space for free.
Over the weekend, Marinelli gave a television interview to MSNBC host Alex Witt. “Do you think people might grow skeptical and concerned that this movement is just part of a bigger strategy by the Kremlin to destabilize the West?” she asked.
“Sure, we believe that’s certainly a reasonable skepticism for people to have,” Marinelli said, “but the truth of the matter is that the American government has for a long time tried to rally the American public against Russia no matter what the issue is.”
That wasn’t quite a denial, was it?

[liminalOyster]

Excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's The New Yorker’s Big Cover Story Reveals Five Uncomfortable Truths About U.S. and Russia:

5. Fixating on Russia continues to be used to distract from systemic failures of U.S. elites.

Denouncing the autocratic abuses of foreign adversaries such as Putin has long been the go-to tactic to distract attention from the failures and evils of U.S. actions — including the unpleasant fact that support for the world’s worst despots has long been, and continues to be, a central precept of U.S. policy. Or, as then-Secretary of State Clinton put it in 2009 about the decades-ruling Egyptian tyrant: “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.”

That Putin abuses the civic freedoms of Russians plainly answers none of the policy debates over Russia, given how ready and eager the U.S. is to align with the planet’s worst monsters. It’s instead designed to encourage Americans to fix their gaze on bad acts by people thousands of miles away in order to obfuscate the corruption of their own society and savagery by their own leaders. In several places, the New Yorker article warns against exploiting and inflating claims about Putin as a means of ignoring that the real causes of America’s problems reside not in Moscow but at home:



It is true that Putin is used to avoid confronting the fact that Trump is “a phenomenon of America’s own making.” It’s also true that he’s used to avoid confronting the fact that Trump is a byproduct of the extraordinary and systemic failure of the Democratic Party. As long as the Russia story enables pervasive avoidance of self-critique — one of the things humans least like to do — it will continue to resonate no matter its actual substance and value.

And this avoidance of self-examination extends to the West generally:



As Even The New Yorker Admits™, the primary reason for Trump, for Brexit, and for growing right-wing über-nationalism throughout Europe is that prevailing neoliberal policies have destroyed the economic security and future of hundreds of millions of people, rendering them highly susceptible to scapegoating and desperate, in a nothing-to-lose sort of way, for any type of radical change, no matter how risky or harmful that change might be. But all of that gets to be ignored, all of the self-reckoning is avoided, as long we get ourselves to believe that some omnipotent foreign power is behind it all.

Using Russia — yet again — to whitewash our own sins and systemic failures is bad enough. Let’s just hope it doesn’t lead the two countries back into a protracted and devastating Cold War or, worse still, direct military confrontation. With tensions rising and rhetoric becoming harsher and more manipulative, both of those outcomes are more likely than they’ve been in many years.

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/28/the ... nd-russia/

[liminalOyster]

There's so much content-bleed across threads that I'm not sure where to post this so I'll just stick it here since I feel I've already been a bit of a loudmouth.

I'm curious as to how those who seem a bit more credulous about Putin as the head of the octopus integrate the role that Russia played in smearing our progressive-Left brethren last year. First, Jill Stein being trashed for her appearance at an RT anniversary dinner seated with Putin (and of course all the rather noxious speculation that progressive figureheads on RT are simply being used/duped.) Second, while Bernie was mostly tied to the historical USSR, there was clearly a potential campaign to red-bait him being whispered in the wings (honeymoon to Burlington's sister-city in the USSR, softball team named after the "People's Republic of Vermont," etc) - what if Bernie had won; then how would all this be shaking out? To me it seems extremely plausible that Bernie would also have been attacked as somehow (and ridiculously) in bed with Putin, no? Third, probably least consequentially but most intriguingly, I still think that Pussy Riot appearance on House of Cards really really reeks. I mean, realistically, we're being told that there's a multiple-decade long geopolitical strategy to promote internal dissent in the US to strengthen Russia and yet there would seem to be evidence of the inverse - Pussy Riot being fucking Hollwood darlings, appearing with HRC et al, and the very word pussy becoming rather closely associated with the most visible movement against Trump? Pussy Riot, Pussy Grabs Back, Pussy Hat, etc.

I'm just curious about the degree of conviction I'm witnessing here WRT the Russia-show. I certainly don't feel I'm defending Putin - would anyone in their right mind defend Putin? - or diminishing the extent that nasty nation-states play dirty on all sides. But does anyone here really question that we're rather suddenly being spoon fed a slick and calculated presentation intended to deflect from the real issues that were at stake during the election? Am I really just simple-minded or still haunted by a kind of idiotic proto-Leninism from my faded adolescence for buying the line that we've been experiencing an ongoing referendum on neoliberalism that offered us a series of Faustian decisions around the world (Scotland, Brexit, Trump, Bernie, etc) and the answer has usually seemed rather clear time and again?

A few years ago, while traveling through Colorado, I met a guy who had just come from the Aspen Institute which he'd attended in the role of infosec expert of some sort. He told me an anecdote - which I intuitively believed - about having earlier interned for MI6 and paper-shredding now declassified documents. One was a general threat assessment that ranked categories of events of social concern. Climate Change and Terrorism ranked high but the top of the list was Civil Unrest due to Economic Disaster. Assuming he was telling the truth, this seems relevant in so far as it makes me feel that the organs of social control have dramatically doubled down. To those - SLAD and Brekin esp. - who seem much more credulous about the big picture here ( I think but could be wrong - and also fully respect you've parsed much more material than me ), I'm curious how you integrate what seem to me like persistent disjuncts in the overall narrative arc?

edit: part of me really muses if the current PR campaign is nothing but a setup for creating the only single grounds on which HRC could run ever for president again in 2020: as the wronged prodigal daughter come home to usurp her stolen throne. Teaser: http://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/01 ... ders-stein