The troll → media pipeline

Eoin Lenihan's 2020 Medium account ("I ran a Political Satire Account…") describes how he was smeared as the head of a neo-Nazi bot army and "400 fake Antifa accounts." His reconstruction has three tiers: operators who fabricate logs and dox; credentialed "analysts" who give the output a polished face; and outlets that print it without vetting the chain.

It is his story and is held at his tier. Its relevance is the overlap: the data collector for the QAnon paper and the highest-connectivity node in chapter 12's graph both appear, independently, in someone else's account of the fabricate → launder → amplify cycle.

Fionda on Mensch: the filing is a fact, the allegations are his

Joe Fionda's affidavit, sworn under penalty of perjury in the Cook County matter (Case 20222000050), alleges that Louise Mensch asked a plaintiff whether Special Counsel Durham had approached her and later instructed her to delete texts, and quotes DMs filed as exhibits. It separately alleges Mensch's role in the November 2016 Heat Street FISA-warrant story.

Welna and Fionda's sworn affidavits in that case also document Mensch payments to Welna. That is why it sits here: the same data collector, paid by the same "analyst" tier Lenihan describes, a year before he collects the dataset for the MSU paper.

The docket reaches print — and the claimant becomes the creator

Kara Berg's story, "Utah musician accused of being QAnon insider sues MSU professor for defamation," covers the Wayne County filing of August 7. Dilley calls the suit frivolous and vexatious. And then, sourced to Schoenberger's attorney Barry Powers, the paper prints:

The witness list: 146 names, and who is on it

The plaintiff's preliminary witness list runs to 146 entries. The extract below is from screenshots; numbers 25–56, 86–97 and 115–116 were not visible and are missing, not omitted. The list reads as a map of this file: Bijan Kian, Claudia Tietze, Cory Michael Daniel, Jim Stewartson, Joe Flynn, Neal Rauhauser, Richard Todd Miller, Rocco Castoro, Lisa Clapier, Tanya Cornwell Biss, Tere Joyce, Beth Bogaerts, Kraig Peterson.

Entry 7 is this author — listed as a witness, not a party, consistent with the captions set out in chapter 18.

OCR extract of the preliminary witness list, Schoenberger v. Dilley et al. Spellings as listed.

What the lawfare costs, and who is asked to pay

A working ledger of the suits run through the Biss practice, the pipeline chapter 05 and chapter 18 trace. Demands are as widely reported; outcomes are deliberately left for the dockets.

Two further items from the same ledger are held at this tier until their own artifacts are in hand: a report that the ShadowBox Strategies retainer of October 2017 was split into three $5,000 payments (to Schoenberger, to Chavez, and to Fitzgibbon via Bogaerts); and a Nevada default judgment in the Kash Foundation's suit against Jim Stewartson.

Biss, in one reel

My compilation of where Steven Biss's name turns up and how it reaches Ty Clevenger: the Nunes suits, the Lokhova v. Halper opinion, news coverage, and a November 2018 livestream where a chat user named "Ahme" writes "Cicada is Thomas S and I know him" and then "MY HUSBAND IS TIMS LAWYER." The name "Ahme" looks like the amethetanya address in chapter 09. That match is my reading, not something the stream shows.

Biss / Clevenger compilation. 14 min. Clips are from their original broadcasters and streams.

The counter-disinformation side has a money column too

Chapter 12's point was that the method runs on both sides of the line. The funding does as well. A working analysis maps a concentration of philanthropic money — Craig Newmark Philanthropies among the largest — across research labs such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, threat-taxonomy projects such as DISARM, and think tanks such as New America, where the 2017 departure of the Open Markets team after it praised the EU's fine against Google is the best-known case of donor pressure on research.

It is here as context, not as a finding. The analysis goes further — to a single coordinated "control architecture" — and this file does not adopt that. What it takes from it is narrower: the people in chapters 12–14 who present as the counter-disinformation side are operating inside a funded market for exactly the research product this desk supplied for free.

The Architecture of Outrage. How the people fighting disinformation eventually adopt the same tactics — the mirror that chapter 12 describes · Watch on YouTube ↗