Cesar Sayoc: the Trump Russia Link

Update – thanks to Ken Carvel, who discovered that Sayoc’s facebook profiles had one ‘Olga Rubin’ in common.

‘Rubin Investment Properties’ would seem to be beneath the reach of a semi-indigent man living in his van, previously bankrupt and expelled from the house of his Democrat-supporting mother.   But Sayoc’s accounts indicate that he was associating with Florida’s ‘Little Moscow’ – Sunny Isle Beach, where Russian mobsters associated with Donald Trump have long been buying apartments. James MacKenzie covered this for Patribotics last year

 

HostKey West: Trump’s Miami Red Square

“Donald Trump’s Little Moscow deserves more attention”, MacKenzie wrote, and how right he was.

 

We will do a further article shortly on the nexus of the NRA, Russia and Trump in this area of Florida, and their architecture for owning prosecutors that may have given Sayoc the confidence he needed to both vote as a felon and harass and threaten anti-gun activists like David Hogg online. At the bottom of this a piece, there is a link and a warning to a further article containing a repository from one of Sayoc’s two Twitter accounts, including graphic and racist imagery. 

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Cesar Sayoc, the suspect in the recent bombing campaign, now owns the most famous white van since that of OJ Simpson. Covered in pro-Trump memes and conspiracy theories, the van instantly led to Sayoc having his twitter feeds and the images on his van deeply analyzed for their hateful content. But is there anything more that his social media can tell us, and how, if at all, does it feed in to Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election?

The fact that Sayoc had several social media accounts on the same platform with identical purposes is significant in and of itself. The linked names ‘hardrock16’ and ‘hardrockintlet’ show that Cesar wanted to created a small ecosystem of messaging, branding himself with the Hard Rock cafe, and heavy metal in general.

The two accounts had directly similar purposes – and not the normal ones for being on Twitter. Sayoc did not use them for one to one chatting or talking, other than to send threats to various of his targets. In other words, it seems plain that the suspect considered his social media operations to have a purpose that contained no conventional ‘social’ role. He was not online to make friends. His twitter account hardrock16 put out 1,200 odd tweets, and yet had just 13 ‘likes’. Cesar was not there to connect with people. His feed was broadcast-only. He was there to disseminate messaging, the same messaging he had on his van. 

And a great deal of that messaging, it turns out, was produced in Russia.

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Cesar’s account hardrock16 was created in April 2016, and his hardrockintlent account in 2015. His likes column there showed he was active on Twitter just after the election, and in January 2017; the first of his 13 likes on that account came three days after Trump’s election, and the second and third in January of 2017. But if he tweeted in order to elect trump, or through the last year, he had wiped those tweets from this account. The first extant tweet, a video of himself, was sent in February 2018. It was followed with two other videos, and after that the “memetic warfare” began. This year, Cesar was all about spreading narratives – and very specific ones at that, narratives and images that were produced by the Russian state. 

Analysis on Medium by citizen journalist @USHadrons identified memes created by Russia and targeted at US soldiers that appeared on Sayoc’s van, memes she had already logged as Russian:

A third was on the back of the suspect’s van, and by 2018 he was mostly accusing

Democrats of being Russian influenced. But his 2016 pro-Russian posts were complemented by a chilling take on a ban of anti-gay activists at the World Cup in Russia, one that went along with his psychopathic threats to have left-wing activists eaten by crocodiles in the Everglades.

‘Awesome Russia make them disappear, never to be seen again. Awesome ban. Say nothing make the activist vanish’

Undoubtedly then Sayoc’s content and sympathies came from, and lay with, Russia, as well as with Trump and the GOP. His messaging, as unhinged as it was, seemed to have a purpose, a definite intent to it, as though he was tweeting to order or enacting some twisted sort of message-delivery orders in his own mind.

Sayoc’s tweets suggest a partly military background. He said he was 12 years in military school,

and the GRU certainly believed ‘memetic warfare’ was a psychological operation, or ‘psyop’. Is it possible Sayoc considered himself some kind of a psyop in Putin’s troll army?

It may come out that Sayoc was being paid to do what he did, but given his level of poverty, it can’t exactly have been very much. More likely is that we are looking at a second, and far worse, “Pizzagate” crisis – that Sayoc was radicalized by Donald Trump’s tweets and by Russian pushed propaganda lines from the Internet troll farm and others to act as he did. An unhinged man who had been listening to Russian propaganda from Mike Flynn Jr about ‘Pizzagate’ nearly shot up Comic Ping Pong, the restaurant named in the conspiracy theory, in  December 2016.

In that sense then Russian trolls “weaponized” Cesar Sayoc, whether he linked with them offline or not. He was a serial fantasist, of Filippino and Italian descent – note – not a “white male” as the internet race-baiters had it – but thought of himself as Native American, and some of the ‘Russians’ he boasted of meeting were waving Italian flags from the World Cup and may have been his relatives. But Sayoc’s tweets give plentiful URLs for the FBI to mine for future indictments, including a “Deplorable” “Meme Magic” Facebook group.

Indeed, those Americans who have been spreading race-baiting propaganda knowingly on Russia’s behalf may find that their forthcoming indictments are seen as easy wins by prosecutors around the country – because Cesar Sayoc just put a Putin-loving face to a wave of violent threats that have appalled Americans and nearly resulted in assassinations and deaths.

Patribotics has compiled a huge number of Sayoc’s memes and videos, which are now added to this post in ongoing updates linked to a second page. Dive in at your leisure, but please be aware before clicking to read that this content will be distressing, and contains racism, sexism, bigotry, and violent imagery.

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More of our stories:

Are Saudi Arabia Blackmailing Trump Over Donald Jr and Jared Kushner?

Did Carter Page Call Devin Nunes From Moscow?