Chabad, The Armenians and The Russian Deep State

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You’re not supposed to talk about Russian-Armenians. But it’s impossible to ignore them now or then.

Mikhail Gorbachev is Russian-Armenian — if not by blood then by attitude. It’s why Gorbachev betrayed Robert Maxwell, who we’ve discussed previously, failed at the peaceful, orderly transfer of technology and information between the Soviet Union and America. When Gorbachev detonated the Soviet Union he unleashed the Armenian mafia. Their spies like half-Armenian, half-Jewish Garry Kasparov continue to warp our understanding of Russia and ourselves.

There’s a lot of clues about Gorbachev’s Armenianness. He hails from a town — Privolnoye — where the second largest ethnic group is Armenian after Russian. In recent years the Azerbaijanis have put a lot of this “Gorbachev as Armenian” discourse online. You can read it to your heart’s content.

Gorbachev wasn’t feted in his hometown. He was ultimately seen as a traitor because he couldn’t really answer the question of Nagorno-Karabakh’s status to Armenia’s satisfaction. He let Azerbaijan have it.

Sound familiar? Putin, needing Turkish support, let Azerbaijan take Nagorno-Karabakh.

And then there’s this detail that David Remnick, then of the Washington Post, wrote about this conflict in “Armenians Still Angry at Moscow, Gorbachev” on September 10, 1988.

After seven months of ethnic and political conflict in the Soviet Caucasus, Moscow officialdom finally allowed western correspondents to visit Armenia this week, presuming that all was now quiet and calm. They could not have been more mistaken.

Armenia, the smallest of the 15 Soviet republics, has become disenchanted with the Communist Party and its leaders, including Mikhail Gorbachev. In interviews here, Armenians called Gorbachev a “liar,” “a failed promise” and “an old-style dictator.”

Last February, when Armenians staged demonstrations demanding reunification with the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, they carried portraits of the Soviet leader. They believed that the man who had allowed them to express their opinions so openly would also agree with them on Nagorno-Karabakh, which is 75 percent Armenian and historically part of Armenia.

But after a three-day attack on Armenians in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait in February that resulted in 32 deaths and the Supreme Soviet’s decision in July to keep Nagorno-Karabakh under Azerbaijani administration, the portraits disappeared. “Gorbachev just closed his eyes to all our problems,” said Grigor Manukyan, a 25-year-old engineer. “We are a people in a state of shock.”

“Everybody has stopped believing in him,” said another young activist on Opera Square. “His support is absolutely zero.” This negative assessment was borne out in dozens of conversations this week in Yerevan and surrounding villages.

When States are weak things fall apart. Some groups win out, though. Some groups prosper. We’ve had a lot of discussions here about the Russian Jewish networks which took advantage of the situation. We’ve even talked a little bit about the Russians aligned with Yeltsin. We notice, as we must, Bill Browder and his son’s relationship with Robert Maxwell and Founders Fund.

But they were certainly not the only groups which prospered from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Enter the Armenians.

Margarita Simonyan, the Russo-Armenian editor-in-chief of state media outlet RT who was newly sanctioned, is more Russian than the Russians. She says that anyone who doesn’t support the Ukraine War isn’t really Russian. Simonyan among the Russian media managers sanctioned by America for allegedly interfering in our presidential election.

There are many questions I still have — what was the Armenian element in what went down in Chechnya in 2000? Why was Simonyan selected? Was Alyona Minkovski — who once ran a show on Huffington Post — an alternate choice? Was Arianna Huffington?

There could well be clues in her biography as provided by the BBC:

(Simonyan’s) views towards the West are perhaps best summarised by comments in her last interview with the BBC, in March, as Mr Putin prepared to secure a fifth term as president in a largely uncontested election.

Asked whether there was a serious challenger, she replied: “Is there a need for a serious opponent? Why? We are not like you.

“And we don’t like you much, really.”

Who is the “we” here? And what exactly was she doing in New Hampshire?

Ms Simonyan was born in the Krasnodar region of Russia into an Armenian family. Her academic achievements helped her gain a place on a prestigious exchange programme to the US, and she arrived in New Hampshire in 1995.

She later returned to Russia and became a TV journalist.

Her rise to prominence came in 2004, when she reported on the Beslan school siege by Chechen militants. It ended after three days with the bloody state response that left hundreds dead, including 186 children.

For Ms Simonyan it led to rapid advancement. Soon after, she was chosen, aged 25, to create and lead the international network Russia Today, later rebranded as RT.

I’ve come to believe that the Armenians wanted the chaotic free-for-all of the Soviet collapse. Less than eighteen months after the Armenian protests in 1988 the whole Soviet Union fell apart and Armenia, the smallest of the 25th Soviet Union’s republics, became an independent state. And yet there were plenty of Armenians back in Russia who could be used to help an enterprising KGB player take control…

Of course the Armenians wanted to control the Baku oil fields when they became independent. The dream was to dissolve the Soviet Union into chaos and in that chaos, take over the oil fields. Alas, it didn’t quite work out that way and the Armenians were forced from Baku.

Still Christian Armenia more or less stayed aligned with Christian Russia — that is until Azerbaijan began secretly buying weapons from Belarus and Netanyahu’s Israel and using them to massacre Armenians. Both Belarus and Netanyahu’s Israel are close allies of the Russians.

Unable to forestall a second Armenian genocide or equip much of a military the Armenians and their considerable allies in the underworld began causing trouble all around the world, especially in Russia where they paid the Tajik terrorists.

Rather curiously, the indictment against RT’s two producers mentions this curious

Afanasyeva also collected information from and gave instructions to U.S. Company-1  staff. For example, after the March 22, 2024, terrorist attack on a music venue in Moscow, Afanasyeva asked one of U.S. Company-1’s founders to blame Ukraine and the United States for the attack, writing: “I think we can focus on the Ukraine/U.S. angle. . . . (T)he mainstream media spread fake news that ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack yet ISIS itself never made such statements. All terrorists are now detained while they were heading to the border with Ukraine which makes it even more suspicious why they would want to go to Ukraine to hide.” 

And yet the evidence is fairly clear that the Crocus Concert Hall was owned by Azeris — Azeris in business with none other than Robert De Niro. (Doesn’t De Niro’s performance at Trump’s trial in New York take on another color now? Sure enough, Trump’s sentencing has been postponed — just as I had predicted.)

When you understand that Margarita Simonyan is Armenian it looks like the RT producers and their American and Canadian assets are being instructed to cover up the real culprits — the Armenian mob who have increasingly adopted the practices of the Wagner Group.

Naturally the US warned of an imminent attack — a gesture that while not totally heeded opened up the possibility of a thawing of relations between the American and Russian deep states. We’re now living in that world where deep states are taking down these criminal networks.

Viewed this way, Putin’s decision to keep Tucker Carlson waiting — a measure of disrespect we wrote about here — might be because Putin knows that Tucker has his own strange ties to the Armenian mafia and Chabad. Tucker Carlson even spoke at Hells Angels president Sonny Barger’s funeral in 2022. The Hells Angels is especially close to the Armenian mafia around the world.

How soon this happened is anyone’s guess but I suspect it probably started at St. George where Tucker went to private school. The Armenian Mob was all over Providence in those days and the son of one of the Voice of America players would have been an ideal target.

The Azeris, for their part, have also noticed this sort of thing and pointed out how keen Tucker Carlson is to support the Armenian mafia party line. A segment Carlson did with Vivek Ramaswamy came up for particular opprobrium. Ramaswamy, it should be noted, was the only political candidate to show up on Tenet Media. Vivek is quite close with influencer Ashley St. Clair, who is herself tied into Chabad.

The Armenia mafia is still aligned with Chabad, which until recently, had been Russia’s state-sanctioned Judaism. To be sure there have been hiccups — Armenia’s one synagogue was a Chabad synagogue until it was burned down earlier this year and the Israeli state continues to ethnically cleanse the Armenian quarter in Jerusalem — but in the main both groups share a commitment to overthrow the world order which makes it harder for them to traffic in stolen goods, slavery and data theft.

A lot of the fights seem contrived and fake between the groups. Doesn’t it seem like Candace Owens debate with rabbi Shmuley Boteach is a kind of kayfabe fight? A sort of “state-sanctioned” or permitted anti-semitism?

It certainly feels like Dan Bilzerian’s anti-Semitism is a bit too contrived and maybe a little too convenient. Bilzerian’s interview with Patrick Bet-David felt as if it were each of them trying to sting the other with Bet-David getting the upper hand. It’s worth watching Joe Rogan’s conversation with Bet-David to get it exactly right.

We’ve been over the Chabad ties to the Russo-Ukraine war already but it looks like Chabad picked wrong when it supported Yevgeny Prigozhin’s drive toward Moscow.

The Wagner Group, which drew soldiers from Russia’s prisons, had its own connections to the Armenian mafia. And so did Alexei Nalvany whose own ties to far right and Armenian criminal groups have been airbrushed out of the anti-Putin narratives.

If you know that Navalny, of course was quite close to the Armenian mafia maybe the Russians had a point in banning him. Would America’s deep state tolerate the cartels or domestic mafia taking over a political party here? Or would they suspiciously find themselves getting deplatformed?

Richard Spencer and I discussed the name Tenet the other day. I’ve written my own views elsewhere on why I believe Chen was stinging everyone but his are worth recording here.

“Tenet Media” ripped off its name and logo from Christopher Nolan’s 2020 film, Tenet. In it, we learn that the “Protagonist,” who seems like a confused, almost hapless participant in a mission to take down a doomsday organization, is, in fact, the man who started the whole operation. He seems a step behind … but in fact, he’s two steps ahead! The Protagonist started “Tenet” in the future, or, from current his standpoint, the past. The whole thing has been a “pincer operation,” moving in two directions at once.

Might this odd naming choice reveal to us what is really going on with Tenet Media?

The most plausible, simplest explanation is that Tenet Media is a scheme, launched by the Kremlin-backed “RT,” to influence Americans and the 2024 presidential election. But perhaps something else is going on…

Might this have been a sort of “pincer movement” in which the real targets were the influencers themselves? This case is not subtle. State-aligned Russian operatives directly funded American and Canadian influencers. Perhaps, you could say, it was almost too obvious and too easy to prosecute. Tenet Media money flows might also reveal the entire Russian-backed network: Tucker? Greenwald? et al.

Might Russia be burning its foreign assets in preparation for a new president or for a change in strategy? Might another “protagonist” be behind Tenet? It’s worth considering.

I think this is quite right.

In the days since the indictment we’ve learned that the Russians have an organization — the Orwellian-named Social Design Agency — which….

extensively monitors and collects information about a large number of media organizations and social media influencers. One document revealed a list of more than 2,800 people on various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Telegram, spanning 81 countries, that SDA identified as influencers, including television and radio hosts, politicians, bloggers, journalists, businessmen, professors, think-tank analysts, veterans, professors, and comedians. When referring to politicians, the list often mentioned which U.S. state and/or political party they represent and the position they hold in Congress.”

More curious still:

On another list of over 1,900 “anti-influencers” from 52 countries, the U.S.- based accounts comprised 26% of the total accounts being monitored by SDA… “(A)nti- influencer” indicates that the account posts content that SDA views as contrary to Russian objectives.

You get the sense here that the Russians are burning their assets. The Russians suspect, I think correctly, that they no longer have need of any right-wing influencers once Trump is defeated.

They’re going to promote Jackson Hinkle over, say, Benny Johnson. Hinkle pushes the “no genes” theory because the Russian deep state wants to be further ahead than us on genetics. If genes aren’t real as Hinkle says why is Putin’s daughter a geneticist?

There’s a kind of desperation you’re starting to notice among the influencers. Candace Owens is trying to promote crazy anti-semitism to stir up social conflicts that were long settled.

She’s posting anti-Chabad content as a controlled fight — and a loyalty test. Who will come to Chabad’s defense now that it’s being removed from the former Soviet Union?

Meanwhile Chabad is trying to work a deal with the Vatican over Latin America. Who is going to control different parts of Latin America?

They’re looking to Latin America as a safe haven. Is it actually? Or has Millei laid an elaborate trap?

TENET means “snare” in Russian. What is it in Spanish again? Oh that’s right — trampa!

Somehow it fits to go from Trump to Trampa.