Feeding The Demons

"The passion for destruction is also a creative passion, a form of art." Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin

Feeding Demons is a reality-based political thriller tracking the thirty-year, covert campaign to subvert American democracy. A damaged propagandist, Scott Brennan — modelled on the tactics of Steve Bannon — rises from failed ventures to become the architect of information operations. Across London, Prague and the United States, Russian military strategists, intelligence officers, organised crime and opportunistic billionaires forge networks that manipulate elections and public life. An abducted Ukrainian student, a Czech special-ops officer and a calculating Russian spymaster reveal the human cost of cognitive warfare. Dark, cinematic and topical, Feeding Demons exposes how modern propaganda conquers nations from within.

 

 

SYNOPSIS

The book was written in 2020 and first published in the Czech Republic that same year. It has now reached its second edition. It is a Forsyth-style political thriller which, drawing on real events, portrays the actual people involved in thirty years of preparations for an American coup. The author focuses in particular on a propagandist underestimated by everyone else. The character of Scott Brennan, the central villain, is a precise mirror of the life and work of Steve Bannon. The cast includes figures from the Russian military, intelligence services and organised crime; Western military subcontractors hired by the Russians for the dirtiest propaganda work; greedy and uneducated American billionaires; and a real-estate tycoon drowning in debt, accompanied by his conniving family.

Plot

The introduction opens with a horror-like scene: a shooting at a Texas high school. A seventeen-year-old student in Lampasas steels himself for an act of terrorism. A young man with an unformed identity, an autistic outsider drawn into a radicalisation and recruitment network run by subversive operatives, decides to commit a deed he believes will make him famous. We follow him moment by moment until he opens fire on his classmates. We still do not know why he did it. All we know is that he had been following the instructions of his idol – a figure on 4chan operating under the pseudonym Honey Badger. At the end of the book, the scene is replayed, this time revealing that Honey Badger is actually Scott Brennan, the propaganda chief of identitarian extremists.

The first chapter begins in 1996 at a meeting of the Russian General Staff. Its chief, General Samsonov, announces a radical doctrinal shift. Russia is economically ruined and its army is losing combat capability. Samsonov proposes a dramatic change in the nature of warfare: allow the West to believe that Russia has run out of breath in terms of kinetic warfare, and shift all military investments into soft methods – building influence networks and subverting the West through money and cognitive manipulation. Psychologists and political experts of the Russian Academy of Sciences are tasked with developing the plan.

We then move to London, where an ambitious advertising careerist, Miguel Vasquez, is active at the beginning of the new century. Coming from a poorer background despite his Eton education, he covets the prestige of his former classmates and founds an institute for behavioural-influence research. With investment from a famous American billionaire, the institute soon transforms into a commercial military subcontractor.

Its first contract is the deradicalisation of young Muslims and their recruitment networks in Austria, where the firm proves highly successful: a major Al-Qaeda recruitment structure is dismantled.

Meanwhile in the United States, we follow the unhappy career missteps of the ambitious propagandist Scott Brennan, who leaves the Navy and tries his luck in gaming and film – both with disastrous results. A senior Russian intelligence officer, Grigory, takes note of Scott’s manipulative talent and high education. When Scott loses both his father and beloved mother, and – on the brink of bankruptcy – relapses into alcoholism, Grigory offers him a way out: collaboration. His network within the Republican Party places Scott at the centre of a long-running operation aimed at breaking moderate Republicans and replacing their traditional voter base with aggressive non-voters from impoverished regions.

A third storyline unfolds in Prague: the rise and consolidation of Russian organised crime. Borja, the capo di tutti capi of Russian-speaking gangs, escapes a raid at the U Čápů restaurant thanks to an unknown informant. The raid is carried out jointly by a Czech rapid-response unit and the FBI. Borja receives the tip-off, but we do not know whether it came from the Americans or the Czechs. He simply does not turn up at the lavish birthday celebration, and everyone else is arrested instead. From the conversation among Czech officers, we learn that the Czech commanders had not been bribed. So who warned him?

We also meet the novel’s main heroine, Oksana, a Ukrainian computer-science student kidnapped by Borja’s gang and trafficked as a forced prostitute.

Thanks to his intuition and his ability to work with people inside intelligence services, Borja climbs higher, moving his assets from Eastern Europe to America and London. He brings Oksana to London as a honey-trap. Oksana understands the gang’s ruthless power and knows how many women have disappeared without a trace, so she tries to adapt.

The newly ascendant Russian leader brutally subjugates both organised crime and the wealthiest crime-linked oligarchs. From these subjugated oligarchs, he constructs an influence army. He assigns tasks and dictates which types of subversive operations they must finance. Part of this influence-building includes the dismantling of the Republican Party, the rise of a new kind of American politician, and the acquisition of influence shares in Silicon Valley companies through venture-capital funds.

In London, Oksana meets David, the Czech tactical-unit officer who once took part in the raid in Prague. They encounter each other at a wild party hosted by a Russian oligarch for influential London opinion-makers, and both feel an irresistible attraction – the fate of two tragic losers in a world of money, each unwilling to accept their own destiny.

Oksana is approached by the Russian operative Grigory, who works with Scott Brennan in America and has detected competing activities by Borja’s network in the United States. He wants her to inform on Borja. After a passionate night with David in London, Oksana decides on a completely mad course of action: she reveals the entire leadership of the gang to London police and hands over Borja’s laptop. Knowing full well what awaits her, she ultimately takes her own life in despair.

After a moral collapse, Scott Brennan resigns himself to working for the Russians. He grows fond of Grigory but prefers acting independently and continues drinking, causing Moscow constant worry. The new pro-Russian Republican donors entrust him with new media, strategy, information subversion, and eventually even the management of Miguel Vasquez’s London-based behavioural-influence firm. The firm sets up an American branch for Scott’s patrons and hires the world’s best data experts for major campaigns. Vasquez learns they must now work for Russian clients and is horrified. Scott ultimately succeeds in all his tasks with Russian support. The firm proves instrumental in Brexit and in the American presidential election. His star rises unstoppably.

But after the victorious election, he encounters the most formidable adversary he has ever faced – the President’s daughter. This head-on collision costs him everything. Scott Brennan is humiliatingly expelled from the White House and sent to Europe to organise the Russian fifth column within local political parties.

The book ends with a sensory description of the bustling evening atmosphere in Santa Monica and the line:Tourists from all over the world had come to admire a nation that had just been conquered – though they did not yet know it.

In the epilogue, we see cash-strapped Russian oligarchs in British Columbia seeking financial assistance from Chinese billionaires.

Alex Alvarova is Czech-Canadian author and communication expert.A recognized authority in political marketing and public relations, a sought-after seminar leader, facilitator, podcaster and public speaker. In 2017 she wrote The Industry of Lies, a non-fiction work that introduces, outlines and fully supports a core concept: Russia used the 2013 presidential election in the Czech Republic as a trial run to perfect its hybrid-warfare aggression for altering the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential elections. In 2021, she published Feeding The Demons: The conquerors of America, a political thriller on behavioral propaganda. She wrote numerous expert articles on political marketing and algorithmic propaganda.​​ Together with her co-host, expert on social media algorithms, Josef Holy, she hosts a Czech podcast called Canaries In The Net, on algorithmic propaganda and AI.