American spies: “Those sneaky Russians want to get their grubby asiatic fingers on our patriotic COVID cure!”

Another ridiculous spy-fed story has hit the wire: We’re being told that Cozy Bear — the Russian hacker group that supposedly hacked the 2016 election and gave us Donald Trump — is now prowling the internet for America’s COVID-19 vaccine secrets. And the Russians aren’t alone. China and Iran are in on it too. The New Axis of Evil is at it again! 

From the New York Times

A couple of thoughts on this breaking development. 

First about Cozy Bear: It does not exist. This evil Russian hacker “group” is a fiction — a fiction made up by Crowdstrike, a privatized spy security firm, in order to drum up business and increase its valuation. I repeat: Cozy Bear does not exist. I wrote about this three years ago in an investigation for The Baffler following the 2016 election. 

The thing about these security firms is that they frequently tailor their findings to meet the demands of the market. And they do this by practicing a very cynical profit-driven forensic science. They reverse-engineer things to produce results: First they decide on the guilty party (the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians) and then they find the evidence that confirms this assumption. 

As I’ve pointed out in the past, claims about cyber attacks and hacks are a perfect vehicle for spy-fed xenophobic and nationalistic propaganda. These attacks all happen within computer systems. The physical evidence showing that “they happened” boils down to a bit of data in some log file somewhere. That data can be faked. It can be invented. And it can be interpreted in pretty much any way the people doing the interpreting want. Best of all, there’s no real way for people to physically verify what happened. There’s no bullet hole or a crater to look at and sniff. There’s no video evidence. You have to take spies at their word. You have to trust that they’re telling you the truth.

This COVID vaccine hacking story is a perfect example. Nothing actually happened, even the spies pushing this story ultimately admit that. Yet to them this “nothing” is evidence of “something” — something huge and dangerous.

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Giant Trove Of Hidden Nazi Artifacts Found In Argentina

The largest collection of Nazi objects in Argentina’s history was discovered outside of Buenos Aires this month.

Around 75 artifacts — including some that were likely used by Hitler himself — were found in a hidden room inside a collector’s home.

Among the disturbing items were magnifying glasses engraved with swastikas, a bust of Hitler, a box of harmonicas, and a scary-looking medical device used to measure heads (an ethnocentric technique used by Nazis to distinguish “Aryans” from Jews).

Authorities suspect that many of the pieces belonged to high-ranking Nazi officials. This theory is supported by photographs found with the collection — one of which shows Hitler using a magnifying glass like the ones confiscated.

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The Disturbing Rise of Anti-Semitism Among Black Celebs

Recently, big-name Black entertainers like Ice Cube, Nick Cannon, Diddy, the Jacksons (Stephen and DeSean), and even beloved Black author Alice Walker, have spouted age-old anti-Semitic talking points—usually by quoting known bigot Louis Farrakhan—insisting that “the Jews” run everything, and locating Black liberation in anti-Jewish suspicion. 

On his podcast, Cannon spoke to fellow anti-Semitic conspiracist Professor Griff, formerly of Public Enemy (he was kicked out of the group for his anti-Jewishness, specifically for calling Jews “wicked”), agreeing with Griff’s racist view that Jewish people control media and claiming that “Semitic people are Black people” so Black people cannot be anti-Semitic. After Cannon was dropped by ViacomCBS for his comments, Diddy then took to Instagram and invited Cannon to his network RevoltTV. On July 4th, Diddy’s RevoltTV broadcast a speech by Farrakhan—a man who has praised Hitler and repeatedly calls Jews “Satanic”—worldwide, and also shared a Farrakhan video on Twitter in which the Nation of Islam leader called the Jewish head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, “Satan” and claimed that “those of you that say you are the Jews, I will not even give you the honor of calling you a Jew. You are not a Jew. You are Satan, and it is my job now to pull the cover off of Satan so that every Muslim when he sees Satan, pick up a stone, as we do in Mecca.” 

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