The truth behind TruthFeed
There are right-wing fake news websites, and then there are pro-Trump fake news websites. Granted, in this era of a completely Trumpified Republican party, the difference may seem negligible; nevertheless, it is real. TruthFeed is one of the latter kind.
Back when TruthFeed came out of the gate in March 2016, Manafort had just been appointed campaign chairman, and Trump was battling Ted Cruz for the Republican nomination. TruthFeed threw its weight behind Trump. On one particular day in April, all three of its front-page stories were slamming Cruz, and author Amy Moreno’s language was colorful: Cruz was taking a brutal beating, and being accused of ‘colluding’ with John Kasich.
After Trump won the nomination TruthFeed provided backup support for his campaign against Clinton. They quickly started pushing conspiracy theories about Hillary’s health and Hillary’s ‘body count’, with pictures of bloody hands, and liberal use of metaphors like ‘clawed back’. Remarkably, TruthFeed had advance knowledge of Wikileaks’s ‘October surprise’ email dump — two days before Roger Stone’s infamous tweet promising the same. Truthfeed joined the chorus, along with Russian propaganda network RT.com, carrying news of GRU-linked Guccifer 2.0's hack-and-leak operations.
TruthFeed’s pro-Trump propaganda continued unabated after the election. In fact, as Bloomberg’s Ben Elgin reported recently, for a period of about three months starting in July 2017, TruthFeed content was promoted heavily by Russian social media trolls — from accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Nowadays TruthFeed redirects to TruthFeedNews.com, but carries on the same vendetta against Trump’s enemies, whether it is Robert Mueller, Hillary Clinton, the FBI, or the Democrats, with its usual mix of breathless falsehoods and cherry-picking.
So what can we find out about TruthFeed? It turns out, quite a lot, much of it interesting.
First, its reach is substantial. TruthFeed is not just a single website, but rather a franchise of several websites and social media organs that drive traffic to them. TruthFeedNews.com, RightWireNews.com, and PatriotBeat.com at my last count, all share metadata such as Google AdSense identities and MailChimp identities, and also authors, that identify them as being of the same ownership. It is associated with Facebook pages and groups that drive traffic to the websites: at my last count, I found at least five: TruthFeed, USA Patriots for Donald Trump, Keep America First 2020, Team Trump 2020, and USA for Trump. All told, the followership of these Facebook pages is over 2.5 million; back in 2016, TruthFeed claimed that it was getting over 1 million hits a day. A recent analysis by Columbia Journalism Review showed that TruthFeed was one of the most influential conservative websites, only trailing Breitbart and InfoWars.
Second, it is remarkable for what is not mentioned — any links with the Trump campaign. And yet, TruthFeed’s social media pages consistently advertise links to a Trump campaign related website: KatrinaPierson.com.
Katrina Pierson, a Trump campaign staffer, who formed a pro-Trump PAC with other campaign staffers, has had a colorful past, from being an Obama supporter, to a Texas secessionist, to a Tea Party activist, to finally, being part of Trump’s campaign, for both 2016 and 2020. Now, she runs her own website named after herself, that showcases her views and her media appearances. It also has a category for ‘News’ — with various articles sourced from right wing media, with a claimed authorship, not of Katrina Pierson herself, but rather of some entity known as ‘Katrina Pierson News’.
Do we have any reason to believe that KatrinaPierson.com is linked with the TruthFeed franchise in any deep way, other than that the TruthFeed administrators link to her articles frequently? Indeed, we do — it is hosted by the TruthFeed franchise, as demonstrated below.
There are various suggestive similarities. One is the authorship: this franchise tends to name their authorial entities in the same way, as “Patriot Beat News” and “Katrina Pierson News”. Another is the source code behind the website: it is clear that KatrinaPierson.com uses the same WordPress templates and plugins as others in the TruthFeed franchise, which suggests the same website developer. Both websites are also publicized by the same Facebook pages; both also use the same identifiers for the MailChimp and RevContent services.
But the slam-dunk case is made by the hosting history of KatrinaPierson.com. For a period of three months from August 2017 to November 2017, this website was hosted on a LiquidWeb server where the only other website hosted was TruthFeed.com.
Social media uncovers other links with the Trump circle. TruthFeed’s author Amy Moreno has a public Facebook profile; so one can see that among her friends are Lynne Patton and Juanita Broaddrick. The latter, who accused Bill Clinton of rape, was co-opted by Trump’s 2016 campaign, and has pictures with Trump, Sean Hannity, and Rudy Giuliani on her profile page. Lynne Patton, Trump’s HUD appointee in charge of New York and New Jersey, appears to be close to Katrina Pierson herself, as evidenced by her profile pictures. She has been a Trump family associate since 2009, involved in casting some seasons of the Apprentice, and also on the Eric Trump Foundation board for several years.
Both Broaddrick and Patton are often featured in TruthFeed and publicize TruthFeed articles in turn. In one Tweet, Patton refers to TruthFeed author Amy Moreno as ‘boo’.
Trump’s campaign of 2016 created several social media stars. One of these was Bill Mitchell, a recruiter from North Carolina, whose pro-Trump Twitter feed gained so many followers that he started a new conservative radio show called Your Voice America; he also became an ironic favorite to liberals due to his insatiably cheerful prognostications about Trump. It also pushed into prominence a number of alt-right provocateurs: Mike Cernovich, Baked Alaska, Douglass Mackey aka “Ricky Vaughn”, Richard Spencer, and others.
This was also a time when the definition of the term ‘alt-right’ was fermenting. During the summer of 2016, people across the pro-Trump spectrum from Bill Mitchell, to Steve Bannon, to the neo-Nazis hiding behind aliases, were calling themselves ‘alt-right’: defining it as the edgy ‘nationalist’ right who were replacing the old ‘globalist’ Republican right, rejecting their agenda of lower taxes for the wealthy, uncontrolled immigration, and political correctness. Steve Bannon famously called Breitbart, the website he ran, the platform for the alt-right.
After Trump won the election, it became necessary to cast out many of the more unsavory elements — the open racists and anti-Semites — who had besmirched Trump’s movement, but who had previously been convenient for creating a wave of rage to buoy his vote totals. Trump himself disavowed the alt-right once they were no longer useful, just days after white supremacist Richard Spencer led an alt-right group in ‘Hail Trump’ salutes.
Trump’s devotees took the cue and began an attempt to sanitize their movement. Bill Mitchell came out against the ‘alt-right’ brand, promoting an ‘America First’ rebranding, that he claimed was more inclusive (even the Daily Stormer got the irony of Mitchell adopting the name of an anti-semitic group as being more inclusive). “Real Trump supporters are not racists,” Mitchell tweeted; then disrespected the alt-right icon Pepe the Frog, calling it the ‘damned green frog’, and made himself a target of intense rage on Twitter and Reddit’s r/the_donald subreddit.
Meanwhile some alt-righters with the more extreme voices got themselves banned from Twitter. Jared Wyand, who had led a Twitter campaign against the Star Wars movie Rogue One, was booted off Twitter when he blamed ‘Jewish control of the media’; his current Gab account bio states: “I’m extremely busy with a vendetta against the Jewish people”. Another notorious alt-right Twitter account, @TheRickyVaughn, got suspended for his tweets attempting voter suppression of Democratic voters, though it took Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s personal intervention.
TruthFeed author Amy Moreno was at the center of this battle. A graphic designer and copywriter from Salt Lake City, who also writes novels under the pseudonym ‘August Steele’, Amy Moreno has been writing for TruthFeed from the beginning, along with her daughter Eren. Early in TruthFeed’s life, Amy scored a friendly interview with Bill Mitchell on his radio show, where the two were simpatico over their shared Trump fandom. But after Trump’s victory, when both had reason to celebrate, they had a falling out instead. The fault line between them was exactly the one mentioned above: Bill Mitchell, following the lead of the new Trumpian establishment, was eager to cast out the unvarnished racists; Amy Moreno was eager to embrace them.
Their spat centered on Amy Moreno’s refusal to condemn Jared Wyand’s anti-Semitic tweets, and Bill Mitchell’s conviction that their movement should clearly dissociate from the neo-Nazis. “You’ve been sucked in by a Jew hater,” he told her in a private text that she later published, “so stupid Ames.”
Bill Mitchell might have been giving her too much credit by implying that Amy was bamboozled in any way, because it appears that her association with the alt-right is heartfelt. She herself has been suspended from Twitter multiple times, and created several incarnations of her account, from @VivaLaAmes to @VivaLaBanned and now @VivaLaAmes13. She claims to be a great friend of the alt-right personality ‘Ricky Vaughn’ and to ‘love’ him; when he was recently doxxed, she changed her Twitter handle to “Je suis Ricky Vaughn”, popularized a GoFundMe campaign for his benefit, and mourns him regularly on her feed.
Amy’s own Twitter feed is chock-full of attitude where she rants against ‘MAGA cucks’ and ‘shitlibs’ in ‘circle-jerks’ for their virtue-signaling, PC ways, that she claims are craven attempts to gain followers. She regularly hearkens back to their days as a shitposting band of rebels who took their hero, Trump, from victory to victory when everyone scorned them; Twitter felled account after account; and much of polite society ostracized them and called them deplorable. Interspersed among her glorious rants are teaser shots of her tattooed cleavage and links to her TruthFeed articles.
But while Amy’s personality very much defines TruthFeed’s attitude and lack of regard for objectivity, she is not the person who owns the site nor the one who administers it — that person prefers to stay in the shadows. In her interview with Bill Mitchell she coyly states that TruthFeed was started by ‘two investors’ without naming them. All websites in the TruthFeed franchise have hidden registrants; neither do any of the Facebook artifacts or Twitter accounts mention the name of the owner(s).
Amy Moreno’s Twitter spat with Mitchell escalated when she claimed he had tried to get her fired by complaining to her boss that she was a Nazi. He later claimed to not just be acquainted with TruthFeed’s owner, but that this person was one of his best friends who he chatted with on a daily basis. So who is the owner of TruthFeed, why do they prefer to stay hidden, and why was Mitchell so confident that they did not identify with the alt-right white supremacists themselves?
Facebook profiles can be tremendously revealing — sometimes in unintentional ways. A profile that uses a fake name, stock photography, and privacy set to the max, can reveal an intention to hide. And when that profile is one of the administrators of a fake news group, that draws one’s attention.
One of the administrators of TruthFeed-linked Facebook group is a profile called ‘Cliff Satori’, a highly unusual name. Its profile picture is a stock nature shot from Hawaii. The profile has no friends, no public posts, no likes, or biographical information at all. ‘Cliff Satori’ also happens to be one of Amy Moreno’s friends.
While it seems as though we might have hit a wall, Facebook’s notoriously lax privacy means that we really haven’t: there is a set of data that Facebook will present through code that their web page will not. So we can obtain the list of Facebook pages and groups associated with ‘Cliff Satori’.
Most are expected: the TruthFeed franchise, one belonging to Katrina Pierson (which is also part of the TruthFeed franchise), several other Trump-friendly and right-wing pages, including InfoWars, Alex Jones, and Dan Scavino Jr. — Trump’s social media director. But the very few non-political pages stand out. All are to do with Joshua Tree, especially live music venues in and around Joshua Tree. One page is awfully specific: Starlight Villas, a vacation retreat. It is easy to find that the owner of this property, and of the website StarlightVillas.com, is Cliff Tang, of Los Angeles. In an interview about his Joshua Tree property, Cliff Tang claims to have been a recruiter, and further public information available on the internet confirms this. It also turns out that one Clifford Tang from Yucca Valley also created the certificate that verifies the identity of the TruthFeed website.
So it is clear that a Cliff Tang of Los Angeles is not only directly involved in TruthFeed’s operations but also administers the Facebook groups that drive traffic to it, with his aliased Facebook profile ‘Cliff Satori’. (Cliff Tang did not respond to requests for comments.)
If you feel curiously unsatisfied that the shadowy presence behind an influential right-wing propaganda website is a vacation property owner from Southern California, you are not alone.
One of the most successful blogs in the bigfoot-hunting corner of the internet for years was Bigfoot Evidence. Its creator, Sanh Oriyavong a.k.a. Shawn Evidence, turned the skills he gained from marketing Bigfoot to marketing the Bigfoot of politics — through a very successful pro-Trump website called RedStateWatcher, that he created with his brother Sam. Its associated Facebook page often received more traffic than even Trump’s posts on his own official page; they gained enough notoriety that the brothers were covered by Washington Post before the election of 2016.
While RedStateWatcher and TruthFeed are not related in any outward manner, the people behind it are. Both websites are created by people you would least expect to be in the right-wing propaganda business: media and marketing entrepreneurs from the same multi-racial Southern California milieu. The Oriyavong brothers are from Laos; Cliff Tang appears to be Chinese-American. Sam Oriyavong and Cliff ‘Satori’ Tang are friends on Facebook.
The association goes deeper. Bigfoot hunter Sanh Oriyavong went on to create several other successful projects with an associate: Mulder’s World, a Facebook page that deals with the paranormal; Ikwiz, a Star Wars-themed quizzes page; InsiderBTC, a news aggregator for bitcoin traders; etc. All of these websites share the same Google Analytics identity, which shows that they are owned by the same entity, though some are registered to Sanh Oriyavong, and others to his associate — Romeen Sahebi of Redondo Beach, Los Angeles.
Romeen Sahebi, a Bigfoot hunter in his own right, has a similar long partnership with Cliff Tang on other media projects. Together, they were executive producers on two independent films: Contour and The Agent; they formed an indie band called The Knockarounds and formed a company called BiteSize Inc. together to publicize it, that is now dissolved; in 2012, they formed a company called Media Market Partners that is also now dissolved.
Romeen Sahebi might even be involved in the TruthFeed franchise through his interest in cryptocurrencies. One of the websites that is part of the TruthFeed franchise is CryptoScoop.net. Although the registration is private, it uses the same Google Adsense identity as others in the TruthFeed franchise — thus showing that CryptoScoop has the same owner as TruthFeed.
CryptoScoop is publicized through its social media organs, all of which are associated with Romeen Sahebi. Its Facebook group ‘Cryptocurrency’ is administered by Romeen Sahebi. Its Facebook page of the same name has Romeen Sahebi’s email address listed on its About page. And its Twitter account ‘CryptoScoopNews’ counts Romeen Sahebi among its few dozen followers. Romeen Sahebi apparently now is part of another crytpocurrency organization: Ubiquicoin— and Cliff ‘Satori’ Tang’s very first Like is for the Ubiquicoin Facebook page.
While Cliff Tang is clearly one of the people involved in TruthFeed, it is clear that Romeen Sahebi is involved as well, at least where the website CryptoScoop.net is concerned. (Romeen Sahebi did not respond to requests for comments.)
The line between conservative media and hucksterism is often fuzzy. Rick Perlstein, stellar historian of the American Right, noticed this congruence when, as an experiment, he signed up for a number of conservative mailing lists in 2007: soon he was plied with ‘secrets’ about ‘hidden money mountains’ and ‘23-cent heart miracles’. The usual hustle involves building mailing lists of the most easily frightened, gullible people in America, then using that list to profit off them and frighten them further.
Each age has found its practitioners. In the 1960s Richard Viguerie perfected the art of direct mail right-wing propaganda using Robotype machines. Glen Beck, whose conspiratorial story-telling achieved top billing on Fox News, extolled the virtues of hoarding gold while also being a paid sponsor for a company that sold gold coins. In the Obama era, people who read emails about his alleged Kenyan birth were ushered to Patriot Depot, an online store selling merchandise with patriotic insignia.
Today the currency is Facebook profiles, and the flytrap that catches them are Facebook pages with pro-Trump memes. The list of profiles can then be sold to PACs who have the ability to match them up with voter rolls. TruthFeed and all sorts websites, up and down the food chain, display advertisements from sponsors. But the scam may go deeper than performing for clicks. As the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal has shown us, Facebook profiles of people who are susceptible to a tried-and-tested message are gold for political operations.
In that regard, two of the very few follows of TruthFeed’s Twitter account are suggestive — they are the official Twitter accounts of America First Policies, a non-profit pro-Trump political advocacy group, and America First Action, the affiliated political action committee. Of all the pro-Trump PACs in operation today, this one is unique, because it appears to be the most closely associated with Trump himself, despite the fact that politicians are supposed to be at arm’s-length from PACs.
America First Policies was created in January 2017 by former Trump staffers, including Brad Parscale (who ran Trump’s social media operation in 2016), Rick Gates (who has now pleaded guilty in the Mueller case), and Katrina Pierson, who (as shown above) is hosted on the TruthFeed platform, and both follows and is followed by TruthFeed’s Twitter account. America First Action counts as its members, among others, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s ex-campaign manager, and Sheriff David Clarke. In recent days, both Trump and Pence have attended events hosted by this group.
Social media follows are not ironclad proof. And yet, it is interesting that TruthFeed’s official account, one that follows only 18 accounts in total, counts these two political groups among its follows; all other follows are of people connected to Trump — including Michael Cohen, Trump’s fixer, now under investigation at the SDNY; his two adult sons; and social media director Dan Scavino Jr.’s personal account.
Meanwhile, TruthFeed’s pages trawl through Facebook collecting engagement data day after day. On a typical day the four TruthFeed websites might publish anywhere from 20 to 40 articles, each with inflammatory titles and images; thus providing raw material for posts on their 5 Facebook pages and groups. On a typical day a combined followership of more than 2.5 million is exposed to more than 40 memes constituted in this way, each highlighting a particular propagandized twist on the news. Facebook engagement receives an extra oomph from TruthFeed’s use of Facebook’s comment plug-in, so that people can comment directly on the website while being signed in to their Facebook accounts.
The value of Facebook engagement for advertisers has always been that people volunteer, with their likes, comments, and shares, how well they receive each message. TruthFeed’s posts are playing out a political messaging experiment in real time. For instance, just from a single day: a post that claims that CNN’s primetime ratings have dropped 30% from last year received close to 800 likes, shares, and comments. While on the same page, a post that calls out Bill Clinton for an unspecified act of ‘collusion’ during the 2016 election only received about 100 likes, shares, and comments.
No doubt, hard data of this kind would fascinate any pro-Trump political messaging shops.
(Follow me at @TheOddPantry)
