Imitating Alexander Nix's "I'm a Posh British Man" Pitch in :16 Career-Killing Seconds
“…so, Alexander Nix is with me and he starts in with his, sort of like, razzle dazzle (Imitating Nix:) “We work for the Pentagon, We work for MMD, MI6, ...dah, dah, dah, dah, dah… We are brilliant (unintelligible) and what not. I’m a posh British man. You should trust me with all your money!”
Cut to 4:50 through :5:06 on the video to see him “do Nix" here.
It’s hard to imagine that Christopher Wylie only arrived on the scene a week ago, and in this time, his whistleblowing has had a Pearl Harbor-like effect on Social Media, particularly Facebook, the Trump Administration and Cambridge Analytica’s Alexander Nix, among other interesting characters.
Wylie is an interesting character himself.
Clearly, Mr. Wylie and the media companies that planned the taping of Nix and his cohorts was well-planned, brilliantly executed and has had - for the moment - the desired effect on Nix, who reportedly was the first casualty.
Channel 4’s video of the undercover meetings with Nix were nothing short of brilliant. However, my personal “favourite” (spelled “Britishly”) is this one here from The Guardian. It’s a 1 to 1 between a Guardian reporter and Mr. Wylie on YouTube, among other places.
However, if you only want to see the really funny part, where Wylie does a hysterical :16 second imitation of Nix – who he describes in the early part of the interview as an “upper class Etonian”…cut to 4:50 through :5:06 on the video, where you will see, Wylie, a self-described data scientist imitate Nix and his best “posh British man” pitch.
The 3 Aleksandr/Alexanders
Now we find that there are actually 3 Alexanders, sort of. Alexander Nix, the recently fired CEO, Alexander Taylor, the new CEO and Dr. “Aleksandr” Kogan, the Russian University professor who teaches at Cambridge.
Other Learnings/Questions
1. Wylie calls the whole CA caper a “grossly unethical experiment.”
2. CA set up a fake office in Cambridge, to leverage the image that all the work was being conducted in coordination with academia at the University.
3. What they were doing was creating “cultural weapons”
4. When did the 3 Alexanders initially meet? That’s important. How did Nix find Kogan? Wylie makes it sound that they first connected "after" the Mercer’s made the investment. That sounds improbable to me.
5. Is Christopher Wylie safe in London at this time?
Since then, Wylie has released at least one memo, addressed to Rebecca Mercer and Steve Bannon, from Rudi Giuliani’s law firm no less (Go Mr. Mayor!!), which states that doing anything with a person or a company who is not American is clearly illegal.
Oh, and just yesterday, Wylie posted that “Brexit” which happened in June of 2016 was essentially a dry-run.
There are at least a dozen more observations and questions that this interview raises, which I won’t bore you with, since if you review the interview, they should be self-evident. Though another favourite part for me was that Bannon’s congratulated himself for coming up with the Cambridge Analytica name… which if I am correct, Bannon continues to profess in public, when he’s not distancing himself from the firm.
The main question I have about all this is, “Why now?” This all happened almost 4 years ago, in 2014. Wylie left that firm a few years ago, so what was going on with him that he waited all this time to plan this.
Based on his appearance, Wylie is definitely an outlier. He’s obviously smart, though is not cut from the cloth of Mr. Nix’s Etonian background. So, Nix had to know that Wylie might not be someone he could control, though he hired him anyway.
I hope this week we learn more about Christopher Wylie. Here’s what his Wikipedia says:
Born and raised in Victoria, British Columbia, his parents Dr. Kevin Wylie and Dr. Joan Carruthers were both physicians. At age 6 he was abused by a mentally unstable person, and the school tried to cover it up. In 2000 his father and he won a settlement of 290,000 Canadian dollars against the school district.
As a child he was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD.
He left school at 16 without a qualification, but by 17 was working for the Canadian opposition leader Michael Ignatieff. He taught himself to code at age 19. At 20, he began studying law at the London School of Economics.
In 2013 he was introduced to SCL Elections which would later create Cambridge Analytica.
As the now ex-Director of Research at Cambridge Analytica - the data analytics company which holds some credit in influencing American audiences to vote for Donald Trump - in 2018, Wylie became the whistleblower who gave The Guardian documents that described the secret workings behind Cambridge Analytica.
As we now know, the documents center around Cambridge Analytica's alleged unauthorized possession of personal private data from approximately 50 million Facebook user accounts obtained for the purpose of creating targeted political campaigns for the 2016 US presidential elections. These campaigns were based on psychological and personality profiles mined from the Facebook data.
In March 2018, or beginning just last week, Wylie has delivered revelations that have triggered government investigations on both sides of the Atlantic and pushed long-simmering privacy concerns. Hmmm…ya think?
Wonder what the Clubs at Cambridge University and Eton are thinking today.