Sadly that Twitter thread looks more like the usual conspiracy theory, trying to link multiple "but this looks weird" facts without actual knowledge. The same kind of things used by the opposing side to come up with any of their latest "George Soros controls the world" or other odd theories. A slight double standard in that sense.

Unfortunately a lot of the arguments he makes are also... irrelevant at best and at worst does the sort of attribution of familial sin that is the hallmark of both our nativist immigration policy and the ugliest episodes in our country's history such as the Japanese internment post-Kuramatsu. Cold-War era communist regimes loves medals and fancy titles and in some cases one would be viewed as a liability without them. Also, in these states where almost all business is owned or at least partly owned by the state there are state functionaries everywhere, political cadres were run of the mill. In fact, switching out the backgrounds you can make these sorts of conspiratorial assumptions about lots of people, including me. My grandparents were actual Chinese Communist Party officials in the 70s and 80s. I currently live in the Vegas area where I trade cryptocurrency and work on projects that I've used an LLC as to legally avail myself to the protections they bring. Now, I also went to law school, became a public defender and then went into immigration, which got me blackballed by the Chinese consulate after I represented some dissidents in their immigration cases, including Falun Gong followers. Since you can't FOIA the Chinese consulate, all I need is to spin up a poorly engineered Twitter clone on a k8 cluster I already have running and I'm the Chinese version of this pair, bonus points if I post some Soros memes then? And 2 months later it is very much obvious that they should have hired $150,000 worth of engineers instead of bootstrapping their half-assed operation on AWS without a backup plan.

The fact is, you don't need foreign interference for radical right wing domestic extremism to make sense, they exist, they have existed, they will continue to. Russia was a FOMO investor, not the guy holding coins since they were $3 a pop, and very much opportunistic. The operation screams of a deranged naivete. They figured they could host a completely unmoderated site on AWS? Even soccer streaming pirates leave DMCA contacts on their pages for crissakes, not to mention directory traversal, not knowing what "bulletproof" hosting is (which probably cost less than AWS if bandwidth was really what they were worried about). It's not that suspicious that they went to a Russian host - Chinese hosting either plays by western rules on Alicloud and the likes or requires local police to issue a permit, and the best you can do is probably buy from a Russian reseller anyway - and getting hosting for free speech in countries where free speech doesn't exist requires just enough doublespeak that took them 10 whole days to figure out? it's inept that it took them so long, really.

With the caveat that obviously my sample is skewed, during my time as a public defender I've seen a lot of conspiracy cases and most of them are incredibly poorly planned out. This isn't exactly a conspiracy as your typical criminal conspiracy to steal a couple of big screen TVs from Walmart and then return them with receipts you found in the parking lot (this happened, we didn't go to trial) but it's certainly only a notch above that in planning out their platform and scaling and potential legal matters. If Russia is in such a dire state that they are throwing their dwindling funds (a country with NYC's GDP, 60x the pop, that mostly exports timber? Ouch) at an amateur hour production like this then we should just all start running shoddy Twitter clones on cheap VPSes because it sounds like the easiest scam in the world to pull from a nation-state. And maybe they'll buy the Brooklyn Bridge too.

What will happen if anti-Putin posts show up on Parler? Will the Parler CEO get poisoned or the site simply goes offline. Any bets?