"Anonymous," whatever it once may have been, has an "official" (and verified) channel on YouTube. It has become a full-on information warfare outlet.

They are pushing insane Duginist propaganda video content every day, including David Icke, with sensational headlines and the whole bit. It needs to be taken out. Sharing this link for context only. It needs to go.

https://www.youtube.com/@-anonymous

Anonymous Official

The purpose of this channel is to help more people get prepared for what is happening in the world.

YouTube

And there's this, which I rate as credible.

"Let me go ahead and get to the punchline—Anonymous, the hacker group that started Occupy—the radical Leftist movement in America—a good percentage of those folks worked with the Russians on the leaks and disinformation campaigns that put Trump in office."

https://medium.com/@robertstrongphd/the-end-of-history-and-the-beginning-of-transhumanism-how-anonymous-helped-russia-trick-526e303978ca

The End of History and the Beginning of Transhumanism: How Anonymous Helped Russia Trick…

The End of History and the Beginning of Transhumanism: How Anonymous Helped Russia Trick Neo-Conservative and Neo-Liberal Americans Into Destroying Their Own Empire. Aleksander Dugin is the most…

Medium

"The Russian-Anonymous propaganda machine has turned their guns on liberals, because they see mainstream liberalism as the shiny face of exploitative capitalism—the enabler that benefits from financial exploitation for art’s sake."

"My Anonymous comrades, the ones I was surprised to find were working for Russia, seemed to all jump ship as soon as they saw mainstream democrats sabotage a true socialist candidate, Bernie Sanders."

"They began to lean hard into Plan B, i.e., “okay, America, you asked for it. You didn’t accept the easy way during Occupy Wall Street, and now you must take the harder path.” We are lucky that the new world war is just an Epistemological War at this point. But if we don’t dismantle the machine of Mammon that is putting a stranglehold on the world economy as well as the ecosystem, the new Eurasia will dismantle it for us."
@davetroy this line tho' - "While they worked to put Trump in office, Trump, to them, is performance art, the bloated, belching, derelict clown of late stage capitalism."
@cpep I think that's on the money.
@davetroy thanks for this, an interesting perspective on Dugin.
@davetroy @cstross Dugin as Marxist accelerationist? It’s not the strangest idea I’ve heard, but…
@davetroy I mean, he stumbles at the start as Anonymous didn't start Occupy. And the... very strange misunderstanding of Dugin, who is a pretty straightforward Fascist. And the deliberate misunderstanding of how reactionary empires use each other. And the misunderstanding of the far right and the right wing's methods of large scale organisation which combine enmity with cooperation via manufacturing ignorance. It's just a really bad article.
@flaviusb Anonymous did in fact accelerate Occupy in a very early phase. He is using a Frankfurt school lens to interpret Dugin, which I would not do, as I agree he is more straightforwardly fascist. However he makes coherent arguments internally consistent with his worldview. But the key point is that factions of Anonymous became involved in Duginist operations, and that’s also factual.
@davetroy Thin gruel. 'Some from this group did support this thing in its early days after it started' is factually different from 'this group started that thing'. Like, he says "The Russians, whom we must remember are still Marxist, despite how they’ve portrayed themselves in this propaganda campaign", which is literal American neonazi shit.
@davetroy The line he is trying to draw is 'Anonymous were far left - they all supported Bernie - and then they supported Trump and/or Putin!' which is nonsense. 'Anonymous' were always a bunch of things, the majority faction being 'cyberlibertarian' which skews right, and some were far right from the beginning. Of course the far rightists support a far right thing, and of course they are the ones claiming the mantle of 'official' and being supported in that through platform verification.
@davetroy Anyway, it seems relevant to me that he misunderstands Dugin as not being a fascist and he also misunderstood his friends from 'back in the day' as not being neo-nazis. Like, a consistent misunderstanding.

@flaviusb it’s a peculiar worldview, but that doesn’t invalidate the factuality of his observations. It also aligns with research done by myself and others. The Willis Carto / Noontide Press vector within Occupy is especially pertinent to the Dugin alignment.

https://washingtonspectator.org/paranoia-on-parade/

Paranoia on Parade | Washington Spectator

How reactionary grievances have helped bring America’s democracy to the brink of collapse

Washington Spectator
The right hand of Occupy Wall Street: from libertarians to nazis, the fact and fiction of right-wing involvement - Spencer Sunshine

An article by Spencer Sunshine about far right involvement in the Occupy movement.

libcom.org
@flaviusb and this is another good piece from Spencer Sunshine.
https://politicalresearch.org/2014/02/13/20-right-occupy
20 on the Right in Occupy

In my Public Eye article “The Right Hand of Occupy Wall Street,” I detail many of the issues related to right-wing and conspiracy theorist participation in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement—including the false attempts by the mainstream right-wing media to “smear” all of Occupy as antisemitic.1 I also show how genuine Far Right—as well as conspiracy and right-libertarian—elements were drawn to Occupy by its critique of finance capital, welcoming of everyone, ambiguous categories (such as “the 99%” and “the 1%”), and use of franchise activism. Partly because of the original “smear,” many progressive activists simply refused to acknowledge the presence and extent of right-wing involvement in Occupy. For reasons of space and readability, only a part of this documentation was included in the original article. Therefore, a fuller body of research is presented here.

Political Research Associates
@flaviusb Anonymous did in fact start one half of the first wave, June 2011. It then helped accelerate the second wave later that year. More in this paper, which is detailed, but omits the Carto/Noontide angles.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6vh0q283
Technologies of Social Change : Mapping the Infrastructure of the Occupy Movement from #OccupyWallStreet to #OccupySandy

Author(s): Donovan, Joan | Abstract: This dissertation is an ethnographic account of the information and communication technologies used by networked social movements, particularly Occupy, to communicate and coordinate campaigns and actions. Studying networked social movements is difficult because they diverge from the classic theories of social movement formation due to their lack of leaders, capacity to mobilize large groups quickly, decentralized decision- making, and heavy reliance on networked communication technologies. Networked social movements gain coherence by leveraging the connective capacity of information and communication technologies to forge new social solidarities across space, time, and ideologies. While many studies have investigated the social media presence of networked movements such as Occupy, 15m, and the Arab Spring, few identify the invisible work that goes into managing media for these large-scale uprisings or unearth what kinds of skills, knowledge, and resources are necessary to build and sustain networked movements. My fieldwork attends to these shortfalls, while also contributing a thorough account of the history of the Occupy movement and the political implications for structuring collective action in this way. Since October 2011, I have participated in the construction of a communication platform, called InterOccupy.net, designed to mitigate problems caused by the failure of email and social media to communicate strategic and tactical plans for direct action. By situating my research within the developing infrastructure of InterOccupy, my study documents the Occupy movement's increased organizational capacity and strategic use of resources at the very moment when other scholars were writing Occupy's obituary

@davetroy "I reached out to several of the ones I knew from my Occupy ...approximately 1/3 of Anons actually worked for the Russians to put Trump in office, because they saw him as the wrecking ball that could conceivably bring down the American empire. About 1/3 of them were coerced into working for the Russians by the same KGB blackmail techniques by which Russia keeps so many GOP politicians on the leash. And about 1/3 don’t even go into the dark web anymore for fear..."