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The government deployed Microchip as a witness in the trial of Douglass Mackey, aka Ricky Vaughn, part of the mostly online alt-right coalition that helped boost Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016. Following four tense days of deliberation, a jury convicted Mackey of election interference on March 31, increasing the probability that Microchip might provide information for future federal prosecutions of a similar nature.

During the trial, the court granted Microchip the ability to keep his real identity secret, which is relatively rare, and sometimes not granted to witnesses even in cases involving mobsters or members of drug cartels. The trial established that Microchip is working for the FBI on multiple cases and has been a source for them for five years, going back to the time around the 2018 midterm elections.

A 2018 post from Microchip's "Pro" Gab account.

Microchip has deep connections to the pro-Trump radical right, and his cooperation with unknown FBI investigations could have profound implications for his allies. He testified at trial in March that he pleaded guilty to a conspiracy against rights, which is a charge along the lines of what Mackey faced. The public admission of Microchips crime marked the end of an online persona based around being untouchable.

I cant believe Ive gotten away with what Im doing for so long, Microchip wrote in a direct message in October 2016, according to testimony in the Mackey trial. We have a million-dollar campaign in Hillary and they have no idea how I spread like cancer.

Here is what Hatewatch knows about Microchip and his work as a federal informant:

Although Microchips identity remains secret, he showed up in court on March 22 unmasked. Everyone in court that day, including Douglass Mackey, Mackeys family, the jury and the reporters present, saw Microchips face. Online, Microchip favored an avatar featuring an impish young man wearing a MAGA hat and raising an ice cream cone. The real Microchip is a middle-aged man.

Microchip entered court wearing a hoodie, and carried himself with a vague swagger that matched his reputation as an online troll. That trolling attitude crept into his testimony, like when he defined the hateful and pro-fascist imageboard website 4chan to the jury as a place where internet intellectuals get together to discuss current events.

Microchip's Twitter account in March 2016 sharing fake news about senator and then-presidential candidate Ted Cruz.

On the stand, Microchip described himself as a mobile app developer. He said he is presently self-employed. He previously told Buzzfeedhe lives in Utah. He told the jury he first joined Twitter in 2015, where he shuffled through numerous accounts as moderators struggled to keep up with his stream of hate-inflected disinformation.

Microchip also posted on the white supremacist-friendly social media platform Gab, where he used a verified account. Unlike Twitter, Gab did not repeatedly suspend him, making it easier for researchers of the radical right to find his numerous posts in one place.

When not trafficking in disinformation and hate, Microchip liked to post about cryptocurrency, namely Bitcoin, and so-called altcoins such as Ripple. He expressed an interest in day trading crypto, which means buying and selling the currency in a speculative, short-term manner.

Microchip claimed during testimony that a loathing for Hillary Clinton and a desire to undermine her ambitions motivated him to publish disinformation more than any admiration he might have held for Trump. Other statements he has made about his ideology through the years are inconsistent, but lean into fringe, far-right and conspiratorial ways of seeing. He has praised Adolf Hitler,as well as the terroristic neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division.

Mackeys attorney Andrew Frisch grilled Microchip on the stand about his past drug use, which the FBI documented. Microchip confessed to using hallucinogens such as psychedelic mushrooms, and harder, more addictive drugs like heroin, primarily in the early 2000s.

Frisch also brought out several comments Microchip made about Adderall, a legally prescribed stimulant used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as part of a string of questions about his mental health. He confessed to using Adderall more recently than the other drugs.

Frisch: Did you say in this tweet: I'm now 36 hours into my Adderall and ChatGPT marathon. Did you say that?

Microchip: I did.

Frisch: Do you know what ChatGPT is?

Microchip: I do.

Frisch: What is it?

Microchip: Its a generative AI; a generative artificial intelligence using a language model.

Microchip's updated, nonsensical Twitter bio from February 2023.

Frisch highlighted a nonsensical recent Twitter bioMicrochip published and posted under in February:

Frisch: Do you recognize this one?

Microchip: I do.

Frisch: Did you tweet this one?

Microchip: I didnt tweet that. Thats my profile.

Frisch: Thats your profile.

Microchip: Thats right.

Frisch: It says: I drink Black Rifle coffee, wear a fishnet trucker hat, have a Jesus tattoo, and inject testosterone. George Santos and John Kirby Stan account. Pro-balloon. Did you write that?

Microchip: I did.

Frisch: By the way, Stan is a modern slang word for being a fan of. Is that fair?

Microchip: Big fan of those two, yeah.

George Santos is a New York congressman who has been accused of fraudand of fabricating many elements of his life story. John Kirby is a spokesperson for the Department of Defense who has helped craft messaging about Americas military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Frisch also highlighted a post in which Microchip wrote, I have the crazy, which the defense attorney successfully fought to have entered into evidence. Frisch also quoted another over-the-top tweet Microchip wrote about his mental health.

Frisch: This one is February 13, 2023. You say: 3,109 crazy tweets over two weeks. What can I say, Im insane, on pills, dont shower, can barely take care of myself, hear voices, talk to the walls, and can predict the future. Did you say that?

Microchip: I did.

Microchip offered the jury a summary of why he chose to plead guilty to participating in a conspiracy against rights. He described the part he played in group direct messages on Twitter that were littered with different pseudonymous extremists who collaborated to deceive the public. Microchip himself ran, or headlined by name, direct message groups where people crafted politically charged disinformation.

Direct messages function like group text messages, and radical-right activists used them to coordinate public-facing campaigns designed for Twitter, like choosing what disinformation would be most impactful in shaping the outcome of the 2016 election.

Yeah. So, I was in a group. I was in many group DMs, and in one of those group DMs we crafted memes, and one of the memes that was crafted there dealt with voting the incorrect way. Voting by text or hashtag. And then I intentionally spread those memes to defraud voters of their right to vote, Microchip said of his own criminal case.

Microchip also testified to the government that he employed bots to inflate his online profile. Microchip told the court he paid services both to boost his content and encourage authentic users to boost him organically. Assistant U.S. Attorney William Gulotta questioned him on behalf of the team prosecuting Mackey.

Gulotta: At the height of your following, how many followers did you have?

Microchip: On this account, 134,000. On other accounts, 80,000, 30,000. Probably comes out to millions over time.

Gulotta: How did you build up your following?

Microchip: The first phase of building up the following would be through bots. The first step

Gulotta: Let me stop you there. Sorry. Whats a bot?

Microchip: Yeah, its basically well, its a Twitter account that is created either by human or through an automated process and that account is then used to, you know, retweet, like, reply, to people on Twitter.

Gulotta: Okay. Were there specific services that you used to build your following?

Microchip: Oh, yeah.

Gulotta: Can you describe those?

Microchip: Yeah, so one of the first services to kind of seed the followers was a service called Add Me Fast, and that service is kind of like a peer networking service where I would insert the tweet into that service, somebody else would insert a tweet and then, we would retweet each others information, right? And you could gain points doing that and, if you accumulate points, you can then expend those on likes, followers, retweets. So that service, I would spend sometimes $300 a month on it. That would give you around a thousand to three thousand retweets, likes, or follows.

Gulotta: And, so, this is a system in which other actual human beings log in, and they will see a tweet that another member has posted, and they will either follow it, follow the person, or retweet the tweet?

Microchip: Thats right.

Gulotta: And then you would do the same thing for other members.

Microchip: And you can get points and then you can expend those, also. The $300 is, youre basically buying points to have people do that or you can sit there and retweet their stuff to get points, so you can do that. That was the first step. Another step is using Fast Followerz with a Z at the end. And that service, you spend like, a monthly fee of, you know, a hundred to two hundred, sometimes three hundred bucks a month. And they have control of all the bots, so you dont actually retweet anything, but you put in your Twitter handle or you put in a tweet that you want to get retweeted, and the service that I would use would be 50 to a hundred followers, something like that, a day, and then those followers would also retweet or like my tweets anywhere from three to five times.

Gulotta: Did you build your following organically, too, without the use of bots?

Microchip: Oh, yeah. The bots were there only to accumulate anywhere from a thousand to 5,000 followers, at which point people would see that account and then say, oh, maybe this person has something interesting to say, he has a lot of followers, and so then it would organically take off from there.

Gulotta: Okay. So, the bot sort of kick-starts the account and it goes from there.

Microchip: Yeah.

Gulotta: Why is it important to have followers?

Microchip: Because theres that human inclination that when you see somebody as being followed by a lot of people, that they might have something interesting to say, so its a it's basically taking advantage of that of that human trait.

Microchip made it clear that he and other radical-right posters viewed Twitter as a highly trafficked, but loosely regulated, public square they could hijack in service of their political goals. He noted that Twitters appeal to journalists made it an ideal place for such tactics, because they could multiply their reach by getting people to write stories about their antics.

In May 2018, Data and Society published an influential report called The Oxygen of Amplification,which highlighted the role that media figures played in buoying the visibility of hate and disinformation. As a leader among the radical-right figures who posted to Twitter during the 2016 election cycle, Microchip seemed to understand that principle better than the media did at that time. During the Mackey trial, Microchip said he wanted to infect everything through Twitter in 2016, adopting rhetoric like the contagion metaphor found in Data and Societys analysis.

Gulotta: What does it mean, as far as you understand, to push a hashtag?

Microchip: Yes, so thats when you have an agenda of some sort, and you see that theres a hashtag thats already out there or you develop your own hashtag, and what you do is you basically have the group of people that youre with make new tweets with those hashtags so that you have thousands of tweets that are attached to at that hashtag.

Gulotta: And why would you do that?

Microchip: To register ourselves on trending lists.

Gulotta: Whats a trending list?

Microchip: Its a list on Twitter. Back then it was like, on the right-hand side of the homepage. I think there was an explore feature on there as well at one point, and it would show, you know, global trends. There would be USA trends, sometimes they had local trends, but yeah, those would be keywords from hashtags mostly back then, yeah.

Gulotta: And that sort of measures the popularity of a particular hashtag?

Microchip: It does, yeah.

Gulotta: So if a bunch of people are pushing a particular hashtag, the hope is it gets on the list?

Microchip: Thats right.

Gulotta: And why would you want it to be on a trending list?

Microchip: Because I wanted our message to move from Twitter into regular society and part of that would be well, its based on the idea that, you know, back then maybe, I dont know, 10 to 30 % of the US population was on Twitter, but I wanted everybody to see it, so I had figured out that back then, news agencies, other journalists would look at that trending list and then develop stories based on it.

Gulotta: What does it mean to hijack a hashtag?

Microchip: So, I guess I can give you an example, is the easiest way. Its like if you have a hashtag. Back then like a Hillary Clinton hashtag called Im with her. Then what that would be is I would say, okay, lets take Im with her hashtag, because thats what Hillary Clinton voters are going to be looking at, because thats their hashtag. And then I would tweet out thousands of tweets of, well, for example, old videos of Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton talking about, you know, immigration policy for back in the 90s where they said: You know, we should shut down borders, kick out people from the USA. Anything that was disparaging of Hillary Clinton would be injected into those tweets with that hashtag. So that would overflow to her voters, and theyd see it and be shocked by it.

Gulotta: Is it safe to say that most of your followers were Trump supporters?

Microchip: Oh, yeah.

Gulotta: And so by hijacking, in the example you just gave a Hillary Clinton hashtag, Im with her, youre getting your message out of your silo and in front of other people who might not ordinarily see it if you just posted the tweet?

Microchip: Yeah, I wanted to infect everything.

Gulotta: Was there a certain time of day that you believed tweeting would have a maximum impact?

Microchip: Yeah, so I had figured out that early morning eastern time that well, it first started out with The New York Times. I would see that they would they would publish stories in the morning, so the people could catch that when they woke up. And some of the stories were absolutely ridiculous sorry. Some of the stories were absolutely ridiculous that they would post that, you know, had really no relevance to what was going on in the world, but they would still end up on trending hashtags, right? And so, I thought about that and thought, you know, is there a way that I could do the same thing? And so what I would do is before The New York Times would publish their, their information, I would spend the very early morning or evening seeding information into random hashtags, or a hashtag we created, so that by the time the morning came around, we had already had thousands of tweets in that tag that people would see because there wasn't much activity on Twitter, so you could easily create a hashtag that would end up on the trending list by the time morning came around.

Mackey represents one of dozens of radical-right figures Microchip associated with during the three-year period between when he started using his pseudonym and when he first started cooperating with the FBI. Those three years, 2015-18, mark a busy period for the hard right, one in which disinformation and foreign influence campaigns sometimes monopolized attention on social media. Microchips layered involvement in the online Trump movement, connecting neo-Nazis to more mainstream figures, and his willingness to talk, makes him an ideal source for detailing how that world operated, using methods both lawful and unlawful.

During the Mackey trial, the judge said maintaining Microchips anonymity was partially based on the possibility that exposing his name could endanger ongoing cases.

Photo illustration by SPLC

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What We Know About 'Microchip,' the FBI's Far-Right Judas - Southern Poverty Law Center

"The problem is not the bomb itself," Gen. (ret.) Stanley McChrystal says in an interview with filmmakers, describing how to combat improvised explosive devices in Iraq. "You have to go 'left of the boom.' You had to go upstream from the problem and look at where the problem is coming from. Where is the energy?"

McChrystal, former commander of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, is one of many veterans, officials and experts interviewed in the new documentary film, "Against All Enemies." The movie takes a deep look at the Jan. 6 insurrection, the roots of military extremism and why so many veterans of the armed forces are attracted to those movements.

"When I look at Jan. 6, of course, there were people who did violence and climbed gates and caused trouble, but in my view, they were likely the foot soldiers. They were the result of the efforts of other people," McChrystal says.

More than a thousand people have been charged with storming the Capitol that day, the filmmakers say. According to research conducted by National Public Radio (NPR), one in five of those defendants served in the U.S. military.

"Against All Enemies" is a very dense but engaging documentary that not only shows the evolution of extremism from the start of the 20th century through today, it also tries to explain the appeal of these groups to the veteran community by exploring all sides of the issue, even that of the extremists themselves.

The film reveals that Jan. 6 wasn't just a once-in-a-lifetime event; it was the latest in a developing pattern of attacks that could pose a serious threat to American democracy. Many of the groups leading the charge are military veterans.

"The challenge with having veterans directly involved is twofold," McChrystal says in the film. "They bring a certain expertise. They might bring in organizational skills or military skills that can make a movement more dangerous. The second thing that's disturbing is, in our society, veterans have legitimacy; they have a particular place of respect."

Their presence not only brings legitimacy of service to alt-right groups, it brings the potential for recruiting more veterans with military skills to the extremist cause. "Against All Enemies" uses veterans like former Army officer Michael Breen. As the president and CEO of Human Rights First, a nonprofit that researches and uncovers extremist tactics, he reminds us that those skills aren't limited to firearms.

"There are places in our military where we are trained to start and fuel insurgencies," Breen says in the film. "There are places in our military where we are trained to overthrow governments or work with armed militias to do that sort of thing. I'm not saying this to be alarmist, and I don't think we need to be afraid of our veterans. I do think we need to have a solid understanding of how badly this can escalate."

For those wondering how bad it can get, "Against All Enemies" takes us back to the late 1960s, when Vietnam veteran Louis Beam launched his right-wing movement that echoed the same talking points used today. Beam created a network of militia cells that even used early forms of the internet to communicate, disseminate radical literature and plan robberies, bombings and other acts of violence across the country.

From Beam, the film fast-forwards to 1995, when Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, friends who met while in the U.S. Army, bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Then in 2021, of course, comes the Capitol insurrection.

Kristofer Goldsmith, a former U.S. Army forward observer, was initially attracted to groups like the Proud Boys, but is now a self-proclaimed "Nazi hunter," tracking and exposing their activities. He warns that there is already a future for extremism, forming in Gen Z-led groups, some of which are openly fascist and advocate violence. The groups, say the experts and veterans, are sliding to authoritarianism or worse: a civil war.

One of the biggest reasons veterans are attracted to alt-right groups, Goldsmith believes, is the lack of the culture of service and the bonds it forms. When veterans leave the military, they also leave their service family, and these right-wing paramilitary groups fill that hole.

"When you're vulnerable and you're looking for family, they look like they could be family, providing that sense of mission and camaraderie that you had in the military," Goldsmith says.

"Against All Enemies" premiered at the 22nd annual Tribeca Festival in June 2023. It was produced by former U.S. Navy aviator turned writer and podcaster Ken Harbaugh and award-winning director Charlie Sadoff, who also directed the film. Its executive producer is New York Times bestselling author and documentary filmmaker Sebastian Junger.

It can be viewed through July 2, 2023, on Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV and web browsers on iOS and Android devices via Tribeca at Home.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on LinkedIn.

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'Against All Enemies' Explores Why Veterans Are Drawn to ... - Military.com

For three days this week an American think tank called the Edmund Burke Foundation has been hosting a conference in London to talk up what it calls national conservatism in the hope of signing up the British right.

So what? The NatCons didnt exactly set the town alight some spoke to a nearly empty hall but they did draw a few big names and they represent a defiant new brand of Christian nationalism that

Who are these guys? The Edmund Burke Foundation is named after Britains leading voice against the French Revolution but was set up in Washington in 2019. Its funding is opaque, but key figures include the Jerusalem-based academic Yoram Hazony and Christopher DeMuth, a former adviser to Ronald Reagan.

The NatCon UK audience is less easy to identify. Of the conference delegates who would speak to journalists this week and many were told not to none were Tory party members. Several had flown in from the US, keen to see if Trumpian politics could be exported.

Much of the focus was on social issues. One delegate said he was a socialist and not that keen on capitalism. There were clerics and theologians who believe faith should play a greater role in public life and want bishops to be willing to die on the hill of gender identity.

For this group, social conservatism trumped immigration as a priority.

God squad. The NatCon conference was held in a church and many of its speeches were shot through with religion. Does that mean England is ready for a US-style Christian right or a version of Germanys Christian democracy? In pockets of the electorate, perhaps. Danny Kruger MP, a former aide to Johnson, spoke of normative nuclear families with a mother and a father. Miriam Cates, a fellow backbencher, said the biggest problem facing the country was a decline in birth rates and a cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our childrens souls.

Right flank. For Suella Braverman, appearing at the conference had more to do with politics than philosophy. The home secretary attacked government policy in defiance of the usual rules on collective responsibility and her resignation from Cabinet is now baked into expectations back in Westminster. She used the event to draw a line between the right she seeks to lead and relative moderates whore now openly calling her unfit for office.

Lost in translation. If England and America are two countries separated by the same language, NatCon underscored where the division lies. There is limited appetite, among MPs or the wider public, for politics laced with religion and a state that seeks to intervene in peoples private lives.

Meanwhile in Bournemouth, A separate one-day event, run by the Conservative Democratic Organisation and funded by Lord Cruddas, aimed explicitly to take back control of candidate selection and policy formation, and give it to members. Its implicit aim is to restore Johnson to the premiership.

Four days of soul-searching left three questions hanging:

The short answers are yes, yes / no and yes. Tory leaders always have to worry as much about their right flanks as their left. But for now Sunak can probably sleep easy. Neither conference had huge numbers of attendees. And while the CDO had a quaint Englishness to it, NatCon felt like an attempt to transplant a Christian alt-right movement that (so far) doesnt carry weight in the secular UK.

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The American alt-right wants to set up shop in the UK - Tortoise Media

The following is a guest contribution and reflects the authors views alone. For information on how to submit an article to the Opinion Section, click here.

At the first-year activity fair, you may have come across a booth for the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions (JMP), where fellows advertised the program as an opportunity for those interested in American politics and constitutional thought to hear from a range of perspectives. You may have even read that it doesnt matter whether you regard yourself as on the right or left, progressive or conservative, or none of the above, as the Madison Programs Undergraduate Fellows Forum application form proclaims. All of this would, quite reasonably, lead you to believe that the James Madison Program is a Princeton program for those across the political spectrum to get involved with political thought on campus. One of us thought so, and joined JMPs Undergraduate Fellows Forum under this pretense, leading them to be listed as part of the program throughout their Princeton career.

Over our four years at Princeton, however, we have both come to understand that the Madison Program acts quite differently from how it markets itself. While the Madison Program represents itself as a non-partisan center on campus to engage with American constitutional law and Western political thought as Princetons center for American Ideals, the Madison Program in fact exists to further conservative viewpoints on campus, and in recent years, has increasingly provided a platform to far-right and extremist individuals.

For academic freedom to genuinely exist, groups such as the Madison Program must be honest about the ideas they favor. While we have no say over how the Madison Program operates, we hope to use this platform to alert students to where the Madison Program stands within the marketplace of ideas, a basis on which students can form their own opinions and engage with the program as they wish. The Madison Program has frequently invited speakers and research fellows who are affiliated with the far-right, some of whom have endorsed categorically disproven conspiracy theories, promoted and advanced antidemocratic policies, and espoused shockingly bigoted rhetoric. In addition, the programs sources of funding suggest a deeper level of connection between the program and organizations around the country working on heavily right-wing and anti-queer policies. Those may very well be relevant factors for individuals evaluating the credibility of the programs offerings and their desire to engage with it. Students, faculty, and staff should know what theyre buying into.

Professors Eldar Shafir and Uri Hasson recently highlighted the significant problems with the JMPs decision to invite Ronen Shoval the founder of an ultranationalist Israeli organization who has previously campaigned to silence academics and even shut down the program in political science at Ben Gurion University to be a lecturer at Princeton this year. Unfortunately, Shoval is only the most recent in the James Madison Programs history of repeated invitations to hateful and unreliable visitors.

Notably, in 2022, the James Madison Program hosted Stephen Wolfe, author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, as a visiting fellow for the program. In his book, written while he was still a fellow with JMP, Wolfe argues that Christian Nationalism is Americas way forward. Wolfe calls for a Great Renewal of Christianity in every facet of American life and governance and a return to what he calls Old America. He also affirms for his readers that violence would be a morally permissible way to create a Christian Nationalist state. According to Bradley Onishi, a faculty member at the University of San Francisco who focuses on tracking white Christian nationalism, Wolfes resonances with Hitlers view of the nation are uncanny, specifically in his calls to institute a Christian head of the people, his emphasis that nationality can only be rooted in racial identity, and his musings on interracial marriage that groups have a collective duty to be separate and marry among themselves.

Further back, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the JMP hired known right-wing couple Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying as visiting fellows who made headlines for supporting ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19 which has since been thoroughly discredited and for denouncing COVID-19 vaccinations. We should be able to trust that our professors and our faculty will listen to the experts, especially when it comes to a national emergency where their own students and peers are in harms way.

In addition, Ronen Shoval is not the first right-wing Israeli to come to Princeton through the JMP. In 2020, the program brought Benjamin Schvarcz on as a postdoctoral research associate, and then in 2021 as a fellow. Schvarcz was hired directly from the Kohelet Policy Forum, an Israeli right-wing think tank credited with driving the judicial reforms in Israel, which have been heralded by many Israelis and policymakers as a threat to democracy.

The James Madison Programs list of advisors includes extremist individuals as well. Harlan Crow, who was recently found to have given undisclosed donations to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and who owns an extensive collection of Nazi memorabilia, including a signed copy of Mein Kampf, is on the list as a civic volunteer, as is his wife Katherine Crow 89. Crows Nazi and Hitler memorabilia, as well as a garden filled with statues of historical dictators and despots, demonstrates his ties to and support of hateful, alt-right politics.

Additionally, the James Madison Program has clear ties to the Witherspoon Institute, located just down the street from Princeton. The James Madison Program advertises seminars and summer programs hosted by the Witherspoon Institute and actively encourages students to attend their programming. The Witherspoon Institute, a right-wing think tank, has a long history of funding research that supports far-right objectives, including the notorious and widely-discredited Regenerus Study arguing against same-sex marriage based on a pseudo-scientific conclusion that children fare worse in queer households.

We also have to analyze the influence of conservative donors on the JMP. JMP was founded with $525,000 in support from the John M. Olin Foundation, which, as investigative journalist Jane Meyer writes, aimed to establish conservative cells, or beachheads at the most influential schools in order to gain the greatest leverage. The formula required subtlety, indirection, and perhaps even some misdirection. JMP has continued to receive financial support from other partisan institutions.

Over 20 years ago, the conservative nonprofit Philanthropy Roundtable advised donors who looked to shift campus to the right to support JMP and copy its model elsewhere.

Because the program receives no money from the university and has forgone any part of Princetons endowment, it has avoided entanglement in any ideological strings the university might attach, the article explained. At the slightest threat to the programs integrity, the foundations and philanthropists supporting it can pull their money.

It is not conjecture to suggest that these donors right-wing ideologies influence the operations of the James Madison Program, including the lectures it hosts, the fellows it hires, and the classes those fellows teach. As Professor Robert George the director of the program stated early in the programs tenure, You should reject the money if you cant follow a donors intent. You have a moral obligation to follow the donors intent. If the James Madison Program was supposed to achieve a goal other than advancing conservative ideology in academia, its founding donors certainly missed the memo.

We do not object to the James Madison Program merely taking right-wing funding or having conservative-leaning Ph.D. and postdoctoral fellows. But they should be transparent about it. The National Council of Nonprofits states that a fundamental financial transparency practice is to make it easy for visitors to a nonprofits website to find information about the nonprofit's budget-size and its sources of revenue, as well as information about board composition, programs, outcomes/impact, staffing, and donors (protecting the identity of those who wish to remain anonymous). Transparency on funding is important for non-profits and educational institutions especially because it often signals the organizations ideological leaning and goals. The Madison Program, meanwhile, provides no information about any donors in any of its annual reports.

A diversity of ideological perspectives is an asset to campus, and our aim is not to undermine that. However, it is essential that when engaging with the James Madison Program, students and faculty know exactly which values the program holds dear in its operation. JMP touts itself as Princetons program on American Ideals and Institutions, but it is clear they are choosing to platform an extremist, right-wing conception of American ideals.

Rooya Rahin is a senior from Highlands Ranch, Colo. studying politics. She is the emeriti chair of the Editorial Board and Financial Stipend coordinator of the Prince and an incoming Princeton MPA student through the SINSI program. She can be reached at rrahin@princeton.edu.

Dylan Shapiro is a senior from Atlanta, Ga. in the School of Public and International Affairs. He is an incoming 1L at Yale Law School and can be reached at dylan.shapiro@princeton.edu.

The rest is here:
What you need to know about Princeton's James Madison Program - The Daily Princetonian

John Farnham

The singers career was flagging when a strange, effusive protest track landed on his desk. A new documentary details how his best-known song came to be bagpipes and all

Wed 17 May 2023 11.00 EDT

Listen to any classic rock station in Australia, continental Europe and much of the rest of the world and youre likely to hear Youre the Voice. John Farnhams 1986 track is one of Australias most enduring global classics a pop song thats both sentimental and forceful in its convictions, and seemingly nonpartisan enough for alt-right groups to try to co-opt it. It hasnt been as heavily memed as, say, Daryl Braithwaites The Horses, another Australian hit of a similar vintage but its just as ingrained in the cultural memory among people young and old.

As far as immortal hits go, you could absolutely do worse: aside from being a musically strange, ineffably genius work, its also a song with a strange history that seems to act as a proof of concept.

By 1986 Farnham was out for the count, according to much of the Australian music industry. The then-38-year-old had been recording under his own name for nearly 20 years at that point, having broken out in the late 60s with a string of dinky but popular hits. As Johnny Farnham he had built a reputation as a gangly, grinning teen idol performing versions of tracks such as Raindrops Keep Fallin on My Head and Acapulco Sun on TV shows such as Hit Scene and Happening. By the 70s he had begun to appear in musical theatre and was hosting roles on television, the relative shine of his early success quickly beginning to dull.

In the 80s after changing his stage name to John Farnham, the singer tried to pull off what so many teen idols have tried to do and which most fail at: a pivot to serious music. The relative lack of success of his first grown-up record, 1980s Uncovered, confirmed that Farnhams attempt to move away from the relatively cloistered world of cabaret and musical theatre would be harder than it may have first seemed. Salvation seemingly arrived in 1982, when Farnham was asked to join Melbournes successful soft-rock outfit Little River Band after the departure of its vocalist Glenn Shorrock. Rather than revive both careers and kill two birds with one stone, it sent each act into a relative downslide, the groups two albums with Farnham failing to reach the same commercial heights as their records with Shorrock in Australia or the US.

Farnham found his time in the band difficult, and there was acrimony at the centre of the group for his relatively short time fronting them. In Finding the Voice, a new documentary about Farnhams life and career, Glenn Wheatley, the manager of Little River Band at the time, describes working with them as akin to managing world war two a perhaps over-the-top but nonetheless evocative descriptor. By the time the bands final album with Farnham was released, 1986s No Reins, he had already left the group not with the resuscitated career he had hoped for but with a drive to create something under his own name that would.

Salvation finally came in the form of Youre the Voice: a huge, effusive and strangely timely single that would single-handedly reorient Farnhams career. Written by the British songwriter Chris Thompson, Icehouses Andy Qunta, Procol Harum songwriter Keith Reid and singer-songwriter Maggie Ryder, Youre the Voice was inspired by a 1985 nuclear disarmament rally in London that Thompson missed; saddened that he hadnt been there to lend support, he began writing a song that he felt captured the spirit of the massive protest.

Eventually the tape was passed to Farnham and his team, supposedly through Qunta. Although Farnham had previously been trying to hone a more rock-oriented sound, Youre the Voice is the product of mod-cons: producers David Hirschfelder and Ross Fraser used walls of samplers and synthesisers to create the songs trademark sound a rich, glossy universe of metronomic blips and synth sighs that sounds like one of Kate Bushs off-kilter hits given a buff and polish.

Although the track is deeply familiar now, at the time it was considered profoundly off-piste for a centrist pop song, using a sample of a car door slamming to form part of the drum track. (Finding the Voice dedicates much of its generally quite dull runtime to talking heads including Celine Dion and Robbie Williams saying why they love the track; the most thrilling sections, no doubt, are when Hirschfelder is mapping out the array of unwieldy synths he used to put the song together.) The songs most recognisable feature its bagpipes solo is still its masterstroke; a downright strange innovation suggested by Farnham that required the entire song to be redone in B-flat, the only key the bagpipes play in.

The tracks graceful, soaring intensity perfectly mirrored Thompsons guilelessly aspirational lyrics, which are decidedly softer and more amenable than more strident protest songs of the decade, such as Midnight Oils Beds Are Burning. And then, of course, theres Farnhams voice for much of the song, its little more than a wordless, mellifluous wail, occasionally pushing itself into an outright howl. Its the embodiment of the songs striver sensibility an instrument being pushed, arguably, to its limits.

Listening now, its almost funny to think of Youre the Voice as a protest song: capturing the profound individualism of the 80s, history has all but buffed away the tracks anti-nuke origins. Instead, it just feels as though it may have been written as a kind of battler anthem, or a simple call for unity. (In contrast to other hits of 1986, of course decidedly apolitical songs including Diana Rosss Chain Reaction or Starships We Built This City you can understand its resonance.) For Farnham, it was a lifeline.

Although it was initially rejected by radio stations because of its associations with Johnny Farnham, the track became a huge success, totally revitalising the singers career and leading to its associated album, Whispering Jack, becoming Australias all-time highest-selling album by an Australian artist. Its a once-in-a-lifetime success story to match a once-in-a-lifetime anthem.

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Make a noise and make it clear! How John Farnhams Youre the Voice became Australias anthem - The Guardian