Art is seen as a weapon in various intellectual traditions and memes are being weaponized for ideological purposes. Some key parts that I thought were very interesting:
"Bannon was very clear about it, is that this idea of Britain, in some ways, being a sort of cultural leader for America. And so this idea of where Britain led culturally, then it would sort of set a path for America, also.
And Steve Bannon's things, he kept on telling me, was to change culture. That was the thing - is that politics was downstream of culture. So first of all, you have to change the culture. And this is where they really saw Britain as its place in the English-speaking world, sharing a culture with America. And so the idea of, if you could sort of have a bridgehead first here, then that could be influential in terms of the impact upon America later."
CADWALLADR: "Some of the stuff is just so crazy. So on Tuesday this week there's an example of the craziness. I was looking on Twitter. And I was just, what is this? I thought it was the Russian Embassy Twitter account, initially. The Russian Embassy Twitter account is this extraordinary thing. It trolls me. It trolls other journalists. It trolls, like, MPs. And I thought it was the Russian Embassy first. And it had my article about Arron Banks and the gold deals and his meetings with the embassy. It had a picture - a screenshot of that. It put fake news stamped over it. And then it said, this journalist lies, or this journalist conspirator or something. And it tagged me into it.
And then I realized it wasn't even the Russian Embassy Twitter account. It was the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Twitter account. So this is the Kremlin. This is the government agency in Moscow, which directs all of Russia's foreign affairs, targeting me specifically via its Twitter feed and calling me a conspirator and writing, fake news, and going in to defend Arron Banks and Nigel Farage, interestingly."
And the thing is about it, this thing is just being normalized. It does it in this jokey way. And this is also what we saw from the Leave EU campaign - Arron Banks and Nigel Farage's campaign. By doing things in this jokey fashion, it normalizes it. And then you go a bit further.
And there was this very weird episode which happened last autumn when this first started to happen, which was that the Russian Embassy started writing me letters and calling my journalism - calling me a bad journalist and with an agenda and spreading lies, et cetera. And at the same time, Arron Banks and Nigel Farage's campaign were retweeting the Russian Embassy. And then they did this, like, mock video of me, so they took a clip of the film "Airplane!" and it was a woman being hysterical in the film. It's like a spoof. People come and slap her around the face, and then they threaten her with a gun. They'd Photoshopped my face into that video, and they'd added the Russian national anthem to the music behind it."
This is the original Airplane footage, sans photoshop.