Phil Butler - Putin's Praetorians - Confessions of the Top Kremlin Trolls

When I first realized what was out there I was dumbfounded. They far outclassed the bench in the mainstream coming from the left and right and they had been shut out of the industry, and eager for a platform. A short list of a few names follows, to give you an idea. It is in no way complete, as there simply isn’t enough room.

Patrick Armstrong, Alex Mercouris, the Saker, Robert Parry, Ray McGovern, Peter Lavelle, Eric Kraus, Patrick Cockburn, John Pilger, Gil Doctorow, Stephen Cohen, Graham Phillips, Paul Robinson, Gordon Hahn, Ed Lozansky, Wayne Madsen, Anatoly Karlin, Giraldi, Paul Craig Roberts, Mark Ames, Michael Krieger, Justin Raimondo, Chris Hedges, Sharon Tennison, James Carden, Phil Butler, Danielle Ryan, Anissa Naouai, Andrew Korybko, Mark Sleboda.

South Front, Anti-media, Storm Clouds Gathering, The Blogmire, Antiwar.com, Counterpunch, Newsbud, The Intercept, Unz Review, Moon of Alabama, Kremlin Stooge, The Wall Will Fall, Off-Guardian, Signs of the Times, Global Research, American Committee for East-West Accord, Pravoslavie.ru.

And then, to add to all this wealth, in the summer of 2016 along came the Alt-Right, which to our surprise, packed a powerful intellectual punch along with a fascination and admiration for contemporary Russia and a blistering critique of neoconservatism. Some of their writing about the country is simply excellent. In particular Vincent Law and Richard Spencer.

Another story we realized was going almost completely unreported was the remarkable and dramatic turn towards Christianity at all levels of Russian society. Some of us, including myself, were practicing Russian Orthodox Christians, so it was very evident to us, and this topic also became a rich source of original material which was either ignored by the openly Christophobic mainstream, or crudely misreported as a negative.

One cannot remotely begin to understand Russia’s past or present without understanding her nation-defining religion, and learning about it gave us extraordinary insight. The quantity of articles exceeded what we could put on Russia Insider, leading us to start a separate site — Russian Faith.

On the subject of talent, the German blogosphere deserves special mention. I am half German, and so began to follow the German mainstream and alternative media, and was again amazed at what I discovered. It is hard to believe, but the German mainstream is more strident, brittle, and hysterically hostile towards Russia than even the Anglosphere.

Thankfully, Germans have demonstrated a healthy reaction to the nonsense, and they have a lively alt media scene, creating some of the best writing about Russia. We have carried many German articles in translation and continue to do so.

Russia Insider quickly outgrew my ability to fund it, so we embarked on a series of crowdfunds which brought in over $100,000 in the next 18 months. Readers also frequently simply hit the donate button, bringing in another $100,000. This is peanuts in the media world, but it was enough, together with ad revenue, for us to keep RI growing.

More than anything, it was yet more confirmation of a powerful, popular enthusiasm for what we were doing. We have received zero support from the Russian state. Everything we have done has been from contributions from thousands of individuals. It is a remarkable fact.

When we started in late 2014, what we were saying was shocking to many and definitely ‘edgy’. But as Trump and Sanders emerged in late 2015 and early 2016, it felt like we were riding some sort of tsunami. I realized that we had been precursors to a massive popular revolt, that were being swept along by a vast crowd waking up to the corruption of their society. It was surreal to go from rabble-rousing outsiders to having both upstart candidates espousing some of our favorite talking points.

As I write this in June of 2017, the American political melt-down is the gift that keeps on giving, with Russia-gate pushing much of the American right into pro-Russian positions on Ukraine, Syria, and much else, which we were arguing two years ago, sending new audiences and admirers our way.

What needs to happen to make our media healthy again, and I’ve thought a lot about this, and what the prospects are for opposition media like Russia Insider.

The fact is that the media are by far the most important political and social institution in society. They are more politically powerful than any branch of government, academia, or social or religious institution, especially in the apostate West. They literally tell people what to think on just about everything. Control the media and you control everything else — by default.

Watching and analyzing them as closely as I do, it is blindingly obvious to me that they are beyond repair — incapable of reform. The only solution is to replace them lock, stock and barrel with new outlets, new owners, new editors, and new writers, for the existing ones are incapable of change.

Only to the degree these new media appear can society address the crucial issues of our age. Nothing will improve until this is done — neither our endless wars, nor our political and social chaos. Any small progress we are making is thanks to the new media — whether on the right or the left.

Our media are our civilization’s lifeblood, the mechanism by which it functions, and as long as they remain blindfolded, civilization not only cannot progress, but will regress and fail, as is clearly the case today.

For all our success, Russia Insider is relatively small, but taken together, the opposition media are formidable — they make up about 30% of the landscape in the US. They could well dominate relatively soon.

The funds required are not nearly what they used to be, for new media is far cheaper than what was needed to build the legacy media. Perhaps a $1 billion of investment would be enough across the US market, a trivial sum on the national scale.

It’s time for some patriotic and forward-thinking billionaires to step up to the plate and put some significant funds into this diverse crop of media upstarts like Russia Insider.

Russia is an incomparably fascinating, deep, wonderful civilization, one of the great world civilizations, with a fantastic wealth of ideas, culture, and Christian spirituality. The truth is that it is, and was, routinely smeared by its enemies, and its true nature is barely understood in the West.

It is like some priceless treasure, mothballed for the 20th century by Communism, and misconstrued before that. It has protected and defended at great cost the secrets and intellectual wealth inherited from the Byzantine empire, the most successful civilization man has ever known, going back to the very beginning of the Christian era. It is a veritable treasure chest now opening up to benefit all mankind.

The sole filter for information about Russia for decades have been the media, which have given a very slanted and frankly dishonest picture of the country — due to a bitter anti-Russian bias among its owners, editors and writers.

Actually, the deception goes back much further. It got started in late 18th c. England as Russia emerged as the British Empire’s greatest global adversary. The deception was sustained by enlightenment, democratic, and liberal forces in Europe throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, whom Russia saw as mortal enemies, which they indeed turned out to be.

It is fair to say that the average Westerner, even the average highly-educated one, has a very faulty and slanted knowledge of Russia, tainted as it has been now for three centuries of outright hostility. I see it again and again when talking to highly educated and fair-minded people, especially older ones.