I wrote about Matt Ofalea’s brilliant four-and-a-half minute video below in “The playbook on the laptop.” The video compiles clips — mostly of news anchors and reporters — opining on air with mind-numbing certainty and Hive-like unanimity that the New York Post’s reportage on Hunter Biden’s laptop was “a lie,” “altered or fake,” “pure distractions,” and of course, “RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION.” I have posted the video once again below.
DISGRACED IDW FIGURE SAM HARRIS DELETES HIS TWITTER ACCOUNT: “On Thursday, prominent atheist and disgraced member of the Intellectual Dark Web Sam Harris deleted his Twitter account. The move comes after the Waking Up podcast host was slammed for stating that he hated Trump to such an extent that he wouldn’t have cared if Hunter Biden ‘had the corpses of children in his basement’ in the lead up to the 2020 election.”
We saw Musk discover the hard evidence of the leftist “woke” nature of Twitter when he found the pile of “stay woke” t-shirts in the closet and blew up the liberal myth about the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson. He said how that leftist bent had distorted world conversations “has been really bad. Far left San Francisco/Berkeley views have been propagated to the world via Twitter.” He committed that there would no longer be a “thumb on the scale” to promote such a leftist narrative any more.
Musk also noted that it was conservatives who suffered the brunt of the permanent suspensions, that that wasn’t happening to people on the left before he took over.
One piece of evidence of that was that if people on the left made threats they now were suffering consequences when they might not have before.
Semafor, which was launched by former NYT columnist and Buzzfeed’s chief Ben Smith, accused Musk of taking funds from Bankman-Fried to finance his purchase of Twitter.
The publication insinuated that Musk took $100 million in funding from Bankman-Fried, who is accused of misappropriating funds from his crypto venture FTX to a sister company called Alameda in a Ponzi scheme to rival that of disgraced financier Bernie Madoff’s.
Musk fired back at Semafor after it published the piece titled “Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, and a secret text,” which was penned by Liz Hoffman. The story accuses Musk, who now owns Twitter, of “gleefully” mocking the “downfall” of FTX.
The article was published after Musk claimed Bankman-Fried set off his “bullsh*t meter” when he offered to invest in Musk’s takeover over the social media platform. The article strongly implies that Musk had taken Bankman-Fried’s money.
Semafor’s lead investor appears to be none other than SBF — a fact that Musk was quick to point out in his public rebuke of the publication, with receipts to prove it.
“Semafor is owned by SBF,” wrote Musk. “This is a massive conflict of interest in your reporting. Journalistic integrity is [garbage bin emoji].”
It can’t be Thanksgiving without the classic 1978 clip from the TV show WKRP in Cincinnati, in which the radio station hired a helicopter that dropped live turkeys. Chaos ensued when the birds hit the ground below “like sacks of wet cement.” It’s one of the most hilarious clips from 70’s TV — or from any decade, for that matter.
And now, because of some disgruntled Dems, Liz Cheney may meet the same fate as those turkeys: dropped from their favor because of her obsession with Donald Trump. They also suspect her of using the January 6 committee — of which she was one of two Republicans — as a stepping stone to her political future.
Which, of course, is toast anyway, but Liz doesn’t yet believe that.
According to the Washington Post, fifteen anonymous staffers are miffed that the committee may be deep-sixing the information they had brought to the table. Their work, part of the “Blue Team,” focused on law enforcement and how it failed to assess the predicted attack on the Capitol. Other groups, like the Green Team and the Purple Team, examined financing for the January 6 event, along with militia groups and extremism.
But that’s all taking a back seat because of Liz Cheney’s fixation on Trump. Even the name of her group provides a clue: it’s the “Gold Team.”
One former staff member said:
“We all came from prestigious jobs, dropping what we were doing because we were told this would be an important fact-finding investigation that would inform the public. But when [the committee] became a Cheney 2024 campaign, many of us became discouraged.”
Live look at the leftist autophagy, already in progress:
Maher and Harris spoke extensively about COVID-19, from various treatments to how Americans settled into distinct camps over the virus.
“I hate the way it’s dividing people,” Maher began. “Climate change never divided people for real in my life.” He segued to the so-called King of All Media, a figure whose pandemic fears proved paralyzing.
“Howard Stern and I … for years there was animosity. We got back together like two lost lovers,” Maher said with a smile. “And we had just repaired this relationship and were having this beautiful friendship. Now, I think I’ll never see him again.”
“I still love him and I hope he still loves me, but he is, in my view, a germophobe. I think he would admit [it], it’s pretty obvious,” Maher continues. “People have the right to be whatever level of scared they are of germs. I can’t live in that world. I don’t want to … I can’t live in your paranoid world.”
Listening to this balderdash, you’d have thought that Clinton had led a saintly life, that she had been constantly set upon by jealous, corrupt inferiors, and that her career had been a spotless series of legislative and diplomatic triumphs. Buying into the notion of Hillary as a lifelong victim of the patriarchy, Stern seemed to be out to make up, in one interview, for every time he’d ever gotten a stripper to remove her top. One illuminating moment came when Stern praised Howard Zinn, the Communist author of A People’s History of the United States, a shoddy work of propaganda that has, alas, become a perennial best-seller and college text. Every Stern fan knows that Howard’s not big on books, so if he’s actually read Zinn’s opus, it’s likely his chief source of information on American history—a scary thought.
It was a stunning listening experience. When Hillary blamed James Comey (along with “the Russians and Wikileaks”) for her election loss, Stern went along with her, even though Comey had done Hillary a service by choosing not to prosecute her for clear violations of the Espionage Act. When she mentioned her emails, Stern didn’t bring up her private server or her destruction of the emails with BleachBit but instead agreed readily with her baffling claim that the emails had been “misinterpret[ed]”; when she criticized Trump’s “trade battles” and tax breaks, said that Trump was in Putin’s “camp,” and accused Trump fans (and not Antifa) of committing acts of violence around the country—and when she even knocked the booming Trump economy—Stern nodded along. He made no mention of Fusion GPS, the Clinton Foundation, her contorted version of the Benghazi episode, her dubious story about coming under fire in Bosnia, or anything else remotely scandalous in her (or her husband’s) past. Both Hillary and Stern took Joe Biden’s side in the Ukraine controversy and agreed that Trump’s famous phone call with the Ukrainian president had amounted to an “abuse of power.”
The entire interview was a case of kowtowing on an epic scale. Howard Stern, who rose to fame, in considerable part, by zapping fraudulent politicians, had now given one of the most sycophantic interviews of all time to a woman regarded by many as the most duplicitous pol of our era. It was a terrible comedown for a guy who’d earned a reputation for fearless honesty.
As Stephen Kruiser wrote at the start of year: Howard Stern Is Now Your Grandmother. “I wasn’t a radio guy but there was a time in the early ’90s when I set my alarm to listen to Howard Stern. He was that good. He was crass. He was insightful. Most importantly — for me — he was funny. He was also beyond edgy. Now he’s a bitchy, housecoat-wearing granny.”
Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t read books. As he explained in a profile on Sequoia Capital’s website (which will be an assigned text in journalism courses for the rest of time), “I would never read a book.” “I’m very skeptical of books,” he said. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”
This error is not irremediable, because Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-defunct crypto exchange FTX, is likely soon to have a lot of time for reading.
* * * * * * * *
There is nothing in this story that would surprise the ghost of John Law, the Scottish financier who blew up the Mississippi Bubble in early 18th-century France. Bubbles are nearly always inflated with cheap credit. When monetary conditions tighten, the most leveraged players go down first, but the result is a cascade of illiquidity, which then turns into insolvency as asset prices plunge.
Another classic feature of the FTX story is the role of shady political influence. Just as Law ingratiated himself with the Duke of Orleans, the regent during the minority of Louis XV, so financial fraudsters through the ages have relied on friends in high places to protect them from legal or regulatory scrutiny.
Take Enron, the energy trading company that filed for bankruptcy in December 2001. Ken Lay, its chief executive, could not have inflated his castle in the air without Fed Chair Alan Greenspan’s monetary policy “put,” but Enron also bought itself protection with roughly $6 million of political donations, a third of which went to Republicans. In addition, the company sought to buy itself popularity by paying the Houston Astros to rename their ballpark Enron Field.
Sound familiar? In 2020, Bankman-Fried gave the Joe Biden campaign at least $10 million. In the 2022 midterm election cycle, he was the second-largest funder of Democrats, after George Soros, giving $39.8 million in federal contributions. The majority of those donations, about $27 million, went to the Protect Our Future PAC, which supported candidates who prioritized pandemic prevention.
Not all bubble-blowers present themselves as philosopher kings. Law did; Lay not so much. As the son of two law school professors, SBF was exceptionally well prepared for self-aggrandizement. The Sequoia profile is full of gems:
Q: You just happen to be alive in the most important time in the history of the future race. The existential point! Really?
SBF: It certainly would not be one’s prior — at least, not naively. But if you want to really needle on that, there are some anthropic considerations by which that might not be as crazy as it sounds.
When a young man sets out make billions of dollars very quickly, there is a common suspicion that he is actuated by greed. By raising him as a doctrinaire utilitarian, professors Bankman and Fried provided their son with the perfect alibi: He was making the money purely in order to engage in “effective altruism,” the get-rich-quick version of utilitarianism. Because you can only do the greatest good for the greatest number if you first make the greatest amount of money.
So the fact of the matter is we don’t know why Anderson Lee Aldrich shot up Club Q. But to [NBC’s] Ben Collins, that doesn’t matter. What matters is immediately to tie the shooting to a broader narrative. This, it goes without saying, is utterly bankrupt journalism. It could certainly be that Aldrich shot up the club out of antigay or anti-trans animus fueled by (say) LibsOfTikTok’s endless spotlighting of the most off-putting left-wing LGBT people on social media. But until you know that, you can’t assume. This is something you learn in the first week or two of any intro to journalism class. What Collins has done here is really wrong. He has spread a huge amount of… well, not even misinformation, because we don’t know yet! This is basically the journalistic equivalent of being not even wrong.
But the worst part of Collins’ monologue, by far — the part that tipped me over from exasperation at Collins and into genuine queasiness, like This dude is doing something really gross — came when he followed up his question about what reporters can do better with this: “Because there are five dead people in a strip mall, because that was the only place they felt safe as gay or trans people, in this town, in Colorado Springs.”
Let’s name those victims: Raymond Green Vance, Kelly Loving, Daniel Aston, Derrick Rump, and Ashley Paugh. They are actual, real-life, flesh and blood human beings who were alive until Saturday night. Since they cannot speak for themselves, they deserve to have their lives and their experiences represented accurately by the journalists discussing and reporting on them. Ben Collins is putting words into their mouths and thoughts into their heads. He is, in effect, speaking over recent murder victims solely to make a political point and to inflate the importance of his own particular beat. That’s the only way to describe this.
It’s not just the teddy bears in bondage gear. (Or the teddy bears with black eyes.)
It’s also that the photographer deliberately inserted pages from a Supreme Court case, Ashcroft vs. Free Speech Coalition, in the background. That case is about… child pornography.
Specifically, that case was a victory for child pornography. The case ruled that “virtual child pornography,” child porn that did not use actual children as actors, could not be criminalized.
This afternoon, Balenciaga issued a non-apology apology, which only mentions “unsettling documents,” not the bondage-clad stuffed bears:
That day fifty-nine years ago, which went so very differently from what this young man and his wife expected, changed everything in ways that even today aren’t fully understood. The Warren Commission report asserted that the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but there is an entire cottage industry of alternative explanations and lingering suspicions that the CIA and/or FBI were involved. After the Russian collusion hoax and more that we have seen over the last few years (and before that, going all the way back to the Gulf of Tonkin incident that got us into the Vietnam War), that’s a lot more plausible than it used to be, but we may never know for sure.
In any case, there is so much about JFK and his death that is eerily reminiscent of our situation today: the establishment media covering up his Addison’s disease and personal peccadilloes just as zealously as it covers today for Old Joe’s dementia and his crack-addicted, corrupt son; growing suspicions that the government is not leveling with us; and even questions about the veracity of election results (Richard Nixon was sure that the 1960 election had been stolen from him but opted not to contest it).
The world we live in was born in many ways during the JFK era. And just as that young couple of my acquaintance unsuspectingly went to the Trade Mart to see the president while world-changing events were taking place, so today most Americans are still going about their business as usual without realizing how severely the Left and America’s other enemies are threatening our republic and our society today. (That’s the focus of my forthcoming book, The Sumter Gambit: How the Left Is Trying to Foment a Civil War.) But as it soon became horrifying clear what had happened on Nov. 22, 1963 (if not why, or by whom), so also what is happening today will all become obvious eventually.
“That’s why, you know, all these stupid singing shows and talent shows. We like to try and break people. Is there anything stupider than an award show?” he began.
“We’re gonna compete. These two movies are gonna compete. What do you mean compete? It’s not two horses, you know, it’s two movies. How can you say, we’re gonna say this one is better? You can’t, it’s fake. It’s horse shit,” Seinfeld joked.
Host Dax Shepard joined in, agreeing with Seinfeld and questioning how the movies are evaluated.
“Yeah. One came out like two weeks before Christmas. You’re already in a great mood. You evaluated this movie like — with Christmas cheer. What do we do with that? We gonna factor for that when we evaluate these movies?” Shepard said.
“Yeah. And these stupid people, myself, I’ve been sat there like an idiot at these award shows, and we’re gonna put a camera on ’em and we’re gonna watch ’em win and lose. It’s so completely contrived. There is no real competition,” Seinfeld replied.
“It’s like two tomato sauces competing,” he continued. “You can’t — they’re just different tomato sauce. What do you mean? We’re gonna — best picture. What a stupid phrase. Best actor. Best what? For who? When?
“No, it’s preposterous,” Shepard agreed.
“They’re doing different parts. It’s so stupid,” Seinfeld concluded.
The Academy Awards were originally useful to Hollywood in the late 1920s to add an additional sheen to the business, just as talking pictures began. In the 1998 A&E documentary version of Neal Gabler’s excellent 1989 book, An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, the narrator (actor R.H. Thomson) notes that after being unable to break the monopoly that east coast-based Thomas Edison had on moviemaking at the start of the 20th century, the largely Jewish immigrants who created what we now call Hollywood went west, both for the excellent weather that allowed them to film outdoors throughout most of the year, and for the freedom to build, as Gabler dubbed it in his title, “An Empire of their Own,” far from Edison’s (often anti-Semitic) control. Eventually, with 75 percent of the public going to the movies at least once a week between the wars:
Actors became the gods and goddesses of the new American religion. And where there are new gods, there must be new idols. So the studio heads began a movie guild with the lofty title of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was [MGM’s Louis B.] Mayer’s brilliant idea [in 1929] to create the Oscars, where the movie moguls could honor themselves by giving each other awards. In this way, they went from being a group of immigrant Jews, to award-winning American producers.
Not to mention, as one biographer quoted Mayer, “I found that the best way to handle [filmmakers] was to hang medals all over them. […] If I got them cups and awards they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That’s why the Academy Award was created.”
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