31.08.2025, Aleksandrovskoye.
The West will continue its attempts to destroy our country both militarily and by destabilizing the situation within Russia in order to establish a government under its control.
Continued. Beginning
The influence of big money
The other side of the coin of the populist movement in the US is that it is not entirely grassroots, at least as far as the US congressional elections are concerned.
At the beginning of Clinton’s presidency, Democrats launched a “crusade” against the tobacco industry with the aim of declaring nicotine a drug and regulating tobacco sales in the same way as drug sales. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) became the instrument for this. The American magazine Mother Jones reported in May 1996: “When it became clear that Clinton’s FDA was going after tobacco companies, they switched their political support—traditionally bipartisan—to the Republicans. In 1993-94, the industry invested an unprecedented $1.8 million in the Republican Party’s soft takeover of the House of Representatives and Senate. This victory not only destroyed the Democratic members of Congress who had been persecuting the industry for decades, but also brought tobacco’s friends into leadership positions.” These were the very elections that brought Newt Gingrich to the top and were marked by the “Contract with America.” The “Contract” was an important PR move and changed the Republican Party’s stance, but it would hardly have been successful without the tobacco industry’s money.
After Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, all congressional investigations into tobacco were halted. An article Mother Jones lists a number of recipients of money from tobacco companies: the Institute for Competitive Enterprise received between $50,000 and $100,000 or more, Citizens for a Sound Economy received hundreds of thousands of dollars, and “significant donations” were made to Gingrich’s Progress & Freedom Foundation and the Washington Legal Foundation (closely associated with the American conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation).
The last organization is an NGO founded in Washington in 1977 to fight legal battles in support of business and the free market. Since the stated goal of the Foundation is to “defend and promote the principles of freedom and justice,” with freedom meaning a free market and freedom of speech for companies, the organization is widely perceived as conservative, and its cooperation with the Heritage Foundation contributes to this perception. The Washington Legal Foundation also deals with corporate criminal liability, environmental regulation, food and drug legislation, healthcare, and intellectual property—that is, what the US Congress regulates. The organization’s website does not indicate its source of funding, but it does accept donations.
According to the American media, the Tea Party movement was not independent either. In 2016, American politician and writer Jeff Nesbitt published a book entitled Poisoned Tea: How Big Oil and Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Hijacked the Republican Party. In this book, Nesbitt recounts that after working in the White House under President Bush Sr. in the spring of 1993, he was compelled to pursue political consulting, and it so happened that his first client was a think tank called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), chaired by Texas Congressman Ron Paul, a considered libertarian. The center proclaimed its mission to be “fighting for smaller government, lower taxes, and less regulation.” Trump uses the same slogans.
It turned out that Richard Fink, the right-hand man of American billionaire oil industrialist Charles Koch, always appeared at the think tank’s critical strategy sessions and talked about what Charles Koch was interested in and wanted to do. From this, Nesbitt concludes that the think tank he advised was backed by the Koch brothers’ money — their combined wealth at the time was the largest in the United States.
Charles Koch
It should be noted that Richard Fink is quite an interesting character. It is not easy to find his photo on the internet, and his biography reveals only his date of birth and the university he attended. His biographies do not even mention the fact that he was a member of the privatization commission under President Reagan (this fact can be found in the White House archives). Moreover, at the same time that Fink was working on what Nesbitt calls “the takeover of the Republican Party,” he served on the board of trustees of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization that aimed to purge the Democratic Party of its far-left members. This Council (disbanded in 2011) founded the Institute for Progressive Politics, which still exists today. The Council also welcomed Bill Clinton’s election as US president.
According to Nesbitt, one of his first tasks as a CSE consultant was to participate in a CSE leadership trip to New York to raise funds for a meeting “with a major corporate partner with vast experience in building real political power that could help the CSE move beyond Koch oil money for new grassroots efforts.” That partner in New York turned out to be the tobacco company Philip Morris. The Kochs and the tobacco company agreed with the CSE to create sort of grassroots anti-tax groups in several states that would fight any taxes that were introduced. It didn’t matter what kind of taxes they were — the front groups could fight cigarette taxes in the northeastern United States and refined oil taxes on the coasts. Any tax was bad. And these front groups would be able to take on all of them, with the backing of Philip Morris and the Koch brothers.
Nesbitt writes: “You could rename anything a tax, and God knows how much the American public hates taxes. This was, in essence, the beginning of the American “Tea Party” rebellion against the government’s ability to pay for its programs. They could recruit ordinary citizens from various ideological groups to work side by side with corporate-controlled workers, providing real support on the ground when activists were lacking. And no one would know — or even want to know — that these “grassroots” anti-tax groups were jointly created and funded by the largest private oil company and the largest tobacco company in the world.“
David Koch
Later, according to a study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, other major US tobacco companies joined this conspiracy: RJ Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, and Lorillard.
It was only almost 20 years later that it became known that the leitmotifs of the “Tea Party movement” against taxes, regulation, and the government were developed almost simultaneously by the two largest tobacco companies—Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds—under the guise of political and business coalitions fighting excise taxes of all kinds, including cigarette taxes. In the 1990s, the Kochs (key partners in the grassroots mobilization network), Philip Morris, and RJR, collaborating with CSE, helped create state-level propaganda campaigns against taxes and regulation, such as Get Government Off Our Back, Enough is Enough, and Citizens Against Regressive Taxation.
Nesbitt also reports that over the years, Richard Fink, a political advisor to Charles Koch, and his numerous protégés have publicly detailed how one could take control of one of the two national political parties from the outside and embed free-market libertarian principles at the core of its platform. To achieve this, they believed it would require:
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an extensive academic network for intellectual support;
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political networks in every state that could rely on the intellectual foundation being created in American universities;
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a genuine grassroots political alliance that extends to all state capitals and works closely with the academic and political network;
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a propaganda weapon that could bring tightly controlled messages and narratives to the forefront in the media in a way that appeared to be independent journalism;
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a group coordinating actions at the national level that could ensure the discipline and manageability of a political network spanning the entire ideological spectrum—from the patriotic movement to proponents of American exceptionalism.
Nesbitt reports that all five of these key tools were used in the organization and funding of the ‘Tea Party movement,’ and that they were well-prepared by the spring of 2009. Among them were: the Sam Adams Alliance for leading grassroots efforts; the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity for leading propaganda efforts in all American state capitals; the State Policy Network (SPN) for coordinating funding and free-market policy in individual state think tanks; American universities that were connected through SPN and received hundreds of grants from Koch foundations; and, of course, the successor to CSE, the nonprofit Americans for Prosperity, created to coordinate efforts at the national level, as well as the CSE splinter group FreedomWorks of Dick Armey (co-author of the ‘Contract with America’) and Matt Kibbee.
According to The Guardian, the Koch brothers’ money also funded the establishment of the Cato Institute (the first free-market think tank in the US) and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which in the late 1990s and 2000s served as the generator of extreme neoliberal ideas, a role once played by the economics department of the University of Chicago. 14 of the 23 provisions that George W. Bush included in his list were, according to The Wall Street Journal, first proposed by scholars working at the Mercatus Center, on whose board of directors Richard Fink sat.
IRS records show that the budgets of almost all these organizations grew when Obama was running for the White House and then took office, meaning almost a year before the Tea Party movement was presented to the public.
Interestingly, although Trump continues the populist agenda of the Tea Party movement and implements CSE’s slogans, the Kochs did not support Trump in either 2016 or 2020. In 2024, structures affiliated with Charles Koch (David Koch passed away in 2019) invested $30 million in supporting his rival Nikki Haley and over $10 million more in campaigning against Trump. And they lost. They lost to an even larger capital—that of the digital giants, which has taken on a leading role in the US economy.
From the 1990s, when the main profits were concentrated in the oil and tobacco industries, as well as in the military-industrial complex, to the present day, the US economy has changed significantly. By the time Trump emerged as a presidential candidate, the largest capital was held by investment funds, and the world’s wealthiest people were making their money in the digital sector of the economy. First, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, became the world’s richest man, then Jeff Bezos, the founder of the Amazon online store, took the top spot from him, followed by Elon Musk. Moreover, it is the digital companies that began to exert the maximum influence on US elections, and in several ways at once.
On the one hand, the emergence of social media changed the role of the media and the methods of delivering campaign propaganda to voters. On the other hand, these very social media platforms have the capability for shadow moderation of information (where only the user themselves sees the message they wrote), meaning direct influence over what information the voter receives and what they do not. On the third hand, the vast sums of money available to the owners of these companies allowed them to directly interfere in elections. For example, in 2020, ballot drop boxes in swing states were placed with money from Mark Zuckerberg, who invested about $300 million in this. However, this was an illegal action in almost all states, as it violated existing state election laws. The lawlessness was justified by the need to protect people’s health during the pandemic. Thus, digital companies became a new factor in US politics.
It is also known that multi-million dollar contracts, and often the initial capital for these digital companies, were received from the US intelligence community. Therefore, their entry into politics is the entry into politics of the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other intelligence agencies. For instance, one of the people with the easiest access to the elected US President Trump, alongside businessman Elon Musk, is businessman Peter Thiel, the founder of the PayPal payment system. His business was initially supported by the CIA, and later Thiel himself admitted to cooperating with the FBI. And the elected US Vice President J.D. Vance previously worked for Peter Thiel, after which Thiel helped him become a US Senator and a vice-presidential candidate. Thiel financed the election campaigns of several US senators and a number of members of the House of Representatives. So it’s already time to wonder: will it be Trump’s supporters or, in fact, Thiel’s supporters sitting in Congress?
Conclusions
The ideology behind Trump’s slogans directly implies that under Trump, the US will strive to maximally punish Russia for daring to challenge it. The strength of American opposition to Russia will be constrained not by Trump’s desire to make peace with us, but by a potential war with China, which the US considers a more serious adversary than Russia, and for which it needs a stockpile of weapons and ammunition. Trump will attempt to pull Russia away from China in order to then use us as a battering ram against China—this would avoid having to deploy US armed forces, which aligns perfectly with Trump’s notions of propper policy.
The ideology of Trump’s grassroots movement suggests that attempts to suppress those who challenge US hegemony will become even harsher. And the fact that Trump is supported by the owners of digital companies implies that digitization and attempts to dehumanize people will not cease—on the contrary, they will be intensified. The digitization of all aspects of life (along with the resulting potential for total surveillance and, consequently, total control) in the West will not stop but will accelerate. The obsessive propaganda of sexual perversions might cease, but that is where the benefits of a Trump presidency end.
The West will continue its attempts to destroy our country, both through military means and by destabilizing the situation within Russia to install a government subservient to it, which would surrender Russian interests. One should not expect sanctions against Russia to be lifted or for the West to stop igniting fires around its perimeter. We must prepare for a long period of confrontation with the West.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
