Eric Garland has been a respected Competitive Intelligence professional for twenty years. In 2016 he started tweeting about Trump Russia collusion and corruption with a now-famous tweet thread “It’s time for some game theory.” Dozens of media outlets attacked him. They didn’t refute what he said. They provided no supporting evidence for their attacks on him. Instead, they said Garland was a crazy conspiracy wack job.
Fast forward to 2018 and it’s clear much of what Garland has been tweeting about is accurate. The attacks on him were baseless. Read the initial game theory thread. It is about about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and how Wikileaks and Snowden were part of it. This was considered crazy insanity by Very Important Pundits in 2016. Today, in 2018 there are federal indictments against Russians who interfered in the election and Wikileaks and Assange long ago showed us who they really are, which is far-right Putin-supporters. And Snowden is in Russia and doesn’t do or say anything publicly without Russian intelligence oking it. Really, he doesn’t.
Curiously (or maybe not so curiously), the attacks against Garland often use the same words and phrases even though they came from different sources. And yes, some of them were supposed leftie sites like Mother Jones.
Garland has consistently rallied the Never Trump troops, provided important information, and never gives up. He should be applauded, not attacked.
From his Anatomy of a Defamation:
In the annals of gaslighting, there must be some record around going from being a moderately well-known entity in a niche profession to being a public menace of mental instability worthy of 200 articles about how you aren’t worthy of public attention, published in a variety of global outlets.
Welcome to my 2016–2018. This is what happened if you stepped up to Russia, the Global Mob, and the financial elite during their seminal and doomed attack on democracy.
The language was unusually harmonious in terms of common phrases.
As per my profession, I ran a statistical analysis of it. The word clusters among the 100-plus articles were, in terms of median probability, unlikely. Most writers put a stamp on their prose. Catch phrases. Favorite zingers. It is unusual to see the same phrasing turn up constantly without a guiding force.
Grifter. Fraud. “So-called strategist.” Establishment Democrat. Amphetamines. Craft beer.
Always with the quotes around my career. Not, “guy who started in 1997 in this particular field who gives lectures at conferences and writes peer-reviewed journal articles.”
“So-called” or “self-described.”
They have for two solid years, in concert, churned out hundreds of nearly identical articles attacking me personally without taking on an argument or correcting a factual error in good faith.
As for those who chose to green-light pieces about me instead of digging into a thousand different opportunities to expose corruption or elucidate espionage, I wonder what it is they find worthwhile. But I don’t think the opinions of this current batch are especially important.
The general public is catching on and the money for this effort will surely soon run out.