Reposting comment from dup at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24501195

You don't have to go back far (author -> paper -> author affiliations -> sponsoring foundation ...) before you literally find Steve Bannon's face staring out of the page at you.

I have no idea whether the arguments in the paper are credible or not (I'm not technically qualified to assess them) but the source seems to have a very clear political agenda. That doesn't invalidate their claims but I can't take them seriously without hearing from a more independent source.

There are some fairly distinct signs of media engineering all over this story. Just little things like the paper downloads with the name "The_Yan_Report.pdf" - what scientist uploads their paper with that name to Zenodo? That sort of thing.