Yesterday we were talking about GETTR, a purported Trumpite social network which looked from the visuals more like a hook-up site or worse. It was the project of (apparently) recently canned Trump spokesman and gatekeeper Jason Miller, though Trump himself said he wouldn’t be joining it. There were other oddities beyond the name – like the fact that it seemed to be populated by posts scraped from Twitter.
But overnight things got much more weird.
It turns out that GETTR is a rebranded project of exiled Chinese billionaire and all around hybrid cartoon/James Bond villain character Guo Wengui. As Josh Kovensky discussed here a few weeks ago, having been driven out of China over purported corruption charges, Guo hooked up with Trump world, apparently becoming a funder of various pro-Trump enterprises and the go to money man for Steve Bannon. (When Bannon was arrested last year for the charges Trump eventually pardoned him for, he was on Guo’s yacht sailing somewhere off New York.) Guo has been funding various Big Lie projects and back in early June he hosted and seemingly funded a big Big Lie get together with Bannon, Mike Flynn, the MyPillow guy and more. The event managed to combine the Big Lie with Guo’s other project, a non-existent country called the New Federal State of China. (Guo, of course, is a member at Mar-A-Lago.)
We don’t know whether Guo was really corrupt in China or just fell out of favor with the Communist Party and had to high tail it out of the country. Either way, he’s now Joe Anti-Communist. And one of the dimensions of the event in early June was Trumpers creating a narrative uniting the Big Lie with Guo’s non-existent country.
(In case you’re wondering if all this sounds just too weird, yes, you’re not the only one who thinks Guo may in fact be a spy for China. Indeed, one entity that thinks Guo may be a spy is none other than the United States government. He denies it.)
In any case, back to the Big Lie and fake government of China shindig in June. As Josh put it back on June 4th …
All four of them drew heavy comparisons between Guo’s New Federal State of China and their own battle to overturn the results of the 2020 election based on the myth that it had been stolen. Bannon referred to the New Federal State as the “deplorables of China,” while Flynn made the comparison more explicit.
“When we talk about the formation of new ideas, of new countries, new nation-states, you have to take a look at yourself, have the conversations in your communities,” Flynn said. “Like the communities that I represent, which are people that care deeply about freedom, and we are not about to give it up.”
Okay, so where does GETTR fit into all this?
Miller eventually conceded that Guo was one of the funders of the new effort. But he played down Guo’s role saying he was only one of a “consortium of international investors” funding the effort. He wouldn’t say who these other international investors were. But in the Daily Beast’s account, it seems like Guo is much more than some passive investor. GETTR seems to be his. Or rather GETTR doesn’t seem to be new at all. It seems to have been operating in the Chinese language internet space for some time as part of Guo’s global New Federal State of China grand plan propaganda campaign. You can read more of the convoluted details here. But the gist seems to be that Guo recently told the app’s users to download their account data because he was about to wipe the site clean and relaunch it as Jason Miller’s GETTR. That’s how we got to yesterday’s big announcement. It also explains why despite having visuals reminiscent of a sex trafficking site, the marketing verbiage sounds more like it’s aimed at creating some kind of international movement against cancel culture and communism.
Still keeping up? Or rather how does Miller fit into all this? Who knows?
One close observer of the world of 3rd tier Trump toadies surmises that Miller, after getting canned by Trump, probably over the blog fiasco, went to Bannon to find a new gig and Bannon made him the beard for GETTR.
In any case, Miller is rather sadly still begging Trump to join.
