Exclusive: Russian Propaganda Traced Back to Staten Island, New York 

Moscow may have paid for the memes, but a man in a quiet Staten Island neighborhood hosted them. It’s further evidence of how deep into America the Russian campaign extended.

KATIE ZAVADSKI BEN COLLINS KEVIN POULSEN and SPENCER ACKERMAN at The Daily Beast

Russia’s propaganda campaign targeting Americans was hosted, at least in part, on American soil.

A company owned by a man on Staten Island, New York, provided internet infrastructure services to DoNotShoot.Us, a Kremlin propaganda site that pretended to be a voice for victims of police shootings, a Daily Beast investigation has found.

Every website needs to be “hosted”—given an Internet Protocol address and space on a physical computer—in order to be publicly viewed. DoNotShoot.Us is a website run out of the Kremlin-backed “Russian troll farm,” according to two sources familiar with the website, both of whom independently identified it to The Daily Beast as a Russian propaganda account. It was hosted on a server with the IP address 107.181.161.172.

That IP address was owned by Greenfloid LLC, a company registered to New Yorker Sergey Kashyrin and two others. Other Russian propaganda sites, like BlackMattersUs.com, were also hosted on servers with IP addresses owned by Greenfloid. The company’s ties to Russian propaganda sites were first reported by ThinkProgress.

The web services company owns under 250 IP addresses, some of which resolve to Russian propaganda sites and other fake news operations. Others are sites that could not be hosted at other providers, like “xxxrape.net.” There’s also a Russian trinket site called “soviet-power.com.” (The IP address that pointed to DoNotShoot.Us now resolves to a botnet and phishing operation, and is currently owned by Total Server Solutions LLC.)

The use of a tiny, no-questions-asked hosting company run by a man living in New York shows the Kremlin-backed troll farm’s brazen use of Americans and American companies to conduct its disinformation campaign.

Over the past two months, Russia’s efforts to integrate Americans and U.S. communities into its vast propaganda campaigns has become clearer, as social media companies began shuttering accounts originating from Russia’s Internet Research Agency, or troll farm.

In September, The Daily Beast discovered that one of the troll accounts, “Being Patriotic,” organized 17 in-person rallies for Donald Trump on one day in Florida alone. Last week, BuzzFeed reported that unwitting Americans were used to amplify Russian social media accounts pretending to be a Black Lives Matter offshoot.

Now, it appears Russia’s influence campaign attempted to host that campaign within the United States.

DoNotShoot.Us purported to be a collection of stories about “outrageous police misconducts [sic], really valuable ones, but underrepresented by mass media” in an effort to to “improve the situation in the U.S.”

The site served as a de facto database of shootings by police across the U.S, with each entry accompanied by anti-police invective. (An entry for the assault of a man named Ross Flynn lists the “reported reason” for the incident as “resisting and evading arrest”—and the “real reason” as “cops don’t treat detained people as humans.”)

The site also features a list of petitions (No. 2 on the most popular list: “Stop Police Violence Against Pit Bulls, Justice For Mr. Brown”) and an archive of graphic videos that have since been pulled from the web.

Greenfloid also hosted BlackMattersUs.com and other sites designed to impersonate African-American activists that have been identified as Russian troll accounts by independent Russian news agency RBC. BlackMattersUs.com claimed it was a “nonprofit news outlet” for the “African-American community in America,” but often used its page to smear Hillary Clinton and push Kremlin talking points.

While hosted in America, content for the sites was generated by paid staffers in St. Petersburg.

Former FBI agent Clint Watts, an expert on Russia’s propaganda campaign, said the Kremlin’s use of an American host is true to form.

“All of these placements are designed to create anonymity around the source and make it look authentic—like there’s real, grassroots support around the world for these interests,” Watts told The Daily Beast.

“You don’t want these to trace back to Russia, so you pick a believable community closest to your target. It’s not necessarily that they’re directed Russian agents, but they can go through Russian communities—witting or unwitting—outside of Russia.”

Quiet Neighborhood, Nasty Material

Sergey Kashyrin now lives in a quiet Staten Island neighborhood of bungalows, semi-detached homes, and cracked sidewalks just a few blocks from Midland beach. It is still reeling from the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. When a reporter visited Monday morning, Kashyrin’s street was blocked off by road work signs and mud-caked tire tracks traced the roads. On nearly every block, construction crews were still at work repairing boarded up homes amid tall marsh grasses towering in overgrown yards.

In business filings, Kashyrin and the two other registrants of Greenfloid LLC all gave their address as a well-kept beige semi-detached house in the middle of a quiet block. It has a lush and green backyard, with a greenhouse and coop, and tall plants that peek out of the front-facing windows. The house, if not the block, seems to have avoided much of the devastation; across the street are wild lots where other homes once stood. Kashyrin wasn’t home, and a woman suggested a reporter call him.

Reached by phone, Kashyrin gave a string of answers, many of them contradictory. He initially said he didn’t want to talk about Greenfield LLC. Then he said he was available to talk, and said that Greenfloid is part of the fight against Russian propaganda—never mind the fact that his company hosted it.

Kashyrin next pivoted to say his service didn’t consciously provide hosting to the Russian trolls—despite evidence to the contrary—but instead unknowingly rented them virtual servers that they used to funnel traffic to a different hosting company in Russia. He declined to name the company. “We were not hosting those websites. The guys bought virtual servers, and they put the proxy,” Kashyrin said. “It just redirected to the original site in Russia.”

Such an arrangement would have the same effect as hosting, while slowing the troll websites and consuming needless bandwidth. But it’s conceivable the Russians used such a scheme to make it easier to quickly relocate the sites without having to copy their contents. It’s largely a distinction without a difference—Kashyrin’s firm was still serving the Russian propaganda through its servers and internet, even if the images and text were ultimately held in Russia as Kashyrin claims.

When asked why the company hosts so many fake news sites, often angled toward Russian interests, Kashyrin said that there are likely simply many customers “from there who are doing that.”

‘It’s Funny, Having Russian Propaganda’

One thing that’s clear, however: Greenfloid is more than just a stand-alone firm. Greenfloid is listed on the site of its Kharkiv, Ukraine-based parent company ITL as its North American division, and a number listed for Greenfloid dials into a Russian-language menu for ITL.

This isn’t the first time ITL has been called out over allegations its servers were used to host sites run by the Russian troll factory. It also hosted the website Whoiswhos.me, which revealed the identities and personal information of Russian opposition bloggers.

A number of Russian bloggers and activists had their names, photos, and personal information revealed on WhoisWhos. At least seven of them were physically assaulted, and some had their cars burned, the Russian news site Fontanka said in June 2016.

ITL was alerted and the site was taken offline, Fontanka reported. (Kashyrin said it was around the same time that Greenfloid banned proxies, disassociating itself from the two Russian sites. He declined to provide a link to the proxy ban policy because “it’s too late today.”) ITL also took down a separate news site, registered at the same time as WhoisWhos, that reported on the Russian-backed war in Ukraine from a pro-Russian perspective. Fontanka said its investigation strongly suggested the sites were linked to the Russian troll factory because of the similarities, in style and content, to sites run by the group.

Russian hackers are also apparently happy with ITL’s service. On one popular Russian crime forum, a user wrote that ITL’s support team “does not ask anything,” and that users can pay in anonymous Bitcoin currency.

All the companies link back to Dmitry Deineka, a Ukrainian national who lives in the country’s second-largest city, Kharkiv.

“I’m sorry, but we don’t give out information about our clients, that violates the NDA and company rules,” Deineka wrote to The Daily Beast by email. He denied that a “Russian troll factory” was among their clients.T crowd, dislike Putin and would not support his agenda.

“We never support Russian propaganda, because the headquarters of our company is in Ukraine,” he added.

But the explanation is hardly iron-clad. Residents of Kharkiv are predominantly Russian-speaking, and the city has been symbolically important to the Russian-backed separatist movement.

So Kashyrin pivoted again.

“It’s fun[ny], having Russian propaganda using Ukrainian company,” Kashyrin said, despite his claim moments earlier that he would never host Moscow’s agitprop. “It might be the reason these guys choose our company as the provider.”

ITL, an acronym that has different meanings including Integrated Technology Laboratory, is also registered as an LLC in Las Vegas, Nevada.

In emails to The Daily Beast, Deineka compared his company’s services to those of Amazon, “only much smaller,” and said he couldn’t confirm whether it was used to host BlackMattersUS or DoNotShoot.Us even if he wanted to.

Deineka reiterated that he does not have the troll factory or its aliases listed among his clients. “If that name was in a client’s profile, we would have immediately denied him services,” Deineka said.

“Let me try to explain the technical question,” Deineka wrote. “We are not hosting providers who put sites up. We provide VDS (virtual dedicated server) services and can’t check, without interrupting our client’s server operations, what the user does.

“The user can host sites, can use the VDS as a proxy-server, and so on,” Deineka added. “We’re like Amazon WS (Web Services), only significantly smaller. We rent servers, we don’t host sites.”

Amazon Web Services does, in fact, allow customers to host websites, and ITL’s website says it offers “convenient and fast hosting for sites.”

‘Now I’ve Got My Face Plastered on the Site!’

BlackMattersUs.com, which was hosted by Greenfloid, was revealed to be a Russian troll site earlier this month by the independent Russian news organization RBC. It sometimes posted content supplied by social media followers like Porsche Kelly, a poet who emailed them her poem after following BlackMattersUS on Instagram.

She was surprised when told by a reporter last week that the site was operated by Russian trolls. An editor had promptly responded to her email, saying the site was always happy to share “thoughtful and powerful messages.”

“And now I’ve got my face plastered on the site!” Kelly said.

Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter have suspended social media pages related to the site.

But Greenfloid’s business continues. The most popular sites hosted by the companies are two MP3 downloading destinations and Bible.ru, which is a link to annotated bibles in Russian.

—with additional reporting by Joseph Cox

President George W. Bush 10/19/2017 At New York

George W. Bush — a former president whose verbal gaffes have, for many, been more memorable than his presidential addresses — delivered a speech Thursday that's unlikely to be forgotten. The remarks, given at a New York forum Thursday, will almost certainly be most remembered for how unusual the speech and the circumstances surrounding it were: A former president, one who has remained largely silent since his departure, offering a speech implicitly rebuking a sitting president from his own party,

Washington Post 10/20/2017

Thank you all. Thank you. Okay, Padilla gracias. So, I painted Ramon. I wish you were still standing here. It’s a face only a mother could love – no, it’s a fabulous face. (Laughter.) I love you Ramon, thank you very much for being here.

And, Grace Jo thank you for your testimony. And, big Tim. I got to know Tim as a result of Presidential Leadership Scholars at the Bush Center along with the Clinton Foundation, with help from 41 and LBJ’s libraries.

I am thrilled that friends of ours from Afghanistan, China, North Korea, and Venezuela are here as well. These are people who have experienced the absence of freedom and they know what it’s like and they know there is a better alternative to tyranny.

Laura and I are thrilled that the Bush Center supporters are here. Bernie [Tom Bernstein], I want to thank you and your committee. I call him Bernie. (Laughter.)

It’s amazing to have Secretary Albright share the stage with Condi and Ambassador Haley. For those of you that kind of take things for granted, that’s a big deal. (Laughter and Applause.) Thank you.

We are gathered in the cause of liberty this is a unique moment. The great democracies face new and serious threats – yet seem to be losing confidence in their own calling and competence. Economic, political and national security challenges proliferate, and they are made worse by the tendency to turn inward. The health of the democratic spirit itself is at issue. And the renewal of that spirit is the urgent task at hand.

Since World War II, America has encouraged and benefited from the global advance of free markets, from the strength of democratic alliances, and from the advance of free societies. At one level, this has been a raw calculation of interest. The 20th century featured some of the worst horrors of history because dictators committed them. Free nations are less likely to threaten and fight each other. 

And free trade helped make America into a global economic power.

For more than 70 years, the presidents of both parties believed that American security and prosperity were directly tied to the success of freedom in the world. And they knew that the success depended, in large part, on U.S. leadership. This mission came naturally, because it expressed the DNA of American idealism.

We know, deep down, that repression is not the wave of the future. We know that the desire for freedom is not confined to, or owned by, any culture; it is the inborn hope of our humanity. We know that free governments are the only way to ensure that the strong are just and the weak are valued. And we know that when we lose sight of our ideals, it is not democracy that has failed. It is the failure of those charged with preserving and protecting democracy.

This is not to underestimate the historical obstacles to the development of democratic institutions and a democratic culture. Such problems nearly destroyed our country – and that should encourage a spirit of humility and a patience with others. Freedom is not merely a political menu option, or a foreign policy fad; it should be the defining commitment of our country, and the hope of the world.

That appeal is proved not just by the content of people’s hopes, but a noteworthy hypocrisy: No democracy pretends to be a tyranny. Most tyrannies pretend they are democracies. Democracy remains the definition of political legitimacy. That has not changed, and that will not change.

Yet for years, challenges have been gathering to the principles we hold dear. And, we must take them seriously. Some of these problems are external and obvious. Here in New York City, you know the threat of terrorism all too well. It is being fought even now on distant frontiers and in the hidden world of intelligence and surveillance. There is the frightening, evolving threat of nuclear proliferation and outlaw regimes. And there is an aggressive challenge by Russia and China to the norms and rules of the global order – proposed revisions that always seem to involve less respect for the rights of free nations and less freedom for the individual.

These matters would be difficult under any circumstances. They are further complicated by a trend in western countries away from global engagement and democratic confidence. Parts of Europe have developed an identity crisis. We have seen insolvency, economic stagnation, youth unemployment, anger about immigration, resurgent ethno-nationalism, and deep questions about the meaning and durability of the European Union.

America is not immune from these trends. In recent decades, public confidence in our institutions has declined. Our governing class has often been paralyzed in the face of obvious and pressing needs. The American dream of upward mobility seems out of reach for some who feel left behind in a changing economy. Discontent deepened and sharpened partisan conflicts. Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication.

There are some signs that the intensity of support for democracy itself has waned, especially among the young, who never experienced the galvanizing moral clarity of the Cold War, or never focused on the ruin of entire nations by socialist central planning. Some have called this “democratic deconsolidation.” Really, it seems to be a combination of weariness, frayed tempers, and forgetfulness.

We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates into dehumanization. Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions – forgetting the image of God we should see in each other.

We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism – forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America. We see a fading confidence in the value of free markets and international trade – forgetting that conflict, instability, and poverty follow in the wake of protectionism.

We have seen the return of isolationist sentiments – forgetting that American security is directly threatened by the chaos and despair of distant places, where threats such as terrorism, infectious disease, criminal gangs and drug trafficking tend to emerge.

In all these ways, we need to recall and recover our own identity. Americans have a great advantage: To renew our country, we only need to remember our values.

This is part of the reason we meet here today. How do we begin to encourage a new, 21st century American consensus on behalf of democratic freedom and free markets? That’s the question I posed to scholars at the Bush Institute. That is what Pete Wehner and Tom Melia, who are with us today, have answered with “The Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In The World,” a Call to Action paper.

The recommendations come in broad categories. Here they are: First, America must harden its own defenses. Our country must show resolve and resilience in the face of external attacks on our democracy. And that begins with confronting a new era of cyber threats.

America is experiencing the sustained attempt by a hostile power to feed and exploit our country’s divisions. According to our intelligence services, the Russian government has made a project of turning Americans against each other. This effort is broad, systematic and stealthy, it’s conducted across a range of social media platforms. Ultimately, this assault won’t succeed. But foreign aggression's – including cyber-attacks, disinformation and financial influence – should not be downplayed or tolerated. This is a clear case where the strength of our democracy begins at home. We must secure our electoral infrastructure and protect our electoral system from subversion.

The second category of recommendations concerns the projection of American leadership – maintaining America’s role in sustaining and defending an international order rooted in freedom and free markets.

Our security and prosperity are only found in wise, sustained, global engagement: In the cultivation of new markets for American goods. In the confrontation of security challenges before they fully materialize and arrive on our shores. In the fostering of global health and development as alternatives to suffering and resentment. In the attraction of talent, energy and enterprise from all over the world. In serving as a shining hope for refugees and a voice for dissidents, human rights defenders, and the oppressed.

We should not be blind to the economic and social dislocations caused by globalization. People are hurting. They are angry. And, they are frustrated. We must hear them and help them. But we can’t wish globalization away, any more than we could wish away the agricultural revolution or the industrial revolution. One strength of free societies is their ability to adapt to economic and social disruptions. 

And that should be our goal: to prepare American workers for new opportunities, to care in practical, empowering ways for those who may feel left behind. The first step should be to enact policies that encourage robust economic growth by unlocking the potential of the private sector, and for unleashing the creativity and compassion of this country.

A third focus of this document is strengthening democratic citizenship. And here we must put particular emphasis on the values and views of the young.

Our identity as a nation – unlike many other nations – is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood. Being an American involves the embrace of high ideals and civic responsibility. We become the heirs of Thomas Jefferson by accepting the ideal of human dignity found in the Declaration of Independence. We become the heirs of James Madison by understanding the genius and values of the U.S. Constitution. We become the heirs of Martin Luther King, Jr., by recognizing one another not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

This means that people of every race, religion, and ethnicity can be fully and equally American. It means that bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed. (Applause.)

And it means that the very identity of our nation depends on the passing of civic ideals to the next generation.

We need a renewed emphasis on civic learning in schools. And our young people need positive role models. Bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone, provides permission for cruelty and bigotry, and compromises the moral education of children. The only way to pass along civic values is to first live up to them.

Finally, the Call to Action calls on the major institutions of our democracy, public and private, to consciously and urgently attend to the problem of declining trust.

For example, our democracy needs a media that is transparent, accurate and fair. Our democracy needs religious institutions that demonstrate integrity and champion civil discourse. Our democracy needs institutions of higher learning that are examples of truth and free expression.

In short, it is time for American institutions to step up and provide cultural and moral leadership for this nation.

Ten years ago, I attended a Conference on Democracy and Security in Prague. The goal was to put human rights and human freedom at the center of our relationships with repressive governments. The Prague Charter, signed by champions of liberty Vaclav Havel, Natan Sharansky, Jose Maria Aznar, called for the isolation and ostracism of regimes that suppress peaceful opponents by threats or violence.

Little did we know that, a decade later, a crisis of confidence would be developing within the core democracies, making the message of freedom more inhibited and wavering. Little did we know that repressive governments would be undertaking a major effort to encourage division in western societies and to undermine the legitimacy of elections.

Repressive rivals, along with skeptics here at home, misunderstand something important. It is the great advantage of free societies that we creatively adapt to challenges, without the direction of some central authority. Self-correction is the secret strength of freedom. We are a nation with a history of resilience and a genius for renewal.

Right now, one of our worst national problems is a deficit of confidence. But the cause of freedom justifies all our faith and effort. It still inspires men and women in the darkest corners of the world, and it will inspire a rising generation. The American spirit does not say, “We shall manage,” or “We shall make the best of it.” It says, “We shall overcome.” And that is exactly what we will do, with the help of God and one another.

Thank you. 

Sean Hannity

The making of Sean Hannity:

 How a Long Island kid learned to channel red-state rage

By Marc Fisher Washington Post

Before stardom on Fox News, Hannity found controversy on college radio

Fox News host Sean Hannity has cultivated a strong conservative following from his early days in talk radio, building an image of a blue-collar, working class guy. 

The president and his favorite prime-time pundit are both New Yorkers of significant means who talk like they grew up in the tough part of town. One drenches his well-done steaks in ketchup and the other favors Coors on ice. Both have long traveled by private jet, yet both feel somehow spurned by the elites.

Donald Trump and Sean Hannity champion the little guy, the forgotten men and women, the audience that has cheered Hannity on as he emerged in the past nine months as perhaps the most dependable pro-Trump voice in the mainstream media, as well as a friend and adviser to the president.

In the process, Fox News’s top-rated host has regained ratings supremacy, pushed back against an organized boycott of his advertisers and quieted rumors of his impending departure from the network.

Hannity, long a movement conservative, nonetheless embraced Trump, who is largely allergic to ideology. Like the president, who has been a Republican, a Democrat and an independent through the years, Hannity isn’t necessarily what he appears to be.

He denies being a journalist, but has said, “I think a lot of the reporting we do is better than the mainstream media.” He covets being in a position of authority, leading a movement, yet he repeatedly embraces story lines that prove to be inaccurate. He’s not a politician, but he takes positions, which have, as he puts it, a way of “evolving.” He was, for example, against amnesty for illegal immigrants, and then he was for creating “a pathway to citizenship,” and then he was against that idea.

What Hannity has stood for — at least for the past couple of years — is Trump. Rival TV host Joe Scarborough calls him Trump’s lap dog. Hannity, a still-rambunctious 55, insists he’s not; he’s pushed back against the president on tax reform and health care, for example.

But the president instinctively understands that his people are Hannity’s people and vice versa. At an August rally, when Trump bashed the media as “the source of division” in the nation, he made a single exception: “How good is Hannity?” he said to rising cheers. “How good is Hannity? And he’s a great guy and an honest guy.”

When the president was still opening casinos in Atlantic City, Hannity was systematically building a following, identifying the issues that could stir up listeners (homosexuality, he declared in his first radio gig, is “disgusting”) and portraying himself as a brash truth-teller whose plain talk was too blunt for the entrenched and the powerful.

April 1989: The voice on the answering machine at the Santa Barbara chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union had a distinctive New York sound. The young man seeking help had just been thrown off his show on the radio station at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He was being discriminated against because he’s a conservative, the voice said. Could the ACLU help Sean Hannity get his show back?

Stewart Holden, a local lawyer who volunteered for the ACLU, was intrigued. He asked his local board to take the case, even if Hannity’s show, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” had already achieved some notoriety. People had heard about the rookie host’s inflammatory style, how he railed against “liberal fascists” and hung up on callers he didn’t like.

Every Tuesday at 9 a.m., Hannity, then 27, spent an hour figuring out how to build an audience, how to connect with the bedrock conservative Americans he knew were out there, even in a solidly liberal college town like Santa Barbara.

“It’s my hope to make radio a career at some point,” Hannity wrote in his application for a no-pay position at KCSB in 1989. He wrote that he had “developed a lot of discipline and good-working habits.”

Hannity had come to Santa Barbara in part because his sister lived there. He supported himself as a house painter, wallpaper hanger and contractor, all the time listening to talk radio. He told people that he was “a serious intellectual” who was studying political science. In fact, Hannity attended three colleges — Adelphi, New York University and UC-Santa Barbara — but never graduated.

In his first months on the air, Hannity developed themes that would sustain him for decades — blasting the news media, lending credence to fringy theories, speaking up for the little guys who felt overrun by the elites. “America’s lost its virtue,” he said.

That April, Hannity shared his theories about AIDS, as a tape of the show reveals: “What is the cover up all about that the media is hiding from the general public? Contrary to what we hear in the general media, you can get AIDS from saliva, from tears. . . . They won’t let you say it’s a gay disease.”

More listeners called to complain about Hannity than about all of KCSB’s other shows combined, according to former managers. But the calls really spiked after Hannity’s show about AIDS. He said he wouldn’t want a gay teacher telling his child that homosexuality “is an alternative lifestyle.” He egged on a guest who claimed that AIDS was spreading among gay men because they consumed each other’s feces.

Jody May-Chang, who also had a show, “Gay and Lesbian Perspectives,” on KCSB, heard Hannity’s AIDS episode and felt compelled to call.

“I have a son, okay?” she said on the show. “I just gave birth to him about eight weeks ago and I certainly hope he doesn’t grow up to be like you.”

“Artificial insemination,” Hannity replied. “Aren’t you married to a woman, by the way?”

When May-Chang confirmed that she was, Hannity and his guest, Gene Antonio, an anti-gay activist, bantered about how her son came to be.

“Turkey baster babies,” Antonio said.

“Yeah, isn’t that beautiful?” Hannity said. “I feel sorry for your child.”

 Santa Barbara Independent article from June 22, 1989 on Sean Hannity being kicked off the air at KCSB. (Santa Barbara Independent )

Later in the hour, Hannity added that “anyone listening to this show that believes homosexuality is just a normal lifestyle has been brainwashed. . . . These disgusting people.”

May-Chang asked the station to silence Hannity. “For me, the goal was ‘Get this guy off the air, he’s fomenting hatred,’ ” she said. “In retrospect, the higher thing was the First Amendment, but at the time, what he was saying was just abhorrent.”

The station’s student manager told Hannity he was being taken off the air. The young host did not take the news well. “He was extremely upset,” recalled the manager, who declined to have his name published. “I thought he was going to hit me.”

Even though some of its leaders found Hannity’s message reprehensible, the ACLU took his case and informed the university it would sue, alleging discrimination against Hannity’s conservative views. Hannity was called before a university board that governed the station.

“The station did not like my opinions,” Hannity argued, according to a transcript of the board hearing. “I stood for conservative, traditional, loving family values.”

Under pressure from the ACLU, the university counsel “just wanted us to do whatever Sean wanted,” said Elizabeth Robinson, the KCSB manager. “They didn’t want to be on the wrong side of a First Amendment case.” The board concluded that Hannity had been improperly removed and offered to put him back on the air. But Hannity demanded a public apology and double his old airtime. The station stuck with its initial offer, which Hannity rejected.

“We were gleeful,” May-Chang said. “We thought that was the end of him.”

Finished with Santa Barbara, Hannity put an ad in the trade magazine Radio & Records, promoting himself as “the most talked-about college radio host in America.”

From then on, Hannity, who declined to be interviewed for this article, would portray the KCSB chapter as a symbol of liberal intolerance. The ACLU’s role was written out of the story, unmentioned in his own account.

Years later, Hannity accused his liberal foil on their Fox News show, Alan Colmes, of being “a card-carrying member of the ACLU.” Colmes said he was proud to be a member, “because they defend all free speech.”

“No, they don’t, actually,” Hannity replied.

Robinson lost track of Hannity. Seven years later, when she saw him for the first time on Fox News, she said she saw “nothing surprising. The older we get, the more we become who we were.”

In 1990, Bill Dunnavent was trying to bring a relatively new concept to northern Alabama — highly opinionated political talk radio. Three years earlier, the Federal Communications Commission had repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which for nearly four decades had required broadcasters to provide equal time to people who disagreed with views expressed on the air. The rules kept political talk on the airwaves within civil bounds, some people said. Others said it unfairly limited debate, keeping it dull and centrist.

Dunnavent advertised for show hosts, got more than 50 tapes from eager young talkers, and narrowed the field to two candidates. One had a distinctive New York accent, a Joe Six pack affect, and a collection of headlines from California that proved he could win attention.

“I hired Sean because he had enough guts to stand up for his convictions and because he sounded different from everybody else in our area,” said Dunnavent, who put Hannity on WVNN in the afternoons and paid him $19,000 a year.

The station owner told his new hire he had only two rules: “We don’t talk about religion, and we don’t talk about abortion.”

One day soon after Hannity had started work in Huntsville, Dunnavent flipped on his car radio to hear the kid interviewing a madam from the Mustang Ranch brothel in Nevada.

“I found a pay phone and told him, ‘Don’t ever do that again!’ ” the owner recalled. “He was doing what he does, pushing the envelope. Sean understood that the job is to say something that evokes someone’s emotions.”

Hannity started out “very raw,” Dunnavent said, but improved dramatically over a couple of years, becoming the area’s top-rated host. His official station biography said that he “made a proud name for himself by insulting lesbians.” (“Over the years, I have evolved into more of a libertarian when it comes to people’s personal lives,” Hannity said in 2013.)

Hannity met his future wife, Jill Rhodes, in Huntsville, where she was a newspaper columnist. At a prenuptial meeting, Hannity lit into their minister, arguing that the church had become too liberal. The pastor suggested that Jill was “crazy to be marrying this guy” and she left the session in tears, Hannity later said.

In 1992, a salesman who’d been driving through northern Alabama called up Eric Seidel, the station manager at WGST in Atlanta, and told him about a great guy on the radio in Huntsville.

Seidel happened to have a cassette Hannity had sent him. The manager popped it into his tape deck and heard an eager talent with strong conservative views and a knack for landing big-name guests, including the voluble local congressman, Newt Gingrich. Seidel hired the kid just as right-wing radio voices were becoming an alternative to traditional news media, a battalion arrayed against Bill Clinton, his wife, and their liberal, multicultural vision.

Hannity’s show had a lot of rough edges at first. He would get angry at callers and hang up on them. His righteousness, blue-collar Long Island diction, and plain-spoken rhetoric struck his Georgia audience as refreshingly authentic, Seidel said: “Sean’s not somebody who’s going to make you laugh a lot. He’s not like Rush. There was a blue-collar nature to his family.”

Hannity was also extremely competitive. In Atlanta, he’d listen to promos for his main competitor, Neal Boortz at WSB, and counter program his own show. When Boortz booked Robert Shapiro, O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, for a 10 a.m. interview, Hannity called the lawyer’s PR rep and begged for a 9 a.m. slot with Shapiro. He not only beat the competition by an hour, but Hannity kept extending the interview, making Shapiro late to the Boortz show.

Boortz and Hannity competed for the same audience — conservative men — but their approaches were radically different. “I would tell Sean, ‘I am here to attract a large audience so the station can play commercials for them,’ ” Boortz said. “Sean is truly, truly there to save the country. . . . His whole appeal is two words: Earnest and honest. I have never heard Sean say anything off the air that was different from what he’s said on air.”

Few listeners feel a connection to the personal lives of Rush Limbaugh, with his stories about his Palm Beach, Fla. estate and private jets, or Glenn Beck, with his armored cars and guard dogs. But when Hannity talks about his martial arts practice or his beer drinking or his afternoons spent hauling his kids to sports practice, he makes a regular-guy connection that sticks.

“He’s easy to listen to,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog group that has tracked Hannity for decades. “There aren’t a lot of complicated narratives like Beck or Limbaugh. He doesn’t claim to be the expert on anything. He’s just kind of a guy.”

Hannity proudly says he never backs away from a battle, but he leavens his aggressive side with the occasional you-got-me shrug. In September, Hannity asked a guest, a radio psychologist, to diagnose Hillary Clinton’s mental health.

“You can’t do that,” interrupted another guest. “You don’t like it when people say Trump is insane.”

“Okay,” Hannity said — flashing his impish smile — and dropped the topic.

Though he’s fixed in the public mind as a TV talker, Hannity is the nation’s second-highest-rated radio host, behind only Limbaugh. He’s No. 1 in the key 25-54 audience among cable news shows. He makes $36 million a year, according to Forbes, which ranked him No. 77 among the world’s top-paid celebrities. (Two other radio hosts, Howard Stern and Limbaugh, made the top 100, both way above Hannity’s pay grade.)

But like the president, Hannity retains enough blue-collar cred to position himself as a scrappy fighter for the regular guy. “My overpaid friends in the media, well, they have their chauffeur-driven limousines, they like their fine steakhouses and expensive-wine lifestyles,” he told viewers last fall. “The people you’re watching on TV” do not feel your pain. “And therein lies the contempt.”

Hannity grew up on Long Island, son of a probation officer and a homemaker. Something of a troublemaker as a kid, he and his pals would go “skitching,” grabbing onto the bumpers of passing cars to hitch a ride.

He was a news junkie, delivering the New York Daily News and Long Island Press, listening deep into the night to the pioneers of raucous talk radio. His heroes were rabble-rousers such as Bob Grant, famous for shouting “Get off my phone!” and dumping callers who annoyed him. As a teenager, Hannity would call in to the shows, testing his conservative arguments.

Gingrich, who got to know Hannity in 1990 and has remained a frequent guest, said the connection Hannity forged with Trump “is the New York thing. They talk the same language. I can’t possibly interact with the president in that same way that Sean can.”

Hannity’s big move up came courtesy of a fellow talk-radio fan, Roger Ailes, who created Fox News for owner Rupert Murdoch in 1996 and essentially translated conservative radio to a TV format. Ailes hired Hannity to host a debate show that the new network initially referred to internally as “Hannity and LTBD” — “liberal to be determined.” That turned out to be Alan Colmes, who shared the 9 p.m. hour with Hannity until 2009, when Hannity went solo.

Hannity has done one hour of TV and three of radio every day for 21 years. Through the George W. Bush years, he loyally supported the president’s policies. Then, during the Obama presidency, Hannity’s tone shifted. He leaned more heavily on stories he believed were being given short shrift by the “liberal media” — stories about where Obama was born, and who deserved blame for the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya.

It wasn’t winning over a new audience. By 2013, Hannity’s audience was shrinking; it was the year after a presidential election, when cable news numbers typically droop, but Fox News, still under Ailes’s iron leadership, was talking about changing the channel’s approach.

“We are beginning to dramatically change the way news is presented to the public,” Ailes wrote in a memo announcing that Hannity would move from 9 p.m., the heart of prime time, to 10 p.m., losing the cherished time slot to Megyn Kelly, who, Fox hoped, might lure a younger audience. Kelly’s numbers soared. Hannity’s fell by a quarter between 2009 and 2014.

Four years later, Kelly is gone, moved to NBC; Ailes is dead, having spent his final months denying sexual harassment allegations, which also felled former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. Hannity is the only remaining original prime-time talk show host from Fox’s launch.

Last month, he returned to his 9 p.m. home, making way for Laura Ingraham to take over the 10 p.m. slot. His numbers are back, and a drive last spring to get his advertisers to dump him seems now to have been a bump in the road.

Hannity’s comeback coincided with his early, eager embrace of his fellow New Yorker. As early as the fall of 2015, Hannity wore a Trump-brand necktie to interview the upstart candidate at the CPAC convention in Maryland. As some conservative talk hosts pronounced themselves Never Trumpers or came to his side late and halfheartedly, Hannity went all in.

Hannity had come to see conservatives as not just a political movement, but a cultural tribe. In 2008, he launched Hannidate, an online dating service “where people of like conservative minds can come together to meet.” It didn’t last long, but Hannity’s sense of his audience as vanguard of a crusade to restore a fading culture only strengthened. Hannity made his name as a movement conservative, but he was loyal to the first rule of talk shows: As radio host Mark Levin put it, “In this business, you don’t get out ahead of your audience.”

When Hannity “hitched his wagon to Trump,” Carusone said, “he got access and access brought ratings.” Trump insiders used Hannity’s show as their safe space. When things got hot, Donald Trump Jr., Sebastian Gorka and the candidate himself went on Hannity.

Trump attacked the Gold Star father, and Hannity stood by him. Trump went after a federal judge of Mexican descent, and Hannity backed him. Even after the “Access Hollywood” tape emerged of Trump boasting about grabbing women, Hannity defended his guy: “King David had 500 concubines, for crying out loud.”

After the inauguration, the first interview the new president gave to a cable news channel went to Hannity.

Hannity’s “advocacy journalism” sometimes entails passing along stories that never quite check out. He used his TV show last year to promote the false rumor that Hillary Clinton was hiding a severe health crisis. He let Trump push the baseless idea that Ted Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the John F. Kennedy assassination. “I saw that somewhere on the Internet,” Hannity said.

After the election, Hannity doubled down on his loyalty. He defended the administration’s false contention that Trump’s inauguration crowd was the biggest ever.

And Hannity spent many hours hawking a discredited theory whereby a murdered Democratic National Committee employee, Seth Rich, was said to have been killed by Democratic operatives because he supposedly had leaked emails that were embarrassing to Hillary Clinton. Fox News retracted its report that had lent credence to the theory, and police affirmed that the scenario had no validity; the murder was the result of a robbery gone bad.

Through much of the spring, Hannity kept at the story, backing off only after Media Matters urged his advertisers to pull their ads. Several did, though one, USAA insurance, returned to his show because “we heard from our members, and . . . the lines between news and commentary are increasingly blurred,” a company statement said.

In late May, Hannity, facing pressure from Rich’s parents, dropped the story. “Out of respect for the family’s wishes for now, I am not discussing this matter at this time,” Hannity said on TV. Fox News and Hannity declined to comment on the Rich coverage.

The Rich debacle led some people who know Hannity to believe that his time at Fox was nearing an end, that the next generation of the Murdoch family was looking to tone down the sensationalism. But Hannity has told friends he would never cave to those who want to take him down.

“I’ve told you for years what’s going on here,” Hannity said on the radio in May. “I’ve told you that every single conservative host on radio that you like and you listen to is being recorded every second of every day by these losers in their bathrobes or in their underwear . . . being paid to do it in the hope that we conservatives say one word, one sentence, one phrase that they don’t like and that they can then use to attack our advertisers in the hopes that our advertisers will bail out, the show becomes financially unfeasible and that the host gets fired.

“This is a kill shot. . . . This is to silence me.”

When Ted Koppel interviewed him in March, Hannity asked the CBS newsman, “You think I’m bad for America?”

“Yeah,” Koppel replied, “because you have attracted people who are determined that ideology is more important than facts.”

Like Hannity, Chip Franklin, a radio host at KGO in San Francisco, started out in the business as a conservative, but Franklin switched sides and now runs a liberal show. “I know Hannity knows that Koppel was right,” Franklin said.

“I’ve seen what happens to people like Hannity because I was seduced in the ’80s and ’90s when I was yelling about what Clinton did to Monica Lewinsky and things like that. I know Hannity knew that Obama was born in the United States. I know Hannity has the same facts we all do about the crowd size at the inauguration or the Russian connection. I know that because I knew him in New York and he was always a conservative, but not like this.

“And then he got in this boat and didn’t realize how strong the current was, and he couldn’t get off. Because people adore him now. Nobody around him wants him to change. So he doubles down. He can’t go against his audience because he’ll lose millions of dollars.”

“Donald Trump and Sean Hannity are both disruptive of the status quo,” said Kellyanne Conway, counsel to the president and an architect of the administration’s communications approach. “Disruptive project a strength and moxie that fascinates some people and causes envy in others.”

Trump watches and values Hannity’s show, she said: “Hannity’s monologues have caught our attention. There’s a deeper, investigative component, and in this predictably vanilla and mediocre media environment, somebody like Hannity can break through with a steady stream of undercovered stories.”

The administration uses Hannity’s show because that’s where Trump’s base is. “Sean gets programming and the president gets a platform for his message,” said a senior White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity to be candid. “But between the two men, it’s not a transactional relationship. They’re genuinely friends.”

Last spring, Fox News’s Howard Kurtz asked Hannity if there was “anything so far in the Trump presidency that’s disappointed you?”

“Not yet,” Hannity replied.

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