The Democratic Party may not be any good at cultivating a healthy economy, governing, or protecting the rights of average Americans, but they excel in all forms of election cheating.
But don’t think Democrats are content with merely sucking up illegal American contributions. No, Democrats have also mastered the art of illegally sucking up illegal campaign contributions from foreigners abroad.
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio took the stand and testified in the federal trial of Prakazrel “Pras” Michel, founder of the hip hop band Fugees, and his alleged involvement in a money laundering scheme that included a huge — and illegal — donation to Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
DiCaprio recalled a conversation with Malaysian financier Jho Low, who mentioned that he was looking to donate millions of dollars to the Obama campaign by giving the money to Michel and having him pass it to Obama’s people.
Fast Facts:
Low was sentenced — in absentia — to a 10-year sentence in a Kuwaiti court for his role in laundering roughly $1 billion of the almost $4.5 billion worth of Chinese currency he allegedly swindled in what’s known as the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal.
Low claimed he wanted to donate between $20-$30 million dollars to Obama.
It is illegal for American presidential candidates to accept donations from foreigners.
The DOJ charged Low for trying to donate money to lobby the Trump administration, hoping to have the charges against him relating to the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal dropped.
Low is on the lam and is believed to be hiding in China or Macau. China denies harboring him.
“It was a significant sum, something to the tune of $20-30 million,” DiCaprio testified in court. “I said, ‘Wow that’s a lot of money!’”
Additional witnesses testified that they were wired money from Low and asked to forward it to the Obama campaign.
Michel allegedly took the mad stacks from Low and used them to lobby Obama’s government on behalf of Low and the Chinese Communist Party.
He distributed $21.6 million to American straw donors who would then donate it to the Obama campaign, concealing the fact that the money came from Low.
But just because Democrats seem to love sucking up money with people connected to communist China, don’t think that they’re not looking at other foreign Sugar Daddys.
The Berger Action Fund is a nondescript name for a group with a rather specific purpose: steering the wealth of Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire, into the world of American politics and policy.
As a foreign national, Wyss is prohibited from donating to candidates or political committees. But his influence is still broadly felt through millions of dollars routed through a network of nonprofit groups that invest heavily in the Democratic ecosystem. Such groups don’t have to disclose the source of their funding — or many details about how they spend it.
Newly available tax documents show that his giving through the Berger Action Fund, which describes itself as advocating for “solutions to some of our world’s biggest problems,” swelled in 2021 to $72 million, cementing Wyss’ status as a Democratic-aligned megadonor.
Representatives for Wyss insist they comply with laws governing the giving of foreign nationals and have put in place strict policies limiting the use of donations to “issue advocacy” — not partisan electoral activities. But the fact that the money cannot be publicly traced highlights the difficulty of putting such assertions to the test.
Those same groups have helped to bankroll efforts to lift President Joe Biden’s agenda and paid for TV ads promoting Democratic congressional candidates ahead of last year’s midterm elections.
One quarter of the year gone! Career criminals coddled by Soros Stooges, crazy woman who thinks she’s a man murders children, lots of Flu Manchu fraud, and Botox makes you crazy(er). It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Everyone and their dog is covering the ham sandwich Trump indictment, so I’ll leave that to others. I will note that Alan Dershowitz is not impressed. “Based on what we know about this case, it may be one of the weakest cases in my six years of experience.”
On the morning of Election Day last November, William French went to his local polling place in Freeland, Pennsylvania, to cast his vote. But the qualified and registered voter wasn’t allowed to. The disabled U.S. Army veteran was told that the precinct had run out of paper for ballots and he had to come back later in the afternoon.
So that’s what he did, returning at 3:30 p.m. But the precinct still didn’t have ballots. Election workers told him to return yet again. But by nightfall, it was too difficult. French has endured 17 surgeries on his destroyed leg and uses a cane to walk. But the sidewalks are a mess, and he was worried about the risk of falling and further injury.
That same morning, Melynda Reese and her husband went to their polling location in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania. But only Reese’s husband was allowed to vote, and for the same reason: The precinct had run out of paper. They came back at 4:00 p.m. and were told there would be a lengthy wait.
Reese is a corrections officer and her husband’s primary caregiver. He had recently suffered two cardiac arrests and a stroke. He required regular medication and attention and couldn’t be left alone. Long waits were also too much to bear. The couple returned at 6:30 p.m., and saw a line that stretched so long that they knew they couldn’t wait. Around 9:15 p.m., an election official called Reese and told her that ballots were finally available and she could vote. But her husband had just taken his sleeping pills and she couldn’t leave him unattended.
French and Reese are just two of the thousands of voters affected by poor election administration in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The two just sued Luzerne County, its Board of Elections and Registration, and its Bureau of Elections in federal court for violations of their constitutional right to vote.
“Voters in Luzerne County through no fault of their own, were disenfranchised and denied the fundamental right to vote. William French and Melynda Reese are two of those voters. They bring suit to vindicate the denial of their sacred right to vote, to make sure voters are not disenfranchised in the future, and to bring integrity back to elections in Luzerne County,” said Wally Zimolong, lawyer for French and Reese.
The House Oversight Committee is investigating the explosive claims by Dr. Gal Luft, a former Israel Defense Forces lieutenant colonel with deep intelligence ties in Washington and Beijing, who says he was arrested to stop him from revealing what he knows about the Biden family and FBI corruption — details he told the Department of Justice in 2019, which he says it ignored.
Luft, 56, first made the claims on Feb. 18 on Twitter, after being detained at a Cyprus airport as he prepared to board a plane to Israel.
“I’ve been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the U.S. The U.S., claiming I’m an arms dealer. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic. I’ve never been an arms dealer.
“DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim, and Hunter Biden.
“Shall I name names?”
Luft remains in jail awaiting extradition to the US over what he says are trumped-up charges of arms trafficking to China and Libya, and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Luft claimed that he tried to reach out to the DOJ about the Chinese energy company CEFC paying Hunter $100,000 and James Biden, Joe’s brother, $65,000 “in exchange for their FBI connections and use of the Biden name to promote China’s Belt and Road Initiative around the world.”
James O’Keefe has not allowed his forced exit from Project Veritas to stop him. His new journalism outfit, O’Keefe Media Group (OMG), just released a video uncovering evidence of what O’Keefe calls a possible “money-laundering scheme” for the Democrats. Some individuals reportedly appear to have donated thousands of times over a relatively short period to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars to ActBlue and Biden for President, based on Federal Election Commission records.
“FEC data shows that some senior citizens across the U.S. have been donating thousands of times per year,” O’Keefe began. “Some of these individuals’ names and addresses are attached to over $200,000 in contributions. We went and knocked on a few of their doors to corroborate the data that we received from a group of citizen journalists called Election Watch in Maryland.” The video then showed O’Keefe visiting someone who is listed as donating over $217,000, through 12,000 separate contributions. This money was earmarked for various entities through leftist platform ActBlue over three years’ time. Some of the donations were made with variations of the person’s name and address, O’Keefe stated.
The data he obtained was state and FEC data, O’Keefe said. “We’re wondering if these donors are victims of what appears to be a money-laundering scheme, or [if] these residents actually participated in the scheme. We’re making phone calls, we’re knocking on doors, these are things that you can do, we hope you do that.” There are “bizarre amounts of data” on homes and individuals making many thousands of dollars of donations, O’Keefe said, urging others to help him investigate.
The first person shown opening the door to O’Keefe, a Marylander listed as donating $32,000 in 3,000 different contributions, said he was unaware of the donations but advised O’Keefe as a solution to hit Donald Trump “with a bat.” The man added, “I want to see a scar on his f**king head. Now stop f**king with me,” and slammed the door.
Another donor, Cindy, according to O’Keefe, supposedly donated over $18,000 in 1,000+ donations to ActBlue in 2022, which would necessitate donating “three times a day, every day, for the whole year.” When asked if she’d donated over $18,000, Cindy responded with a quick laugh, “I doubt that. No, I don’t think so… I wish I could have donated $18,000 to Biden’s presidency.”
Meanwhile Carolyn Lenz, in Tucson, Ariz., told OMG that she “absolutely [did] not” donate over 18,000 times for $170,000+ to ActBlue. She looked at the data showing “she” donated multiple times a day, often in $5 to $15 increments, and insisted that the donations were not hers. “They must be” fraudulent, Lenz said.
After rejecting her in 2018, the voters of Alameda County, California selected Pamela Price as their new District Attorney last year. Price had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from George Soros for her two campaigns. That probably tells you most of what you need to know, since Soros only funds candidates who are soft on crime and willing to empty the jails as much as possible. Price quickly proved herself no exception, seeking to cut a plea deal with a killer who had been arrested for one triple murder for hire, was accused in the murder of a court witness, and several other violent crimes. Rather than the 75 years to life sentence that Delonzo Logwood was eligible for, Price wanted to cut him loose after fifteen years. Thankfully, a County District Judge stepped in and rejected the deal out of hand. (Free Beacon)
A California judge this week blocked a newly-elected progressive prosecutor’s effort to slash a triple murderer’s sentence.
Alameda County district judge Mark McCannon rejected District Attorney Pamela Price’s plea deal for a 31-year-old man jailed for a 2008 triple murder-for-hire, among other crimes. Price, who took office in November and has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the progressive billionaire George Soros, attempted to sentence Delonzo Logwood to just 15 years in prison, though he was eligible for a sentence of 75 years to life.
You can’t keep a bad man down. Keith Chastain, 38, is a one-thug crime spree.
Chastain racked up an impressive array of arrests in Fresno County, California, (of course). Between Feb. 19 and March 21, he was arrested 10 times for a menagerie of crimes encompassing 15 misdemeanors and 18 felonies, including:
six stolen cars
fraud
DUI (duh)
drugs (duh)
vandalism
Chastain was hit with three additional charges — DUI, trespassing, and auto theft — but those were dropped when cops failed to file the charges in time.
Snip.
“Unfortunately, this is not as unique of a situation as it seems,” Tony Botti, spokesman for the Fresno County Sherriff’s office, stated. “California has watered down the laws so much over the years for property criminals and repeat offenders that they are not held accountable like they should be. Sadly, it is our community members who suffer due to these soft-on-crime policies.”
According to court documents, Edwin Maldonado spent many months thumbing his nose at what he was ordered by the court to do.
His punishment for that is more like a prize.
“You’ve got someone who was rewarded for being a failure, and this guy was a failure over 1,000 and some odd times,” said Andy Kahan with Crime Stoppers.
First, Maldonado gets a felony charge for drug possession. A few weeks later, he’s charged with aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. He makes his $30,000 bond and walks out of jail.
“I’ve certainly had clients hauled back into court on violations, maybe two or three times that have been alleged,” said criminal defense attorney Emily Detoto.
Associate Judge Tiffany Hill presided over a bond revocation hearing for Maldonado.
“For obvious reasons, you are not abiding by your rules and conditions period, and God knows what he was doing when he wasn’t where he was supposed to be,” Kahan said.
According to court documents, Maldonado failed to comply with any of his bond conditions for eight months.
According to his GPS monitor, he left his curfew zone 847 times, was called 453 times about his whereabouts, and had more than 1,000 GPS monitor violations.
A suspect arrested and charged in a recent brutal “jugging” robbery in Houston that left a woman paralyzed was out on a $100 bond for a weapons-related charge.
On the morning of February 13, Nung Truong, 44, withdrew money from a bank ATM but was followed for approximately 24 miles by two suspects. Surveillance video released by the Houston Police Department shows a black male bumping into Truong and causing her to drop her belongings. The suspect initially fled with an envelope but returned seconds later to body-slam Truong to the ground before taking $4,300 in cash.
A mother to three children aged 13, 15, and 20, Truong is now paralyzed and unable to walk or care for herself.
Last Friday, Houston Police arrested Joseph Harrell, 17, and Zy’Nika Ayesha Woods, 19, for the attack and charged both suspects with Aggravated Robbery with Serious Bodily Injury.
According to court records, on January 26, 2023, Harrell had been granted a General Order bond of $100 for Unlawful Possession of a Weapon. He also faces charges of Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon related to an incident in February in which he threatened another victim with a gun. Harrell is currently being held in the Harris County jail on bonds totaling $240,000.
Snip.
Although Harrell’s Unlawful Possession of a Weapon charge was assigned to Harris County Court 2 under Judge Paula Goodhart, his bond was signed by Judge David Singer.
Elected to Harris County Criminal Court 14 in 2018, Singer lost in the March 2022 Democratic primary election and his term ended December 31, 2022. As a one-term judge, Singer is not eligible under state code to serve as a visiting judge.
The 11th Administrative Judicial Region confirmed to The Texan that Singer is not listed as a visiting judge.
The Harris County Office of Court Management emailed the following statements to The Texan:
“David Singer was appointed as associate judge pursuant to Section 54A.002 of the Texas Government Code and the Local Rules for Harris County Criminal Courts at Law. His start date was Jan. 1, 2023.”
Finland gets the green light to join NATO, with Turkey and Hungary approving their membership. Sweden’s application is still under negotiation. As I noted previously, tangling with the Finns has not been a source of happiness for Russia.
Poor priorities. “European Ammo Maker’s Growth Stymied By TikTok Data Center Sucking Up Electricity.”
LA City Council member Mark Ridley-Thomas convicted of taking bribes. “He was convicted of one count of bribery, one of conspiracy, one count of honest services mail fraud, and four counts of honest services wire fraud. The jury acquitted him on 12 other counts.”
Veterans Affairs assistant secretary Kurt DelBene is married to Rep. Suzan DelBene (Wash.), chairwoman of the DCCC. It’s a big club, and you’re not in it. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Federal prosecutors announced a 58-year-old Plainview man is facing 102 years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing $4 million in federal relief funds passed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Friday, Andrew Johnson pleaded guilty in the Northern District of Texas to three counts of bank fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft, and one count of engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from unlawful activity, according to a news release published by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
Johnson swindled millions from the Paycheck Protection Program passed in the early weeks of the pandemic to help stave off the economic effects of business closures, government restrictions, and shelter-in-place mandates. As part of the fraud, Johnson applied for and received forgiveness for 27 bogus loans.
He spent more than $3.5 million of the stolen funds on “home renovations, vacations, clothing, cosmetic surgery, college tuition, cars, wedding expenses, and equipment for an unrelated business venture,” according to the DOJ.
After an investigation that took longer than a year, the Office of the City Auditor in Austin said it found Central Texas Allied Health Institute (CTAHI), a nonprofit City of Austin contractor, committed fraud against Austin Public Health and falsified health records.
According to the investigative report, CTAHI misrepresented over $1.1 million in financial transactions across three contracts with Austin Public Health and was incorrectly paid roughly $417,000 between December 2020 and September 2021 because of fraudulent contract claims. The report also claimed CTAHI falsified its COVID-19 vaccine contract performance by overstating vaccination totals and fabricating patient data.
“This is up there with some of the biggest cases we’ve investigated on my team,” said Brian Molloy, chief of investigations at the Chief of the City Auditor.
CTAHI, President Todd Hamilton, and Dr. Jereka Thomas-Hockaday — both of whom were named in the report — denied the claims made in the report in a statement Thursday.
Snip.
CTAHI’s three contracts with Austin Public Health were for COVID-19 testing, workforce development, and COVID-19 vaccines, according to the city. Between December 2020 and September 2021, the city said CTAHI submitted 23 claims for reimbursement to APH under the workforce development and COVID-19 vaccine contracts.
Flu Manchu is the fraud fount that just keeps giving… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
NHL might stop pushing gay pride after backlash from players and fans. “Philadelphia Flyer’s player Ivan Provorov didn’t want to participate in a ‘Pride’ event during warmups…Soon, other players also refused to participate after Povorov showed it could be done, and some entire team organizations dropped their planned LGBT pride events. And thanks to this one man’s stand, the NHL is considering dropping the whole ‘Pride’ push.”
Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel and coiner of Moore’s Law, is dead at age 94. Semiconductors have radically changed just about every facet of the world.
Recently Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping announced a “strategic partnership.” Here’s Peter Zeihan explaining exactly what “strategic partnership” means.
“Vladimir Putin of Russia entertained president or chairman Xi Jinping of China, and they had one of the big hoity-toity summits where they pledged their unending support for each other. The reality, of course, is nothing of the sort.”
Putin used the magic phrase strategic partnership, which, for the uninitiated, sounds really important and like an alliance. But this is the phraseology that the Russians have been using for centuries, where they [want] a partnership with the country that they don’t trust, and they expect the other country to pay for everything, and they expect to stab that other country in the back at the earliest opportunity.
Unless, you know, the other country is just cold and brutal enough to stab them in the back first.
“That’s the magic phrase that you know that they really, really, really, truly despise each other. And that this is only an alliance of convenience. It has to do with getting out from under some of the sanctions that had to do with Ukraine war. So let’s put that in a box.”
“Within hours of leaving Russia, Xi Jinping of China invited the leaders of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan and Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to a summit with just him, not the Russians.”
“This is the Chinese making a naked power play for control of Russia’s backyard.”
Zeihan reiterates his theory that Russian rational for the war is plugging historical gaps through which they’ve been invaded. “There are other access points that the Russians are really paranoid about…one of them is the Altai Gap that leads straight to China.” AKA the Dzungarian Gate.
When the Russians see the Chinese making this sort of naked power play to get on the other side of that gap and position themselves politically, economically, maybe militarily with countries that are on the wrong side of that line while the Russians are occupied in Ukraine, the Russian mind immediately falls into kind of this revanchist position where they realize that they are now under assault from all possible angles. And this is like the worst case scenario for the Russians, and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it, because they have completely committed their entire conventional forces to their Western periphery in the war with Ukraine.
“Now that the Chinese are actually nibbling on the eastern periphery, we know that this relationship is now in its dying years, because the Russians know the Chinese absolutely cannot be trusted. I can’t say, for the rest of it, that’s really realization.”
It’s no secret that one of the motives behind Xi Jinping’s various actions on Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc., is China reasserting control over “historical lands,” and China lost a lot of land in Outer Mongolia and the Far East/Siberia to Russia in the 19th century that it had previously controlled. (See the treaties of Aigun (1858) and Peking (1860) for details.) And all that land is a lot closer to Beijing than Moscow.
Like Hitler and Stalin, Xi and Putin deserve each other.
I have rarely heard it mentioned in the mainstream media, but, according to reports, during the 1990s in communist China, thirty thousand members of Falun Gong were rounded up and executed. The founder of Falun Gong, Li Hongzhi, fled China and now lives in the U.S., while in China members of the order went underground. According to Freedom House, “Falun Gong practitioners across China have since [July 1999] been subjected to widespread surveillance, arbitrary detention, horrific torture, and extrajudicial killing — abuses which continue today.” Nonetheless, there are still some 100 million practitioners worldwide, and the movement continues to grow.
Information concerning the repression of Falun Gong is a Chinese state secret, with severe penalties for anyone attempting to obtain data. As the Falun Data Infocenter puts it: “The CCP has also used political and financial influence around the world to either keep journalists silent, or drive false narratives about Falun Gong.” With total control inside China and compliance by foreign journalists, the Chinese Communist Party has driven a false narrative that minimizes the number of Falun Gong practitioners and hides data on the number of those abducted, tortured, killed, and killed for their organs, thus totally obscuring the record.
Not exactly new, but worth mentioned that, yes, communists are still oppressive scumbags who murder people who essentially practice Tai Chi for their organs because they dared to object to being repressed.
So i went looking for a good, recent video on the subject, only to find him again.
Yes, it’s bald, bearded, bespeckled British bloke again. (Actually, his accent is a bit posh to be a proper “bloke,” but, you know, alliteration.) If you watch YouTube videos about technology, history, etc., pretty soon he’s going to show up. And it’s not like he has just one channel, he has multiple channels on different subjects.
Bald, bearded, bespeckled British bloke is Simon Whistler.
Media personality Simon Whistler was brought up in the south-east of England. After completing his university education (undergrad business BA, postgrad law diploma PGDL), he worked abroad for one year where he met his now wife and eventually ended up permanently moving to her home country, the Czech Republic.
After working as a freelance voice over artist and podcast host, at the age of 28 he started working on his first YouTube channel, a collaboration with the popular website TopTenz.net. From there he launched another channel in collaboration with another website TodayIFoundOut.com.
Soon enough both those channels had over a million subscribers, and Simon expanded his content to cover biographies on his Biographics channel and geography on his Geographics channel.
From there is was a move into comedic business content with Business Blaze and later to covering humanities greatest achievements with his channel Megaprojects.
Simon also runs a number of podcasts, merchandise lines, and has had his work featured on television and in print.
Oh, multiple channels with over a million subscribers. Nuthin to it.
That page lists seven channels Whistler has:
Business Blaze (which is now Brain Blaze) (posted three days ago)
So that’s, what, twelve videos in four days? And I’m not sure I’ve found all his channels. There are also some sister channels to Today I Found Out (Higher Learning, Origins, Fact Quickie, etc.) where Whistler doesn’t seem to be in front of the camera but may still be involved in.
This brings up a few questions:
When does this man sleep? Even assuming he has a staff of writers, editors, etc., that still seems like a grueling production schedule.
I’ve only clicked on a few of his videos before today, so why does he show up with such frequency in my feed? Why is he so beloved to the all-powerful algorithm?
How do we know that Simon Whistler isn’t, in fact, an AI host generated deep within the bowels of YouTube’s server farm?
Assuming he is but flesh and blood, I have to think he makes a somewhat handsome living from all this content. But in an era of rising interest rates, how long will the likes of Raid: Shadow Legends, Ridge wallets and Nord VPN continue to underwrite the YouTube economy?
None of this particularly sinister, but it is curious…
A Chinese company based out of Hong Kong which paid at least $3 million to several members of the Biden family has since been revealed to have ties with the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
According to the Daily Caller, State Energy HK Limited sent $3 million via wire transfer to Robinson Walker LLC, a company run by an associate of the Biden family named John Robinson Walker. The wire transfer took place in March of 2017, shortly after Joe Biden’s term as Vice President came to an end, according to a report released on Thursday by the House Oversight Committee.
One of the direct subsidiaries of State Energy HK is State Energy Group International Assets Holdings Limited (SEIAH). At the time of the wire transfer, SEIAH’s chairman was Ren Qingxin, who previously worked for the CCP as a representative at a business organization.
Shortly after the $3 million transfer, Ren was succeeded in his leadership position by Lei Donghui, who had been a member of the CCP since 2002, where he served as Secretary General of the International Engineering Business Bureau of China State Construction (CSC). CSC has since been designated by the Department of Defense as a “Communist China military company.”
Subsequently, the $3 million sent to Robinson Walker was then transferred to four different members of the Biden family: Joe Biden’s son Hunter, brother James, daughter-in-law Hallie, and a fourth unidentified family member, the Oversight Committee reports. The transfers were sent in several transactions, both to the family members directly and to several of their companies, including Owasco PC, JBBSR Inc, and RSTP II, LLC.
The previously-unknown involvement of Hallie – the widow of Biden’s elder son Beau, who later became Hunter’s girlfriend after Beau’s death – has proven to be one of the biggest bombshells yet in the GOP’s investigations into Biden family corruption.
Dutch Farmer’s Party poised to win 16 or 17 seats in parliament thanks to opposing that country’s mad global warming anti-meat mandates. “The Boer-Burger Beweging (BBB), or Farmer-Citizen Movement, is set to become the largest party in the country’s senate, winning more seats than Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s ruling conservative VVD party.”
Red Guards come to Maine. “Kristen Day said students affiliated with one of RSU 14’s Civil Rights Teams harassed her daughter. When her daughter refused to speak about her sexuality, two students affiliated with the club began to bully her and call her homophobic.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Eric Weinstein on Joe Rogan about what really happened with Kayne West. He suggests that West’s Hitler comments were simply him trying to channel Thomas à Kempis.
Mutiny! Bank runs! Twitter files! It’s a ginormous LinkSwarm full of interesting (and alarming) links!
And I finally get a chance to talk more about the FTX scandal.
The Twitter files revelations continue to roll out. And Democrats aren’t happy that the workings of their thought police apparatus are being unmasked.
As one might expect, the Judiciary hearing on the “weaponization” of federal agencies, featuring Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger as witnesses was full of fireworks, facts, and ad hominem friction.
Out of the gate, Ranking Member Democratic Del. Stacey E. Plaskett labeled the two “so-called journalists” as dangerous and a “threat” to former Twitter employees.
She claimed that Republicans brought “two of Elon Musk’s ‘public scribes'” in “to release cherry-picked out-of-context emails and screenshots designed to promote his chosen narrative – Elon Musk’s chosen narrative – that is now being parroted by the Republicans” for political gain.
“I’m not exaggerating when I say you have called two witnesses who pose a direct threat to people who oppose them,” Plaskett said after the video.
Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, had a simple response to her accusations:
“It’s crazy what you were just saying.”
“You don’t want people to see what happened,” Jordan continued.
“The full video, transparency. You don’t want that, and you don’t want two journalists who have been named personally by the Biden administration, the FTC in a letter. They say they’re here to help and tell their story, and frankly, I think they’re brave individuals for being willing to come after being named in a letter from the Biden FTC.”
Taibbi was having none of it.
Matt Taibbi epic comeback:
"Ranking Member Plaskett, I'm not a 'so-called journalist'. I've won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and I've written 10 books including 4 NYT Best Sellers." pic.twitter.com/crXlWjScEr
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) March 9, 2023
As Glenn Greenwald chimed in from Twitter: “To Democrats, “journalist” means: one who mindlessly and loyally endorses DNC talking points. ”
Unshaken, Matt Taibbi continued, when he was allowed to respond, laid out what he and Shellenberger had found in their research of The Twitter Files:
“The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere,” Taibbi said.
“What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”
Taibbi pointedly added that “effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system.”
“It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at.”
Democrats only response to Taibbi and Shellenberger’s facts was to get personal…
Snip.
As we detailed earlier, journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger are testifying before the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government today. Both journalists were involved in the ‘Twitter Files’ disclosures, in which we learned that the government was directly involved in censoring disfavorable speech.
“Our findings are shocking,” writes Shellenberger at his blog. “A highly-organized network of U.S. government agencies and government contractors has been creating blacklists and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans, often without them knowing it.”
Ahead of the appearance, Taibbi released his prepared remarks. He also dropped a new and related Twitter Files mega-thread on ‘THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX’ which will be submitted to the Congressional record which, according to Taibbi, ‘contains some surprises.’
But Twitter was more like a partner to government. With other tech firms it held a regular “industry meeting” with FBI and DHS, and developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government: HHS, Treasury, NSA, even local police…
But equally concerning was how those driving The Narrative used NGOs that agreed with them as Arbiters of Truth.
We came to think of this grouping – state agencies like DHS, FBI, or the Global Engagement Center (GEC), along with “NGOs that aren’t academic” and an unexpectedly aggressive partner, commercial news media – as the Censorship-Industrial Complex.
Who’s in the Censorship-Industrial Complex? Twitter in 2020 helpfully compiled a list for a working group set up in 2020. The National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, are key…
Twitter execs weren’t sure about Clemson’s Media Forensics Lab (“too chummy with HPSCI”), and weren’t keen on the Rand Corporation (“too close to USDOD”), but others were deemed just right.
NGOs ideally serve as a check on corporations and the government. Not long ago, most of these institutions viewed themselves that way. Now, intel officials, “researchers,” and executives at firms like Twitter are effectively one team – or Signal group, as it were:
The Woodstock of the Censorship-Industrial Complex came when the Aspen Institute – which receives millions a year from both the State Department and USAID – held a star-studded confab in Aspen in August 2021 to release its final report on “Information Disorder.”
The report was co-authored by Katie Couric and Chris Krebs, the founder of the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Yoel Roth of Twitter and Nathaniel Gleicher of Facebook were technical advisors. Prince Harry joined Couric as a Commissioner.
Why the fuck is Prince Harry on a committee deciding how free American citizens should be censored?
Their taxpayer-backed conclusions: the state should have total access to data to make searching speech easier, speech offenders should be put in a “holding area,” and government should probably restrict disinformation, “even if it means losing some freedom.”
Snip.
The same agencies (FBI, DHS/CISA, GEC) invite the same “experts” (Thomas Rid, Alex Stamos), funded by the same foundations (Newmark, Omidyar, Knight) trailed by the same reporters (Margaret Sullivan, Molly McKew, Brandy Zadrozny) seemingly to every conference, every panel.
The #TwitterFiles show the principals of this incestuous self-appointed truth squad moving from law enforcement/intelligence to the private sector and back, claiming a special right to do what they say is bad practice for everyone else: be fact-checked only by themselves. While Twitter sometimes pushed back on technical analyses from NGOs about who is and isn’t a “bot,” on subject matter questions like vaccines or elections they instantly defer to sites like Politifact, funded by the same names that fund the NGOs: Koch, Newmark, Knight.
#TwitterFiles repeatedly show media acting as proxy for NGOs, with Twitter bracing for bad headlines if they don’t nix accounts. Here, the Financial Times gives Twitter until end of day to provide a “steer” on whether RFK, Jr. and other vax offenders will be zapped.
Well, you say, so what? Why shouldn’t civil society organizations and reporters work together to boycott “misinformation”? Isn’t that not just an exercise of free speech, but a particularly enlightened form of it?
The difference is, these campaigns are taxpayer-funded. Though the state is supposed to stay out domestic propaganda, the Aspen Institute, Graphika, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, New America, and other “anti-disinformation” labs are receiving huge public awards.
Meant to cover this back in February, but FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, in additional to all those federal fraud charges, was charged with “12 new counts, including illegally making over 300 political contributions to the tune of tens of millions of dollars through straw donors and using corporate funds.” The overwhelming majority went to Democrats and left-leaning causes. “Bankman-Fried was the second largest individual donor during the 2022 US midterm elections, contributing $39 million to various Democrat causes.” Also: “FTX’s former CEO wanted to give at least $1 million to a pro-LGBTQ political action group, but couldn’t find anyone bisexual or gay at the company whom he trusted, the document said.”
Speaking of Bankman-Fried: “The previously sealed names of two people who co-signed Sam Bankman-Fried’s $250 million bail package have been publicly released. The guarantors were identified in the unredacted bonds as Andreas Paepcke, a Stanford research scientist, and Larry Kramer, former dean of Stanford law school…How the fuck did these Stanford faculty members get so rich as to guarantee that size of a bail?”
Speaking of crypto, Silvergate, a California bank that was a heavy player in the crypto space, is shutting down and liquidating after huge bank runs in the crypto-winter. Want to guess who was a big booster of Silvergate? Would you believe Sam Bankman-Fried?
When China began to require Western corporations to establish Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cells, businesses brushed off the move as benign. For example, when HSBC HBA 0.0% became the first international financial institution at which workers established a Chinese Communist Party cell in its investment banking venture in China in July, the bank stated that the CCP committee does not influence the direction of the firm and has no formal role in its day-to-day activities. But the CCP may have begun to flex its muscle in other ways. This week, the CCP cell inside the Beijing office of Big Four accounting firm EY demanded that party members wear CCP badges at work in the run-up to China’s annual parliamentary meetings.
Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, California, was closed today by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, which appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as receiver. To protect insured depositors, the FDIC created the Deposit Insurance National Bank of Santa Clara (DINB). At the time of closing, the FDIC as receiver immediately transferred to the DINB all insured deposits of Silicon Valley Bank.
All insured depositors will have full access to their insured deposits no later than Monday morning, March 13, 2023. The FDIC will pay uninsured depositors an advance dividend within the next week. Uninsured depositors will receive a receivership certificate for the remaining amount of their uninsured funds. As the FDIC sells the assets of Silicon Valley Bank, future dividend payments may be made to uninsured depositors.
Silicon Valley Bank had 17 branches in California and Massachusetts. The main office and all branches of Silicon Valley Bank will reopen on Monday, March 13, 2023. The DINB will maintain Silicon Valley Bank’s normal business hours. Banking activities will resume no later than Monday, March 13, including on-line banking and other services. Silicon Valley Bank’s official checks will continue to clear. Under the Federal Deposit Insurance Act, the FDIC may create a DINB to ensure that customers have continued access to their insured funds.
As of December 31, 2022, Silicon Valley Bank had approximately $209.0 billion in total assets and about $175.4 billion in total deposits. At the time of closing, the amount of deposits in excess of the insurance limits was undetermined. The amount of uninsured deposits will be determined once the FDIC obtains additional information from the bank and customers.
SVB was a bank that primarily counted venture capital firms and technology startups as clients. It achieved financial stardom during the COVID-19 pandemic because major cash deposits from the booming firms increased its deposits from $60 billion in the first quarter of 2020 to over $200 billion in December 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported. Its securities portfolio rose from roughly $27 billion in 2020’s first quarter to approximately $127 billion at the end of 2021.
The fact that most of SVB’s assets were seemingly secure — they were mainly longer-term government bonds — led many investors to feel the bank was secure. Those feelings would be dashed in just two days. The bank suddenly announced Wednesday that it needed to raise over $2.2 billion, sending its stock plunging by more than 60% in a matter of days.
The government securities bought by SVB pay a fixed rate, so when market interest rates were raised, a gap began to grow between how much the securities were worth on the open market and what they were valued on the bank’s books. The unrealized losses in SVB’s securities portfolio in December had grown to more than $17 billion, a number expected to grow, as the securities could only be sold at a loss.
Crack the whip: unacceptable because of origins in slavery
Waiter or waitress: server should be used instead
Biological gender, biological sex, biological woman, biological female, biological man, or biological male
Illegal immigrant or illegal alien
Cake walk: “originated during slavery” and thus perpetuates “racist motifs”
In reference to illegal migration: onslaught, tidal wave, flood, inundation, surge, invasion, army, march, sneak and stealth
Anchor baby
Chain migration: this is a term used by “immigration hard-liners”
Peanut gallery: “the cheapest seats often occupied by Black people and people with low incomes”
Third-world countries: too “derogatory”
Oh, it does not end there. Politico reporters are also not allowed to say that a transgender person “identifies as” a certain gender, or describe the current situation at the border as a “crisis.” The guide also warned reporters to make sure not to portray migrants as a “negative, harmful influence.”
Want some more? “Pro-choice” is frowned upon in favor of “abortion rights supporter,” and (of course) “pro-life” is outlawed, with “anti-abortion” taking its place. “Late-term abortion” is also a no-no; reporters are told to use “abortion later in pregnancy.”
College student accused of stealing more than half a million dollars via credit card fraud working part-time at a mall jewelry store where most of the items are under $50. She marked up items, then returned them at the original price and somehow pocketed the difference. She made eight fake transactions totally more than $540,000. As though somehow the store wasn’t going to notice something funny going on.
I’m pro-life but this is stupid. “Texas Lawmaker Looks to Restrict Online Access to Materials Assisting or Facilitating Abortion.” You can’t ban access to information you don’t like, that’s prior restraint and illegal under the U.S. Constitution.
Speaking of violating rights, a judge was suspended for not allowing a defendant access to legal council. Again. The dumbass in question was Kenton County District Judge Ann Ruttle in Kentucky.
It turns out that having your ruling party alienate the entire world with a genetically engineered plague, rampant human rights abuse and widespread intellectual property theft is not conducive to continued economic success. Who knew?
Hence comes the hashtag #SaveTheBoss, i.e. the company needs to survive to save jobs. I assume there’s more than a little irony to the tag, given how badly conditions suck in so many Chinese factories. .
Takeaways:
“In the first half of 2022, 460,000 companies announced their closure, and 3.1 million self-employed people have canceled their business.”
“It’s hard to be a boss this year. All industries are in decline. In order to maintain the factory, profits have to be squeezed and squeezed. Many have even accepted orders with zero profit outright. The purpose is simply to keep the cash flowing.”
“According to data released by China’s General Administration of Customs, China’s exports fell 9.9 percent year on year in December 2022, widening the decline from 8.7 percent in November and marking the biggest drop since February 2020.” And those are the official numbers. It’s almost certainly worse.
“The once congested roads in this major terminal in Guangdong Province, and also in the Pearl River delta region, are now empty. Trucks are parked all over the parking lot, reflecting how depressed the foreign trade export industry is.”
“The Chinese government is carefully covering up the situation of its major economic regression, so it isn’t easy to tell from the statistics how serious the situation is.” But employers think it’s really bad.
“I heard that four or five factories are closing down here every day.”
Foreign companies are pulling out as well. “500 European companies have already moved to Singapore to set up their headquarters.”
Workers are returning from their Chinese New Year vacations only to find their factories shut down owing them back wages.
“At least 80,000 to 100,000 people are stranded in Suzhou, and there are probably more than 200,000 workers in the whole Yangtze River delta who are looking for work.”
“If someone promises to work in an electronics factory for 30 RMB, that is 4.3 USD an hour, don’t believe it. It’s all a lie.”
“Just after the Chinese New Year, the labor prices are dropping like an avalanche.”
And more foreign companies are pulling out of the country, like Toshiba, Microsoft and Panasonic.
“4.6 million factories are without orders.” I’ve got to think some of those “factories” have to be pretty small.
American capital firms are planning to pivot to Europe for foreign growth.
“The largest wave of unemployment in the history of CCP country is here.”
Many Chinese business owners are mystified by this drop in foreign orders.
Here’s a hint: Your crooked commie rulers acted like the biggest jerks in the world and everybody got tired of it. You reap what you sow…
“Biden’s job growth is mostly immigrants working for low wages.” Also this: “The Department of Homeland Security has been issuing an unknown number of two-year work permits to illegal immigrants, which will keep them in the workforce suppressing wages and fanning the flames of discontent amongst Americans unable to find jobs until the next presidential election.” What the hell?
“Disinformation Inc: State Department bankrolls group secretly blacklisting conservative media.”
The Department of State has funded a deep-pocketed “disinformation” tracking group that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news organizations vital advertising dollars, the Washington Examiner can confirm.
The Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups, is feeding blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling alleged “disinformation,” the Washington Examiner reported . This same “disinformation” group has received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities linked to the highest levels of government, raising concerns from First Amendment lawyers and members of Congress.
“Any outfit like that engaged in censorship shouldn’t have any contact with the government because they’re tainted by association with a group that is doing something fundamentally against American values,” Jeffrey Clark, ex-acting head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, told the Washington Examiner. “The government or any private entity shouldn’t be involved with this entity that’s engaged in conduct that is either legally questionable or at least morally questionable.”
GDI compiles a “dynamic exclusion list” that it feeds to corporate entities, such as the Microsoft -owned advertising company Xandr, emails show. Xandr and other companies are, in turn, declining to place ads on websites that GDI flags as peddling disinformation.
The Washington Examiner revealed on Thursday that it is on this exclusion list. The list includes at least 2,000 websites and has “had a significant impact on the advertising revenue that has gone to those sites,” said GDI’s CEO Clare Melford on a March 2022 podcast.
GDI has identified that the 10 “riskiest” news outlets for disinformation are the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.
Another huge story that the news media has done it’s best to ignore: a toxic derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The blew it up to prevent a BLEVE and ended up releasing Phosgene gas. That’s carrying your World War I reenactment too far.
90-year California Democratic Senator old Dianne Feinstein to retire after 2024. But…
A few hour later she was evidently unaware she had retired. Increasingly, “crazy” or “senile” seem to be the two most common flavors of the Democratic Party…
After talking to his government sources, Peter Zeihan thinks that we won The Great Balloon War, having gained valuable insights by capturing Chinese tech, and that the entire episode is another symptom of high level CCP dysfunction.
Some takeaways:
“What the Chinese were technically trying to do: They were doing overflight of a lot of our military bases, specifically our ICBM launch facilities, because the Chinese are new to having a nuclear deterrent.”
“Remember that as early as the 1970s, the United States had over 30,000 nuclear weapons, about one-third of which would have been deployed by missile. Now, with arms control treaties and the post-cold war environment, we have slimmed that down to just a few hundred.” Here Zeihan is wrong. The declared number of nuclear warheads the United States possesses is 3,750, but those numbers don’t count tactical nuclear weapons. Including those yields an estimate in the 5,500 range, though some 1,800 of those are slated for dismantlement.
“But the United States has a deep bench of experience in building and maintaining these things and the Chinese simply don’t.”
“Balloons are big, they’re slow moving, you can’t maneuver them very well, they’re obvious.”
He reiterates his theory that Xi has purged any possible successor and surrounded himself with slavish yes-men.
“It just never occurred to me that they could be that dumb. Well, turns out the rampant stupidity that is taking over decision making in Chinese policy has now reached a bit of a break point.”
“The Chinese have lost the ability to coordinate within their own system.”
“The Americans were reaching out to the Chinese, and the Chinese refused to take the call because they didn’t know what to say, because they couldn’t get directions.”
“The bureaucracy is seized up…there’s really only two types of people left: Those who will do nothing unless they are explicitly instructed to do something, or those who are True Believers.”
He doesn’t think that the Chinese got anything from balloon observation of our missile silos they couldn’t have gotten from satellites.
“The whole time U.S. hardware was tracking that balloon, tracking its emissions, taking digital renderings of the entirety of the structure, and, oh yeah, yeah, just just so we’re, clear this one’s not a weather balloon, this thing was 300 feet wide. That’s a big ass balloon. That’s like an order of magnitude bigger than weather balloons.”
“The equipment that was hanging from the bottom of the balloon, the payload was bigger than an Embraer [jetliner], and there were long range antennas and listening devices and computing capacity and solar panels on this thing, along with some propellers.”
“The diplomatic system seized up because the truth was so obvious, but the Chinese diplomatic corps had no idea that this was going on.”
He asserts that it we shot it down over Montana, there’s a good chance people would die, which is simply not the case, since there are vast stretches of Montana with very minimal population. (See also: the Columbia explosion.)
“We’re getting a better look at spy equipment out of China, and their capabilities, and their emissions, and how they handle information, and what they’re looking for, as a result of this incident than normally you would have gotten after a one or two year probing effort using more traditional methods.”
Zeihan and his sources either missed or omitted a more likely explanation for China’s spy balloon, mainly that they were more interested in signals intelligence and threat response communication than photographing ICBM silos (though they might well have done some of that too). Because radio waves bounce off the ionosphere, that’s the sort of information you can’t get from satellites. Maybe the point of the exercise was intended to see what sort of signals they could capture when we scrambled assets to take a look at them.
Still an incredibly stupid thing to do, but more purposely stupid than Zeihan gives them credit for.
Despite increasing sanctions and scrutiny on hostile Chinese business practices and intellectual property theft, private equity firms have previously managed to mostly evade scrutiny for taking Chinese money. That may finally be changing.
Takeaways:
“The US is starting to wise up on Chinese investments. It’s been cracking down by closing loopholes But not all the loopholes have been closed, Which means China could be getting US trade secrets.”
“Better late than never. This feels like your grandparents finally learning how to unplug and plug back in the WiFi router. Shouldn’t have taken this long to figure out something so obvious, but glad they eventually got there.”
“After years of letting China buy up sensitive US technology, property, and companies, the US government is finally putting its foot down. In 2018, Trump signed the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act, or FIRRMA. This changed how the Committee on Foreign Investment, or CFIUS, screened investments in the US for national security issues.”
“Before, CFIUS could only review foreign investments if they resulted in a controlling stake. Now CIFIUS can review any investment.”
“When Biden got into office, he ordered CFIUS to look at all investments that affect critical aspects of the US supply chain, or Americans’ personal data, and several other things.”
“As you might imagine, this has not gone over well with Wall Street, which loves Chinese money more than Snoop Dogg loves marijuana.”
“‘Wall Street now stands as an increasingly lonely voice arguing for more engagement with China.’ This was going on even as China was taking a wrecking ball to its economy with its zero covid policy, committing genocide against an ethnic minority, and selling the organs of political prisoners for profit. Find someone that loves you the way Wall Street loves Chinese money. They’re ride or die…and the people that die are political prisoners.”
“Private equity and venture capital firms were able to get an exception granted in FIRRMA for limited partners. That means that if a foreign entity becomes a limited partner in, say, a private equity fund, CFIUS doesn’t have any jurisdiction over it. Should have seen something like this coming. Finding loopholes is what Wall Street does best.”
“The type of investments that private equity firms are involved in means that Chinese companies could get access to critical technology. Stuff that could affect national security. Portfolio details could hold national economic or intelligence value.”
“The China Investment Corporation or CIC. At $1.3 trillion US dollars, it’s the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. ‘CIC has said repeatedly that it separates commercial activities from governmental functions and makes its investment decisions independently.'”
“CIC’s board of directors includes representatives from the Chinese government.”
“CIC’s Deputy General Manager Qi Bin has explained that cooperation with developed economies is to be leveraged to obtain advanced technology.”
“CIC is also partnering with large investment companies, like Goldman Sachs, Japan’s Nomura Holdings, and France’s BNP Paribas. CIC’s Deputy General Manager Qi Bin has talked about leveraging these partnerships for the ‘win-win’ ‘mutual benefit’…of Chinese companies. Somehow I’m getting the sense that “win win” has a different meaning in China. I think in English we would call this ‘short-term win for long-term loss.’ I’ll give you my money and you give me your trade secrets.”
There’s finally some efforts for CFIUS to close private equity loopholes.
Pardon me if I express deep skepticism that the Biden White House will actually constrict the inflow of Chinese money…
