Negative Insurgencies

A discussion with the open source researcher Gal Suburban

Readers and listeners are well acquainted with the indefatigable open source researcher Gal Suburban, who joins me this week for the fifth time on the PREVAIL podcast. She’s spent the last six years deep-diving on fifth generation warfare, psy-ops, corrupt creatures of the Florida swamp, and traitors to our democracy. I like to have her on the show because, at any given time, the stuff she’s looking into winds up being stuff the rest of us have to catch up on later.

Here are three takeaways from our discussion:

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There is an insurgency within the GOP, and the malign forces are in control.

The Republican Party is full-on MAGA, which is to say, anti-democratic (small and capital “d”). Its decisions are predicated on the designs of a Russian strongman and the whims of a deteriorating, mobbed-up presidential candidate whose criminal trial in New York began this week.

As the villains in James Bond movies cannot ramp up their evildoing without monologuing about their intentions, real-life far-right thought leaders are constantly publishing books outlining their plans. Gal has been buying and reading these books. She calls it “the Traitor Book Club.”

“I’m going through all of the anti-democratic influencers or grifters that are running around, and I order their books. And I’m just trying to get a kind of a grasp on what their thinking is,” she tells me, “the way that they’re planning, the way that they’re seeding narratives.”

For example: Mike Flynn has a series of fun reads on fifth generation warfare. Patrick Byrne—the former CEO of Overstock.com and the author of 2021’s The Deep Rig: How Election Fraud Cost Donald J. Trump the White House, By a Man Who Did Not Vote for Him—has a new title: Danger Close: Domestic Extremist #1 Comes Clean. In this memoir, Byrne “unveil[s] his second life with the U.S. Government, from facilitating a bribe for Hillary Clinton to romancing a Russian spy, Byrne argues that these were early elements in a Deep State soft-coup against America, culminating in the alleged rigging of Election 2020, challenging fundamental principles of just governance.” It features an introduction by Flynn, and, just in case here was any doubt about Byrne’s allegiances, a preface by the alleged Russian spy Maria Butina, his former paramour.

This is the sort of stuff Gal has been reading. I asked her why.

I think that it’s already started, obviously, but in the next six months or however, leading up to the election, I think the narrative warfare part of everything is going to intensify. So I think understanding the way that they operate and what their goals are helps me understand even what I’m seeing even in my sources of information, because all of their narrative warfare…poisons our information stream, too…

Your last guest that you had on your last episode [Robbie Harris] was such a—oh my gosh, I learned so much listening to her and reading your piece about it, because she has a lot to say about that. I feel like what she was talking about was very similar to what we’re seeing here with the right wing and how it’s almost like an insurgency within the GOP—that the GOP doesn’t even realize they’re being taken over at gunpoint, right?

And so it’s just interesting to watch that. I’ve been trying to teach myself a little bit more about those aspects of what we’re experiencing and then just trying to get a grasp on what their goals are. Because…as loud as their movement is and as, as you know, as orchestrated as they are with messaging, there’s a lot of different factions that have different ideas, so I’m just curious to see which ones will ultimately prevail.

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Mike Flynn ain’t all that.

Whether he’s hobnobbing with Russian intelligence officials in Moscow, pleading guilty to lying to the FBI, or stirring up trouble on the eve of the insurrection, the retired lieutenant general and former U.S. military intelligence guy pops up like a proverbial bad penny.

This is a mystery to me. What’s with this guy? Why does he remain relevant? I don’t really understand the appeal, so I asked Gal to explain.

Yeah, he’s not, like, very cool. He’s not a smooth talker. He’s not all that handsome. He’s a small kind of stature. He’s not a super charismatic guy. I think he just wields this impression of authority based on his military experience and his positions in government. And he’s able to kind of maneuver the conversation around him to make him seem a lot more influential and important than he actually is….

I think he’s dangerous, and I think his ideas are dangerous. And I think the people that take his ideas and run with them in multiple other places, they’re all very dangerous. I just don’t know how much power he himself has, but he likes to create this idea around himself that he’s some kind of, you know, Deep State fighter that knows where all the bodies are buried….And people believe him. So they think they’re getting special information from somebody who was privy to it and they weren’t, and they believe it, I guess.

But he’s certainly dangerous. He knows very well how ISIS recruited and radicalized, you know—he was running counter-insurgency operation there. He likely worked with people—I mean, I’m confident he worked with people at USAID and all of that during Operation Iraqi Freedom….And fifth generation warfare in his book, it’s very much presented as what he learned fighting ISIS and Al-Qaeda and these splinter cell, terror cells.

A big part of how ISIS did what it did was working the media, social and mainstream, to seem larger and more powerful than it really was.

“I think [Flynn] presents himself as somebody who is teaching other people to do a counterinsurgency when in fact he’s just an insurgency,” Gal says. “He’s not countering a negative insurgency. He is the negative insurgency.”

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Matt Gaetz is being normalized—and that’s dangerous to democracy.

I see Matt Gaetz as Donald Trump 2.0. Both of them are brash and charming and good at attracting media coverage, favorable or otherwise. Both have skeletons in their closets. Both came from wealth, with rich, powerful, well-connected fathers who bailed them out whenever they encountered any trouble. Both are more interested in power than policy. And both have a well-deserved reputation for intimidating their opponents.

Right now, Gaetz might seem like a clown. He is a clown, one might confidently allege. But so was Trump. In 2016, the media treated him like a clown instead of a threat to democracy. The country is still paying the price.

Gal and I discussed the Elaine Godfrey piece that ran in last week’s Atlantic, “Matt Gaetz Is Winning,” which does more to normalize Gaetz than to put him in the proper perspective. This infuriated her.

“There’s so much that they brushed over,” Gal says. “That’s what’s frustrating is, like, they talk about how his dad has all this family wealth. [He’s] the founding member of the Triumph Gulf Coast Board—they barely talk about that. I think that’s such an important part of the power and money of the Gaetz dynasty in Florida and why, you know, he hasn’t really seen a lot of consequences” for his allegedly criminal behavior.

“I think [Godfrey] does an okay job as far as touching on kind of the run-of-the-mill, here’s-what-you-need-to-know sort of stuff,” she tells me. But, she continues, “it missed, for me, on warning people of, ‘Well, if Matt Gaetz is winning, what does that mean for me?’ And that question just doesn’t get answered.

“And I think it means a lot of bad things for a lot of people.”

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

S7 E9: Like Hell Matt Gaetz is Winning, and Other Tales of Danger Close (with Gal Suburban)

In this conversation, Greg Olear and Gal Suburban discuss various topics including Gal's focus on understanding anti-democratic influencers, the concept of fifth-generation warfare, and the potential dangers of a second Trump term. They also speculate on potential picks for Trump's vice president and discuss the recent comments made by Kevin McCarthy about Matt Gaetz. The conversation explores the dangers of normalizing and underestimating the threat posed by Gaetz, a charismatic and manipulative politician, and emphasizes the need to be vigilant and informed about his actions and motives. The discussion also touches on the tactics of narrative warfare and the importance of recognizing and countering them. The article in The Atlantic about Gaetz is criticized for normalizing his behavior and not adequately addressing the potential harm he could cause. The conversation concludes with a reminder to protect democracy and engage in open dialogue to prevent the rise of authoritarianism. Plus: a courtroom lullaby!

Follow Gal Suburban:
https://twitter.com/5GW_HotTakes

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Photo credit: Congressman Matt Gaetz speaks with Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson, at Hurlburt Field, Fla., Oct. 17, 2017. Wilson awarded ten Air Force Special Operations Command Air Commandos valorous medals, including the Air Force Cross, for their combined efforts during a fierce firefight in a village near Kunduz Province, Afghanistan, Nov. 2, 2016. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Joseph Pick)