TASK DEFINITION: Given a document, an entity and its sentiment towards the entity, verify if it is the correct sentiment towards the entity. Answer should be yes or no. Note that URLs in the text have been replaced with [Link].
PROBLEM: Verify if the sentiment of the following document towards the entity Putin Munich is Neutral . “Have you been to Mamayev Kurgan yet? ” Minin asked me. He was referring to another hill  where the battle was so intense  it changed the hill’s shape. Now the Motherland Calls statue stands there  a 170-foot concrete woman raising a sword to summon her countrymen into battle. It’s where Nazi Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus was captured  Minin noted with reverence  and looked into the sunny distance. “You know  it’s important to see how young people defended their homeland.” When we got to the cafeteria  I saw that it  too  was haunted by its Soviet past. Grouchy middle-aged women in hairnets dished out bland  greasy cuisine. If it weren’t for students tapping at their smartphones  it would have been hard to tell that the 21st century had ever arrived. I sat down at a table with a team from Astrakhan and told them I had been to their hometown once  a romantically shabby old city by the Caspian Sea. The students smirked. “Everyone wants to leave ” a third-year named Anton said. “There’s nothing to do there ” his teammate Sergei added. “We did an amazing job … creating the illusion that  Putin  controls everything in Russia … Now it’s just funny” how much Americans attribute to  him . Anton was hoping that Minin could help him get his foot in the door at one of the state security services. “It’s prestigious  they pay well  and the work is interesting ” he said. If he were accepted  he could hope for a salary of 50 000 rubles (less than $900) a month  which was almost double the average salary in Astrakhan. Was he motivated by any feelings of—“Patriotic conviction? ” Anton finished my sentence  and started to chuckle. “No ” he said. “I don’t care what government I work for. If the French Foreign Legion takes me  I’ll go!”
But most Russians don’t recognize the Russia portrayed in this story: powerful  organized  and led by an omniscient  omnipotent leader who is able to both formulate and execute a complex and highly detailed plot. Gleb Pavlovsky  a political consultant who helped  Putin  win his first presidential campaign  in 2000  and served as a Kremlin adviser until 2011  simply laughed when I asked him about  Putin ’s role in Donald Trump’s election. “We did an amazing job in the first decade of  Putin ’s rule of creating the illusion that  Putin  controls everything in Russia ”  he  said. “Now it’s just funny” how much Americans attribute to  him . A businessman who is high up in  Putin ’s United Russia party said over an espresso at a Moscow café: “You’re telling me that everything in Russia works as poorly as it does  except our hackers? Rosneft”—the state-owned oil giant—“doesn’t work well. Our health-care system doesn’t work well. Our education system doesn’t work well. And here  all of a sudden  are our hackers  and they’re amazing?” The election hack “was a very emotional  tactical decision.” The Kremlin was “very upset about the Panama Papers ” which cast light on Putin’s wealth. In the same way that Russians overestimate America  seeing it as an all-powerful orchestrator of global political developments  Americans project their own fears onto Russia  a country that is a paradox of deftness  might  and profound weakness—unshakably steady  yet somehow always teetering on the verge of collapse. Like America  it is hostage to its peculiar history  tormented by its ghosts.
None of these factors obviates the dangers Russia poses; rather  each gives them shape. Both  Putin  and  his  country are aging  declining—but the insecurities of decline present their own risks to America. The United States intelligence community is unanimous in its assessment not only that Russians interfered in the U.S. election but that  in the words of former FBI Director James Comey  “they will be back.” It is a stunning escalation of hostilities for a troubled country whose elites still have only a tenuous grasp of American politics. And it is classically  Putin   and classically Russian: using daring aggression to mask weakness  to avenge deep resentments  and  at all costs  to survive. I’d come to Russia to try to answer two key questions. The more immediate is how the Kremlin  despite its limitations  pulled off one of the greatest acts of political sabotage in modern history  turning American democracy against itself. And the more important—for Americans  anyway—is what might still be in store  and how far  an emboldened Vladimir Putin  is prepared to go in order to get what  he  wants. Jeff Elkins; Alexey Kurbatov and Muti “It wasn’t a strategic operation ” says Andrei Soldatov  a Russian journalist with deep sources in the security services  who writes about the Kremlin’s use of cybertechnology. “Given what everyone on the inside has told me ” he says  hacking the U.S. political system “was a very emotional  tactical decision. People were very upset about the Panama Papers.”
In the spring of 2016  an international consortium of journalists began publishing revelations from a vast trove of documents belonging to a Panamanian law firm that specialized in helping its wealthy foreign clients move money  some of it ill-gotten  out of their home countries and away from the prying eyes of tax collectors. (The firm has denied any wrongdoing.) The documents revealed that  Putin’s  old friend Sergei Roldugin  a cellist and the godfather to  Putin’s  elder daughter  had his name on funds worth some $2 billion. It was an implausible fortune for a little-known musician  and the journalists showed that these funds were likely a piggy bank for  Putin’s  inner circle. Roldugin has denied any wrongdoing  but the Kremlin was furious about the revelation.  Putin’s  spokesman  Dmitry Peskov  whose wife was also implicated  angrily ascribed the reporting to “many former State Department and CIA employees” and to an effort to “destabilize” Russia ahead of its September 2016 parliamentary elections. The argument was cynical  but it revealed a certain logic: The financial privacy of Russia’s leaders was on par with the sovereignty of Russia’s elections. “The Panama Papers were a personal slight to  Putin  ” says John Sipher  a former deputy of the CIA’s Russia desk. “They think we did it.”  Putin’s  inner circle  Soldatov says  felt “they had to respond somehow.” According to Soldatov’s reporting  on April 8  2016   Putin  convened an urgent meeting of  his  national-security council; all but two of the eight people there were veterans of the KGB. Given the secrecy and timing of this meeting  Soldatov believes it was then that  Putin  gave the signal to retaliate.
It was almost like one of Minin’s hacking competitions  but with higher stakes. The hackers are not always guys in military-intelligence uniforms  Soldatov told me; in some cases they’re mercenary freelancers willing to work for the highest bidder—or cybercriminals who have been caught and blackmailed into working for the government. ( Putin  has denied “state level” involvement in election meddling  but plausible deniability is the point of working through unofficial hackers.) American officials noticed the same messy and amorphous behavior as the summer of 2016 wore on. A former staffer in Barack Obama’s administration says that intercepted communications between FSB and military-intelligence officers revealed arguing and a lack of organization. “It was ad hoc ” a senior Obama-administration official who saw the intelligence in real time told me. “They were kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what would stick.”
When the Obama administration began to realize  in the summer  that the Russians were up to something more wide-ranging than what they’d done before  the White House worried about only half the problem. At that point  the most alarming development was Russian probing of states’ voting systems. The dumps of hacked data and the churn of false stories about Clinton seemed less troubling  and also harder to combat without looking political. In September  Obama approached  Putin  on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou  China  and told  him  to “cut it out.” That fall  National-Security Adviser Susan Rice hand-delivered a warning to the Russian ambassador to Washington  Sergey Kislyak. The White House tasked the Treasury and State Departments with exploring new sanctions against Russia  as well as the publication of information about  Putin’s  personal wealth  but decided that such moves might backfire. If the White House pushed too hard  the Russians might dump even more stolen documents. Who knew what else they had? Nevertheless  with just a month to go until the election  the Obama administration took the extraordinary step of alerting the public. On October 7  2016  a joint statement from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said  “The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails” from U.S. political organizations. “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”
A forgery  a couple of groups of hackers  and a drip of well-timed leaks were all it took to throw American politics into chaos. Whether and to what extent the Trump campaign was complicit in the Russian efforts is the subject of active inquiries today. Regardless   Putin  pulled off a spectacular geopolitical heist on a shoestring budget—about $200 million  according to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. This point is lost on many Americans: The subversion of the election was as much a product of improvisation and entropy as it was of long-range vision. What makes  Putin  effective  what makes  him  dangerous  is not strategic brilliance but a tactical flexibility and adaptability—a willingness to experiment  to disrupt  and to take big risks. “They do plan ” said a senior Obama-administration official. “They’re not stupid at all. But the idea that they have this all perfectly planned and that  Putin  is an amazing chess player—that’s not quite it.  He  knows where  he  wants to end up   he  plans the first few moves  and then  he  figures out the rest later. People ask if  he  plays chess or checkers. It’s neither:  He  plays blackjack.  He  has a higher acceptance of risk. Think about it. The election interference—that was pretty risky  what  he  did. If Hillary Clinton had won  there would’ve been hell to pay.” Even the manner of the Russian attack was risky. The fact that the Russians didn’t really bother hiding their fingerprints is a testament to the change in Russia’s intent toward the U.S.  Robert Hannigan  a former head of the Government Communications Headquarters  the British analogue to the National Security Agency  said at the Aspen Forum. “The brazen recklessness of it … the fact that they don’t seem to care that it’s attributed to them very publicly  is the biggest change.”
That recklessness nonetheless has clear precursors—both in  Putin’s  evolving worldview and in  his  changing domestic circumstances. For more than a decade  America’s strategic carelessness with regard to Russia has stoked  Putin’s  fears of being deposed by the U.S.  and pushed  him  toward ever higher levels of antagonism. So has  his  political situation—the need to take ever larger foreign risks to shore up support at home  as the economy has struggled. These pressures have not abated; if anything  they have accelerated in recent years. II. The History When it is snowing  as it was on this spring afternoon  the gray crags of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations blend into the low-slung  steely sky. This is where the Soviet state once minted its diplomats and spies. Here they mastered the nuances of the world before stepping out into it. Today  the university’s role is much the same  although it has been watered down by corruption: The wealthy often buy their children admission. I had been invited to listen to a lecture by one of the institute’s most prominent faculty members  Andranik Migranyan  who himself graduated from the school in 1972. Migranyan spent much of the past decade in New York  where he ran the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation  a Russian think tank reported to have ties to the Russian foreign ministry. Among his old classmates is Sergei Lavrov  the foreign minister  whom he still counts as a friend.
This afternoon  Migranyan was lecturing on  Putin’s  speech at the 2007 Munich Conference on Security Policy  a speech that seems to be Russia’s sole post-Soviet ideological document—and key to understanding how the relationship between Russia and the U.S. reached today’s nadir.  Putin   still a painfully awkward speaker at the time  was seven years into  his  now nearly two-decade reign. Eighteen years prior  in 1989   he  had been a KGB officer stationed in Dresden  East Germany  shoveling sensitive documents into a furnace as protesters gathered outside and the Berlin Wall crumbled. Not long after that  the Soviet Union was dead and buried  and the world seemed to have come to a consensus: The Soviet approach to politics—violent  undemocratic—was wrong  even evil. The Western liberal order was a better and more moral form of government. For a while   Putin  had tried to find a role for Russia within that Western order. When Boris Yeltsin  Russia’s first post-Soviet president  named him his successor in 1999  Russia was waging war against Islamist separatists in Chechnya. On 9/11   Putin  was the first foreign leader to call President George W. Bush  hoping to impress on  him  that they were now allies in the struggle against terrorism.  He  tried to be helpful in Afghanistan. But in 2003  Bush ignored his objections to the invasion of Iraq  going around the United Nations Security Council  where Russia has veto power. It was a humiliating reminder that in the eyes of the West  Russia was irrelevant  that “Russian objections carried no weight ” as Migranyan told his students. But to  Putin   it was something more: Under the guise of promoting democracy and human rights  Washington had returned to its Cold War–era policy of deposing and installing foreign leaders. Even the open use of military force was now fair game.
In 2007  speaking to the representatives and defenders of the Western order   Putin  officially registered  his  dissent. “Only two decades ago  the world was ideologically and economically split  and its security was provided by the massive strategic potential of two superpowers ”  Putin  declaimed sullenly. But that order had been replaced by a “unipolar world” dominated only by America. “It is the world of one master  one sovereign.” A world order controlled by a single country “has nothing in common with democracy ”  he  noted pointedly. The current order was both “unacceptable” and ineffective. “Unilateral  illegitimate action” only created “new human tragedies and centers of conflict.”  He  was referring to Iraq  which by that point had descended into sectarian warfare. The time had come   he  said  “to rethink the entire architecture of global security.” This was the protest of a losing side that wanted to renegotiate the terms of surrender  16 years after the fact. Nonetheless   Putin  has spent the decade since that speech making sure that the United States can never again unilaterally maneuver without encountering friction—and  most important  that it can never  ever depose him. “You should have seen the faces of [John] McCain and [Joe] Lieberman ” a delighted Migranyan told his students  who appeared to be barely listening. The hawkish American senators who attended  Putin’s  speech “were gobsmacked. Russia had been written off! And  Putin  committed a mortal sin in  Munich :  He  told the truth.”
The year that followed  Migranyan said  “was the year of deed and action.” Russia went to war with neighboring Georgia in 2008  a move that Migranyan described as a sort of comeuppance for nato  which had expanded to include other former Soviet republics. But Western encroachment on Russia’s periphery was not the Kremlin’s central grievance. The U.S.  Migranyan complained  had also been meddling directly in Russian politics. American consultants had engineered painful post-Soviet market reforms  enriching themselves all the while  and had helped elect the enfeebled and unpopular Yeltsin to a second term in 1996. The U.S. government directly funded both Russian and American nongovernmental organizations  such as the National Endowment for Democracy  to promote democracy and civil society in Russia. Some of those same NGOs had ties to the so-called color revolutions  which toppled governments in former Soviet republics and replaced them with democratic regimes friendly to the West. The Rose Revolution in Georgia  the Orange Revolution in Ukraine  the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan—“Russia looks at this with understandable mistrust ” Migranyan told his students. He pointed out that the United States  by its own admission  had spent $5 billion in Ukraine to promote democracy—that is  to expand the liberal Western order. Through this prism  it is not irrational to believe that the U.S. might be coming for Moscow—and  Putin —next. This is why  in 2012  Russia kicked out USAID. It is why Russia banned the National Endowment for Democracy in 2015  under a new law that shuttered “undesirable” organizations.  Putin  is said to have watched the video of Qaddafi’s lynching over and over  obsessively.  He  feared the Americans would come for  him  next.  Putin’s   Munich  doctrine has a corollary: Americans may think they’re promoting democracy  but they’re really spreading chaos. “Look at what happened in Egypt ” Migranyan said  beginning a litany of failed American-backed revolutions. In 2011  the Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak stepped down following protests the U.S. had supported  Migranyan contended. But after “radical Islamists” won power democratically  the U.S. turned a blind eye to a military coup that deposed the new leaders. Then there was Libya. “You toppled the most successful government in North Africa ” Migranyan said  looking in my direction. “In the end  we got a ruined government  a brutally murdered American ambassador  chaos  and Islamic radicals.”
“If we count all the American failures  maybe it’s time you start listening to Russia? ” Migranyan said  growing increasingly agitated. “If [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad] has to go  then who comes in  in place of Assad? … Don’t destroy regimes if you don’t know what comes after!”  Putin  had always been suspicious of democracy promotion  but two moments convinced  him  that America was coming for  him  under its guise. The first was the 2011 nato intervention in Libya  which led  ultimately  to the ousting and gruesome lynching of the Libyan dictator  Muammar Qaddafi. Afterward  many people who interacted with  Putin  noticed how deeply Qaddafi’s death troubled  him .  He  is said to have watched the video of the killing over and over. “The way Qaddafi died made a profound impact on him ” says Jake Sullivan  a former senior State Department official who met repeatedly with senior Russian officials around that time. Another former senior Obama-administration official describes  Putin  as “obsessed” with Qaddafi’s death. (The official concedes  “I think we did overreach” in Libya.) The second moment was in November 2013  when young Ukrainians came out onto the Maidan—Independence Square—in the capital  Kiev  to protest then-President Viktor Yanukovych pulling out of an economic agreement with the European Union under pressure from  Putin . The demonstrators stayed all winter  until the police opened fire on them  killing some 100 people. The next day  February 21  2014  Yanukovych signed a political-reconciliation plan  brokered by Russia  America  and the EU  but that night he fled the capital. To  Putin   it was clear what had happened: America had toppled  his  closest ally  in a country  he  regarded as an extension of Russia itself. All that money America had spent on prodemocracy NGOs in Ukraine had paid off. The presence of Victoria Nuland  a State Department assistant secretary  handing out snacks on the Maidan during the protests  only cemented his worst fears.
“The Maidan shifted a gear ” Ben Rhodes  Obama’s deputy national-security adviser for strategic communications  told me. “ Putin  had always been an antagonist  and aggressive. But  he  went on offense after the Maidan. The gloves were off  in a way. To  Putin   Ukraine was such a part of Russia that  he  took it as an assault on  him .” (A source close to the Kremlin confirmed this account.)  Putin  and Lavrov were known within the Obama administration for their long tirades  chastising the American president for all the disrespect shown to Russia since 1991—like the time in 2014 that Obama listed Russia and Ebola as global threats in the same speech. Yanukovych’s fall made these tirades far more intense. “For two years afterwards  there wasn’t a phone call in which [ Putin ] wouldn’t mention it ” accusing the U.S. of supporting regime change in Ukraine  Rhodes recalled. Regime change in Libya and Ukraine led to Russia propping up Bashar al-Assad in Syria. “Not one more” is how Jon Finer  former Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff  characterizes  Putin’s  approach in Syria. It also led inexorably to Russian meddling in the U.S. election: Russia would show the U.S. that there was more than one regime-change racket in town. III. The Player For Russia  a country relentlessly focused on its history  2017 was a big year. November marked 100 years since the Bolsheviks  a radical minority faction of socialists  brought guns into a fledgling parliament and wrested Russia onto an equally radical path. That bloody experiment itself ended in 1991  with the collapse of the Soviet Union; December 2016 marked its 25th anniversary. Both anniversaries were largely ignored by the Kremlin-controlled media  because they are uncomfortable for  Putin . Bolsheviks were revolutionaries and  Putin   a statist to his core  loathes revolutions. But he was also raised to be a person of the Soviet state  to admire its many achievements  which is why he famously referred to the fall of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
 Putin  governs with the twin collapses of 1917 and 1991 at the forefront of  his  thinking.  He  fears for  himself  when another collapse comes—because collapse always comes  because it has already come twice in 100 years.  He  is constantly trying to avoid it. The exiled oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky has publicly spoken of deposing  Putin   and until recently did not eschew violent means. People like Alexey Navalny  the opposition leader  openly talk about putting  Putin  and his closest associates on trial. The Russian opposition gleefully waits for  Putin  to fall  to resign  to die. Every misstep  every dip in oil prices  is to them just another sign of his coming personal apocalypse. The hungry anticipation is mirrored in the West  especially in the United States.
Fear of collapse is also why Russian propaganda is intent on highlighting the bloody aftermath of revolutions the world over. Things may not be great in Russia now—the country has struggled mightily since 2012—but  the country’s news programs suggest  things can always get worse. That’s what Russians are told happened in the 1990s  in the nine frenetic years between the Soviet Union’s collapse and  Putin ’s ascent to power. “When you have two governmental collapses in 100 years  people are scared of them ” Migranyan told me. Many Russians remember the last one personally. But the number who do is shrinking. One in four Russian men dies before the age of 55.  Putin  turned 65 in October  and is surrounded by people who are as old as  he  is  if not older. Russia is now “in an autumnal autocracy ” Ekaterina Schulmann  a political scientist in Moscow  says. “The more it tries to seem young and energetic  the more it obviously fails.” As Aleksey Chesnakov  a former Kremlin insider  told me  in Russia “the most active voters”—the people who buy in most fully to what  Putin ’s selling—“are the pensioners.” To  Putin ’s supporters   his  regime isn’t an autocracy  exactly. “It can be described as demophilia ” Migranyan explained. “It is not a democracy  but it is in the name of the people  and for the people.  Putin ’s main constituency is the people. All of  his  power comes from  his  rating with the people  and therefore it’s important that  he  gives them the fruits of  his  rule.” The Kremlin calls it “managed democracy.”
This  too  is crucial to understanding why  Putin  acts as  he  does  and how  he  is likely to think about new campaigns against the United States. The Kremlin’s direction of the press  the close eye it keeps on polls and approval numbers  and especially its foreign policy—they all exist to buttress  Putin ’s legitimacy  to curry favor with  his  144 million subjects. It’s a complicated  hiccuping feedback loop designed to guarantee that  Putin ’s authoritarian rule remains popular and unthreatened. This is why  Putin  insists on having elections  even if the result is always predictable. “Without renewing the mandate  the system can’t survive ” Chesnakov said. “According to polls  two-thirds of Russians don’t want a monarchy. They want a democracy. But they have a different sense of it than Americans and Europeans.”  Putin ’s third presidential term is up in the spring of 2018.  He  didn’t bother to declare that  he ’d run for reelection until December 6 (the election is in March) and  he  likely won’t campaign.* This is  Putin ’s carefully cultivated image at home: the phlegmatic leader who hovers coolly above the fray as it churns on beneath  him . But in the past year or so  the fray has given  him  reason to worry. On a chilly afternoon this spring  I watched college students standing on the steps of a nondescript building off Volgograd’s central square  waiting to meet with Alexey Navalny. The opposition leader and anti-corruption crusader has captured the imagination of many young Russians  as well as that of Westerners who see him as a potential rival of  or even replacement for   Putin . Navalny has declared that he is running for president in the upcoming election. Police had blocked off the street in front of the building  which housed Navalny’s local campaign office. They stood groggily watching as Cossacks  members of a southern Russian tribe who have historically acted as the state’s vigilante enforcers  strolled up and down the block  casually swinging their black-leather whips. Angry-looking young men in track pants and sneakers—the other fists-for-hire preferred by the Kremlin—paced around the students  eyeing them menacingly. Young women in vertiginous heels—plainclothes cops—milled around. Every few minutes  they took out identical camcorders tagged with numbered yellow stickers and filmed the students standing on the steps  zooming in on their faces. Navalny had recently been attacked by progovernment thugs who splashed “Brilliant Green ” a Soviet-era antiseptic  on his face. His supporters subsequently posted an image of The Motherland Calls  the giant statue commemorating the Soviet victory at Stalingrad  with its face Photoshopped green  to publicize his rally in Volgograd. The image touched a nerve in a country where the government fetishizes World War II. Within hours  pro-Kremlin social-media accounts were using the image to fuel local outrage. By the time Navalny arrived in Volgograd  from Moscow  the youth wing of Putin’s party was waiting with a protest. The students standing on the steps of the campaign office found the manufactured outrage funny. They were at an age when most things were funny  even when the state was clearly watching them. The FSB had recently sent a summons to the home of Vlad  a fourth-year student at Volgograd State University who had previously picketed in support of Navalny’s Progress Party. Roman  a bespectacled third-year student in veterinary science  had been called into the dean’s office for participating in a protest. “The dean said  ‘Don’t go to Navalny’s protests. His political position is wrong ’ ” Roman told me  shrugging and shoving his hands into the pockets of his puffy red jacket. These young men would soon graduate into an economy that had only recently started to grow again after a five-year malaise. But the growth is barely perceptible  while prices for basic goods have soared. Some of their neighbors and family acquaintances hadn’t been paid in months  they said. “Our parents say things have gotten worse ” Roman told me. But their parents also knew the potential cost of openly opposing the government  and weren’t happy that their sons were at the rally that day. They also believed  from watching state TV  that Navalny was an American agent. The young men laughed at this  too. Navalny had begun to build his base about a decade earlier  with a blog on LiveJournal that carefully documented how government officials supposedly carved thick slices off the state budget and stashed the money in Moscow mansions or real estate abroad. A few years ago  Navalny launched a YouTube channel where he posts slickly produced videos describing alleged government corruption schemes. On another YouTube channel  Navalny Live  he and his team at the Anti-Corruption Foundation host talk shows about politics  the kind of programming that would never be allowed on state-controlled television. Together  the channels have more than 1.5 million subscribers  and the videos have collected hundreds of millions of views. As the students and I stood chatting  a retinue of preschoolers marched past the office with their teachers. The college students broke into laughter and cheers. “Everyone says that Navalny’s supporters are really young  but I didn’t know they were this young! ” Roman said. But things quickly lost their comic lightness when a young man in track pants started loudly arguing with an older Navalny supporter  saying Navalny was funded by the U.S. State Department and noting the personal offense he took at the green-faced Motherland Calls statue. “It’s a monument to a great victory!” his friend  another angry young man in track pants  screamed. “It was built on bones! My grandfather fought for Stalingrad!” (His grandfather  he later admitted to me  had been born in Georgia in 1941.) Suddenly  scores of anti-Navalny protesters appeared  some with brooms  as if preparing to sweep him out of their city. “Navalny  come out!” a middle-aged man with a shaved head screamed into a megaphone as the protesters surged across the sidewalk toward the campaign office. “Navalny  come out!” they yelled in response. The college students packed in tightly on the campaign office’s front steps  ready to defend their leader. The two camps started pushing and shoving  the crowd swaying violently. The cops watched. I looked up and saw Roman’s red jacket. He had taken off his glasses and stood on the top step  blinking and squinting into the noise. The swagger and irony had gone off his face. He looked vulnerable  like a child. Navalny emerged at the top of the steps  calm as ever. Part of the crowd started chanting  “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Navalny invited the man with the megaphone and his comrades up the steps to talk with him calmly  face-to-face. They came up and grabbed him by the legs and started to drag him toward the hostile part of the crowd. Finally the cops acted  freeing Navalny and pushing the crowd back toward the street. Navalny escaped into his campaign office  where  for the next three hours  he fielded questions in a room so packed with supporters that his hair was soon dripping with sweat. He spoke about the contrast between government elites’ luxurious lifestyles and the region’s sagging wages; about rising utility fees  despite falling energy prices; about the pitiful state of the roads. “Alexey!” one of his supporters yelled out. “There’s nothing left in our city since 1945 except the victory!” Everyone clapped. Navalny laughed at the state’s accusations that his supporters—the hundreds of people sweating with him in the room—had been paid by the U.S. State Department to show up. “This is the real political force of the country ” he said. “And we will win. We are destined for victory  because in any culture  in any civilization  people like us win  because they lie and we tell the truth.” I wiped clear a small rectangle on a fogged-up window. There was nothing left of the angry crowd  not even the police. They had vanished as quickly as they had materialized. Two days later  on March 26  Navalny rushed back to Moscow  where thousands of people had heeded his call to come out and protest state corruption. Tens of thousands more came out in nearly 100 other Russian cities and towns  across Russia’s 11 time zones—an unexpected showing that grabbed international headlines. Earlier that month  Navalny had posted an hour-long exposé on YouTube about the extensive luxury-real-estate holdings of the prime minister and former president  Dmitry Medvedev—who in 2008 had lamented that a sum equivalent to a third of the Russian federal budget had disappeared to corruption. Navalny contrasted the opulence of Medvedev’s many homes  filmed by drones  with his awkward call for austerity to the residents of Crimea  who  on joining Russia  had lost access to a steady supply of water  electricity  and reasonably priced food. “There’s no money ” Medvedev advised them two years after the annexation  in 2016  “but you hang in there.” By the time of the mass protests  the exposé had been watched almost 12 million times. A couple of schoolboys climbed up on a lamppost in Moscow’s iconic Pushkin Square  packed with protesters  and called to the cops trying to get them down  “There’s no money  but we’re hanging in there!” In recent years  as the economy has struggled   Putin  has purchased  his  popularity with a series of tactical measures.  Putin  pays extremely close attention to  his  approval ratings to see what works and what doesn’t.  He  and  his  advisers are addicted to polls. According to Alexander Oslon  who runs the Public Opinion Foundation  which does polling for the Kremlin  “They can’t live without them.”  Putin ’s approval rating surged in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea—and  by extension  Russia’s return to imperial grandeur. It was a risky maneuver  the equal  perhaps  of  Putin ’s later interference in the U.S. election. And it paid off  at least in the short term. Russians rallied behind the Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine—and behind  Putin   their audacious president. “There was a spike in loyalty” toward “every organ of the state ” Kirill Rogov  a political analyst in Moscow who studies Russian polling  told me—“a conservative shift in all directions. People started paying more attention to the news  they watched more TV  and they became more indoctrinated.” For a decade  a majority of Russians had told pollsters that they would rather be well-off than live in a great power. In 2014  those preferences flipped. But the rush of patriotism provided by the Crimean annexation proved fleeting. Connected by land only to Ukraine  Crimea is hard to supply from Russia. The peninsula is facing severe water shortages in its near future  and tourism  a mainstay of the local economy  has plummeted. On a recent trip there  I was told by even the most ardently pro-Russia locals  Cossacks who had staged protests supporting Moscow in 2014  that they had come to regret their stance. The violent lawlessness and corruption of Moscow had reached their home  and life had become much harder as Russian citizens. In some ways  they missed being Ukrainian. Meanwhile  the already sluggish Russian economy has lost cheap Western financing  following the imposition of American and European sanctions.  Putin ’s response to those sanctions—banning food imports from the United States and the EU—made food prices climb by double-digit percentages. The economy sank into recession. By the beginning of 2017  the government’s approval numbers had nearly returned to pre-annexation levels. “It’s the brand of the year ” Minin said of Russia’s hackers. “It’s a good thing when  aside from oil  we have cutting-edge specialists” whom the whole world talks about. Russia’s intervention in Syria  which began in the fall of 2015  offered another flag-wrapped distraction. As America shrank from its traditional role in the Middle East  Russia expanded its own  making an ostentatious show of fighting Islamist terrorists on behalf of a reluctant Western Christendom. Shortly after the Syrian army  aided by Russian airpower and commandos  retook the ancient city of Palmyra from the Islamic State  the Russian military flew the Mariinsky Orchestra in from St. Petersburg for a concert in front of the city’s historic ruins—and a dozen press cameras. (Russian TV barely covered the loss of the city by Russian-backed forces to isis half a year later.) There will inevitably be a reckoning for the Syrian adventure  too. For the entirety of his reign   Putin  has struggled to contain an Islamist insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus mountains  from which terrorists have launched attacks on Moscow. But on a trip this spring to Dagestan  a mostly Muslim enclave in the heart of the mountains  I found that the region  once extremely violent  was peaceful. Worried about potential terror attacks in nearby Sochi during the 2014 Olympics  the Russian secret services had allowed hundreds  if not thousands  of Islamist rebels  all of them Russian citizens  to go to Syria. According to one report in Novaya Gazeta  the FSB even provided some of them with a passport and transportation to the Russian border. It was a shortsighted counterterrorism strategy. Two Dagestani men who traveled to isis-controlled territories in Syria in order to bring back their children told me that they heard as much Russian as Arabic on the streets of isis cities. An October report by the Soufan Center  a security-intelligence nonprofit  showed that more foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria came from Russia than from any other country. What will become of these Russian fighters  now better trained and battle-hardened  as isis territory continues to shrink? Some 400 have already returned to Russia  according to the Soufan Center report  but even those who don’t return home can wreak havoc: In April  a suicide bomber blew himself up at a St. Petersburg metro station  killing 13 people. Russian speakers outside the country who had joined isis were suspected of having radicalized him. Russia’s interference in the U.S. election was just as shortsighted. At first  Donald Trump’s victory seemed to be a great coup for  Putin . Kremlin loyalists celebrated Trump’s inauguration in Moscow  including at a live watch party with free-flowing champagne. And it conferred on Russia prestige of a sort. When I asked Victor Minin  the former Russian-government cybersecurity specialist who runs hackathons across Russia  about the effect of American media coverage of Russian hackers  he said  “It’s the brand of the year. It’s a good thing when  aside from oil  we have cutting-edge specialists and the whole world is talking about them.” But this victory has burned out even faster than the others. The fingerprints that the Russians left behind  once discovered  raised an uproar in Washington. Congress  in a rare near-unanimous vote  stripped Trump of the ability to unilaterally lift American sanctions on Russia. They will very likely remain in place indefinitely  a prospect Medvedev bemoaned in a Facebook post the day Trump reluctantly signed the bill into law. Unable to get back the two diplomatic compounds in the U.S. that had been seized during the last days of the Obama administration  the Russians plunged headfirst into a destructive tit for tat—which resulted in the seizure of three more Russian diplomatic posts. Ironically  one of the Russian institutions to suffer the most blowback for the Russian hack is the FSB  one of the agencies believed to be behind the 2016 interference. “Before 2016  the FSB had a good reputation in Washington ” Andrei Soldatov  the Russian journalist  told me. The head of the FSB “was considered a reliable partner in fighting terrorism.” But “it all ended in 2016  and it ended very badly.” FSB officers were put on the FBI’s most-wanted list for cybercriminals  an unprecedented retaliation. The head of the FSB’s elite cyber unit and his deputy were forced out; two other top officers from the unit ended up in Moscow’s most notorious jail. “They’re now under incredible pressure both from the inside and the outside ” Soldatov said. “Sometimes ” says Michael Hayden  a director of the National Security Agency under George W. Bush  “you have successful covert operations that you wish hadn’t succeeded.” Meddling in the U.S. election might have destabilized the American political system  but it is unclear how carefully  Putin  considered the potential consequences for  his  country.  His  goal is to stay in power another day  another year  and to deal with complications when—and if—they arise. The protests sparked by Navalny are a complication that has  for now  been dealt with. Police arrested 1 043 people on March 26 in Moscow alone. On October 7  following another  smaller round of protests  they arrested hundreds more. Navalny will not be allowed on the election ballot  according to various reports and one Kremlin insider I spoke with; a recent court finding against him following trumped-up charges of embezzlement will most likely be used to disqualify him. These were hardly the first protests that  Putin  has weathered. Massive prodemocracy  anti- Putin  demonstrations rocked Moscow in the winter of 2011–12—and were followed by a violent police crackdown on May 6  2012  the day before  Putin  was sworn in for a third time. Dozens of people  some of them first-time protesters  were given multiyear prison sentences. The Kremlin soon raised the penalties for participating in any kind of unsanctioned protest. Several people are now in jail simply for sharing or liking posts on social media. Olga Romanova  who founded the NGO Russia Behind Bars to provide Russians with legal assistance  told me that the lesson the government is preparing for this new batch of young protesters “will be bigger and harsher” than the one in 2012  and that “it will last years.” She said the state was threatening to separate protesting minors from their parents. The feared Investigative Committee “is calling in school principals  school psychologists  teachers for questioning ” Romanova said. “And they testify against the kids.” (This summer  under pressure from the Russian government  Romanova fled to Western Europe.)

SOLUTION: no

PROBLEM: Verify if the sentiment of the following document towards the entity Milo Yiannopoulos is Neutral . The Breitbart employee closest to the alt-right was  Milo Yiannopoulos   the siteâs former tech editor known best for  his  outrageous public provocations  such as last yearâs Dangerous Faggot speaking tour and Septemberâs canceled Free Speech Week in Berkeley. For more than a year  Yiannopoulos led the site in a coy dance around the movementâs nastier edges  writing stories that minimized the role of neo-Nazis and white nationalists while giving its politer voices âa fair hearing.â In March  Breitbart editor Alex Marlow insisted âweâre not a hate site.â Breitbartâs media relations staff repeatedly threatened to sue outlets that described Yiannopoulos as racist. And after the violent white supremacist protest in Charlottesville  Virginia  in August  Breitbart published an article explaining that when Bannon said the site welcomed the alt-right  he was merely referring to âcomputer gamers and blue-collar voters who hated the GOP brand.â These new emails and documents  however  clearly show that Breitbart does more than tolerate the most hate-filled  racist voices of the alt-right. It thrives on them  fueling and being fueled by some of the most toxic beliefs on the political spectrum â and clearing the way for them to enter the American mainstream. Itâs a relationship illustrated most starkly by a previously unreleased April 2016 video in which Yiannopoulos sings âAmerica the Beautifulâ in a Dallas karaoke bar as admirers  including the white nationalist Richard Spencer  raise their arms in Nazi salutes. These documents chart the Breitbart alt-right universe. They reveal how the website â and  in particular  Yiannopoulos â links the Mercer family  the billionaires who fund Breitbart  to underpaid trolls who fill it with provocative content  and to extremists striving to create a white ethnostate. They capture what Bannon calls his âkilling machineâ in action  as it dredges up the resentments of people around the world  sifts through these grievances for ideas and content  and propels them from the unsavory parts of the internet up to TrumpWorld  collecting advertisersâ checks all along the way. And the cache of emails â some of the most newsworthy of which BuzzFeed News is now making public â expose the extent to which this machine depended on Yiannopoulos  who channeled voices both inside and outside the establishment into a clear narrative about the threat liberal discourse posed to America. The emails tell the story of Steve Bannonâs grand plan for Yiannopoulos  whom the Breitbart executive chairman transformed from a charismatic young editor into a conservative media star capable of magnetizing a new generation of reactionary anger. Often  the documents reveal  this anger came from a legion of secret sympathizers in Silicon Valley  Hollywood  academia  suburbia  and everywhere in between. "I have said in the past that I find humor in breaking taboos and laughing at things that people tell me are forbidden to joke about " Yiannopoulos wrote in a statement to BuzzFeed News. "But everyone who knows me also knows I'm not a racist. As someone of Jewish ancestry  I of course condemn racism in the strongest possible terms. I have stopped making jokes on these matters because I do not want any confusion on this subject. I disavow Richard Spencer and his entire sorry band of idiots. I have been and am a steadfast supporter of Jews and Israel. I disavow white nationalism and I disavow racism and I always have.â He added that during his karaoke performance  his "severe myopia" made it impossible for him to see the Hitler salutes a few feet away.
A year and a half ago   Milo Yiannopoulos  set  himself  a difficult task: to define the alt-right. It was five months before Hillary Clinton named the alt-right in a campaign speech  10 months before the alt-rightâs great hope became president  and 17 months before Charlottesville clinched the alt-right as a stalking horse for violent white nationalism. The movement had just begun its explosive emergence into the countryâs politics and culture.
At the time   Yiannopoulos  who would later describe himself as a âfellow travelerâ of the alt-right   was the tech editor of Breitbart. In summer 2015  after spending a year gathering momentum through GamerGate â the opening salvo of the new culture wars â he convinced Breitbart upper management to give him his own section. And for four months  he helped Bannon wage what the Breitbart boss called in emails to staff â#war.â It was a war  fought story by story  against the perceived forces of liberal activism on every conceivable battleground in American life.  Yiannopoulos  was a useful soldier whose very public identity as a gay man (one who has now married a black man) helped defend him  his anti-political correctness crusade  and his employer from charges of bigotry. But now  Yiannopoulos  had a more complicated fight on  his  hands. The left â and worse  some on the right â had started to condemn the new conservative energy as reactionary and racist.  Yiannopoulos  had to take back âalt-right â to redefine for Breitbartâs audience a poorly understood  leaderless movement  parts of which had already started to resist the term itself. So he reached out to key constituents  who included a neo-Nazi and a white nationalist. âFinally doing my big feature on the alt right â  Yiannopoulos  wrote in a March 9  2016  email to Andrew âWeevâ Auernheimer  a hacker who is the system administrator of the neo-Nazi hub the Daily Stormer  and who would later ask his followers to disrupt the funeral of Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer. âFancy braindumping some thoughts for me.â âItâs time for me to do my big definitive guide to the alt right â  Yiannopoulos  wrote four hours later to Curtis Yarvin  a software engineer who under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug helped create the âneoreactionaryâ movement  which holds that Enlightenment democracy has failed and that a return to feudalism and authoritarian rule is in order. âWhich is my whorish way of asking if you have anything youâd like to make sure I include.â âAlt r feature  figured youâd have some thoughts â  Yiannopoulos  wrote the same day to Devin Saucier  who helps edit the online white nationalist magazine American Renaissance under the pseudonym Henry Wolff  and who wrote a story in June 2017 called âWhy I Am (Among Other Things) a White Nationalist.â The three responded at length: Weev about the Daily Stormer and a podcast called The Daily Shoah  Yarvin in characteristically sweeping world-historical assertions (âItâs no secret that North America contains many distinct cultural/ethnic communities. This is not optimal  but with a competent king itâs not a huge problem eitherâ)  and Saucier with a list of thinkers  politicians  journalists  films (Dune  Mad Max  The Dark Knight)  and musical genres (folk metal  martial industrial  â80s synthpop) important to the movement.  Yiannopoulos  forwarded it all  along with the Wikipedia entries for âAlternative Rightâ and the esoteric far-right Italian philosopher Julius Evola â a major influence on 20th-century Italian fascists and Richard Spencer alike â to Allum Bokhari  his deputy and frequent ghostwriter  whom he had met during GamerGate. âInclude a bit of everything â he instructed Bokhari.
âI think youâll like what Iâm cooking up â  Yiannopoulos  wrote to Saucier  the American Renaissance editor. âI look forward to it â Saucier replied. âBannon  as you probably know  is sympathetic to much of it.â Five days later Bokhari returned a 3 000-word draft  a taxonomy of the movement titled âALT-RIGHT BEHEMOTH.â It included a little bit of everything: the brains and their influences (Yarvin and Evola  etc.)  the ânatural conservativesâ (people who think different ethnic groups should stay separate for scientific reasons)  the âMeme teamâ (4chan and 8chan)  and the actual hatemongers. Of the last group  Bokhari wrote: âThereâs just not very many of them  no-one really likes them  and theyâre unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right.â âMagnificent start â  Yiannopoulos  responded.
Over the next three days   Yiannopoulos  passed the article back to Yarvin and the white nationalist Saucier  the latter of whom gave line-by-line annotations.  He  also sent it to Vox Day  a writer who was expelled from the board of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for calling a black writer an âignorant savage â and to Alex Marlow  the editor of Breitbart. âSolid  fair  and fairly comprehensive â Vox Day responded  with a few suggestions. âMost of it is great but I donât want to rush a major long form piece like this â Marlow wrote back. âA few people will need to weigh in since it deals heavily with race.â
Also  there was another sensitive issue to be raised: credit. âAllum did most of the work on this and wants joint [byline] but I want the glory here â  Yiannopoulos  wrote back to Marlow. âI am telling him you said itâs sensitive and want my byline alone on it.â Minutes later   Yiannopoulos  emailed Bokhari. âI was going to have Marlow collude with me â¦ about the byline on the alt right thing because I want to take it solo. Will you hate me too much if I do that? â¦ Truthfully management is very edgy on this one (They love it but itâs racially charged) and they would prefer it.â âWill management definitely say no if itâs both of us?â Bokhari responded. âI think it actually lowers the risk if someone with a brown-sounding name shares the BL.â Five days later  March 22nd  Marlow returned with comments. He suggested that the story should show in more detail how  Yiannopoulos  and most of the alt-right rejected the actual neo-Nazis in the movement. And he added that Taki's Magazine and VDare  two publications  Yiannopoulos  and Bokhari identified as part of the alt-right  âare both racist. â¦ We should disclaimer that or strike that part of the history from the article.â (The published story added  in the passive voice  âAll of these websites have been accused of racism.â) Again the story went back to Bokhari  who on the 24th sent  Yiannopoulos  still another draft  with the subject head âALT RIGHT  MEIN FUHRER.â On the 27th  now co-bylined  the story was ready for upper management: Bannon and Larry Solov  Breitbartâs press-shy CEO. It was also ready  on a separate email chain  for another read and round of comments from the white nationalist Saucier  the feudalist Yarvin  the neo-Nazi Weev  and Vox Day. âI need to go thru this tomorrow in depthâ¦although I do appreciate any piece that mentions evola â Bannon wrote. On the 29th  in an email titled âsteve wants you to read this â Marlow sent  Yiannopoulos  a list of edits and notes Bannon had solicited from James Pinkerton  a former Reagan and George H.W. Bush staffer and a contributing editor of the American Conservative. The 59-year-old Pinkerton was put off by a cartoon of Pepe the Frog conducting the Trump Train. âI love art â he wrote inline. âI think [Breitbart News Network] needs a lot more of it  but I donât get the above. Frogs? Kermit? Am I missing something here?â Later that day  Breitbart published âAn Establishment Conservativeâs Guide to the Alt-Right.â It quickly became a touchstone  cited in the New York Times  the Los Angeles Times  the New Yorker  CNN  and New York Magazine  among others. And its influence is still being felt. This past July  in a speech in Warsaw that was celebrated by the alt-right  President Trump echoed a line from the story â a story written by a âbrown-soundingâ amanuensis  all but line-edited by a white nationalist  laundered for racism by Breitbartâs editors  and supervised by the man who would in short order become the presidentâs chief strategist. The machine had worked well.
The previous November   Yiannopoulos  emailed Bannon with a bone to pick. Breitbart London reported that a London college student behind a popular social justice hashtag had threatened the anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller. âThe story is horseshit and we should never have published it â  Yiannopoulos  wrote. âReckless and stupid. â¦ Strongly recommend we pull. itâs insanely defamatory. I spoke to pamela geller and even she said it was rubbish. Weâre outright lying about this girl and surely weâre better than that. We can and should win by telling the truth.â Six minutes later  Bannon wrote back to his tech editor in a fury. âYour [sic] full of shit. When I need your advice on anything I will ask. ... The tech site is a total clusterfuck---meaningless stories written by juveniles. You donât have a clue how to build a company or what real content is. And you donât have long to figure it out or your [sic] gone. â¦ You are magenalia [sic].â
On December 8  the New York Times published a major story about the radicalization of American Muslims on Facebook.  Yiannopoulos  published a story called âBirth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.â That afternoon  Bannon emailed  Yiannopoulos  and Marlow. âDude---we r in a global existentialist war where our enemy EXISTS in social media and u r jerking yourself off w/ marginalia!!!! U should be OWNING this conversation because u r everything they hate!!! Drop your toys  pick up your tools and go help save western civilization.â âMessage received â  Yiannopoulos  wrote back. âI will do a Week of Islam next week.â âU donât need that â Bannon responded. âJust get in the fight---ur Social Media and they have made it a powerful weapon of war. â¦ There is no war correspondent in the west yet dude and u can own it and be remember for 3 generations--or sit around wasting your God-given talents jerking off to your fan base.â Over the next several months   Yiannopoulos  began to find the right targets. First  it  was a continued attack on Shaun King  the writer and Black Lives Matter activist whose ethnicity  Yiannopoulos  had called into question. Next it was thenâYahoo CEO Marissa Mayer  who Bannon called in an email to  Yiannopoulos  the âposter child for the narcissistic ecosystem.â And increasingly it was enemies of Donald Trump. In response to a  Yiannopoulos  pitch accusing a prominent Republican opponent of Trump of being a pill-popper  Bannon wrote: âDude!!! LMAO! â¦ Epic.â And Bannon signed off on an April story by  Yiannopoulos  imploring #NeverTrumpers to get on board with âTrump and the alt-right.â (Bannon did  however  veto making it the lead story on the site  writing to  Yiannopoulos  and Marlow  âLooks like we have our thumb on the scale.â) Why was Bannon so concerned with the focus of his tech editorâs energies? In a February email exchange before  Yiannopoulos  appeared on Greg Gutfeldâs Sunday Fox News show  Bannon wrote  âGutfeld should become an object lesson for u. Brilliant cultural commentator who really got pop culture  the hipster scene and advant [sic] gardeâ¦.got on fox and tried to become a political pundit...lost all credibility. â¦ You r one of the potential heirs to his cultural leadership so act according.â Bannon was grooming the younger man for something greater. In May  Bannon invited  Yiannopoulos  to Cannes for a week for the film festival. âWant to discuss tv and film with u â he wrote in an email. âU get to meet my partners  hang on the boat and discuss business.â
The boat was the Sea Owl  a 200-foot yacht owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer  who is a major funder of Breitbart and various other far-right enterprises. That week   Yiannopoulos  shuttled back and forth from the Cannes Palace Hotel to the pier next to the Palais des Festivals et des CongrÃ¨s and the green-sterned  âfantasy-inspiredâ vessel complete with a Dale Chihuly chandelier. The Mercers were in town to promote Clinton Cash  a film produced by Bannon and their production studio  Glittering Steel. On board  Yiannopoulos drank  mingled  and interviewed Phil Robertson  the lavishly bearded patriarch of Duck Dynasty  for his podcast. âI know how lucky I am â  Yiannopoulos  wrote to Bannon on May 20. âIâm going to work hard to make you some money -- and win the war! Thanks for having me this week and for the faith youâre placing in me chief. The left wonât know what hit them.â âU just focus on being who u are-- we will put a top level team around u â Bannon wrote back. â#war.â
Bannon passed the request from Mercer to  Yiannopoulos .  Yiannopoulos  passed  it  to Charlie Nash  an 18-year-old Englishman whom he had met at a conference of the populist right-wing UK Independence Party conference the previous year  and who started working as his intern immediately after. Like some bleach-blonde messiah of antiâpolitical correctness   Yiannopoulos  tended to draw in ideologically sympathetic young men at conferences  campus speeches  and on social media  accumulating more and more acolytes as  he  went along. In June 2015 it was Ben Kew  who invited  Yiannopoulos  to speak at the University of Bristol  where  he  was a student;  he âs now a staff writer for Breitbart. In September 2015 it was Tom Ciccotta  the treasurer of the class of 2017 at Bucknell University  who still writes for Breitbart. In February 2016 it was Hunter Swogger  a University of Michigan student and then the editor of the conservative Michigan Review  whom  Yiannopoulos  cultivated and brought on as a social media specialist during his Dangerous Faggot tour.  Yiannopoulos  called these young researchers  his  âtrufflehounds.â Nash  who had just been hired by Breitbart at $30 000 a year after months of lobbying by  Yiannopoulos   dutifully fielded the request from the billionaire indirectly paying his salary and turned around a story about the rejected Capitol HillAwry app on the 25th â and a follow-up five days later after Apple reversed its decision. âHuge victory â Bannon emailed after the reversal. âHuge win.â This was the usual way stories came in from the Mercers  according to a former Breitbart editor: with a request from Bannon referring to âour investorsâ or âour investing partners.â After Cannes  as Bannon pushed  Yiannopoulos  to do more live events that presented expensive logistical challenges  the involvement of the investing partners became increasingly obvious. Following a May event at DePaul University in Chicago in which Black Lives Matter protesters stormed a  Yiannopoulos  speech  he wrote to Bannon  âI wouldnât confess this to anyone publicly  of course  but I was worried ... last night that I was going to get punched or worse. ... I need one or two people of my own.â
âAgree 100% â Bannon wrote. âWe want you to stir up more. Milo: for your eyes only we r going to use the mercers private security company.â Copied on the email was Dan Fleuette  Bannonâs coproducer at Glittering Steel and the man who acted for months as the go-between for  Yiannopoulos  and the Mercers. As  Yiannopoulos  made the transition in summer 2016 from being a writer to becoming largely the star of a traveling stage show  Fleuette was enlisted to process and wrangle the legion of young assistants  managers  trainers  and other talent the Breitbart tech editor demanded be brought along for the ride.
First came Tim Gionet  the former BuzzFeed social media strategist who goes by âBaked Alaskaâ on Twitter  whom  Yiannopoulos  pitched to Fleuette as a tour manager in late May. Gionet accompanied  Yiannopoulos  to Florida after the June 2016 Pulse nightclub killings in Orlando. The two planned a press conference outside a mosque attended by the shooter  Omar Mateen. (âBrilliant â Bannon emailed. âBtw they are ALL âfactories of hate.ââ) But after some impertinent tweets and back talk from Gionet  Fleuette became Yiannopoulosâs managerial confidante. âHe needs to understand that âBaked Alaskaâ is over â  Yiannopoulos  wrote in one email to Fleuette. âHe is not a friend he is an employee. â¦ He is becoming a laughing stock and that reflects badly on me.â In another  âI think we need to replace Tim. â¦ [He] has no news judgment or understanding of whatâs dangerous (thinks tweets about Jews are just fine). â¦ He seems more interested in his career as an obscure Twitter personality than my tour manager.â At the Republican National Convention   Yiannopoulos  deliberately chose a hotel for Gionet far from the convention center  writing to another Breitbart employee  âExactly where I want him. â¦ He needs the commute to remind him of his place.â Gionet did not respond to multiple requests by BuzzFeed News for comment.
But Gionet  who would go on to march with the alt-right in Charlottesville  was still useful to  Yiannopoulos  as a gateway to a group of young  hip  social mediaâsavvy Trump supporters.  Yiannopoulos  managed all of  his  assistants and ghostwriters under  his  own umbrella  using âyiannopoulos.netâ emails and private Slack rooms. This structure insulated Breitbartâs upper management from the 4chan savants and GamerGate vets working for  Yiannopoulos . And  it  gave  Yiannopoulos  a staff loyal to  him  above Breitbart. (Indeed   Yiannopoulos  shopped a separate âTeam Miloâ section to Dow Jones  which publishes the Wall Street Journal  in July 2016.) It also sometimes led to extraordinarily fraught organizational and personal dynamics. Take Allum Bokhari  the Oxford-educated former political consultant whom  Yiannopoulos  rewarded for his years of grunt work with a $100 000 ghostwriting contract for his book Dangerous. But the men were spying on each other. In April 2016   Yiannopoulos  asked Bokhari for âa complete list of the email  social media  bank accounts  and any other system and services of mine you have been accessing  and how long youâve had access.â Bokhari confessed to having logged into Yiannopoulosâs email and Slack  and had used  Yiannopoulos âs credit card for an Airbnb  a confession  Yiannopoulos  quickly passed on to Larry Solov  the Breitbart CEO. âMy basic position is that he is not stable and needs to be far away from me â  Yiannopoulos  wrote to Marlow and Solov. Meanwhile   Yiannopoulos  had compiled a transcript of what he called âa short section of 30 hours of recording down on paper â which appeared to be of conversations between Bokhari and a friend. The newcomers brought in by Gionet werenât much better behaved.  Yiannopoulos  had to boot one prospective member of  his  âtour squadâ for posting cocaine use on Snapchat. Mike Mahoney  a thenâ20-year-old from North Carolina  had to be monitored because of his propensity for racism and anti-Semitism on social media. (Mahoney was later banned from Twitter  but heâs relocated to Gab  a free speech uber alles social network where he is free to post messages such as âreminder: muslims are fags.â) âLet me know if thereâs anything specific thatâs really bad eg any Jew stuff â  Yiannopoulos  wrote of Mahoney in an email to another member of his staff. âHis entire Twitter persona will have to change dramatically once he gets the job.â On September 11  2016  Mahoney signed a $2 500-a-month contract with Glittering Steel. As the Dangerous Faggot tour swung into gear   Yiannopoulos  grew increasingly hostile toward Fleuette  whom  he  excoriated for late payments to  his  young crew  lack of support  and disorganization. âThe entire tour staff is demanding money â  Yiannopoulos  wrote in one email to Fleuette in October. âNo one knows or cares who Glittering Steel is but this represents a significantly damaging risk to my reputation if it gets out.â And in another  âYour problem right now is keeping me happy." Yet ultimately Fleuette was necessary â he connected  Yiannopoulos âs madcap world and the massively rich people funding the machine. âI think you know who the final decision belongs to â Fleuette wrote to  Yiannopoulos  after one particularly frantic request for money. âI am in daily communication with them.â
 Yiannopoulos âs star rose throughout 2016 thanks to a succession of controversial public appearances  social media conflagrations  Breitbart radio spots  television hits  and magazine profiles. Bannonâs guidance  the Mercersâ patronage  and the creative energy of his young staff had come together at exactly the time Donald Trump turned offensive speech into a defining issue in American culture. And for thousands of people  Yiannopoulos  Breitbartâs poster child for offensive speech  became a secret champion.
Aggrieved by the encroachment of so-called cultural Marxism into American public life  and egged on by an endless stream of stories on Fox News about safe spaces and racially charged campus confrontations  a diverse group of Americans took to  Yiannopoulos âs inbox to thank him and to confess their fears about the future of the country. He heard from ancient veterans who âbinge-watchedâ his speeches on YouTube; from âa 58 year old asian womanâ concerned about her high school daughterâs progressive teachers; from boys asking how to win classroom arguments against feminists; from a former NASA employee who said he had been âlaid off by my fat female bossâ and was sad that the Jet Propulsion Lab had become âcompletely cuckedâ; from a man who had bought his 11-year-old son an AR-15 and named it âMiloâ; from an Indiana lesbian who said she âdespised liberalsâ and begged  Yiannopoulos  to âkeep triggering the special snowflakesâ; from a doctoral student in philosophy who said he had been threatened with dismissal from his program for sharing his low opinion of Islam; from a Charlotte police officer thanking  Yiannopoulos  for his âcommon sense Facebook postsâ about the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott (âBLUE LIVES MATTER â  Yiannopoulos  responded); from a New Jersey school teacher who feared his students would become âpawns for the left social justice campaignâ; from a man who said he had returned from a deployment in âan Islamic countryâ to discover that his wife was transitioning and wanted a divorce (subject line âRegressivism stole my wifeâ); from a father terrified his daughter might attend Smith College; from fans who wanted to give him jokes to use about fat people  about gay people  about Muslims  about Hillary Clinton. He also heard  with frequency  from accomplished people in predominantly liberal industries â entertainment  tech  academia  fashion  and media â who resented what they felt was a censorious coastal cultural orthodoxy. Taken together  they represent something like a network of sleeper James Damores  vexed but silent for fear of losing their jobs or friends  kvetching to  Yiannopoulos  as a pressure valve. For  Yiannopoulos   these emails werenât just validation  though they were obviously that. They sometimes became more ammunition for the culture war. âIâm a relatively recent ex-lefty who received deep liberal indoctrination via elite private schools (Yale and Andover) â wrote one film editor who introduced herself as an âUndercover âpede in Hollywood." (âCentipedeâ is slang for an online Trump supporter.) âIâve been deeply closeted thus far due to the severe personal and professional repercussions of not beating the progressive drum.â In an email titled âWorking for E! Is Hell â a production manager at the cable network wrote  Yiannopoulos  that  her  employer was a âcontributor to the fake news machine and my colleagues have become insufferable. â¦ I â¦ offer you my services â¦ a partner in fighting globalism.â And Adam Grandmaison  whom Rolling Stone described as âunderground hip-hopâs major tastemaker â reached out to  Yiannopoulos  to suggest he investigate a journalist who had accused her ex-boyfriend of physical abuse. In an email to BuzzFeed News  Grandmaison wrote that he was merely voicing concern about a black man being judged by the media  and that "I didn't intend for [Milo] to write about it." (Grandmaison's email to  Yiannopoulos  began "first off i absolutely do not want credit for tipping you off to this.") Even more tips came in from tech workers. A Google employee sent  Yiannopoulos  a picture of a cartoon gingerbread man named âGogy  the Googely Googlerâ that had been posted by a coffee machine to remind employees to tidy up. According to the Google employee  the sign had turned into an HR problem after employees were angered that Gogy was identified as male.
A Google spokesperson told BuzzFeed News the company has no record of Gogy or any related HR complaint. A Twitter software engineer who felt betrayed by the âmoral companyâ he had worked for since 2012  when it âstood for free speech â emailed to tell  Yiannopoulos  that the removal of  his  verification in early 2016 âwas obviously politically motivated.â And some of these disgruntled tech workers reached beyond the rank and file. Vivek Wadhwa  a prominent entrepreneur and academic  reached out repeatedly to  Yiannopoulos  with stories of what  he  considered out-of-control political correctness. First it was about a boycott campaign against a Kickstarter with connections to GamerGate. (âThese people are truly crazy and destructive. â¦ What horrible people â wrote Wadwha of the campaigners.) Then it was about Y-Combinator cofounder Paul Graham; Wadwha felt Graham was being unfairly targeted for an essay he wrote about gender inequality in tech. âPolitical correctness has gone too far â Wadhwa wrote. âThe alternative is communism â not equality. And that is a failed systemâ¦â  Yiannopoulos  passed Wadhwaâs email to Bokhari  who promptly ghostwrote a story for Breitbart  âSocial Justice Warrior Knives Out For Startup Guru Paul Graham.â Wadwha told BuzzFeed News that he no longer supports Yiannopoulos.

SOLUTION: yes

PROBLEM: Verify if the sentiment of the following document towards the entity Brexit is Neutral . The financial services sector  which accounts for about 12 percent of Britainâs economic output and pays more tax than any other industry  potentially has a lot to lose from the end of unfettered access to the EUâs post-Brexit market of 440 million people.
But it is particularly vulnerable to  a Brexit shock   because about a third of the transactions which take place on  its  exchanges and in  its  trading rooms involve clients in the EU.
This has led some politicians and economists to predict London will lose its pre-eminence as a financial center after Brexit  although supporters of leaving the EU say Britain will benefit over the long term by being able to set its own rules.
According to Savills  commercial property prices in the City of London have dropped more since the Brexit vote in June 2016 than at any point since 2009  the last year of the global financial crisis.
So far  Brexit seems to be having no impact here. The number of venues  such as bars and restaurants  applying for new licenses to sell alcohol in the City of London in the first eight months of 2017 is at a record high  data from the municipal local authority that runs the district shows.
âBusinesses are naturally hesitant to plan and execute growth hires due to the uncertainty around  Brexit  â said Hakan Enver  a director at Morgan McKinley.
The findings suggest that the first wave of job losses from  Brexit  may be at the lower end of estimates by industry lobby groups and firms  which could mean London will keep its place as the continentâs top finance center  at least in the short term.

SOLUTION:
no