Dr. Gal Luft, the “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigation, told the NY Post last week that he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals linked to Chinese military intelligence, and that they had an FBI mole who shared classified information with the Biden benefactors from the China-controlled energy company CEFC.
“I told the DOJ that Hunter was associated with a very senior retired FBI official who had a distinct physical characteristic—he had one eye,” Luft said.
That FBI official is widely believed to be former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who gave $100,000 to a trust for two of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s grandchildren in 2016 shortly before telling Hunter, “I would be delighted to do future work with you.”
Now, Biden’s DOJ has charged Luft with failing to register under the Foreign Agents Act (FARA), as well as Iranian sanctions violations. He’s alleged to have conspired with others to act in China’s interest, including recruiting and paying a former high ranking U.S. government official to support policies beneficial to China.
Democrats are turning the federal justice apparatus into banana republic keystone cops to hide their own crimes.
Speaking of Hunter: “How reckless Hunter Biden photographed himself driving at 172mph while behind the wheel of his Porsche en route to a days-long Vegas bender with prostitutes and pictured himself smoking CRACK while behind the wheel.” No doubt left-wingers will crow about how Hunter is “living his best life.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Federal judge blocks Biden’s censorship schemes. “Terry Doughty, a Louisiana federal judge, issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday blocking certain federal agencies and officials, including the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services, from communicating with social-media platforms.” Good.
“When I decided to stand up on behalf of disadvantaged children in support of school choice, my Democrat colleagues didn’t stand by me,” [Georgia State House Rep. Mesha] Mainor explained of her decision in a statement to Fox News Digital. “They crucified me. When I decided to stand up in support of safe communities and refused to support efforts to defund the police, they didn’t back me. They abandoned me.”
“For far too long, the Democrat Party has gotten away with using and abusing the black community,” she added. “For decades, the Democrat Party has received the support of more than 90% of the black community. And what do we have to show for it? I represent a solidly blue district in the city of Atlanta. This isn’t a political decision for me. It’s a moral one.”
Another half year gone. In one way, it seems impossible that it’s flown by so quickly. In another, I certainly feel tired enough for that, and then some…
There’s a zillion Biden corruption links I could have added to this week’s LinkSwarm, so feel free to share your favorites in the comments.
U.S. Attorney David Weiss wanted to bring charges against President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden in Washington, D.C., IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley said on Friday — and when he was reportedly barred from doing so, he told six witnesses.
Shapley testified on the matter last month, telling the House Oversight Committee that Weiss revealed in an October 2022, meeting that he had actually wanted to charge Hunter Biden in two federal districts but that he had been denied — and when Attorney General Merrick Garland denied that had ever happened, Shapley publicly named the witnesses he said Weiss had told.
“He surprised us by telling us on the charges, ‘I’m not the deciding official on whether charges are filed,’” Shapley told the committee when he testified in late May. “He then shocked us with the earth-shattering news that the Biden-appointed D.C. U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves would not allow him to charge in his district.
Shapley explained that by not allowing Weiss to file charges in D.C., Graves had effectively barred Weiss from seeking charges on crimes allegedly committed during 2014 and 2015 — including “foreign income from Burisma [Holdings] and a scheme to evade his income taxes through a partnership with a convicted felon … The purposeful exclusion of the 2014 and 2015 years sanitized the most substantive criminal conduct and concealed material facts.”
It was at that same meeting in October 2022 that Weiss said his request for special counsel authority had been denied, Shapley said. He was instead told to go through the regular process — which would have once again pitted him against a Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the race-conscious admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
“The Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the six-justice majority.
However, universities may still consider an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. Roberts clarified that this does not mean universities can simply establish through application essays or other means the regime declared unlawful by the Court. It means, explained Roberts, “the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.”
Of course our elite liberal institutions are furious, since they desperately want to discriminate the basis of race.
Paragraph 2: National Geographic magazine (now owned by Disney) laid off its last remaining staff writers. Paragraph 14: “Among those who lost their jobs in the latest layoff was Debra Adams Simmons, who only last September was promoted to vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion at National Geographic Media.” Usually it takes longer for DEI to destroy a company… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Speaking of Disney disasters, Indiana Jones and the Dial Up Internet of Depravity: “What a fucking incomprehensible calamity of a film this is. I mean, I’d be lying if I said I went into it expecting great things, but Jesus Fucking Mother of Christ, this was worse than anything I could have imagined.”
“7 Simple Ways To Get Away With A Massive Foreign Bribery Scheme.” “Get one of your immediate family members elected to a powerful office: Like your father, for one completely random example.”
I was going to do a post rounding up the sudden spat of absolutely unhinged attacks on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has had the unmitigated gall to actually primary Slow Joe Biden. Only to find out that Tucker Carlson had already done it for me.
Some takeaways:
There’s never been a candidate for president the media hated more than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. You thought that title belonged to Donald Trump. Of course it must! But go check the coverage. Trump got a gentle scalp massage by comparison when he announced. When Trump rolled out his presidential campaign in 2015, the New York Times waited until the 17th paragraph of the story to attack him. “But as well known as he is,” the paper said at the time, “Trump is also widely disliked.” Then they cited a poll to back it up. That was the attack on Trump. Eight years later, the Times attacked Bobby Kennedy in the very first sentence of the story. Quote, “Robert F Kennedy, Jr.” the paper declared, “announced a presidential campaign on Wednesday built on relitigating covid-19 shutdowns and shaking Americans faith in science.”
“You’d think Bobby Kennedy just declared war on the enlightenment!”
“NPR devoted an entire segment to savaging Kennedy, not just as a candidate, but as a human being. NPR described him as someone who, for his own perverse reasons, has made, quote, debunked and false and misleading claims that undermine trust in vaccines, and who in his spare time provides moral support to crazed extremists.”
“People magazine didn’t even bother to report a single word of anything Kennedy said at his announcement, and instead wrote an entire story about how his relatives hate him.” Having the entire Kennedy clan hate him would only increase my (admittedly low) estimation of him.
When did the Democratic Media Complex start hating him? July of 2005. “That’s the moment that Kennedy published a magazine article suggesting there might be a link between the rise in diagnosed autism cases and the ever-expending schedule of mandatory childhood vaccines.”
“The Pharma Lobby rolled out the most ferocious public relations campaign in memory and both [Rolling Stone and Salon] swiftly caved. Both pulled the story, and then disavowed it groveling as they did.” Both of those outlets were already on shaky ground, though neither was as bad as they become later.
No one in the national media bothered to explain why autism diagnoses had skyrocketed. If it wasn’t the vaccines, and maybe it wasn’t, then what was it? To this day there has not been a convincing explanation. Instead, reporters just attacked Bobby Kennedy. They’ve called him a lunatic and a Nazi. Instagram shut down his account YouTube just last week pulled down a perfectly reasonable interview he did with Jordan Peterson.
Speaking of which, here RFK Jr. explains to Jordan Petersen how he thinks ObamaCare got the Democratic Party in bed with Big Pharma.
I’ve omitted a lot of Carlson providing example after example of various Democratic Media Complex personalities viciously attacking Kennedy.
I’m no fan of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. His a lefty scumbag on many (perhaps most) issues, has more than a whiff of fringe lunacy about him, and (through no fault of his own) I find him hard to listen to, due to his spasmodic dysphonia. (Though obviously he’s much more coherent and articulate than Biden. As is the average third-grader.) And I think he’s more wrong than right on the vaccine-autism link.
Still, the degree to which the Democratic Media Complex has thrown away even the merest pretense of dispassion about him due to his threat to either a Biden second term or the wishes of Big Pharma (to the extent those two can be disentangled) makes me more inclined to listen to him, and more readily defend his right to speak in the public space. The DNC seems hellbent on presenting any fair challenge to Biden in the Democratic primary, which makes me very curious about just what they’re so scared of…
The O’Keefe Media Group has published a new story focusing on perhaps James O’Keefe’s most powerful investigative subject to date, BlackRock Inc.
In the footage, a BlackRock Recruiter named Serge Varlay describes how BlackRock is able to ”run the world” in about 7 minutes of riveting undercover footage. The footage was captured over the course of several meetings in New York by one of OMG News’ rockstar undercover journalists.
BlackRock Inc is the world’s largest asset management company that’s gained more notoriety as of late due to its large acquisitions. Varlay says it’s easier for BlackRock to do things when “people aren’t thinking about it” and the asset giant “doesn’t want to be anywhere on the radar. This story is a peek into why.
Serge Varlay told our journalist that BlackRock manages $20 trillion dollars worldwide. According to him, “it’s incomprehensible numbers.” BlackRock has over $9.5 trillion of assets under management, that’s larger than the GDP of all countries on the globe except the US and China.
“The senators…are f***ing cheap – you got 10 grand, you can buy a senator,” Varlay remarked in what is arguably the most unabashed description of corruption and bribery from their own company we’ve ever heard. The extended soundbite from Varlay is below:
You can take this big f*** ton of money and buy people, I work for a company called BlackRock…It’s not who is the president it’s who is controlling the wallet of the president. You could buy your candidates. First, there is the senators these guys are fuckin cheap. Got 10 grand you can buy a senator I’ll give you 500k right now It doesn’t matter who wins they’re in my pocket.
Here’s the video:
Right after that video drops, O’Keffe’s org email starts filling up with spam mail preporting to be from state governments.
We’re getting crazy emails into our proton mail, crazy emails. It appears to be a denial of service attack. Every state government, North Dakota, Oregon, State Department. We’re getting inundated every second every minute with emails from every state department of labor, government transportation agency. So somehow we’ve been signed up immediately on all 50 states email this serve.
BlackRock, of course, is one of the companies pushing ESG the hardest. They also seem to be one of the primary vectors into the corruption of our government.
If O’Keffe is receiving this much flak, he must be over the target…
More Biden corruption comes to light, California gets even more crazy, and two former European Prime Ministers step out of the spotlight in different ways.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer revealed Thursday that he expects there is evidence of at least $20-$30 million being made in illegal payments by foreign nationals to the Biden family.
Appearing on Fox Business, Comer stated “We have more bank records coming in but we’re gonna exceed $10 million this week but I think we’ll get up to $20-$30 million.”
He further noted that it is becoming clear that the Bidens potentially engaged in bribery, influence peddling, and money laundering.
“This is going to be hard for Biden to explain, this is not going to go away, and I think eventually the mainstream media is going to start asking the real questions,” Comer added.
“They know there’s something wrong here. They know all the allegations have merit, because of where Joe Biden was, because of what we’ve seen on tape before, where Joe Biden bragged about firing that prosecutor,” he added,
“They know that this family created these shell companies. They know this family was money-laundering, they were profiting off Joe Biden’s influence,” Comer asserted, adding “The media knows that – they’re just not covering it.”
“I can assure you: there is more money that we’re going to be able to identify, that was transferred between foreign nationals in other countries and the Biden family,” Comer further emphasized, adding “I think, eventually, the mainstream media will turn on Joe Biden and start asking the real questions: ‘What did your family do to receive all this money?’”
Speaking of Biden family corruption: “House Oversight Panel Subpoenas Former Hunter Biden Associate Devon Archer…[The committee] is particularly interested in Archer’s involvement in the family’s international business deals, which included countries like China, Russia, and Ukraine.” Archer was in Global Seneca Partners with Hunter Biden and John Kerry’s stepson.
“Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison stepped down this week as the progressive-run city struggles with homicides, a drug crisis, and a troubling rise in violence involving teenagers.” Time to pull this out again:
Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s longest-serving prime minister, dead at 86. Berlusconi revived Italy’s economy, but then couldn’t keep it out of the PIIGS. But for a whilehe kept the wolves at bay.
Also stepping out of the spotlight this week: Former UK Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned from Parliment. Other than getting Brexit accomplished, Johnson’s tenure seemed all sizzle and no steak.
In April 2023, an unelected Board in California voted to force trucking companies to buy zero-emission trucks. This technology is at early-stage adoption in limited segments, and infrastructure buildout is lagging behind what is required to support electrification in our industry. The Board unanimously advanced the Advanced Clean Fleet rule to accompany California’s equally tough electric vehicle sales mandate regulation, the Advanced Clean Truck rule, that would require truck manufacturers to sell zero-emission vehicles. These two regulations together are designed to create an artificial electric vehicle market sooner rather than later.
This new rule was made at the behest of the environmental lobby, which pushed for unrealistic targets and unachievable timelines that will undoubtedly lead to higher prices for goods delivered to the state and fewer options for consumers. ATA has strongly opposed this rule from the outset and testified at a hearing in Sacramento to express the trucking industry’s concerns directly to the Board.
Snip.
Today’s clean diesel trucks can spend 15 minutes fueling anywhere in the country and then travel about 1,200 miles before fueling again. In contrast, today’s zero-emission trucks:
Have significantly less range of about 150-330 miles between charging or refueling;
Need to be charged or refueled more often and for longer periods of time leading to unproductive downtime;
Cost two to three times more than a comparable clean-diesel truck; and
Weigh thousands of pounds more, reducing payload capacity and requiring more trucks and drivers to move the same amount of freight.
Also: “The California Energy Commission estimates that 157,000 chargers will need to be installed by 2030 to support California’s heavy-duty vehicle electrification goals.” Assuming there’s enough Lithium in the world for the batteries… (Hat tip: TPPF.)
Hope for San Francisco? Residents replace drug-addicted transients on their local sidewalks with large planters.
Here’s a nice, short rant from Paul Chato (who I’d not heard of before) on why Disney’s social justice re-imagining of classic franchises fail: It’s not just their woeful ignorance of their own franchise, it’s the woeful ignorance of the vaster connected universe of fandom/geekdom/nerdom.
“The thing that really ties those of us who grew up reading comic books together is not the primary properties like Superman, Batman, Spider-man, or even Lord of the Rings, but the peripheral stuff or peripheral interests. When we talk to each other, we’ll also reference video games, anime, manga, computers, astronomy, network protocols, synthesizers, cars.”
Put a bunch of us nerds together, even complete strangers, into a room, well, Heaven help you, and soon we’ll be talking about Cowboy Bebop or Akira Kurosawa, or NES, Atari, ColecoVision, Ultraman, Kirby, Adams, McFarland, Studio Ghibli, second breakfasts, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Fireball XL5, Scooby-Doo, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Matrix (only the first one), Terminator, Blade Runner, Aliens, Herge, Miller, Robert E. Howard, Harryhausen, Lasseter, good scotch. Has anyone heard Kathleen Kennedy talk about any of those things? Of course not, and I can hear you laughing.
That’s a pretty good name check list, though I’d add Robert A. Heinlein and H. P. Lovecraft (among others).
But it’s an interesting point: Social justice showrunners are woefully ignorant of vast swathes of knowledge held by the fandoms they hold in such withering contempt.
The Russian Collusion Hoax is now officially bunk, Budweiser’s self-inflicted freefall continues, blue city commercial real estate bites the moose, and a whole lot of shocked face to go around. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The Department of Justice and the FBI did not have “any actual evidence of collusion” between Russian officials and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and began their Crossfire Hurricane probe of Trump’s campaign based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” according to a report released on Monday by special prosecutor John Durham.
Durham scolded federal law enforcement and counter-intelligence officials for failing to “uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law” as part of their investigation.
He wrote that at least one FBI agent criminally fabricated language in an email that was used to obtain a FISA surveillance order. And he accused FBI leaders of displaying a “serious lack of analytical rigor” and relying significantly on “investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents,” referring to staffers and allies of Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic presidential nominee, whose campaign funded the Steele dossier through its law firm Perkins Coie.
Compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, the dossier is an unverified collection of opposition research accusing then-candidate Trump and his campaign aides of collaborating with Kremlin officials. The FBI used the dossier to secure a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page, though its central claims were subsequently disproven by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
The report notes that the FBI was quick to investigate Trump, while it proceeded cautiously with allegations against Clinton.
The 316-page report sent to Congress was nearly four years in the making. It concluded that neither federal law enforcement nor intelligence officials “appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” which the FBI “swiftly opened.”
The report accuses federal officials of acting “without appropriate objectivity or restraint.” Peter Strzok, then the FBI’s deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, opened the investigation “immediately” at the direction of Andrew McCabe, then the FBI’s deputy director. “Strzok, at a minimum, had pronounced hostile feelings toward Trump,” the report states.
It states that former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith “committed a criminal offense by fabricating language in an email that was material to the FBI obtaining a FISA surveillance order.”
Durham wrote that FBI officials continued to seek FISA surveillance while acknowledging that “they did not genuinely believe there was probable cause to believe that the target was knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of foreign power, or knowingly helping another person in such activities. And certain personnel disregarded significant exculpatory information that should have prompted investigative restraint and re-examination.”
“Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report,” Durham wrote.
“Gov. Newsom Announces California Budget Deficit Bigger than Projected.” Legal Insurrection has already used the “unexpectedly” here, so I’ll just note that Newsom is the far lefty a whole lot of Democratic Party power players want to substitute for Biden at the top of the ticket in 2024.
“NIH Renews Funds for ‘Bat Coronavirus’ Research despite Energy Department, FBI’s Lab-Leak Conclusion.” That’s like catching Mrs. O’Leary’s cow after she’s burned down Chicago, strapping lit fireworks to her body and letting her loose in the dynamite factory.
“Things are so bad, in fact, that 26 Empire State Buildings could fit into New York City’s empty office space, as occupancy in the city is hovering around 50% of prepandemic levels.”
“In San Francisco, the downtown area is experiencing its worst office vacancy crisis on record – with 31% of space available for lease or sublease, the SF Chronicle reports.”
Bud Light finds out there’s no bottom to their tranny pander pit. “Sales volumes of Bud Light fell by 23.6 percent in the week ended on May 6, according to retail scanner numbers cited by Beer Business Daily that are based on Nielsen IQ data. That’s a drop from the 23.3 percent slide Bud Light suffered in the final week of April.”
Finnish nuclear plant coming online drops spot energy prices by 75%.
Republican governors released a joint statement on Tuesday pledging to assist Texas in securing its border with Mexico.
In response to Gov. Greg Abbott’s request for assistance, twenty-four Republican governors committed to helping secure the 1,254-mile-border and commended the Texas Republican for the recent actions he was forced to take due to the failures of the Biden administration’s open-border policies, according to the Washington Examiner.
“The federal government’s response handling the expiration of Title 42 has represented a complete failure of the Biden Administration,” the joint statement reads. “While the federal government has abdicated its duties, Republican governors stand ready to protect the U.S.-Mexico border and keep families safe.”
“All states have suffered from the effects of deadly illegal drugs coming across the border, and every state is a border state due to the devastating influx of drugs in our communities. Republican governors are leading the way to address the border crisis by increasing fentanyl sentencing and increasing support for law enforcement interdiction of drugs, among other measures,” they continued.
“Texas Governor Greg Abbott has exemplified leadership at a critical time, leading the way with Operation Lone Star, and deploying the Texas Tactical Border Force to prevent illegal crossings and keep the border secure. We support the efforts to secure the border led by Governor Abbott.”
On Tuesday afternoon, Abbott sent an urgent request to all of the nation’s governors asking them to band together to defeat the invasion at the US/Mexico border, something he said impacts every community in the United States.
“The flood of illegal border activity invited by the Biden Administration flows directly across the southern border into Texas communities, but this crisis does not stop in our state. Emboldened Mexican drug cartels and other transnational criminal enterprises profit off this chaos, smuggling people and dangerous drugs like fentanyl into communities nationwide,” Abbott wrote.
“In the federal government’s absence, we, as Governors, must band together to combat President Biden’s ongoing border crisis and ensure the safety and security that all Americans deserve,” he requested.
While no Democratic governors responded to the letter, twenty-four Republicans pledged to help from states which include: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Jorge Mijares left Venezuela months ago — last November, he says. He’s been in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande River from El Paso, for four weeks. But he planned to cross over Thursday night, as Title 42 immigration restrictions ended.
“I have the app,” said Mijares, 54. “I’m just waiting for it to tell me when to go.”
He’s not concerned about the Biden administration’s warnings against migration. After all, he has many friends who have made it across — safely.
There’s an app that tells you how to break U.S. immigration laws. Of course there is. Silly of me to be even slightly surprised. “The street finds its own uses for things” as the now-elderly cyberpunks used to say…
Twisted Sisiter’s Dee Snider is not down with your tranny madness. You submitted this with a better “we’re not going to take it” pun.
Speaking of tranny madness: Cross-dressing serial thief Samuel Brinton arrested as a fugitive from justice.
Our Glorious Elites try mightily to keep us peons from expressing #WrongThink, two high profile media firings, and more Blue City decline. Enjoy a short but sweet Friday LinkSwarm!
It transpires that the infamous incident before the 2020 election in which 50 former intelligence officials signed an open letter declared a New York Post expose about Hunter Biden’s laptop to have the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” was instigated at the behest of the Joe Biden campaign. This at least is the allegation in a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken released by Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government.
In that letter, which is not easy to find, you’ll see three snippets of dialogue from questioning of Morell, who appears to have organized the open letter. In the first snippet, he explains that the idea originated with a call from Blinken, then of the Biden campaign.
I knew things were bad in my world, but the truth turned out to be much worse than I could have imagined.
My name is Andrew Lowenthal. I am a progressive-minded Australian who for almost 18 years was the Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-based NGO focused on human rights online, freedom of expression, and open technology. My resume also includes fellowships at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. For most of my career, I believed strongly in the work I was doing, which I believed was about protecting and expanding digital rights and freedoms.
In recent years, however, I watched in despair as a dramatic change swept through my field. As if all at once, organizations and colleagues with whom I’d worked for years began de-emphasizing freedom of speech and expression, and shifted focus to a new arena: fighting “disinformation.”
Long before the #TwitterFiles, and certainly before responding to a Racket call for freelancers to help “Knock Out the Mainstream Propaganda Machine,” I’d been raising concerns about the weaponization of “anti-disinformation” as a tool for censorship. For EngageMedia team members in Myanmar, Indonesia, India, or the Philippines, the new elite Western consensus of giving governments greater power to decide what could be said online was the opposite of the work we were doing.
When Malaysian and Singaporean governments introduced “fake news” laws, EngageMedia supported networks of activists campaigning against it. We ran digital security workshops for journalists and human rights advocates under threat from government attack, both virtual and physical. We developed an independent video platform to route around Big Tech censorship and supported campaigners in Thailand fighting government attempts to suppress free expression. In Asia, government interference in speech and expression was the norm. Progressive activists in search of more political freedom often looked to the West for moral and financial support. Now the West is turning against the core value of free expression, in the name of fighting disinformation.
Before being put in charge of tracking anti-disinformation groups and their funders for this Racket project, I thought I had a strong idea of just how big this industry was. I’d been swimming in the broader digital rights field for two decades and saw the rapid growth of anti-disinformation initiatives up close. I knew many of the key organizations and their leaders, and EngageMedia had itself been part of anti-disinformation projects.
After gaining access to #TwitterFiles records, I learned the ecosystem was far bigger and had much more influence than I imagined. As of now we’ve compiled close to 400 organisations globally, and we are just getting started. Some organisations are legitimate. There is disinformation. But there are a great many wolves among the sheep.
I underestimated just how much money is being pumped into think tanks, academia and NGOs under the anti-disinformation front, both from the government and private philanthropy. We’re still calculating, but I had estimated it at hundreds of millions of dollars annually and I’m probably still being naive – Peraton received a USD $1B dollar contract from the Pentagon.
In particular, I was unaware of the scope and scale of the work of groups like the Atlantic Council, the Aspen Institute, the Center for European Policy Analysis and consultancies such as Public Good Projects, Newsguard, Graphika, Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub and others.
New York City Democratic Mayor Eric Adams ripped President Joe Biden’s policies on the southern border Friday, saying that the White House’s position on the issue has turned the Big Apple into a disaster.
Adams has repeatedly asked for assistance from the federal government as New York City deals with thousands of illegal immigrants who have made their way to the city thanks to Biden’s lax border policies. New York City will spend $4.2 billion to house and care for illegal immigrants by the middle of 2024.
“The city is being destroyed by the migrant crisis,” the first-term mayor said during a panel discussion hosted by the African American Mayors Association, the New York Post reported.
The Democrat then said that his city would have seen the biggest financial turnaround in the city’s history if it hadn’t been for the illegal immigration crisis.
“If you removed the $4.2 billion that have been dropped into my city because of a mismanaged asylum seeker issue, you [would have] probably witnessed one of the greatest fiscal turnarounds in the history of New York City,” he said.
Adams is delusional if he thinks illegal aliens alone are destroying his city. Graft, corruption, high crime engendered by leftwing Social Justice policies, high taxes, horribly burdensome regulation, and all the other hallmarks of undivided Democratic Party rule all played bigger roles in New York City’s demise. But the extra illegal aliens didn’t help. So how do you think Texas citizens have felt about the crisis all this time?
“Dem Bigwigs Caught Hobnobbing With Secret Chinese Police Mole.” “New York Sen. Chuck Schumer was recently caught on video rubbing elbows with one of two men arrested for running a secret — and illegal — Chinese police station in New York City’s Chinatown. The hobnobbing occurred at a gala for the Fukien American Association.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Bud Light’s Marketing VP Takes a Leave of Absence and Will Be Replaced.” Not good enough. Alissa Heinerscheid needs to be fired for cause for destroying billions in shareholder value.
Taking the next two in the order they were announced, not order of importance: Don Lemon fired from CNN. Also:
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has laid out the devastating results of runaway government spending on the middle class and why it’s so important to claw back lost ground for the average American, who has “received a pay cut for 24 consecutive months … as inflation has persisted.”
He also noted the average American family has lost the equivalent of more than $7,000 in annual income.
There is a direct link between spending, borrowing and printing trillions of dollars, and these disastrous results for Americans.
President Biden has spent trillions of dollars the nation didn’t have.
These unchecked costs drove the deficit to record highs and pushed the debt over $31 trillion.
A former Connecticut Planned Parenthood honcho took his own life days after police failed to arrest him on child pornography charges — botching the raid by knocking down the door of the suspect’s New Haven neighbor.
Tim Yergeau, 36, the former director of strategic communications at the Southern New England branch of Planned Parenthood, died by suicide on Tuesday amid a child pornography investigation in Connecticut last week.
The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled a proposal that would prohibit schools from instituting policies that “categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.” The policy would allow schools to implement certain limitations in the interest of fairness or safety, however.
The proposed rule, which would impact any school or college that receives federal funding, would expand Title IX protections to include gender identity. Under the proposal, a “one-size-fits-all” ban on transgender athletes playing on teams that match their stated gender identity would be a violation of Title IX. The rule, which is likely to face challenges, will face a lengthy approval process.
This is, in fact, the exact opposite of the text of Title IX, which provides special protection for biological women, not men pretending to be women.
Under the radar, a package of bills is ramming through sweeping changes that will reorient our public schools around a new paradigm — subordinating academic basics to an obsessive, politicized preoccupation with race and social justice activism.
“Critical Social Justice” ideology (CSJ) — the vehicle for manipulating our young people into adopting this worldview — is laced strategically through a variety of bills, including “ethnic studies” (HF 1502), “Teachers of Color” (HF 320) and now the House and Senate omnibus education bills (HF 2497/SF 2684).
Taken together, this legislation will inject reductive, racialized thinking into every classroom in Minnesota’s approximately 500 school districts and charter schools; change the fundamental mechanics of education in our state; and give the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB) broad new powers that amount to an end-run around our state’s hallowed tradition of local control.
Here’s a story I missed earlier: “Kazakhstan Impounds Property of Roscosmos Subsidiary.” That’s the Russian company that’s the main operator of Baikonur spaceport. Haven’t seen any resolution to this, mainly because Russia is so broke thanks to mismanagement, sanctions, and an illegal war of territorial aggression.
Jay Leno drives the 1,025 horsepower 2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170. I have an irrational desire to own something with a Hellcat engine, which I need like I need a hole in my head. Plus I like the look of the Shelby GT-500 Mustang better, and I’m not buying one of those either.
“Disney has proudly employed sex predators for years, and this act of aggression by DeSantis will force thousands of our proud pedo-American workers to leave the park to stay outside the 1,000-foot radius required by law,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger. “This is tyranny!”
Happy Good Friday! The Biden Recession continues it’s downward spiral…
…a deep dive into how the Russian Conspiracy Hoax has corrupted institutions, Chicago doubled down on failure, and unions want to take your packages away. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
“Small Businesses File For Bankruptcy At Record Pace, Surpassing COVID Crash.” So much for a Biden presidency helping the little guy…
They could either keep doing what reporters had done since the beginning of time, confining themselves to saying things they could prove. Or, they could adopt a new approach, in which you can say anything is true or confirmed, so long as a politician or intelligence official told you it was.
We know how that worked out. I was never invited back, nor for a long time was any other traditionally skeptical reporter, while Nance — one of the most careless spewers of provable errors ever to appear on a major American news network — became one of the Peacock’s most familiar faces.
I don’t know Malcolm and don’t mean to get nasty about this, but: even before that January 2017 broadcast, he had an extraordinary record, one that should have scared away any retraction-averse producer. On August 20th, he went on with Joy Reid and said the Green Party’s Jill Stein “has a show on Russia Today.” This wasn’t true, as Stein quickly pointed out, but MSNBC refused to acknowledge the error. Media watchdog FAIR repeatedly asked for a correction, as did friend Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, but they refused to budge.
This may not seem a big deal, but at the time it was still weird and something of a pioneering move for a major news organization to just refuse to fix a clear error.
Nance went on to make a lot more, some I would classify as important. A tweet of his in late 2016 was a major source for the pre-election misconception that the Wikileaks-leaked emails of Clinton campaign chief John Podesta were “riddled with forgeries” and “#blackpropaganda.” He would regularly make all sorts of claims without evidence, like that the K.G.B. had “been surveilling Donald Trump since 1977,” and that “little” comes from Trump’s mouth that isn’t “carefully planned to benefit the Russian Republic,” and all sorts of other nonsense.
I was quiet until he said Glenn “shows his true colors as an agent of Trump and Moscow,” “reports in to his masters in Russia,” and is “deep in the Kremlin pocket.” This was outrageous. I was shocked MSNBC didn’t fire him on the spot. Still, I voiced objections in a measured way I hoped might get through, either to Nance or to someone at the network. “I’ve been on the air with Malcolm Nance and he seemed like a nice guy,” I tweeted, “but this awful practice of calling people traitors and foreign agents based on no evidence has really gotten out of hand.”
Nance’s response was “Ok, you’ve convinced me. You need to be blocked. #Bye.” He remained a regular guest on the network, which didn’t cool on booking him until the Russia story fell apart with the release of the Mueller report the next year.
The Nance situation was symbolic of what happened at the network from the beginning of Trump’s term, really beginning in early 2017. It went from being a place where you had to be at least in the ballpark of demonstrably true to being a place where the factual standard was, “Whatever dogshit drops out of the mouth of any hack or spook.”
Moreover the network didn’t just re-report this stuff, it became the favored launching pad for all the most blatant blue-Anon disinformation, like California congressman Adam Schiff saying he had “more than circumstantial” evidence of collusion, or former Obama defense official Evelyn Farkas suggesting the Trump administration would try to destroy evidence if they “found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians.” Farkas later testified under oath that she “didn’t know anything” about collusion.
Snip.
As we later found out, among other things via Jeff Gerth’s gigantic piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, the FBI said nothing about many stories it knew to be wrong, including the influential New York Times exposé, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” The possibility that officials can lie to us in this way — leaking, asking that attribution be limited to uncheckable “sources familiar with the matter,” then saying nothing as stories start taking water — is exactly why we don’t stick our necks out for such people.
Snip.
the network doubled down, seemingly hiring as contributors every unemployed prosecutor or natsec official they could find, especially from failed Russiagate probes. They’d already spent on names like ex-CIA head John O’Brennan, former assistant FBI counterintelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi, House Intel Director of Investigations and future congressman Dan Goldman (who met Adam Schiff in an MSNBC green room), and federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner. Now, they added cadaverous Mueller sidekick Andrew Weissmann and, astonishingly, Weissmann’s deputy, the fired FBI lawyer Lisa Page. They also began bringing in Page’s lover, fellow FBI firee Peter Strzok, as a commentator.
America became familiar with Page and Strzok after their texts — referring to the Trump-Russia investigation as an “insurance policy,” and ripping “sandernistas,” among other things — became public. These were living monuments to press excesses of the Trump era. As Gerth wrote, Strzok quietly reported to bosses after the Times’s “repeated contacts” story came out, saying, “We are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.” Strzok in other words was exactly the kind of person to whom Rachel might have been referring when she rhapsodized about FBI “not saying anything” to dissuade us from believing errors.
Page on April 10, 2017 got a text from Strzok, saying he wanted to talk to her “about [a] media leak strategy with DOJ.” This was a day before a Washington Post story that cited “law enforcement and other U.S. officials” in saying the secret FISA court found probable cause to believe former Trump aide Carter Page (no relation) was an “agent of a foreign power.” Whoever leaked this was sabotaging not just the Post, but every downstream media org picking up the story, because the story at its roots was wrong: Carter Page was not an “agent of a foreign power,” as the FISA court had been misled, by Steele and the FBI. MSNBC was one of the first outlets to regurgitate this thing.
When sources lie to you, you should be mad. At minimum, you should be ripping their names out of your Rolodex (or modern equivalent). MSNBC did the opposite, hiring seemingly everyone who’d helped them down this reputation-tarnishing path.
MSNBC bet everything on its switch in 2017, and though it paid handsomely at first — in spring of 2017 they became the first cable network in two decades to unseat Fox for the #1 spot, with Rachel owning the top-rated non-sports program on cable — the collapse of the Mueller investigation triggered a long, frankly earned, post-trout-fishing slide. No doubt the indictment of Donald Trump will reanimate things, but prior to that it was grim, as Fox was beating CNN and MSNBC combined by the end of January. The ratings picture for March showed that MSNBC’s top show was The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, rated 11th, followed by The Beat With Ari Melber at 16th.
After all this, after throwing away all their standards, clowning themselves with years of wrong stories, doling out rice bowls to the procession of spooks who now clog their airwaves, and watching as their ratings predictably collapsed, now they want to give me a hard time. Not because I got anything wrong, but because they don’t like my opinions, or where things like the Twitter Files reports came from.
Stuck on stupid. “Far-Left Democrat Brandon Johnson Wins Chicago Mayoral Race.”
Johnson, 47, is a Cook County commissioner, a former social studies teacher, and a paid lobbyist for the radical Chicago Teachers Union. He ran as a decidedly far-left activist, and was backed by Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Johnson campaigned on promoting racial justice and uplifting the working class. He is an opponent of charter schools. In order to pay for a variety of new social programs, he has called for increased taxes on large corporations, wealthy residents, and suburbanites who visit the city. During his campaign, Johnson promised $1 billion in new spending.
Because Lori Lightfoot’s administration wasn’t enough of a disaster…
Speaking of unions behaving badly, the Teamsters are planning a UPS strike.
Yet another reason for the Trump charges to be thrown out. “The progressive daughter of judge presiding over Donald Trump’s hush money case in Manhattan who worked for Kamala Harris and Joe Biden…Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter, Loren, 34, works for progressive digital strategies firm Authentic Campaigns. She was a digital director for Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign and has worked for a slew of other Democratic campaigns.”
Dispatches from the Soros-funded decline of New York City: “On Saturday, the New York Police Department announced that a man who shot a thief in self defense will be charged with attempted murder despite being shot twice and having to wrestle the firearm away from the thief.” (Update: Soros tool Alvin Bragg changed his mind.) (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“Texas Bill Would Create State-Issued Gold-Backed Digital Currency.” This would be a super-interesting story if I thought there was a snowball’s chance in hell of this passing and the Federal Reserve not quashing it.